Lucius's fingers were already curled around the knife in his sleeve.
The woman came to a stop in the exact centre of the corridor, perfectly positioned between him and the double doors at the far end, as though she had always been planning to stand exactly there.
She tilted her head at him with the slow, easy amusement of someone who found the situation genuinely entertaining and felt no urgency about any of it.
Then she smiled.
It arrived with a shift of her weight, her hips cocked, one finger rising lazily to brush against her lips, the whole gesture performing something that read as playful and unhurried and completely at odds with the killing intent radiating off her like heat.
"Did you lose your way somewhere, baby boy?" Her voice came out smooth and measured, each word carrying its own quiet note of mockery, like she was enjoying herself and wanted him to know it.
'Tch, who the hell is this?'
[Appraisal activated!]
[Target: Human Female — Valeria]
[Class: Royal Guard Captain]
[Level: ???]
[Threat Level: CATASTROPHIC]
[WARNING: Target possesses ZERO mana signature]
[WARNING: Physical stats exceed measurable limits]
[RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT ENGAGE]
'Zero mana signature, and yet her threat level is so high!'
She dropped the pise without hurry, settling back into stillness, watching him with the focused patience of a predator who had already decided how this ended.
"You're not a servant, are you?" She said, in exactly the tone a person uses when they're stating something obvious.
"Servants don't move through the building the way you just did, and they don't radiate that particular flavour of intent inside you." The smile returned, sharper this time.
"And they absolutely do not carry the scent of absorbed divine mana on them."
Lucius remained quiet. Every part of him that processed the system's message was pointing him in the same direction — run! — but she was standing between him and the only path that mattered to him.
Valeria took one step toward him, then another, neither slow enough to be cautious nor fast enough to be urgent. Just pressure, building steadily, the way water builds against a dam.
"You're the one heaven has been chasing its tail over. The said anomaly, the one who's been killing our warriors and taking away their blessings." Her amber eyes caught the corridors' dim light and held it.
"I've been curious about you for a while." she moved.
There was no real transition between stillness and motion, one moment she was standing ten meters away, and the next that distance simply didn't exist anymore, her hand sweeping through the precise space where his throat had just been.
Lucius had moved on pure reflex alone, throwing himself backward before his mind had finished processing the threat, rolling on impact and coming back up with the knife forward.
She was already inside his guard.
Her leg came in low, sweeping his feet cleanly out from under him. He hit the stone floor on his back with all the air driving out of his lungs at once from the force of it.
[HP: -8]
He rolled sideways, pulling fire from wherever he could reach inside himself and driving it toward her face with an open palm.
She walked straight into it without adjusting her pace at all. The flames spread across her scarred skin and did absolutely nothing to her, dissipating against her like sunlight against dark stone.
"Fire." She said with a brief, uncomplicated laugh. "How considerate of you."
Her fist dropped toward him. Lucius wrenched his entire upper body to one side. The stone floor beneath where his head had been cracked open under the impact of her knuckles, leaving a crater in the flagstone.
'She's too fast! Too strong!. There's no way I can…!'
He drove the knife toward her in a wide slash. She intercepted his wrist before the blade completed half its arc, closed her hand around the joint, and squeezed it.
The bones of his forearm complained loudly as pain shot the full length of his arm like electricity, burning all the way up into his shoulder socket.
[HP: -7]
He reached for absorption instinctively, grasping for something to pull from her, any reserve of spirit mana he could drain and redirect.
But there was nothing in her. She was completely empty as the system said. Hollow, the same way an empty room is hollow, not depleted but simply never having contained what he was looking for.
Valeria pulled him forward by the wrist and drove her knee upward in the same motion. He managed to twist his body at the last second, catching the blow across his hip rather than absorbing it directly in the stomach.
[HP: -15]
The impact threw him across the corridor and into the wall. He hit it hard and dropped, his vision blurring briefly at the edges before reassembling itself into something he could work with.
Valeria stood in the center of the corridor behind him, watching, her breathing unchanged from how it had been when she first walked in. "Is that the full picture? They made you sound like something genuinely worth finding."
Lucius shoved himself back upright. His ribs had started a sustained, high pitched protest. His wrist throbbed with its own distinct rhythm. Everything in his body that was capable of communicating was communicating the same message — GET OUT OF HERE!.
But the prince's doors were twenty meters away from him, and he did not just come two hundred kilometres for this to be where it ended.
He raised his hand and let the mana gather and build the way he had taught himself to do it. "Smite!"
The technique erupted from his palm as a surge of dense golden light, the same divine method he had stripped from one of the blessed warriors' bodies and learned to call it his own.
It blazed down the full length of the corridor like a sustained burst of concentrated noon sun, filling the space with light so bright it swallowed shadows.
Valeria tilted her head at the incoming surge, looking at it the way a person looked at an interesting object they've never encountered before.
Then she took one step to the side. A single, unhurried, economical sidestep.
The Smite tore past her and carved a glowing wound into the stone wall behind, the rock blackening and cracking along the strike line.
"I'll admit that one surprised me," she said, sounding like she meant it. "Channeling divine techniques through a body with no direct blessing. That's genuinely impressive and unusual."
She accelerated forward.
Lucius threw himself hard to the right. Her fist drove through the wall where he had been standing, stone fragments scattering down the corridor in a cloud of pale dust.
He scrambled backward and threw everything he had into staying ahead of her, every active and passive skill running through his arms simultaneously at maximum output. However, it made no meaningful difference.
She was faster than the gap he could create and stronger than anything he could put between them, and she closed every distance before he had finished each strike.
Her knee found his chest and something inside it gave way with a sharp, definitive crack.
[HP: -25]
The floor rose up and met him. He was on his back, his chest heaving heavily against his broken rib, blood collecting behind his teeth from somewhere he couldn't immediately locate. The corridor above him seemed to rock gently from side to side.
Valeria stepped forward until she was standing directly over him and looked down at his face with the detached interest of someone conducting an examination.
"Credit where it's due, you're still conscious. Most people I hit like that are usually finished."
She reached down, wrapped one hand around his throat, and lifted him off the floor with the effortless ease of someone picking up something they've carried a thousand times before.
Lucius got both hands around her wrist and pulled, his fingers scrabbling for any kind of leverage. What fire he could still pull together crawled weakly across his knuckles and guttered out almost immediately.
The darkness was already gathering at the outer edges of his vision, thickening steadily as the pressure against his throat increased.
"But there's a difference between being hard to kill and being strong enough to actually win," she continued, studying his face with that same calm attentiveness, as though cataloguing his reactions. "You're not there yet."
Her free hand snapped out, too fast to follow with the eyes, too fast to track as anything more than a blur of motion.
And Lucius felt it arrive.
Cold metal at his throat, laid carefully against the skin. Not a strike, something precise and deliberate. A line of sensation that started as ice, shifted almost immediately to fire, drawing itself slowly and with great intention across his neck.
The corridor lost its orientation, walls and floor traded places.
Heat spread rapidly down the front of his chest in a wide, wet rush.
The darkness didn't approach gradually. It simply arrived, total and immediate, and every light in him went out at once.
Darkness.