The Heroine is My Stepsister, and I'm her Final Boss-Chapter 119: Lost Faith

Irene lay there, broken and silent, swallowed by the cold embrace of stone.

The cell was small—far too small for someone once hailed as the Empire’s Prime. Its walls bled dampness, the kind that crawled into her bones and made her knees ache. Her skin, once warm with the heat of battle, was now marbled with grime and dried blood, streaked in a pattern almost ritualistic. She blinked slowly, barely, and even that motion felt like a betrayal of strength she no longer possessed.

Her eyes remained open—not out of vigilance, but because closing them felt like surrender.

’It already happened,’ she thought.

Her failure.

Her capture.

Her disgrace.

The light above flickered, weak and pitiful, casting long shadows across the uneven stone floor. Every shift of the flame seemed to mock her, like the laughing mouths of ghosts.

She tried to speak, to mutter a curse or prayer or scream, but her throat was a bed of cracked salt. Her tongue was a foreign thing, useless in her mouth. The last thing she had drunk was days ago, maybe weeks. She couldn’t tell anymore. The concept of time had eroded alongside her dignity.

Still, she breathed.

Barely.

"...Water," she rasped, though no one listened. There was no one left to listen.

No sword. No boots. No voice.

Just Irene. And failure. They had become one.

She shifted slightly—an inch, no more—sending a splinter of agony through her spine. The movement made her flinch, and that flinch felt like a confession.

’I was supposed to die with my blade in hand... not like this.’

Her mind wandered. Not to strategy or vengeance, but to mundane things. The taste of oranges soaked in honey. The weight of her sword across her back. The scent of steel polish and smoke curling off fresh bread in a soldier’s camp.

How absurd, the things one misses when death is close.

"I was the Prime," she whispered, though the words cracked and shattered on her lips. "The strongest..."

The laugh that followed sounded like a sob. freeweɓnovel-cøm

She remembered the day she earned her rank—how the Empress herself had adorned her neck with the red iron insignia. How Irene had sworn to die before she broke a command. How her comrades had cheered, eyes filled with envy and admiration.

But now, those same comrades were probably dead... or worse—betrayers. Spies. Puppets.

Or maybe she was the puppet. The fool led into slaughter by promises of false intelligence.

Berkimhum had never been weak.

They had simply waited.

And she had walked right into it.

The scent of mildew wrapped around her like a funeral veil. Her nostrils flared faintly, catching a trace of oil and iron—someone had been here recently. Someone had watched her while she rested. If she had slept. The hours all blended now into one long nightmare stitched by silence.

Her body bore witness to more than failure.

There were bruises where interrogators had pressed too hard. Scrapes from being dragged down stairs. A gash across her collarbone, shallow but deliberate. Not a cut for killing—but a reminder. A brand that said: ’you lost.’

She hated how intimate that pain felt.

’Maybe this is what we deserved,’ she thought grimly. ’Maybe the Empire made us monsters too.’

Irene had never asked questions when Royalty gave commands. She had never hesitated to infiltrate, to execute, to extract. What was a life when the Empire promised glory in return?

But that ideology felt paper-thin now—flimsy against the thick stone weight of reality.

Berkimhum had survived. Its capital had withstood siege and subterfuge. And she... she had become a relic of a crumbling regime, rotting quietly in the shadows.

"I was just trying to protect her," she muttered to no one, barely breathing. "To protect the Empire..."

But even her words didn’t believe her anymore.

The pain wasn’t what hurt most.

It was the absence.

Of purpose. Of command. Of someone calling her name.

’Prince Paul....Empress Elizabeth..’ she thought.

Her empress’s younger brother. Her pupil in swordsmanship. His shadow during diplomatic tours. The only one who had ever asked her, in a quiet drunken moment, "Do you know who you are, Irene, when you’re not fighting for someone else, the empress is no longer alive...so choose. "

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The Empire

Zander, the Capital

Steam hissed in soft bursts as Eli extended her newly-forged arm toward the rising sun. It was dawn, and the first light of morning broke across the iron skyline of Zander like a wound split open.

Her mechanical arm flexed with a low, rumbling groan—metal folding into itself with eerie precision. Faint red cracks glowed beneath the synthetic skin, like lava simmering just below the surface. The warmth radiated through the alloyed bones, pulsing in sync with her heartbeat. Each finger curled into a tight, seamless fist, and then uncurled—slow, elegant, dangerous.

The engineers had called it "godsteel."

But to her, it was just hers now.

And still... not.

A faint disconnect lingered between thought and motion. A phantom limb, a ghost of flesh long gone. Sometimes it was a whisper of pain at the elbow. Other times, it was a tingle—like frostbite kissed by flame. But she didn’t flinch. Didn’t complain.

Loss, after all, had become a part of her currency.

She raised the arm higher, watching the molten seams pulse in the early light. The air smelled of forge-slag and smoke, of burned coal and cold steel. The scent of birth—and of cost.

"It was a fair exchange," she said quietly, not to anyone in particular.

The boy beside her—barely seventeen—tensed at the sound of her voice. His black-dyed hair clung to his forehead in oily strands, and his golden lenses flickered slightly as they tried to track her expression. Those eyes were his curse now, just as her arm was hers. They both bore markers of the same resurrection.

She turned to face him. "Well?" she asked, tilting her head. "How does it look?"

The boy’s mouth opened, closed, then opened again.

"...It looks great, Your Majesty," he whispered, barely audible over the soft whirring of her arm’s internal gears.

Eli exhaled through her nose. Not quite laughter. Not quite anger.

"You’re still not there yet," she said, her voice flat.

The boy flinched. She didn’t look away.

"If it were him," she murmured, eyes drifting toward the spires of the distant citadel, "he wouldn’t have said something so boring. He would’ve said something vulgar. Obnoxious. Something that made me want to break his ribs while laughing."

The memory sliced through her like a blade soaked in bittersweet wine.

"He’d say it looked like I’d finally built a proper toy," she continued, quieter now. "That I’d replaced my sword with a hand designed to give pain and pleasure in equal measure."

Her mechanical hand pulsed once, bright cracks glowing like coals with each imagined touch.

"And I would’ve told him..." Her voice cracked, just slightly. "I would’ve told him to shut the fuck up."

She fell silent, the wind whistling over the edge of the platform as heat shimmered off her arm.

The boy didn’t reply. He simply looked away.

But Eli wasn’t watching him anymore.

She was staring at the molten glow where her hand used to be. At the artificial veins and circuitry that now beat in time with her regrets. And the faintest curve of her lips—somewhere between scorn and sorrow—betrayed the truth:

She didn’t regret losing it.

But she hadn’t stopped bleeding either.

"....the war....when will it begin..." she muttered in memories.

*****

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Guys sorry about this but I will be not uploading today and tomorrow. Getting more busy in my work. Its been Hard to juggle both writing and my actual work. But don’t worry I will start uploading like normal starting Friday. 😉 until then, have patience guys.

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