Crunch!
With a sharp, sour crack of bone snapping back into place, Miss Maria calmly forced her left hand back to its normal position. It wasn’t as macho and brash as when Pastor Lynn had straightened his own head, but there was no denying Maria’s ruthless resolve—and she intended to tear her enemies to pieces with it.
She tore open a miracle scroll and pressed it against her left hand.
Her already bloodless pale face turned nearly translucent, as if every drop of blood had been drained from her body.
The Cainhurst bloodline had always been sensitive to the power of light.
This pure solar energy could heal the Black-Clad Nun’s body, yet its potency also seared Maria’s blood to some degree. With the skill Lesser Healing combined with the scroll, the injuries to her left hand and chest knit together easily enough.
But it left her with an unwelcome Weakness debuff.
“Maria, where are you!? My daughter!”
Pastor Lynn, his mind gone, was roaring from outside. Not long ago, Maria had made a strategic withdrawal from the front hall and silently taken refuge in the small chapel. She had lived here for eight years—she knew exactly which spots she could slip through and which corners could break the enemy’s line of sight.
“Don’t worry, Father. I’ll set you free soon…”
Head lowered, carefully treating the last of her silver-bladed swords with holy water, Maria’s steady hands moved like a machine. She listened intently for movements outside, ready to shove all her chips into a gamble with fate. If she didn’t take a desperate risk, there was no way she could stamp out this crisis at its root.
Even with a nearly legendary Foreigner wandering Seth Town, he likely had no experience dealing with Chaos. The Black-Clad Nun meant to keep the damage contained to the smallest possible area.
She forced herself into a cold, mechanical state of work.
Against the Chaos-corrupted—creatures whose bodies were unnaturally resilient, brimming with strength and poison—Maria frankly lacked effective killing means. Though she had taken the class Bloodbound Scholar, this battle was an unplanned encounter; she had almost no prepared combat materials on hand, and any knowledge of enemy weaknesses was useless without the proper tools. She did have the Church’s specially crafted silver cane-swords, but as someone who wasn’t clergy, Maria couldn’t wield more advanced miracle-based combat arts.
As for all that holy fire with special effects the clergy used—Maria had given up on it.
She would take a different approach!
Cainhurst True Blood—within it lay a strange, eldritch power.
Only by tapping that power could she truly destroy the Chaos-corrupted. Otherwise, with a Weakness debuff clinging to her, the Black-Clad Nun’s fate would be either death or something worse than death.
Peeking carefully through the crack of the door, Maria confirmed that the maddened Chaos-corrupted outside wouldn’t be heading her way for the moment.
It was time to gamble with fate.
Blood-power came from blood itself; to awaken it, one had to listen to the echo of the bloodline. As a pureblood Cainhurst, Maria should by rights possess a power far beyond mortals—a power so great that, at its peak, it could even burn away the dreams of Old Gods.
However…
Before crossing into this world, Maria had witnessed—within the rebel of Cainhurst—a hideous, beastlike slaughter with her own eyes. The horror of that scene had filled her with such intense revulsion toward her own nature that she sealed away the blood-power that came with her highborn lineage.
Now, she needed to shatter that mental shackle she was born with.
She lifted the cup. The faintly sweet, iron-rich bouquet spread over her tongue, and Maria—who had never tasted blood of such quality—couldn’t help but cheer inwardly. In this moment worthy of commemoration, she suddenly felt she couldn’t abandon the grace and nobility of her heritage. If she was to die, she would do so beautifully.
“A toast—to all warriors who dare to challenge fate.”
She raised her cup high, to her past life, and to this one.
And then she tilted her head back and drained it in one go.
Gulp…! Like a proud swan, Miss Maria’s pale neck arched in a graceful line as her throat moved enticingly. Gulp…! Blood she hadn’t fully swallowed traced a wild, tempting curve from the corner of her lips. Gulp…! The sound of swallowing filled Maria’s hearing, slowing and amplifying, the intoxicating fragrance bursting on her tongue as time itself seemed to halt.
Gulp…
A gust of icy wind stung her skin; deafening battle cries and gunfire surrounded her. When Maria opened her eyes again, she saw a snow-covered, majestic castle—and bodies strewn as far as she could see.
The dead had died horribly—fangs bared, mauling one another like the ugliest of beasts.
Many handsome knights in iron armor, armed with sabers, had run each other through and fallen together. Swordmasters wielding knightly blades had slaughtered one another.
“So this is the sight you beheld before your flight?”
Maria admitted—it was too much to ask a young girl to witness such cruelty. A field of corpses, kin tearing at each other like beasts—it was enough to warp any child’s heart.
That she hadn’t become a deranged killer was luck in itself. It was thanks to her inherently kind nature, resisting the grotesque cruelty of kin slaying kin. Otherwise, a new blood-drenched seductress would have been born.
Now finding herself in a small girl’s body again, Miss Maria began hopping across the piles of corpses.
She wanted to see for herself the source of the scene she had so loathed in childhood.
The origin of the Cainhurst clan’s unrest—this coup.
Lifting the hem of her white silk dress, Maria’s small figure began climbing the corpse-strewn path, heading straight for the grand, imposing main hall of the ancient castle.
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