The other side of Reincarnation

　A beam of dark light tore across the field before I’d fully processed the voice that announced it, passing clean through Sophia’s kneeling form.

　She started bleeding immediately, badly, collapsing forward before I’d even finished turning toward whoever had spoken.

No. No, not her too. Not like this――

　I caught her before she hit the ground, blood already soaking through my hands, the same helpless, familiar horror rising in my chest that I hadn’t felt since a mansion’s underground chamber years earlier.

I don’t have healing anymore. I gave that up. I have nothing left to actually save her with.

　A gate of fog unfolded a short distance away, and two figures stepped through it with the unhurried ease of people who’d simply walked through a doorway rather than tearing a hole in the world itself.

　The first I recognized instantly, though the recognition made no sense at all.

Lord Reventh Cassmoor. The noble from the court. What is he doing here.

　The second was a girl, young in appearance, standing slightly behind him with an expression of mild, detached curiosity that unsettled me considerably more than any hostile glare could have.

Anti-Subconsciousness said, careful.

A primordial demon. Standing casually behind an archdemon like an assistant. That’s — that’s backward. That shouldn’t be the hierarchy.

　”Isn’t a primordial demon supposed to outrank an archdemon by a wide margin,” I said, mostly to myself, still holding Sophia, still trying and failing to find any way to actually stop her bleeding. ”Why is one just standing there like his attendant.”

　Anti-Subconsciousness had no answer for that.

　The silence itself felt like its own kind of warning.

　”Is he the one,” the girl asked, voice light, almost bored.

　”Yes, my lady,” Cassmoor said, bowing slightly.

　”Okay,” she said, and something in her tone shifted, casual interest sharpening into decision. ”You’re coming with me.”

　”I’ll pass,” I said, still working uselessly at Sophia’s wound. ”First — who are you, and what do you actually want with me.”

　She considered the question with genuine, unhurried curiosity.

　”If I recall correctly, you sent a unit of Holy Knights to retrieve him once, and they were killed. Is that right?”

　”Yes, my lady,” Cassmoor said.

　”And when you didn’t hear back from them,” she continued, ”you went to check yourself, and found them all dead. Along with two others you hadn’t accounted for.”

　”I believe so,” Cassmoor said.

　”So he killed them,” the girl said, simple, almost pleased. ”Interesting. He looks rather weak to me, though.”

　Something in my chest went very, very still.

　”Wait,” I said, voice flattening, everything else in the field suddenly falling away except the shape of what I’d just heard. ”Did I just hear you say you sent the Holy Knights that killed Doran and Fenrik?”

　”I don’t know the people you’re referring to,” Cassmoor said, entirely unbothered, ”but yes, I did send those holy kni――”

　He didn’t finish the sentence.

　My blade was already at his throat before the word had fully left his mouth.

　The girl caught it — not with force, not with any visible strain at all, simply reaching out and stopping the strike as though catching a falling leaf.

　”Impressive,” she said, genuinely delighted, entirely unaware, in that moment, that the thing holding the blade wasn’t fully me anymore.

　My aura released without any conscious decision on my part, cutting through everything nearby like an actual blade — and none of it came anywhere close to touching her.

　I don’t remember the next several seconds clearly.

　What I do remember is my hands closing around Cassmoor’s head, dragging him across the broken ground with a speed that felt, even to me, considerably beyond anything I’d trained for, before throwing him bodily into a jagged outcrop of rock hard enough to shatter stone.

　He got up anyway.

　His aura, once he did, filled the entire field in a way that made the ground itself seem too small to properly hold it.

　”Do you have any idea who I am,” he said, arrogance intact despite everything, demon regeneration already knitting the worst of the damage closed.

　He didn’t get the chance to actually prove that arrogance meant anything.