"The Scions! The Scions of the Heart are here!"

"Praise be the Goddess! We are saved!" The cultists all shrieked, their terror replaced by a frantic, delusional hope.

Emelie stood her ground as she watched the man and the woman approach. Her eyes narrowed as she studied their features. Despite the priest’s uniform and the nun’s provocative lace, there was an unmistakable family resemblance of violet tint in their hair.

"Well look who we have here. I recognize those faces. You’re Violet’s little siblings."

The man adjusted the sleeves of his robes and smiled. "Hahaha... I am Indigo," he said condescendingly. "And this silent cutie is my sister, Lilac. You’ve caused quite a mess, Emelie Herst. Tobias is going to be very cross about the cleaning bill."

"I’m here to ruin more than just his budget, Purple Henchman No.2," Emelie retorted, "I’m here to burn this whole operation to the ground. Yours and this little brotherhood you got going, the story ends here tonight." 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

"Bold words for a woman who stumbled upon a fortress that doesn’t exist on any map... Speaking of which, how did you find us?"

"A lady never tells her secrets," Emelie said with a predatory grin. "Let’s just say I have a very good memory for things that haven’t happened yet."

Lilac, the blindfolded woman, remained motionless. Her hand rested on the leather-bound book chained to her hip, her head tilted as if listening to a frequency Emelie couldn’t hear.

"What’s the matter with Purple Henchman No.3?" Emelie teased, gesturing at her with a dismissive wave. "Is she shy? Or did Violet take all the personality for herself and leave her with nothing but the scraps?"

"... Forgive her silence." Indigo’s smile thinned. "Lilac doesn’t enjoy conversing with anyone outside our bloodline. To her, your voice is nothing more than the buzzing of a fly before the swatter falls."

"How tragic~ I guess that means she’ll only be talking to you from now on, Indigo. Which is a shame, really... because Violet is dead."

Rumble— CRASH!

The atmosphere in the courtyard completely froze. The chanting of the cultists died in their throats and Indigo’s arrogant smirk faltered.

Until,

".... Pffthaha! AHAHAHA!" He burst into a fit of abrupt laughter. "A nice joke! Truly! You have a sense of humor to match your violence. But Violet? Dead? My sister has more lives than a mountain of cats. Other than Tobias, she is the Heart of this Fortress. She cannot be killed by a mere mortal."

"Is that what you tell yourselves?" Emelie’s tone was direct, cutting through his laughter like a blade. "Five hearts." She raised her hand.

Lilac flinched. Her reaction was subtle. A sharp intake of breath and the tightening of her grip on her book, but to Emelie’s trained eyes, it was everything.

Indigo stopped laughing. His face turned a sickly shade of grey. "What did you say?"

"It took five hearts to put her down for good," Emelie continued, stepping forward as the rain swirled around her in a telekinetic vortex. "My friend felt every one of them stop beating. Why do you think she hasn’t come to help you? She’s dead, Indigo. Her head is currently decorating a rug three floors up."

"You lie! You lie, you filth!" Indigo’s composure shattered.

Emelie turned her gaze toward Lilac, her expression shifting into a mock-apologetic pout. "Oh, Lilac~ I was wrong earlier. I said you’d only be talking to Indigo. But I think you will get to speak with Violet after all. Once I’m done killing you and your brother, I’ll be sending you straight to hell. You can have a very long, very quiet family reunion there, hahaha~"

"I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!!!" — "I’LL TEAR THE SOUL OUT YOUR BODY!!!" The sibling roared and–

BOOOM!

The fight exploded with a violence that made the previous skirmish look like a playground tiff. Indigo moved first, drawing two curved shamshir blades that glowed with a sickly purple light.

Lilac didn’t move her feet, but her magic book flew open, the pages fluttering madly in the wind. "Grave Thorns!" she hissed, her first and final words.

Massive black vines erupted from the spaces between the cobblestones. They were tipped with emerald-green thorns that dripped with a neurotoxic slime that lashed out at Emelie’s ankles, trying to drag her into the mud.

"How predictable!" Emelie leaped and hovered three feet off the ground. She then slammed her hands together and let out an icy breath.

The rain itself turned against the siblings. The falling droplets froze mid-air, turning into a storm of jagged, crystalline needles. They shredded the poisonous vines and forced Indigo to cross his blades in a defensive ward.

"Ha! This is nothing!" Indigo snarled, diving through the ice-storm. He was a master of the shamshir, his strikes coming in a fluid, relentless dance. Emelie was forced to manifest a telekinetic shield, the purple blades sparking against the invisible barrier.

"What’s wrong, Purple Henchman No.2~?" Emelie taunted as she parried a strike by hardening the air into a solid block. "Missing your big sister? Does it hurt to know she died alone while you were busy playing dress-up on the balcony? Seriously, what with that priest get-up? You look ridiculous."

"Shut up!" Indigo swung both blades in a scissoring motion, a wave of purple energy slicing through the air.

Emelie dropped her shield and grabbed the overflowing water from the central fountain near the Goddess statue. She twisted it into a massive, rotating serpentine form and swung it at Indigo.

The liquid beast slammed and threw him back across the stones. But Lilac was ready. Her book glowed a violent green, and the vines she summoned wove together to form a protective cocoon around her brother, absorbing the impact.

The courtyard became a chaotic mess of elements. Poisonous vines choked the entire courtyard, while Emelie turned the floor into a sheet of slick ice. Indigo skated across the ice with predatory grace, his shamshirs whistling as they sought Emelie’s throat.

"You’re good, I’ll give you that," Emelie panted, dodging a vine that tried to wrap around her neck. "But you’re so sloppy. You’re fighting with emotion. Violet was a psychopath, sure, but at least she was focused. You? You’re just a spoiled brat with a sword."

"I will make you eat your own tongue!" Indigo screamed, launching a flurry of strikes that pushed Emelie back toward the Goddess statue.

Lilac’s book pulsed again and a thick, purple mist began to billow from the pages, mixing with the rain. Emelie felt her lungs burn and heart spike; the mist was a fast-acting aphrodisiac.

"Aww~ Look at the little sister trying to act like her big sister~ Too bad it’s just cheap tricks." Emelie wheezed. She then spun, creating a telekinetic whirlwind that sucked the mist upward and hurled it back at Lilac.

Suddenly, a thorny vine crept up and latched itself onto Emelie’s ankles, keeping her in place.

"Ow! Really, Lilac? *Sigh* some things never change. You always were the sneaky one–"

"This is where you die, Emelie!" Indigo enchanted himself in strengthening magic for a final, desperate charge. He crossed his shamshirs, the purple light blindingly bright.

He lunged, his blades inches from Emelie’s heart.

Emelie’s streaks and eyes glowed a minty green as she got ready to counter with her magic. "How many times are you going to try the same things–"

SHINK!

A flash of crimson light, faster than Emelie could pick up, had cut through the rain.

Thud!

Indigo didn’t stop moving, but his right arm did. The limb, still clutching a shamshir, flew into the air, spinning uselessly before splashing into the fountain. Indigo stared at his stump for a heartbeat before letting out a high-pitched, gurgling shriek of agony.

"G-GAAAAH!"

"INDIGO!"

Noticing a distinct lack of background cheering, Emelie looked around.

The fifty or so background cultists who had been cheering from the sidelines were no longer standing. In a single moment of silence, they had all dropped dead, their heads lolling at unnatural angles or their chests pierced by a singular, clean strike.

In the center of the carnage stood a woman. Her platinum hair was damp from the rain, her expression as cold and immovable as a mountain peak. She held a long, crimson nodachi, its blade dripping with blood in the cold air.

"Principal Valentine?"

Lilac moved with an instinctual, animalistic fear. She used a mass of vines to snatch her screaming brother from the floor, pulling him back toward the shadows of the estate.

"It’s her," Indigo whimpered, clutching his stump. "The Crimson Flash..."

"We have no chance, Indigo. We should leave." Lilac’s voice was a ragged whisper.

"And leave Violet’s body behind!? We can still revive her if we–!"

"No! We’re going to die here if we stay a moment longer. We’ll retrieve her remains another time! So let’s retreat!"

"... Dammit! You’re right. Ok, let’s retreat for now." The two siblings didn’t wait a second longer. They turned and bolted toward the tall walls of the fortress, Lilac’s vines acting like stilts to carry them away at high speed.

"Oh no you don’t!" Emelie floated off the ground, intending to catch them.

"It’s fine, Emelie. Leave them to me." Diana said, leaving no room for argument. "They have caused enough trouble for you."

She then shifted her stance; her crimson blade held horizontally in front of her face. She stepped into Emelie’s path, blocking her way.

SWOOSH

One moment she was standing in front of Emelie; the next, a ripple distorted the air and she appeared forty feet in the air, directly above the fleeing siblings.

"Die."

"LILAC! LOOK OUT–!"

SHINK! SLASH!

Two clean, wet thuds followed. The heads of Indigo and Lilac bounced off the cobblestones, rolling into the gutters. Their bodies collapsed forward, their momentum carrying them another few feet before they slumped into the mud, the poisonous vines withering into grey ash instantly.

Diana vanished again and landed softly on her toes, next to Emelie. The rain washed the blood from her blade before she sheathed it back into her gem.

Emelie stood in the middle of the ruined courtyard, looking at the decapitated siblings and then at the back of the woman who had ended the fight in less than three seconds.

"Well," Emelie muttered, crossing her arms and letting out a long, exhausted sigh. "That was... incredibly anticlimactic. I had a whole witty speech ready for the finish."

"Efficiency is the only wit that matters in a war, Emelie Herst." Diana’s piercing gaze met her student’s "Now, tell me... where is Rosie?"