"Just as an information before you all die, is that the cursed can never attack back. Let's see how you are going to do that...Aefia?" Silence spoke while smiling evilish at the young girl in front who seemed to have regained her strength and energy over the time with the residue of the healing magic she had absorbed.
"I may be sealed, but I am not cursed." She replied while staring at the opposite person with red eyes that seemed to be a piercing gaze which could kill the person before her hands did. In this case, she still didn't know what the curse was supposed to be, because her skill 'Cursed Fate' was going to stop any from getting her.
"Wrong! Because you seem to not understand that the seal is actually what is draining your magic energy. Lady Gray...she had implanted the reversing ailment onto you while you died. I had assigned her an unseen mission to kill you, and she was successful to it, while also it was a sort of revenge for her. I already knew you were going to take down an entire team if you sensed they were a problem to the environment. The Banshees, was to trap you into this." The woman smiled as she dropped the scythe onto the ground.
"The reversing ailment, it was placed across the parasol's awl-shaped end, and once it was placed inside your blood, you immediately activated your skill 'Cursed Fate'. That in return caused the skill to absorb every single one of those last drop of ailment, and reversed its effects after you had woken up. You were placed into a curse, specifically, a cursed fate.
"That's why, it seems that your days are going to consequetively get worse the more you are alive. Isn't it better to die? I will make it a better way by killing you the way you died in that story, 'Dying in a Battlefield'. I really want to see the story come alive." Silence let out a laugh as she stared at the dazed girl and her shocked, souless eyes. Her right hand immediately reached her left wrist and it seemed it was about to cramp due to her blood pressure.
She tried to retract her elbow, which stood straight in one end and those flower and vines pattern appeared across her face and hands, faintly as they flickered. Along this time, a part of her hair was starting to whiten from the end too, which was a result of Energy Over Consumption, a syndrome where the user gets temporarily paralized while trying to fight, and changed in features. It was rare, but when it happened, a person could change too much as a human.
"You didn't tell me all that?" Ms. Avry stared at the girl beside her with a disbelieve, as the leviathan was directly above their head as she looked at Silence again. "So the days you didn't come to the office, did you die? Did you die while trying to face someone extremely powerful and...you knew you would die." Her mouth was agape, as if more words were going to leave her mouth.
Suddenly, standing upright, she fixated her gaze at the woman in front of her. "It was a trap set up and I didn't know that. Because if I did, I would have let myself get beaten by the hands of those brats, rather then send them to jail and deduce a plan that would help me get killed and free many hostages..." She let out a deep breathe and took a pause.
"I guess I trusted the instincts of my younger self and thought I could try to get a little bit out of the duchess while making her proud. My goals were to just live, until I died.
"I couldn't impress her, and rather maddened her by coming home absolutely injured and leaving a bad image for her in front of the palace guards. I was really just a fool...but that too, if I hadn't had gone through those difficulties, I wouldn't have come across this situation where I finally find the person chasing me." Her speech was overlapped with her patterns dissapearing, but her hair still stayed silvering at the end.
"Of course I am regretful at one part where if that day, I didn't free the hostages and get caught up in that trouble, I would have been able to save my mentor from being captured. Unfortunately, like you said, that scoundrel...Mr. Elephant spoilt it out to you, that I was close to Ms. Avry. If only I could have taped up his mouth before leaving the office, she wouldn't have entangled someone else entirely into this matter."
"What is going on! Why are you saying nonsense that didn't happen?! Stop making up stories that didn't occur, that's like lieing the way you said the competition lied to you!" Ms. Avry slammed a palm onto Aefia's mouth to stop her from speaking. "You did what you wanted to be right for the people being held up, why are you regretting those sort of things! One person is not equivalent to a hundred others. I don't want you to live with that mindset that makes you regret being alive for not being able to save only one person." Her voice turned calmer at the end.
She pulled her hand off she mouth while speaking words that left tears falling from her mentor's eyes, and it splattered onto the ground, covered in blood that had stained her face earlier. Her ears rang heavily as she recalled what the sentence was, again and again.
"But one mothering figure is not equivalent to a hundred people. If you were gone, leaving your children in the harsh reality of humans, won't you regret it? Knowing they would regret not being able to save you either. I heard I was like your own daughter, are you going to abandon me in this world while I am still new?"
Unexpected words fell from her mouth that even Silence trembled from the distance. Ms. Avry's hands flopped to her sides as she stood there speechless and expressionless, and her mind probably full with thoughts that would stay in for the rest of her life. Whether it was short or long, her ears would still ring with the same tone. Suddenly, the creature awakened deeply and raised up in the air, as if summoned by the steps that were left by the young girl who was walking towards it.
The gigantic leviathan plunged down at her, but surprisingly, it couldn't strike her down. Because to begin, she wasn't there. Rather, she stood behind Silence, watching the scene beside her as she silently picked up the scythe. Raising it high, a faint chopping sound was heard behind the great roar the dragon had let out.
"Your wings...did someone steal it? Or...did you steal it form someone?" Aefia asked as her eyes shadowed along with it. Noticing her new placement, the beast followed behind as it roared loudly at her from the distance. Despite the loudness, she stood still, as the front hair lifted to reveal those fierceful eyes of the Guardian of Death. With the scythe in one hand, she looks even more recognizable.
"I have a very faint memory...of being someone, but I can't tell who. I remember, that I once had confronted you before, but I just can't remember when. I have the most foggy memory right now, but not everything covered in haze won't get found out." She spun the long pole of the scythe around her hand and slammed it down on the ground.
"Your curiousity for trying to find out who I am, gets me into the same zone of thinking. I want to know if I ever had a past life before this, and I really want to know too, who you were back then and now. For the surface, I know you are not a real Guardian." Her footsteps didn't place on the ground, but the prove that she had indeed walked past, was seen as flower buds blooming into the soiless ground.
"Guardians are only defined by the power they hold, and I don't see any binds to you and your power of silence. I would say, if this leviathan was your skill, that you are the Guardian of Beast Tamers or Loudness. Actually, none of them qualifies, because only a specific array of skills can be a beast tamer, not an entire title. And loudness? Wouldn't that be sound? Cool names don't hold meanings, they hold regrets."
She stopped short of the beast in front of her, not moving more than that or even moving her fingers. "But you said it, that you wanted to test my ability to take down a beast? Why does it seem so wrong? Did you cast it with the matter you had absorbed from the outside world?" She glanced backwards from her position as her eyes then diverted towards Ms. Avry, who was standing still while severed.
"A real Guardian, can't show their true form to any human, even if they were stronger than them. And to think you easily did that was a little surprising to me too. You will never know this, but I have set up a trap for you too. Stating if I failed to take you down here, I would still be able to take you down later. Because you are not a Guardian by any means." She dropped the wing from her hand and onto the floor, while Silence shrieked loudly.
Her voice was so loud, it sounded like a giant eagle had plunged down and was seeking to ripe off the soul out of its prey. Both humans slammed their hands onto their ears as she took the wing onto her hand, which lost its golden glow, and melted into a very navy blue at the edge and it raised into a gradient with white at the roots. The feathers were flowing around with the light breeze lifting the ends up. Golden dust spread across the body, as it happened to form a symbolic pattern that seemed a heavy catch to the sight of Aefia's eyes.
"Why are you so revengeful! In any universe! You are extremely revengeful and why are you so gruesome! You don't care about human pain...you don't care about your own pain!" Silence spoke with teary eyes and hugged the wing around her, while standing up and shoving it away with shadowed eyes. "You don't understand the value of power and respect, and you always don't feel grateful for being in such a high position...always speaking about leaving your position as a higher up! You have always had a wish to die...now go die!"
She sprinted forward towards Aefia with her hands held out in the front, as to catch her by the throat and squeeze out every single last inch of air from her airways while holding her up. The girl, hanging at the end of her grasp, didn't hold back her laughter and didn't reach her hand out to stop the Guardian from killing her. The scythe from her hand dropped, and her eyes turned maroon after a short while. "I really... really... hate the idea of strangling. Do you not have any other ways to kill inside your mind? I only ripped away a stolen wing, now what are you going to do? Look at you...you are not bleeding."
It was indeed true that no drop of blood fell from the Guardian's back where the wings were. Even if golden blood had fell from her back, it would still be visible when hitting the dark coloured sand. Added to that detail, the wings were not a colour that matched up with Silence's theme. If the woman was mostly golden in colour, with her hair and iris both a bright yellow, why would the wing be the colour that was complimentary to hers?
The Guardian's fingers wrapped around the area of her vocal cord, and soon after, a snapping sound was heard and Aefia immediately coughed up blood with widened eyes that explained she was majorly injured.
Ms. Avry, who jolted alive with this commotion, forced her eyes to look towards the girl who was throwing up liquid the colour of her eyes. She tried to move, but something was blocking her legs as her movements seemed to have frozen around the grasp of the gigantic beast. Its tail wind around her tightly like an anaconda, as she screamed and caught their attention from far.
"What happens now...will conclude a major chapter of your life. Watch carefully, cursed child!" She shifted her hand to her chin and brought her down to force her to look at the way her mentor was being squeezed to death. Aefia held her hand tightly around the Guardian's and burned it with her warm hands as she took off towards Ms. Avry and summoned her sword out of the inventory, which by then had already restored to its original state and went up in flames.
The leviathan, seeing the girl approaching, threw up the human in the air, having her float mid-air while encircling around her at rapid speed. Silence summoned a sword, out of thin air, and held it out at the back of the human which was thrusting upwards at an immense speed. Time slowed down instantly as she watched the golden dragon turn the space into a torture chamber for her.
Tears left her eyes as she glanced down at Aefia who was trying to reach her by cutting through the hard scales of the dragon's body, but her eyes fixated at her face from down there, with shock and panic hovering over each one of them. But just before she could strike it down, the sword penetrated her sternum, as blood spilled from the sides of her mouth and nose.
"I am...sorry...I lied to you all..." Those words left with a small moment of gap splitting and separating the words each time. With the last word falling out, the sword went deeper and immerged from the other side of her body and immediately pulled out as she plunged towards the ground.
Fitting into a small gap in space, she rushed in to catch her mentor before she fell further down and completely died. Aefia's eyes faced to the place where Silence was standing. "Good luck...Cursed Child. I know this will be the memory of your life." Upon this being told, her image faded away and she dissapeared.