Chapter 111. The Protector Arrives to Guard a Corpse That Hasn’t Stopped Breathing
The air in the courtyard didn’t just feel cold anymore; it felt poisonous. Every word the masked assassin uttered was a poisoned needle, designed to find the hairline fractures in Catherine’s resolve and tear them wide open.
Catherine pressed forward, her movements becoming increasingly desperate. She channeled the wind not as a controlled breeze but as a rising gale, trying to overwhelm the assassin’s defensive posture.
Her blade found a narrow opening along his ribs, a flash of steel that would have ended most fights, but the masked man flowed backward like liquid shadow, his reflexes inhumanly precise.
"There," William hissed under his breath from his hiding spot, his knuckles white as he gripped the stone ledge. "Push through it, Catherine!"
"Don’t let him inside your head!"
But the assassin was already inside.
"Aldric fought well at the end, you know," the masked man said, his voice cutting through the ring of steel like a scalpel through flesh.
The casualness of his tone was more violating than any blade. "He screamed your name, Catherine..."
"Right before the ceiling collapsed and crushed the life out of him."
Catherine froze mid-step. The wind around her blade stuttered, dying down to a whimper.
"What did you say?" she breathed, her voice cracking like breaking ice.
"I wonder," the assassin continued, stepping forward with the predator’s confidence of someone who knew he already held the leash. "Was he calling for you to save him?"
"Or was he simply reminding himself why he should have left you behind?"
"Shut up!" Catherine screamed, a raw, bleeding sound.
She launched herself forward in a blind fury, her sword whistling through the air in a desperate arc. The assassin parried it with terrifying ease, the clang of metal echoing off the academy walls like a funeral bell.
"He died believing you would come," the assassin taith, his blade dancing around hers. "And you ran..."
"You ran while they burned."
"I said SHUT UP!" Catherine’s voice broke into a sob of rage.
She swung again, but her technique was unraveling.
The disciplined wind stance she had worked so hard to master was fraying at the edges. Her footwork was becoming heavy, her movements losing their fluid grace as her mind became a battlefield of ghosts.
"The twins died together," the assassin continued, his voice dropping to a mocking whisper as he deflected a wild slash. "And Mira... poor Mira."
"She lasted the longest... She died clutching the dirt, still hoping you’d appear."
"Enough!" Catherine’s voice was a strangled plea. Her vision began to blur.
The courtyard was fading, replaced by the choking smoke and crushing darkness of the past. The stone beneath her feet felt less like solid ground and more like the crumbling debris of eight years ago.
"They all died believing in you," the assassin taunted, his blade slicing through the air to score a shallow but stinging cut across her forearm.
Blood bloomed across her skin, bright, crimson red against the pale stone. "And you repaid them by abandoning everything they died to protect."
William watched from the shadows, his heart hammering against his ribs like something trying to escape.
’She’s breaking,’ he thought, panic rising in his throat. ’He’s not fighting her body, he’s dismantling her soul.’
He wanted to scream, to run to her, to throw himself between her and that monster, but he was paralyzed by the promise he had made and by the horror of watching her unravel.
"Every single one of them," the assassin whispered, his blade coming down in a series of precise, punishing strikes that forced Catherine backward. "All gone because you weren’t strong enough to stay."
Catherine’s eyes went glassy. Her pupils dilated, her focus shattering.
She wasn’t looking at the masked man anymore; she was looking through him, seeing the ghosts of the dead. Her sword swings became wild, unfocused slashes at nothingness.
"Catherine, look at me!" William shouted, unable to contain the desperation any longer. "Don’t listen to him! Fight it!"
But she couldn’t hear him. In her mind, she was back in the smoke, hearing the bones crack and the screams echo.
The assassin saw the opening. He saw the moment her spirit broke. His stance shifted, his blade lowering into a lethal, coiled position.
"Your guard is down, little bird."
Catherine’s stance collapsed entirely. Her sword arm dropped, her shoulders slumped, and her eyes—those eyes that had shown such fire moments ago—were now hollow and empty. She was standing defenseless in the middle of a killing field, her body a marionette with severed strings.
The assassin lunged. His blade swept upward in a vicious, killing arc aimed at her unprotected throat.
"NO!" William roared.
The sound tore from his lungs as he broke cover. He didn’t think he simply exploded from the shadows, his own weapon igniting with magical energy as he threw himself across the courtyard.
Every nerve in his body screamed as he sprinted toward the slaughter, knowing he was seconds too late.
"CATHERINE!"
William moved faster than humanly possible. The promise he had made to Catherine to be there the second she needed him burned in his mind like molten iron.
Aetherion screamed as it shifted, the magical construct responding to his desperation, locking into a single-wield configuration with a sound like grinding tectonic plates.
The assassin’s blade was inches from Catherine’s throat when William’s steel intervened.
CLANG.
The collision was cataclysmic. Sparks erupted between them in a blinding cascade of orange and white light, the shockwave rippling outward through the courtyard.
The force of the parry was so immense that the masked man’s feet skidded backward, carving twin furrows into the dirt as he fought to maintain his balance, his dark cloak snapping violently behind him like the wings of a carrion bird.
William didn’t wait to see if he had won. He dropped to one knee beside Catherine, his heart hammering against his ribs.
"Catherine! Catherine, look at me!" His free hand reached for her shoulder, desperate to anchor her to the present. "Stay with me, damn it!"
But she was gone. Her body wasn’t fighting anymore; it was simply failing.
Her breathing was a series of wet, ragged gasps that sounded like someone drowning in shallow water. Her eyes, those expressive, fierce eyes, were rolled back, showing only the terrifying white of her sclera.
A violent tremor seized her entire frame, a full-body convulsion that seemed to shake her very bones before she finally went limp, collapsing against the blood-stained earth.
"Catherine!" William’s voice cracked.
He pressed two fingers against her throat, his own hands shaking.
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
The pulse was there—rapid, thin, but alive. "God damn it, Catherine, wake up."
She wasn’t dead, but she was lost. Her consciousness had retreated into some fortress of trauma, barricading itself against a world that had become too cruel to bear.
Deep within the suffocating darkness of her own mind, a fragment of Catherine’s awareness flickered like a dying candle. She felt nothing—no pain, no wind, no steel.
There was only a distant, muffled roaring, like waves crashing against a cliff far below. She heard William’s voice, but it sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well, distorted and impossible.
She wanted to reach for the sound, to cling to it, but something darker was pulling her deeper into the abyss.
William’s attention snapped back to the threat. He forced the panic down, shoving it into a corner of his mind where he could handle it later.
He had to focus. He had to kill.
The masked man straightened slowly. His posture revealed no anger or frustration at being interrupted. Instead, there was something far more terrifying: patience.
"How touching," the assassin mused, his voice carrying effortlessly across the clearing. "The protector arrives to guard a corpse that hasn’t even stopped breathing yet."
Without warning, the assassin drove his blade downward. He didn’t aim for William; he aimed for the ground.
CRACK.
The earth shrieked as if it were being torn apart. The blade struck the stone with ceremonial violence, sending jagged, glowing fissures spiderwebbing across the courtyard.
Dark, oily energy bled from the wounds in the earth, pooling like liquid shadow before erupting upward. The air itself began to tear, reality ripping open in ragged, pulsing holes that defied every law of physics William knew.
William’s blood ran cold.
"Fucking shit..." he whispered, the realization hitting him like a physical blow to the gut.
From those weeping wounds in reality, they emerged.
First came the clicking, wet, chitinous sound that set William’s teeth on edge. Then came the shapes: nightmare creatures with too many joints, armored in plates of obsidian flesh that seemed to absorb the afternoon light.
Their limbs moved in unsettling, coordinated spasms, scuttling out of the dimensional rifts with inhuman speed.
William’s stomach turned. He recognized them.
He had seen them in the sketches Catherine had drawn in her sleep; he had seen them in the haunted hollows of her gaze. These were the same abominations that had slaughtered her squad eight years ago.
The same monsters that had fed on the screams of Aldric and the twins.
"This isn’t just an attack," William growled, his grip tightening on Aetherion until his knuckles bled.
His eyes darted from the approaching swarm to Catherine’s unconscious form. "This is a fucking execution for her... the one who survives!"
The assassin stood amidst the chaos, the herald of a living nightmare, watching as the monsters began to circle their prey. "You know it..."
The message was clear: the past hadn’t just come back to haunt Catherine; it had come to finish what it started.