The bicolored rabbit reached the surface with its fur covered in dust and its breathing more agitated than it would have liked to admit. The cold air of early dawn felt different from the cave, cleaner, more open, and its paws found the ruined garden’s grass with the same silent precision it had shown all night.

It didn’t look back. The hole in the ground it had left behind sealed itself without any particular sound, and the furious screams Veronica had thrown from below no longer reached the surface. The bicolored one had let them fade on their own without giving them more attention than necessary.

It moved across the devastated garden in short, precise hops, weaving between chunks of rock, burned silk, and broken wall fragments scattered across the mansion grounds. Its red eyes scanned every detail of the path without rushing, measuring the remaining distance to the hole in the second-floor wall.

It found it easily. The gap where Kanary’s window once stood was wide enough for something its size to pass through without brushing the edges, and the bicolored one slipped inside with a clean, silent jump that didn’t disturb any of the wood or plaster still hanging from the shattered frame.

The room was dark. Moonlight entered through the hole in pale, cold beams that failed to reach the corners, and the dust stirred by earlier explosions still floated in the air with that slow drift of particles that no longer hurry because the damage is already done.

Kanary’s bed stood in the center. The blue-haired girl was still lying there, breathing with the deep, steady rhythm of someone asleep, unaware of everything that had happened around her over the past hours, oblivious to the holes in the walls, the scent of blood magic saturating the room, and the small bicolored creature approaching her from the floor.

On the floor, beside the remains of Shin’s summoning branches, lay Lucian, Daniel, and Ebony. All three were completely unconscious, unmoving, their breathing slow and heavy like those who had drained every last reserve of magic and energy and whose bodies had decided to collect that debt all at once.

The bicolored one studied them from a distance, without approaching yet, its red eyes shifting from one body to another with the calculated attention of something weighing options. Three unconscious bodies. One heir asleep in bed. No visible resistance.

The smile had no form on a rabbit’s muzzle, but the energy it gave off carried all the quality of one. New hosts. Young bodies, with magic, with potential, exactly the kind of material the order always needed and rarely found under such convenient conditions.

It moved first toward Ebony. She was closest to the hole in the wall, and her magic, though exhausted, had a signature the bicolored one had noticed all night without being able to ignore it, something different, something that didn’t match any profile it had processed before. That made her more interesting than the other two.

It stopped beside her hand. It opened its mouth carefully and began pulling something out from inside, slowly, with the delicacy of something handling what it couldn’t afford to damage. A small reddish, glistening worm emerged between its teeth, pulsing with concentrated magic that faintly lit the floor with a dark, damp glow.

Ebony’s hand closed around the rabbit.

It wasn’t slow or clumsy. It was direct, precise, leaving no room for reaction, the kind of movement only possible when the one executing it has been waiting for that exact moment and already decided how to respond.

The blonde’s fingers wrapped around the rabbit’s body with firm pressure, sealing its mouth shut with her thumb before the worm could fully emerge, pinning the bicolored creature against her palm with a calm that contrasted sharply with the ruined state of the room.

“You took your time.” Ebony’s voice was calm, carrying that tone of someone who expected something and finally got it exactly as planned. “Guess the cat really is strong.”

A faint smile. Not relief, not premature victory, but a precise satisfaction, the kind that comes naturally when a plan works exactly when it’s supposed to.

She tightened her grip slightly and spoke the word in a low, steady voice.

“Purify.”

{{Life Magic X Warrior Art: Purifying Fire Fist}}

Green fire wrapped around her hand instantly, without warning, without the gradual buildup typical of most spells. It appeared fully formed and concentrated, covering every finger, every knuckle, every inch of skin from the wrist down, and the moment it touched the rabbit’s fur it spread across the bicolored body with the same speed and intensity.

The rabbit screamed. It was the first truly uncalculated sound it had made all night, a sharp, chaotic cry that carried none of the deep, mocking tone it had used before, but instead pure reflex from something that hadn’t expected that level of pain and had no way to process it calmly.

It thrashed. Its paws clawed at Ebony’s hand, searching for any grip to break free, its teeth snapping at her skin from any angle it could reach, its entire body convulsing with urgency, using every muscle at once.

Ebony didn’t let go. Not when its claws found her wrist and carved red lines into her skin, not when its teeth sank into the edge of her palm hard enough to draw blood immediately. She held firm and kept the spell active, letting the green fire do its work with the patience of someone who fully trusts what they’re doing.

The fire didn’t burn the rabbit. That was the difference between this spell and anything else she could have used. The green flames surrounded the bicolored body without charring the fur, without destroying tissue, without touching anything that was truly the rabbit itself. All the heat, all the purifying energy, went straight for the parasite inside, seeking it out, surrounding it, burning only what didn’t belong to the original animal.

The reddish worm that had begun emerging between the rabbit’s teeth recoiled sharply. It tried to retreat back into the body, but the fire had already closed in from all directions. There was no path left, no depth it could retreat to that lay outside the reach of the purifying magic.

It stopped moving.

The bicolored rabbit stopped struggling almost at the same time, as if both processes were linked and one’s exhaustion meant the other’s. Its paws fell still, its teeth loosened, and its body relaxed slowly, like something losing the tension that had kept it functioning.

Ebony opened her hand and gently placed the rabbit on the floor, without throwing it, without any extra gesture of hostility. The bicolored one lay on its side, breathing, its red eyes still open but dim now, lacking the concentrated magic that had lit them all night.

The parasite that had controlled it was gone. What remained on the ground was just that, a rabbit, small, bicolored, and in very bad condition, its body too damaged by everything that had happened for that liberation to also be a full rescue. It would die either way, but it would die as itself.

Ebony looked at it for a second, then at the room, then stood up quickly and stepped into the hallway, searching for Veronica’s presence with her passive ability, tracing life signatures across the entire building with her focus locked onto the cat girl’s specific signature.

She wasn’t on any floor of the mansion.

She moved down the hallway to the hole in the wall overlooking the garden and looked down. The garden was wrecked, full of craters and remnants of the battle, and at the center of it all was a hole in the ground, large, dark, with jagged edges like something forced open, not carefully made.

She stared at it. Considered jumping in for a moment, calculating distance, depth, the state of her magic, which hadn’t fully recovered yet even after the apple, and what she might find below if she went down alone without knowing the situation.

Then she heard the clapping.

Slow. Steady. Each clap spaced just enough to feel deliberate, not spontaneous, coming from the mansion entrance with the rhythm of something that isn’t in a hurry and wants that to be clear.

Ebony turned her head.

He was walking in from the main entrance with long, calm steps, unhurried, carrying himself like someone entering a place he considered his own. Dressed entirely in white, from shoes to collar, wearing a white crow mask that covered his entire face and a large black gravedigger’s hat on top, contrasting with the rest of his outfit in a way that didn’t feel accidental.

He was different from the plague doctor-masked man. Different in posture, in the way he occupied space, in the quality of presence he projected as he walked. This wasn’t a disciple.

“Impressive.” His voice was clear and well-modulated, lacking the mocking tone of the previous assassin, carrying something closer to genuine admiration, though the kind that makes your skin tighten instead of relax. “Sacrificing your friend just to secure victory. If it had been me approaching at that moment, I would’ve probably been defeated.”

He paused, adjusting his hat with a casual gesture. “That technique of yours is incredible. It burned only the parasite and left the rabbit intact. That’s something no mage or Healer could do without killing the patient.”

Ebony didn’t respond. She stared at him, eyes steady, back straight, but inside she was processing something entirely different from his words. The man’s presence was repulsive in a very specific, hard-to-define way, not like the undead, not like the blood magic from the previous assassin, but like the sensation of hundreds, maybe thousands of small things writhing inside a single body.

Insects. That was the closest word she could find. As if the man were made up of countless lives all moving at once beneath that pristine white outfit.

And yet, the magical signature he gave off was moderate. Not overwhelming, not crushing, not the kind of presence a high-level mage leaks when they don’t bother hiding it. Which meant one of two things: either his real level was manageable, or it was so high that what he showed was only the residue of something far greater.

“(This guy is made up of too many lives… If even a few of them are on the level of that rabbit, we can’t handle this…)” Sweat ran down her forehead slowly, betraying the calm she was trying to maintain. “(But joining him isn’t an option either.)”

The man appeared in front of her.

He didn’t walk there. He was at the entrance, and then he was a meter away, without Ebony being able to identify the exact moment or mechanism of the movement. He was simply there, the crow mask level with her eyes, arms crossed over his white chest.

“I suppose leaving the decision to you is a bit cruel.” His tone didn’t change, still that same calculated admiration, as if this were a business conversation in a normal place instead of a destroyed mansion at three in the morning. “So let’s do this instead. I want to see your potential, since your fight with my disciples was rather brief.”

He pulled something from inside his white coat and tossed it lightly toward Ebony. An apple. Blue, perfect, flawless, glowing faintly with an energy Ebony recognized before her hands even finished catching it.

“That’s an elven fruit. I always keep one in case I run low on magic.” He stretched his neck slightly, relaxing his shoulders like someone with all the time in the world. “If you eat it, it’ll restore all your mana. Well, unless you’re like me, in which case you’d need two.”

Ebony looked at the apple. The magic it emitted was real, no obvious trick, the kind of clean, dense energy only high-quality elven fruits produce. She had heard of them before, but had never held one.

“Listen, eat it, recover your strength, and let’s play a game.” The man extended a hand toward her, palm up, as naturally as if offering a formal handshake. “I’ll give you ten minutes. If you manage to land even a single scratch on me or my clothes, I’ll spare your friends and leave immediately. But if you can’t, you come with me. Deal?”

The silence that followed lasted exactly as long as Ebony needed to check every angle of the situation and confirm none of them were comfortable. Her unconscious friends upstairs. Veronica trapped somewhere underground. Kanary in bed, unable to defend herself. And this man in front of her, with that presence of thousands of lives writhing inside him, offering a deal designed to be humiliating.

She bit into the apple.

The effect was immediate. Elven magic went straight into the core of her energy and began expanding outward, filling the empty spaces left by the night’s exhaustion with a speed and density nothing like the gradual recovery any potion could provide. Her body absorbed it all without resistance, like dry earth receiving water after too long.

She took the man’s hand with the same hand still holding what remained of the apple, looking at him directly through the crow mask with an expression that wasn’t fear or confidence, but something closer to determination, the kind that comes when someone already knows the situation is bad and decides it doesn’t matter.

“This is humiliating.” She said it with her mouth still full, chewing without ceremony. “But just so you know, you’re getting more than just a scratch, asshole.”

The magic kept spreading through her body as she spoke, filling every reserve, every channel, every inch of capacity she had available, and when the last trace of the apple finished processing, Ebony felt—for the first time all night—complete.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep