Extra: Yandere Milfs Obsessed with me!

Loriel did not see the blast coming. Yet the light was anything but furtive: it was a white shriek, a concentrated column of fire that split the air with a whistle. The projectile struck Konstantin square in the right shoulder, tore through flesh, and sent him tumbling across the broken flagstones in a scarlet spray. He landed heavily, his hand still raised in an unfinished gesture, the rune he had been trying to trace fizzling out on his fingertips. A trickle of blood ran from his mouth, and his right eye, wide open, stared at the sky without seeing it.

She screamed his name but her voice was immediately swallowed by the deafening crash of battle all around. She wanted to rush to him, but a movement to her right pinned her in place.

A seraph was breaking away from the melee. He looked nothing like the other warriors of his phalanx: his ivory carapace was streaked with black fissures, and his wings, fanned out, cast no shadow but seemed to absorb all light around them. He walked deliberately over the bodies of his own fallen brothers, without a glance at them. In his left hand he already held a second lance, long and thin, its tip flickering like a dying star. His gaze had fixed on her with relentless precision.

Loriel understood then that she had no time to reach Konstantin. She dove toward the ground, seized the shaft of her own lance, a heavy weapon of blackened iron still smoking with a cherub’s blood, and rose in the same motion. Without thinking, she ran straight at the seraph, her boots hammering the broken marble. He swung his arm down with preternatural speed, releasing the luminous bolt. Loriel did not try to parry; she hurled herself forward, rolled on her left shoulder beneath the projectile as it hummed past within fingers of her skull. The explosion behind her was devastating: the eastern cliff of the promontory collapsed in a cloud of white dust, carrying three ballistae and their crews with it.

She rose, her knees bleeding, but her lance spun in her hand like a wagon wheel. The seraph, thrown off balance by the loss of his second weapon, stepped back just far enough for Loriel to find the opening. In a brief motion, she drove the sharpened shaft into the angel’s thigh, just below the articulated plate of his knee. The sacred metal sizzled at contact with angelic flesh, and she thrust the lance deeper with a brutal twist, sending amber-colored blood spurting. The seraph grimaced with a rictus of mingled surprise and pain, almost human, his clenched fingers opening, and he collapsed sideways, his great black wings folding over him like a shroud of dead feathers. A last breath escaped his split lips, then nothing more.

Loriel stood frozen for a second, her chest heaving with short gasps, then she spun on her heels and rushed to Konstantin. He was still on the ground, but his fingers now were moving. Slowly, with painful precision, he was executing mudras, those sacred gestures learned in the lost monasteries of the East, his phalanges tracing perfect angles in the air.

The angels were still pouring in, but they seemed to hesitate. The seraph Loriel had just killed was not the only one of his kind. Others were joining him, standing in a circle around the Gate, like silent guardians. Loriel counted them: five. Their eyes were embers, their armors cracked, their songs absent.

She made her lance reappear and charged. The first angel raised a twisted sword, broke it clean, but his guard was too slow. Loriel’s lance pierced his torso, lifted him, hurled him against the Gate. He dissolved there in a shrill cry, like shattered glass.

The four angels tightened their circle around her. Their wings beat in rhythm, producing a dull drone. Loriel pivoted on herself, her lance tracing a perfect arc through the air. The tip of the shaft slashed two chests and severed a wrist before its owner had time to scream.

The blood running down her thigh was hot, thick, and her sticky fingers slipped on the lance’s shaft. She clenched her jaw, swallowed a groan, and focused all her energy.

Instead of retreating to tend her wounds, Loriel made a sharp motion forward. She grabbed the nearest attacker by the neck, yanked him toward her with a violence that surprised even the angel, then slammed him against the doorframe of the Gate. The incandescent marble sizzled at contact with angelic flesh, but Loriel did not wait for her adversary to struggle. She drove her lance straight through the heart, thrusting the point until the metal passed through his back and struck the stone behind him. The angel’s body drained in a wan light, a creamy glow that escaped his half-open mouth, then he slumped, his wings folded over himself.

The three surviving angels withdrew in a synchronized motion. They retreated some ten meters, their yellow eyes fixed on her, searching for a gap in her guard, a second of inattention.

Loriel raised her lance to the sky, the shaft streaming with the luminous blood of angels, and she screamed. It was a hoarse, torn cry, rising from lungs burned by exertion.

Behind her, Loriel heard a sound of stones grinding together, then Konstantin’s short, ragged breathing. He had one hand pressed against the gaping wound in his belly, the injury the archangel had dealt him before vanishing into light. With the other hand, he was tracing runes, complex symbols that flared for a fraction of a second before dying out.

"Loriel," he breathed, his voice barely more than a whisper, "hold on a little longer. Just a moment more."

He made it to the Gate, leaned his back against it, and placed his trembling fingers on the incandescent marble. The stone vibrated beneath his palm, and the runes carved into the doorframe blazed with a deep red glow, then orange, then white. An intense heat radiated from the porch, and the light of the Gate, that blinding light that threatened to submerge the city, flickered like a flame in the wind.

"The seal is nearly ready," Konstantin murmured, his lips blue from effort, "but I still need time."

The angels, understanding that the mage was closing the breach, hurled themselves at him in a single motion, their wings spread, their blades aimed at the old man. Loriel was faster. She interposed her worn body, her broken lance, her tattered wings, between them and Konstantin. She parried the most direct blows, deflected a blade aimed at the mage’s throat, struck an angelic face with the pommel of her lance that burst into a shower of sparks. One angel lost a wing, severed cleanly by a backhand of her shaft, and collapsed screaming. Another retreated, his shoulder laid open, his fluorescent blood gushing across the flagstones.

But the third was more skilled. He slipped under Loriel’s guard and drove his blade into her. Loriel felt the cold metal, infinitely cold, penetrate her flesh. She felt the shock, the tearing, then a strange heat spreading through her entire abdomen. Her breath broke in her chest, her knees gave way, and she fell heavily onto the flagstones, her hands still clenched around the shaft of her lance, her eyes fixed on Konstantin.