Smokewell stood and watched as Elsa commanded the giant abyss and the creature charged ahead like a mountain that had sprouted legs and was eager to sprint. Godfrey the Butcher felled the trees, knocking them aside as he ran. Elsa followed him.

  The tall bck cat just stood and watched as her pupil disappeared behind the curtain of dust and into the fray of war on the other side. Elsa had been right. Smokewell had been testing her ever since they'd entered this world.

  And so far, both Elsa and Lily had been crossing each of their obstacles perfectly. Even though the cat had pretended to not know what Lily was upto, she had used her pheromones to keep a track of Lily’s progress through her own objectives. She knew the girl had already found Rownd Radcliff.

  But something had put a halt in her steps. Something had stopped Lily from coming straight their way as they had decided. The girl was in perfect physical health. It wasn't a case of her being wounded and stopping to rest.

  No, something had caught her attention. And she decided to stay put for some reason. Although confused, Smokewell wasn't worried about Lily.

  The girl could reinforce herself as if she was made of steel. No, she was the st person Smokewell had to worry about hurting herself. Elsa was the one that had Smokewell anxious.

  The young witch was showing signs of malice fever. When a ritualist overcharged a ritual with her malice her chances of success would shoot through the roof. It was easy to mistake the phenomenon for a good thing while it was actually the complete opposite.

  The overcharging only meant that the witch would burn herself out at lightning speed. If Elsa kept overexerting herself, she was going to pass out in the middle of the battle. And with her grasp on the Liberation Ritual still being fairly mediocre, she would be leaving herself vulnerable in the middle of a raging battlefield.

  The cat furrowed her brows and gave a low growl. “For someone whose malice is knowledge, she is surely acting quite dumb,” she said as she produced her opium pipe and took a deep pull from it.

  The translucent blue light in its well disappeared. And all the scratchy sensations Smokewell was feeling under her skin from the little creatures that had invaded her body disappeared as well. She felt her strength coming back to her, compounding as the smoke of the stolen souls spread through her body.

  Her sleek bck fur bristled, then hardened as jagged, metallic ptes—gleaming like bckened iron—erupted across her shoulders and spine, clinking softly with each flex of her frame. Her cws, already razor-sharp, elongated into wicked, crescent-moon curves. Muscles coiled beneath her fur, now leaner, more sinuous, sculpted for relentless pursuit. With a low, guttural purr that vibrated through the scorched earth, she sprang forward, tearing through the half-razed forest, making her way through the puddles of blood and stomped down corpses of humans.

  The ground was still shaking from Godfrey's storming footsteps. Smokewell ran through the carnage Elsa had left behind. Her enhanced eyesight showed her just where the girl was headed.

  Towards the ke. Ariane had said that the enemy lived beyond the ke. Smokewell looked down at one of the puddles of blood walker pooled on the ground.

  Observing it for a minute was enough to know that these creatures weren't actually made of blood. “This is sin,” Smokewell mumbled. None of these creatures were born the way regur mortals are born.

  In fact they weren't born at all. They were made. She had limited knowledge of rituals that could create physical manifestations of abstract things like sins. The witchcraft she had learnt in her youth could get very close to creating sentient beings like these blood walkers. But making them this intelligent and ferocious, creating an artificial life form that lived its own life and made its own decisions was near impossible.

  Even for a witch at the Archmaster echelon.

  This was the extent of the power that a God like being possessed. Whatever Godfrey had become after he came here, Smokewell knew one thing for sure, he certainly didn't resemble a human anymore.

  That's when another much more terrifying possibility occurred to her. She looked back at the giant abyss that Elsa was controlling. Last time Elsa had achieved a simir feat, it was when the angels sent them to fetch the Eyes of Cornelius.

  That creature called Yazara En had killed at least a hundred people in a single strike. On the surface it had seemed like he misheard her. To some degree, that had been the case. But, the truth was Elsa hadn't been able to create solid control over the abyssal being.

  Now that she was showing signs of malice fever, it was hard to deny that maybe she was having the same kind of difficulty with Godfrey. She had managed to enhance the Liberation Ritual by adding supplementary spells.

  But it didn't seem like it was enough to establish perfect control over Godfrey's abyss. What was even more disturbing was that the reverse might be happening in this case. Maybe Godfrey was controlling Elsa instead.

  And it was taking a lot more malice than usual for her to keep charging the Liberation Ritual. Thus, the overexertion had triggered the malice fever.

  Without wasting any more time, Smokewell began running again. This time she was running straight at Elsa. The tall, armored cat ploughed through the blood walkers that got in her way, using her cws to tear through their sinful red forms. Now that her fur had transformed into thick and solid ptes she didn't have to worry about the walkers’ smaller forms piercing through her pores and entering her body.

  By the time Smokewell made her way to the young witch, Godfrey had already sin most of the humans and stomped almost every blood walker that came in their way.

  “Elsa!” Smokewell snapped as she came to a halt next to her. “End this stupidity at once. If this was a test until now, then it is over right this instant. We are running out of time. We can't indulge in this madness just for fun.”

  The girl turned to the cat, her eyes were glinting with bloodlust. It was malice fever indeed.

  “It's. Not. Over,” Elsa said and looked up at Godfrey. The giant abyss turned his attention to her and gently lifted her into his palm like a delicate flower and stormed ahead.

  Trying to reason with Elsa was futile right now. She would only be wasting time by engaging further with her. Considering that the girl was overcome with malice fever, she would probably be headed for a pce where she could wreak more havoc using her abyss.

  The tall bck cat used her enhanced eyesight to look past all the debris and destruction of the battle in her way. She caught a glimpse of the ke almost a mile ahead. And the ke was blood red.

  That's it. That's where the blood walkers were spawning from, rising from its depths like undead sentinels. If she could find a way to stop them from coming out then subduing Elsa's bloodlust would get easier.

  Fewer enemies meant a weaker urge to keep fighting. But if the ke really was a source of the blood walkers’ entrance into the battle, then how was Smokewell going to stop them from crawling out?

  She looked around, as if trying to find something that would answer her question. Her eyes happened upon one of the many crimson puddles. Pieces of broken gss were floating within it. Closer inspection revealed that it wasn't exactly gss but some kind of crystal that broke when Godfrey brought his mammoth foot down on them.

  It wouldn't be far from the truth to assume that these crystal-like things were some kind of core that probably functioned as the heart and brain to these creatures.

  Smokewell took off running again, her mind racing. From what she had seen so far, it was obvious that the blood walkers weren't individual creatures. They could form and deform themselves and fuse together in numerous combinations.

  This also meant that the red ke wasn't really a ke but just a bigger blood walker resting in the middle of the forest. And it also probably had a core of its own.

  Smokewell just had to destroy that core to stop the blood walkers from rising.

  Multiple other blood walkers got in her way as she ran for the ke. But she didn't engage with them any longer than a minute. Tearing through their semi-solid, semi-liquid bodies, snatching their life cores in a fsh of her cws. As she ran through these creatures with such animal ferocity, she had observed that the blood walkers protected their core by shifting it around in their bodies. That brought her to another conclusion.

  Since they could divide into smaller creatures it must mean that their core could divide to some degree as well. This made her slightly anxious when she realized that whatever rested in that ke was capable of more than a few complicated tricks for protecting its core.

  In a few more minutes of running fiercely, Smokewell overtook Godfrey and Elsa. She had considered knocking the hell out of the girl for a moment. That certainly would’ve given her some rest needed to recover from her malice fever.

  But it was dangerous because of Godfrey. Smokewell had never seen abysses being used in the way that Elsa did. So it was hard to tell what kind of effect the malice fever would have on an abyss of Godfrey's stature. There was also the possibility of the abyss getting overprotective of his master and shing out at whoever was trying to hurt her.

  She was getting closer to the ke now. She could see the blood walkers coming out of it like ants from their colony, hungry to take home some food. But she came to a sudden halt. A terrifying realization had dawned upon her.

  The ground wasn't shaking anymore.

  Why in the name of the devil would Godfrey stop moving now? At the back of her mind, she already knew the answer. But she was too scared to admit it. Even to herself.

  That's when her heightened hearing caught the ring of a hopeless, piercing sound. Elsa was screaming in agony.

  The cat turned to see what she already knew had happened. Godfrey's abyss had disappeared. Probably because his term of service came to an end. It didn't matter if it had been twenty four hours since Elsa had summoned him.

  Godfrey belonged to this world. It only made sense that the time moved for him the way it moved for everyone here. So according to the world he belonged to, he was already done serving his master.

  “Elsa, you idiot,” Smokewell muttered.

  In the blink of an eye, she whipped out her opium pipe and took the deepest pull from it she had ever taken. Large swaths of blue energy flew into the well of the opium pipe.

  And Smokewell drank them up hungrily, feeling them rejuvenate her reserves of soul energy. She put her pipe away and took a deep breath, focusing the energy of all the souls she had snatched right into her vocal cords.

  “Elsa!” she screamed. “Use the red potion NOW!”

  Smokewell didn't wait to see whether or not Elsa took her advice. Nor did she wait to see the hordes of blood walkers that were swarming the girl.

  The tall bck cat simply turned around and dove into the ke behind her. She had to destroy the core of the master of blood walkers. If Elsa did what she had told her, she would be just fine. But the blood walkers coming from the ke had to be stopped. No matter what.

  She swam through the crimson fogginess of the ke. The inside of the ke was surprisingly hotter. But it didn't bother her as much since she was draped in the thick pting of her armor.

  As she swam deeper and deeper, a pressure was rising inside her ears. But she kept swimming regardless.

  Then she arrived at the rge crystal sphere floating close to the bottom of the ke. Its surface was uneven and jagged. And it emanated a dim blue light from within. Being in its vicinity made Smokewell weak to her stomach. It was like being locked inside a sughterhouse full of rotting corpses.

  She didn’t have much time to waste. She had to destroy this thing right now. She swam closer and raised her fist. She brought it down with all strength, concentrating all the power of snatched souls into her armor pted paw. A loud wave of vibration spread around her in the murky red ke.

  The crystal sphere showed a tiny crack. So Smokewell punched it again. Harder.

  She was about to throw another punch when something unexpected happened. The sphere gave off a gentle groan and a single scarlet red eye opened within it.

  A rge bck iris was staring right back at Smokewell, straight into her soul. The cat froze in her spot, her fist still raised. She was terrified and mesmerized at the same time. It was like looking into the eyes of a god. A cynical and merciless god but a god nonetheless.

  She wanted to punch the sphere again. She knew it. She was trying to move her arm. But it wasn’t working. Her body wouldn’t move. As if a wall had been erected in the path of the signals that her brain was sending her limbs.

  She floated in front of the rge sphere, staring into the eye, still captivated by its hideous beauty when a sharp red limb, simir to that of a rge crab’s pincer, clenched around her waist and it squeezed into her armor. Smokewell screamed…only to realize that she was inside a ke of sin and no one could hear her.

  Sharp102