Chapter 29: Generous Sacrifice
Wez had indeed fled to Graycloud Fortress to escape his debts.
Back then, he wasn’t even of age. A drunk had shoved him carelessly in the street, and he had pulled a knife and gutted the man on the spot.
Kids like him, raised in the slums, all had blood on their hands to some extent. Beneath their filthy hair were the eyes of starving wolves, ready to swarm and tear you apart the moment you flinched or hesitated.
When fugitives are threatened, the first thing they disregard is their own life.
They have to be ruthless enough.
The countdown ended.
Funis didn’t hesitate. She pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a thunderous roar, the recoil numbing her slender arms. The bullet shot forth amid the flash.
She had calculated the timing precisely.
At that moment, Wez’s localized hardening had just worn off and couldn’t be immediately reactivated. And even a Warden’s skull couldn’t withstand the tearing kinetic force from an explosive round at such close range.
Limbs bound by thread, Wez was no different from a training dummy. At this distance, Funis couldn’t possibly miss.
He was certain to die.
Unless.
A massive hiss of steam erupted from the pipe behind the doomed man’s shoulder. In an instant, the stage was enveloped in dense, searing mist. A wave of hot air blew Funis’s snowy sleeves and skirt into a furious flutter.
From the fog, a figure began to swell—muscles bulging, a pair of eyes glowing faint gold glaring fiercely through the haze.
“The power belonging to Michael, Archangel of the Sword of God—the true reason why the Generosity Path is undefeated,” Funis murmured. She stood calm amid the swirling heat, holding her silver hair in place. “With a trump card like that, there’s no way you wouldn’t use it. Backed into a corner, anyone would gamble it all.”
“Burst.” Or more academically: “Generous Sacrifice.”
A short-term, explosive boost in speed and strength, traded for future fatigue, paralysis, or worse. In this state, a Warden’s physical stats could theoretically reach eight times their base values.
As if favored by a glance from Archangel Michael himself, any Transcendent on the Generosity Path becomes a divine warrior—impervious to pain, fearless in death.
But that fleeting heroism comes at a lifelong cost.
Premature aging, disability, amnesia, blindness…
The body’s overdrawn overdrive always exacts a price. Even one as generous as Michael doesn’t grant power freely. It’s a tax all his believers must pay on the road to redemption.
Funis knew scum like Wez wouldn’t care about that price.
He was ruthless enough to himself.
You had to stay on guard against someone who’d wager his own right arm at a casino. He could make anything, at any time, anywhere, into a bet.
Nothing mattered. For the sake of victory, anything could be placed on the table.
First forcing Wez to use localized hardening, then exposing its weakness—Funis had done it all to bring about this very moment: the gambler throwing in everything he had.
Victory or defeat hinged on this.
Like tearing down a curtain, the giant figure within the mist shredded the fog before him. With a heavy stomp, the floor groaned in agony.
Veins bulged grotesquely, facial features distorted by swelling muscles, his overheated, blood-red face resembling the demon masks painted in vermilion by the island nations of the East.
He charged from the steam cloud at impossible speed. His face was so monstrous that even Funis, always calm, shuddered.
She also saw the folding blades that had popped out along the sides of Wez’s metal prosthetic.
For such a small prosthetic, that kind of modification was clearly improper and highly dangerous. Hollowing out the inside made it more fragile.
Funis guessed Wez had maxed the prosthetic’s steam pump output right before bursting, using it to eject the blades and slice through the steel wires binding his body. The overpressure in the cylinder forced the drive shaft to operate at a higher frequency—grip strength and function boosted massively. The mist now flooding the stage had been released to relieve the boiler’s pressure.
Where metal joined flesh at his shoulder, hyperactive granulation tissue squirmed wildly, even growing blood vessels and nerves that entwined with the mechanical frame, only to be vaporized by the searing heat—self-healing also improved during “Burst.” With enough space, full regeneration of a lost limb wasn’t impossible.
A body far beyond human limits, visible regenerative speed, a prosthetic operating at full throttle, and localized hardening that could activate by instinct even if consciousness was lost—
Clearly, in this “Burst” state, Wez was an unbeatable force for Funis.
But she knew this overdrive couldn’t last long.
So Funis saw this as a gamble.
From the moment she chose to fight Wez, this outcome had become inevitable. Wez bet he could tear her to shreds before time ran out. Funis bet she could survive and escape before he did.
Both had staked their lives. Both had gone all in.
But it wasn’t really a gamble.
Because it wasn’t fair.
Wez’s massive form charged at high speed, making even the spacious stage feel narrow. Funis leapt gracefully to the floor below, dodging the train-like onslaught.
The rotten wall caved in. After the crash, the entire theater teetered precariously.
Had she been a second slower, Funis felt she’d have been flattened against the wall—scraped off in chunks.
She used to joke with colleagues from the Temperance Court that the Knights of Mercy from the Generosity Court were like human tanks, charging blindly ahead. After seeing it firsthand, she couldn’t laugh anymore.
The trapezoidal seating below the stage offered more room—better for maneuvering.
Wez, still embedded in the wall from his charge, struggled to move.
Funis took this opportunity to walk slowly toward the theater’s center. Lights flickered beneath her heels one by one. The chandeliers, supposedly devoid of candles, inexplicably flared to life. Night receded behind the girl’s skirt.
She stopped.
Funis lifted her skirt and turned.
She calmly watched the monstrous beast wheeze and stomp toward the stage, each step shaking the ground, the chandelier shadows quivering with them.
The bricks and steel overhead trembled too.
Under the lights, the previously hidden heavy objects now appeared dense and plentiful overhead—rocks and steel suspended like a forest, held aloft by thread-like webs.
Prepared for this.
Prepared for this moment—for Wez, turned monster.
He had once thought Funis was holding back, that she could have dropped them all at once.
He was half right.
She had held back—but not out of naivety or mercy.
Now that the fangs were fully bared, Funis no longer needed to hide. This hunting ground revealed its true face—designed for a greedy wolf to fall into fury and madness.
Everything had long been scripted in Funis’s plan. No accidents allowed. No chaos permitted. Thanks to Chescia’s teachings, she had developed an almost obsessive need for order and precision.
The girl drew a silver ornamental short sword from beneath her skirt. In the candlelight, it spun like a brilliant flower—just as it had in the script.
That’s why it wasn’t truly a gamble.
It wasn’t fair.