She curled up behind the tombstone, both hands clamped tightly over her mouth.
She couldn’t make a sound. She couldn’t breathe too loudly. She couldn’t let that priest find her.
The cemetery’s color tone was changing. One moment, it was a forest cemetery shrouded in night mist. The next, the gray-white tombstones suddenly grew taller, becoming an alpine cemetery standing against the cold wind.
This cemetery kept undergoing different dimensional distortions.
With every flashback, something that didn’t belong to this world mixed in.
The stone bricks beside the ancient tombstones suddenly became black asphalt.
On the broken cemetery archway in the distance, symbols she couldn’t understand—yet eerily recognized—flashed by.
Those symbols looked like they belonged to nomadic peoples.
“37… where are you~?”
The priest’s voice came from the mist, followed by the sound of something being loaded.
Click.
Qiu Meng’s pupils abruptly contracted. Then came the sound of a trigger being pulled.
BANG!
A purple fireball shot into the sky and exploded high above.
The clouds were lit up by purple light, and rings of abnormal ripples spread from the center of the blast.
Then purple rain began to fall. Qiu Meng kept her hand pressed hard over her mouth.
She watched the priest pass by the tombstone she was hiding behind.
The figure walked very slowly. With every step, a dark crimson flower bloomed on the ground. The petals were slender like blood, resembling spider lilies, or perhaps some kind of hand drenched in blood.
The path the priest walked kept twisting. Stone bricks became asphalt, and the asphalt slowly faded into forest mud.
And the mud turned into a sterile white hospital ward floor.
Qiu Meng’s head throbbed harder and harder. This distortion kept polluting her mind.
She had to leave. Qiu Meng held her breath, and the moment the priest turned her back, she ducked low and slipped out from the other side of the tombstone.
She remembered the way she’d come was roughly to the south.
If she could make it back to the cemetery entrance, she might still find Alisia and Seraphina Cadera.
She moved quickly between the tombstones, careful not to step on the blooming dark crimson flowers.
Then, just as she reached the path she’d come from, she heard the priest’s voice.
“Found you…”
The ground split open. Black tentacles extended from beneath the tombstones, covered in countless moist eyeballs, curling toward her.
Qiu Meng sharply dropped her body, narrowly dodging by a hair’s breadth.
The next instant, a red axe struck the iron fence behind her.
CLANG!
The metallic ring stabbed her eardrums. Qiu Meng’s pupils shrank.
That was a fire axe.
“How could this be…?”
She gritted her teeth, turned, and ran.
Things from Earth didn’t belong here. They shouldn’t. They absolutely shouldn’t.
“Sister No. 37, where are your wings~?”
The priest walked out of the purple rain, tilting her head. Her eyes were hollow, yet she wore a smile that looked very human.
Qiu Meng didn’t answer. She just kept fleeing.
But the priest’s hand suddenly stretched out, and the space around it twisted as well, forcing Qiu Meng to turn and face the attack.
She raised her Noble Sword and slashed at the reaching hand.
CLANG!
The blade struck as if hitting something harder than steel. The violent recoil numbed her wrist, forcing her whole body backward.
Then the priest slowly raised the fire axe in her hand. A strange power warped the axe head, slowly stretching it until it became an iron spear.
The spear tip was slender and sharp, but its structure was so bizarre that Qiu Meng’s breath caught.
It looked exactly like the iron fence spike that had run through her in her previous life.
“What do you mean by sister…!?”
The priest stared at Qiu Meng with cold eyes.
“After all… you’re the one who made me like this. Did you forget?”
“…!?”
Qiu Meng had no time to think. The priest attacked.
The priest swung three horizontal slashes with the iron spear.
Qiu Meng spun her body, using the Wind Magic Stone in her Noble Sword to accelerate her movements, deflecting the first two strikes. The third, however, knocked her to one knee.
The priest closed in and pressed down with a heavy strike. Qiu Meng blocked with the flat of her blade, but the overwhelming force made her spit blood.
‘This thing’s strength is terrifying…!’
Qiu Meng backed off two steps, then switched low, sweeping her blade at the priest’s ankle.
Her first strike was dodged. She rose immediately, and a Turning Slash grazed the skin beneath the priest’s black-red robe.
Dark red blood seeped out of the wound—but an eye opened within it.
A row of tiny eyeballs turned inside the gash, all gazing at Qiu Meng.
Her stomach churned, but she forced herself to keep observing. Finding an opening, she thrust at once.
The priest tracked her trajectory, stomped the ground, and blocked the strike with an Earth Magic Shield.
But the moment Qiu Meng saw the shield vanish, the priest vanished too. Then she noticed red light flaring on both sides of her, and alarm bells rang in her heart.
She dropped low and slid across the slick ground, narrowly dodging the horizontal slashes that appeared from nowhere on both sides. Then she used her sword to push off and leap, trying to clear the area covered by the red light.
Meanwhile, the priest’s two afterimages merged into one in midair. As her wings spread, she extended her hand and gathered a crimson thunderbolt in her palm. Qiu Meng’s pupils shrank.
‘Trouble… I can’t dodge!’
Midair, she activated the magic stone on her weapon, using the wind to send her blade diagonally into the crimson thunderbolt.
BOOM!
The crimson thunderbolt was deflected by the blade and struck the priest instead.
The priest staggered back two steps, glaring at Qiu Meng.
“Interesting…!”
After landing, Qiu Meng immediately pressed forward, avoiding the front, and stabbed at the priest’s ribs.
But the priest parried easily with her iron spear.
Qiu Meng quickly withdrew her attack, spun the hilt, slid along the iron spear to the side, and slashed with a Turning Slash.
Realizing she couldn’t dodge, the priest turned her weapon into a deep crimson shield and blocked.
A red gem was embedded in the center of the shield, glowing brighter and brighter.
Qiu Meng didn’t retreat at the strange sight. She charged at the priest, driving her blade down and slamming into the shield.
BANG!
The shield face shuddered. Qiu Meng poured everything into three rapid slashes, hoping to cleave through the seemingly fragile shield—but her failing stamina sent the attacks at odd angles.
After the third strike, she noticed the shield’s edge weakening and crumbling from the impacts. Using the pommel of her sword, she levered it upward.
The shield went flying. The priest turned, her hands morphing into dark red brass knuckles.
A fist shadow closed in on Qiu Meng’s face.
Qiu Meng spun her longsword, striking the brass knuckles with the pommel, then used the momentum for a diagonal slash.
The blade cut through the priest’s chest garments and carved another wound into her body.
Then Qiu Meng swept behind the priest, slashing her across the back, before quickly pulling away to search for something usable in the environment.
She glanced at the iron fence rails that had been severed by the fire axe earlier.
If she could lure her over there…
“Completely different from before! Hahaha!”
Fine cracks appeared around the priest, as if space itself was peeling apart.
The moment the priest raised her hand and began charging something, Qiu Meng loosed a Wind Crossbow Bolt.
The bolt struck the priest’s wrist and punched straight through her hand.
The hand dropped to the ground and twitched once.
The priest, reeling from the pain, spread her black wings and instantly pulled back.
As Qiu Meng prepared to pursue, the severed hand on the ground moved.
The severed hand climbed up, ready to attack her face.
Qiu Meng’s expression changed. She pulled her attack and cut the severed hand down with a horizontal slash.
But that gave the priest an opening. The eye in her chest changed color.
“Reversal.”
In the next instant, the world’s gravity flipped.
Rocks floated upward. Up and down, left and right, front and back—everything became inverted at once.
Qiu Meng tried to slash the severed hand, but her body was sluggish and completely uncoordinated.
Just as she was about to adapt to all this, a sudden stab of pain came from her left thigh.
She looked down and found an iron spike piercing through her thigh.
“Ngh!”
Qiu Meng stumbled back in pain, using her body to hide the sleeve crossbow. Once she found the angle, she raised her hand and fired at the priest’s eye.
But a new hand had already grown from the priest’s severed joint. The priest instantly conjured an Earth Magic Shield and deflected the bolt.
Qiu Meng realized she’d be ground down if the fight dragged on, so she quickly retreated to the iron fence.
‘No good… my body’s at its limit.’