Reality shattered.
Neira was no longer standing in the garden.
She floated suspended in an endless void, forced to bear silent witness to the utter destruction of everything she held dear.
She saw Lengos.
Her stalwart protector was on his knees, but he wasn’t praying.
Piece by piece, his physical body was rapidly transforming into solid gold.
Yet this was no precious, gleaming treasure; it was an agonizing metal.
The knight screamed a soundless scream as jagged roses violently burst from his empty eye sockets, their vibrant buds blooming deep within his lungs, tearing his ruined armor apart from the inside.
She saw Duria, driven completely mad by an overload of sensory ecstasy pumped directly into her veins by Sakurabara, viciously hacking at her own limbs with her blades just to feel a different kind of pain.
She saw Zedora and Perval, locked together in a macabre, inescapable embrace by the thick vines, completely desiccated down to dry husks, every single drop of life ruthlessly squeezed out of them.
Yet that horrific tableau was merely the genesis.
The perspective violently zoomed outward, pulling back into the infinite dark.
She gazed down upon their entire world; a breathtaking sphere of brilliant blue and green; which was suddenly, horrifyingly consumed by a creeping crimson mold.
Silent Bliss was no isolated anomaly.
It was a single, tiny spore.
The sprawling garden expanded outward with the terrifying speed of an uncontainable wildfire.
Vast ancient forests twisted into dense plantations of golden-thorned brambles.
The great oceans grew sluggish and thick, morphing slowly into a stagnant, sweet rose oil.
Cities collapsed not beneath the battering rams of an invading army, but under the unbearable, crushing weight of unbridled hedonism and decadence.
Civilizations abruptly abandoned creation, architecture, and thought; they existed solely to feel.
The entire planet mutated into a colossal, pulsing altar upon which all of humanity willingly sacrificed itself.
And then, she looked up.
She saw the vast, incomprehensible expanse of the cosmos.
An ocean of stars, freezing and indifferent.
And she saw Her.
Sakurabara was not merely a woman.
She was an idea.
A virus.
Neira watched as a crimson mist detached itself from a dead, fully depleted planet and drifted through the vacuum, hungrily seeking out fresh hosts.
Like a parasite that had completely devoured its current vessel and was forced to move on.
She saw thousands of worlds.
Some were already silent ruins overgrown with blood-red flowers.
Others were still actively fighting the infection.
Still others were merely waiting to receive the “Good News.”
Neira’s vision violently zoomed in on one of them.
It was young, green, and completely unblemished.
In the shade of a tree boasting emerald leaves, a man and a woman were resting.
They were naked, beautiful, and profoundly ignorant.
Then, from the shadows, She emerged.
Sakurabara.
She had no horns here.
She appeared as the perfect, mirrored reflection of their deepest desires.
She approached the woman and whispered a single word into her ear.
In that exact fraction of a second, the fate of that entire world was irrevocably sealed.
Paradise was instantly converted into a breeding ground.
Finally, the vision snapped back to Neira herself.
She saw a colossal throne forged from crushed galaxies.
Upon it sat the Lady of Bliss, as vast and terrible as a god.
And standing at her left hand, draped in silks woven from pure agony and lust, was she.
Neira.
In the vision, her face was entirely stripped of mercy.
Her eyes burned with unyielding fanaticism.
It was she who unsealed the gates.
It was she who whispered the profane incantations.
It was she who actively pointed out the next worlds to be devoured.
She knew it with terrifying, absolute certainty: Sakurabara was the insatiable hunger, but Neira was destined to be the spoon that fed the monster.
Everything; the brutal deaths of her friends, the collapse of countless worlds; was going to happen through her.
She gasped violently, tearing in a ragged breath as if she had just been yanked from deep underwater.
She collapsed to her knees, choking on hot tears of pure terror.
The apocalyptic images were permanently seared onto the inside of her eyelids.
“Masaka…
(Impossible…)” Duria whispered, her crimson eyes widening as she watched the tips of Neira’s violet braids turn bone-white in a single second.
Sakurabara straightened up.
She gazed down at the violently trembling priestess with the exact same mild, affectionate amusement.
“Did you see?” she asked softly.”It is not a proposal, little sister.
It is your destiny.
You are the key.
You can resist, you can run away with your little misfit friends, you can play at being heroes…
But the seed has already been sown.”
Neira looked up.
There was no defiance left in her gaze.
There was only pure, unadulterated, animalistic fear.
For a long moment, she couldn’t speak.
Her throat was clamped tight by the sheer horror of what she had witnessed; not the terror of her own death, but the crushing weight of her own inevitable guilt.
She took a deep, violently shuddering breath.
She reached up and placed her small hands directly over Sakurabara’s wrists.
“No,” she said quietly.
Sakurabara arched an elegant eyebrow, as if she had just heard a particularly quaint joke.
“No?”
“I am not your clay,” Neira repeated, her voice steadily gathering strength.
Her eyes flared with a brilliant, luminous pink light; not the aggressive, devouring crimson of Sakurabara, but the warm, restorative glow of a true healer.
“I am not the key to your gates.
I am Neira!
A priestess of Phalli, the Goddess of Lust!
And…
and I would rather be a sheep among true friends than a lioness in a dead, empty garden.
Take your hands off me!”
She shoved the demoness’s hands away.
It was a physically weak gesture, but spiritually, it carried the force of a hurricane.
Sakurabara actually took half a step back.
For a fleeting second, something that might have been genuine wrath flashed in her eyes; the pitch-black sky above them violently rippled, and the endless sea of roses noticeably darkened.
However, a second later, the anger was entirely eclipsed by something vastly worse: sheer amusement.
The Crimson Lady began to laugh.
It was a deep, throaty laugh, terrifying in its genuine mirth.
“Phalli…?
How precious…” she murmured, shaking her head with profound pity, exactly like a seasoned tutor indulging a stubbornly ignorant child.
“So incredibly naive.
So…
remarkably immature.
Do you honestly believe that ‘no’ is the end of the conversation?
My dear, that is merely the opening of negotiations.”
She turned her back on Neira and began to walk away, strolling leisurely toward the infinite horizon of roses.
With every step she took, the world began to rapidly lose its sharp focus.
The vibrant colors started to violently bleed and run, like wet paint left out in a downpour.
“A decision of this magnitude requires proper maturation, little sister,” she tossed over her shoulder, her silhouette beginning to dissolve into a flurry of crimson petals.”The fruit must gather its sweetness before it willingly drops from the branch.
And you, my dear, are still so dreadfully tart.”
Her voice now echoed from everywhere and nowhere all at once.
“Do not fret, my lost little guests.
This is not a final goodbye.
It is merely…
a brief intermission in our grand performance.
We shall see each other again when the hunger finally becomes stronger than the fear.
Sarabata!
(Farewell!)” she added with biting mockery, throwing Duria’s native tongue back at her one last time.
And then the world simply exploded.
Not in fire, but in petals.
Billions of crimson rose petals violently tore themselves from the bushes, instantly forming a suffocating cyclone that devoured everything; the pitch-black sky, Sakurabara’s dissolving form, and finally, the Outcasts themselves.
The cloying scent became unbearable, choking them, forcing its way down their throats and noses.
Total darkness.
And then, a sudden, brutal shock of freezing night air.
“…AAAAH!” Figlin’s scream was cut brutally short as he stumbled and face-planted hard onto solid stone.
They snapped their eyes open.
The endless sea of roses was gone.
The suffocating black sky was gone.
The cloying stench of perfume had vanished entirely, swiftly replaced by the crisp scent of damp stone, ancient moss, and the sharp, metallic copper tang in the mouth that always follows the violent collapse of powerful illusion magic.
They were standing before the entrance to the monastery.
But they weren’t inside.
They were standing outside, directly in front of those exact same iron-bound wooden doors that just a moment ago (or was it an hour?
A week?) had swung open to invite them in.
The massive doors were now shut tight, cold, and entirely dead.
It was night.
A perfectly ordinary, chilly night, with normal, twinkling stars scattered across the sky, accompanied by one pale moon, a second, smaller red moon, and a third partially obscured by drifting clouds.
The silence was natural; they could clearly hear the steady chirping of crickets and the wind rustling through the canopy, rather than the maddening rhythm of an ungodly heartbeat.
Lengos leaned against the stone doorframe, panting hard as if he had just sprinted a full marathon in full plate armor.
His calloused hand was still locked in a death grip around the hilt of his bastard sword.
“Is everyone…
accounted for?” he asked hoarsely, his cold blue eyes rapidly scanning the battered crew.
Zedora sat on the stone steps, staring blankly down at her calves.
They were healed; the fresh, pink skin Neira had gifted her after the brutal fight with the Custodian was still very much there.
“It wasn’t a bloody dream,” she growled, tracing a finger over a raw edge of new skin.”The fight with that golden bastard was real.
My legs are real.
But that cursed garden…”
Perval shivered violently.
He pressed a hand to his chest, right exactly where Sakurabara had dragged her golden nail.
On his skin, tracing the line of a faded scar, was a fresh, angry red welt that looked exactly like a severe burn.
It was perfectly shaped like a rose petal.
“She touched me…” he breathed, his eyes wide with a terrifying concoction of pure dread and a deeply sickening fascination.”I felt her heat.
That wasn’t just some illusion in my head.”
Figlin lay flat on his back, gasping like a beached fish.
Suddenly, he scrambled up with sheer panic in his bleary eyes and began violently pawing at his rucksack.
“The head!
Where’s the bloody head?!” he shrieked.
He hauled an object from the canvas sack.
Gold gleamed dully in the moonlight.
The severed, bullet-holed head of the Gilded Custodian was still there; tangible proof of their victory in the courtyard.
The dwarf hugged it tight to his chest with a profound sigh of relief.
“Phew…
At least there’s that.
The gold didn’t vanish into thin air.
But what in the nine hells was that?!
Tossed us out like unwanted drunks from a tavern!”
Duria stood a few paces away, staring intently at the sealed wooden doors.
Her hand was still clamped tight around the hilt of her katana, her knuckles bone-white from the tension.
“Genjutsu…?
(Illusion?)” she whispered.”But on a scale like that?
Did she drag us into her own mind?
Or did we physically step into her dimension?
Kowai (Terrifying)…
She was playing with us like a cat with a half-dead mouse.”
Yerga casually brushed off her gown, despite there not being a single speck of dust on the fine silk.
She looked profoundly disgruntled, like a theater patron who had just had the performance interrupted right before the climax.
Her skeletal cat let out a low meow, scratching its bony claws against the stone steps.
“She was incredibly powerful,” the necromancer admitted, a distinct, bitter note of envy lacing her voice.”And she possessed impeccable style.
I must confess, the dramatic exit in a flurry of petals is a bit of a cliché, but it is undeniably effective.”
Everyone turned their gaze toward Neira.
She stood in the dead center of the group, wrapping her arms tightly around herself as if she were freezing to death.
She was staring blankly into the empty air, right where she had just witnessed the apocalyptic horizon of desires.
She felt profoundly “dirty” following her sister’s horrific revelation, yet simultaneously terrified by just how incredibly easy it would have been to simply say “yes.”
“She will return,” she said quietly, her voice trembling violently.”She said I have to mature.
That this isn’t the end.” She looked up at the sealed doors of the monastery.”We never actually went inside, did we?
All of that…
the endless garden, the conversation…
it all happened the exact moment before we crossed the threshold.
Or she violently spat us back out the very second I refused her.”
Lengos closed the distance and placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
“You are not alone, Neira.
You told her ‘no.’ That required vastly more strength than cutting down that golden monstrosity.
We are here.
We are alive, and we still have a contract to fulfill.”
Perval spat a bloody glob into the dirt.
“A contract?
What contract?
Memrot wanted to know what happened to his precious village.
Well, now we know.
Some demonic gardener decided to set up a greenhouse here and is breeding freaks of nature.”
“And she’s sitting on my bloody money,” Figlin added, rapping his knuckles against the golden skull.
“Do we march back to Memrot?” Zedora asked, pushing herself up from the steps with a wince.
Lengos stared hard at the sealed doors for a long moment, then turned his gaze back down the winding path leading into the dark forest.
“We have no other choice.
We need to regroup, and we desperately need to figure out exactly what this Sakurabara is before we cross paths with her again.
Because next time…
I strongly doubt she will let us walk away this easily.”
Every single one of them desperately wanted to ask Neira what she had seen in her vision, yet every single one of them was deeply terrified of the answer.
The crew stood in silence before the doors of Silent Bliss; alive, significantly richer in gold, but bearing a searing brand on their minds that none of them would quickly wash away.
The march back through the village was entirely different.
The stifling, pink mist that had previously choked the valley had already begun to thin, steadily blown away by a crisp, biting mountain wind.
The unnatural, suffocating silence had finally cracked.
When they reached the old stone bridge, they were no longer met by a solid barricade of smiling, ecstatic zealots.
Sakurabara’s twisted magic had receded the moment she vanished.
The villagers, who had previously formed a living, unbroken chain of pure euphoria, now lay scattered across the hard cobblestones, violently waking from a nightmare they had genuinely believed was a beautiful dream.
It was a deeply pathetic sight.
People were openly weeping, violently vomiting the last remnants of chewed rose petals, and frantically searching the dark for their loved ones.
They retained no memory of physical pain, but they perfectly remembered the intoxicating bliss they had just lost; which only made their brutal return to this gray, filthy reality infinitely more agonizing.
Neira stopped dead in her tracks.
Her deeply ingrained instincts as a priestess screamed at her to help, to soothe their shattered souls.
“They are entirely broken,” she whispered, watching a sobbing mother rock a child who still stared blankly at the sky.”She stole their will, handed them absolute paradise, and then violently ripped it away.”
Yerga casually stepped over a groaning old man, elegantly lifting the hem of her gown so it wouldn’t drag through a puddle of bile.
Void hissed aggressively at a nearby farmer.
“Leave them be, Neira.
They are merely background dressing,” she stated coldly, not breaking her stride.”They survived.
That is vastly more than they had any right to expect.
Besides, they are all being so…
unaesthetically loud about it.”
Lengos, keeping his hand resting on Neira’s shoulder, gently but firmly pushed her forward.
“You cannot heal the entire world, sister.
We freed them from becoming fertilizer.
The rest is entirely up to them.”
The priestess cast one final, lingering look over her shoulder.
She knew with certainty that Silent Bliss would never be silent again, much less blissful.
It would forever remain a jagged, bleeding scar on the map.
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