Surrounded by devastation, Sunny, March, and Veliona stared at each other with confused expressions on their faces. Their weapons were still raised, ready to strike at the enemies... however, there were no enemies around.
Just dead silence.
Sunny tensely studied the devastated hall, then slowly pulled out the erald amulet and looked at the little girl with a silent question written on his face.
"March... there isn’t so super mysterious Saint napping sowhere in the temple, right?"
She frowned, then shook her head.
Sunny was genuinely perplexed.
"Uh... maybe there is an indescribable horror that had been contained by the chalice? And we have set it free? Or an ancient curse?"
The little girl wiped the sweat off her bruised face, then said in her soft, childish voice:
"I don’t think so. I’ve seen a bunch of mories in here, you know?"
Sunny blinked a couple of tis.
"So, what... we really won? Just like that?"
March stared at him for a bit, and then yelped in outrage:
"What the hell do you an by just like that?! We just wiped out an entire sect! You just killed three Masters! Not to ntion destroying the chalice... which was supposed to be indestructible, by the way... was that not hard enough for you, you crazy brat?!"
Sunny snorted.
"Hard? That wasn’t even in the top ten hardest things I’ve done in my life!"
He then gasped.
"Oh no! March, you murderer! You really just killed all those pretty girls! Didn’t your heart ache a little, you brute?"
She scowled, walked over to him, and kicked him in his shin.
"Ow."
"I don’t want to hear that from you, of all people! And if you’re going to pretend to be hurt, at least add an exclamation mark."
Three Ascended were no joke, let alone as fearso as the War Maidens had been. Granted, they had faced him after being mangled by the Strike of Thunder and the consequent explosion of the chalice. And he had only been able to damage the chalice, thus allowing the divine fla contained within to destroy it, because of his insight into how true sorcery worked.
However, it seed that he had severely overestimated them. After all, Cocolia was barely defeated by five Awakened. If it wasn’t for the fact that the Destruction and Preservation were opposing Paths, they might have all died.
Cocolia was a threat that Sunny would place sowhere between Transcendence and Ascendance, which made quite a bit of sense, considering that he had once assud that she was forcefully being pushed past the threshold of Saints.
He thought that three Masters would be a reasonable comparison... but it seed he was wrong.
He sighed, then asked dubiously:
"So, what? We can just... go?"
March looked around, her gaze lingering on the corpse of the white-haired Maiden for a few seconds. Her little face turned somber, and then, she simply shrugged.
"I guess."
Veliona, who had been silent this whole ti, looked around, as well. Her crimson eyes shimred as her nose twitched.
"Hm... everyone’s dead, I think. What a sha..."
Sunny’s snickered. It seed the strange skill of being able to sniff things out like a dog wasn’t exclusive to Seele herself.
’...Wait, everyone?’
Sunny turned to March.
"Are there... are there other children that were being trained in the sect? Do we need to take them with us?"
He wasn’t too happy about the prospect of taking care of a bunch of kids, especially since he had just slaughtered their previous caretakers. But the idea of leaving them here did not sit right with Sunny, whether or not they were just phantasms of the Nightmare.
Noctis would end up having to deal with settling the children in the Sanctuary, anyway.
Effie’s childish face slowly turned still. She turned away and said in a strangely even tone:
"...There were a couple. But... they, uh, didn’t make it."
She dismissed her armor — revealing her familiar blue and white dress, but downscaled to her current body — then bent down to pick up one of the swords laying on the stones.
"I don’t think they were all that bad at the start... but by the ti the girl I’m in ended up with them, they kind of... went insane."
She paused.
"Not kind of. Completely insane. Kind of like you, Sunny."
His eye twitched.
’I’m not insane...’
She walked to the next corpse, stared at it with strange darkness in her eyes, and then picked up another weapon.
"They wanted to make soone who could kill this person called Solvane. So, with every batch, the training just got worse and worse. In the last batch... only I’m left."
She sighed.
"I’ll probably never get them, so let’s just get out of here, yeah?"
Sunny hesitated a mont before stepping forward. As he walked past her, he roughly ruffled her head with his large, Devilish talons.
"Just give a minute. Then we’ll be out."
Flustered, March’s face reddened in embarrassnt. However, she didn’t swat his hand away.
After all, her hands were full. With sharp weapons, at that.
Sunny headed for what remained of the stone chalice.
As he got closer, the heat of the divine fla grew more intense. Fortunately, he was completely unfazed thanks to the Preservation.
In the spot where the chalice had stood before, surrounded by a ring of flas, a simple knife made of a piece of ghostly glass lay, reflecting the furious white light of the fire. Because of the shape and position of the deep fractures that had spread through the cracked floor, it seed as though the glass blade had been the epicenter of the terrible explosion.
There was not a simple blemish on its surface, though.
Sunny lingered for a mont, then leaned forward and picked up the Glass Knife. It was light and cool to the touch... just how he rembered it. Just to make sure, Sunny glanced beneath the surface of the glass blade and froze for a mont, transfixed by the sight of a single string of fate encased within it, looping endlessly on itself.
Even if he had not seen that knife in one of his nightmares, he would have instantly recognized it for what it was.
The key to an immortal’s death. The Ivory Lord’s death.
...He had found it.
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