Even though it probably only took a minute at best, the march to her death of flames felt eternal. Emika could feel the wood pouring out from her, struggling to replace what was burned of her outside.

I’m going to end this damn weasel, she thought as her skin tightened from the heat and her eyes burned. Pain echoed through her, squeezing out tears that immediately evaporated. Her nose stung sharp with the stench of coal and her scorched flesh.

The true ambition of her plan was not only to defend herself against the attack. No, there was another layer to it. Something that would let her win.

At least, that was what she hoped.

Step after step, she felt her reserves grow thinner, her legs heavier, her shielding falling apart. All of her focus was now on her back, on the visualisation in her head, the clear image she was attempting to recreate within reality.

And finally, the flame burst relented as the weasel noticed she was getting too close. So, it jumped backwards, banking on its higher agility and speed to defeat her from afar.

However, the weasel hit a wall.

A wall made of wood.

It was only now that it seemed to realise it was trapped. Trapped in a large room of branches, braiding themselves together with no way out, the space only lit up by the flame weasel itself and the juniper needles ablaze inside the confinement.

And then, in an intricate constricting pattern, the entwined branches closed in. The weasel panicked, bursting out flames into all directions, but its resources seemed to dwindle. Finally, Emika stepped right in front of it, leaving no way to withdraw. The oxygen in the room went out before the fire was able to breach it.

“Little cutie,” she said, crouching down as it hissed a torching burst at her face. The attack immediately succumbed to the smoke, and the flames on the creature’s skin went thinner. “I wish you hadn’t stood in my way to Melisande. That way, you could have lived,” she murmured, and held out her hand to touch it. Despite how hot the surface was, its fur felt soft, and Emika gently stroked it for just a moment.

The weasel squeaked, exploding into charred vines, small patches of grassy, long needles springing out from its body, before spurting into large longleaf pines, parting through the ceiling of the charred wooden capsule. In its death, the creature burst into an explosion of fire, tearing the entire room apart.

Emika, flames eating at her and her growths, did not care.

Instead, she launched herself forward, committed to close out the last bit of distance between Melisande and herself. The wind accelerating past her fed the flames, turning her into a blazing ball of fire.

Landing on the ground, she pulled all of her growths back to dull the flames, rolling over to subdue them, then relented onwards. Her fight with the creature left behind a mounting forest fire that leapt from one spruce to the next.

She felt the smoke in her lungs, the burns on her skin. The fire churned behind her, no doubt having all intention to devour the dry area whole.

Wading through the forest, desperate to catch up, she started to notice it.

The drain.

Even though the fight had only lasted a few minutes at best, she deeply felt the exhaustion. She launched the next root and jumped, but it came out too short. Pathetically so. Trying to catch herself, she enlarged her wooden arm, but to no avail — she bombed into the ground, tossing up a wave of soil and dirt.

However, Emika would not give up. Not this close. Okay, she couldn’t almost fly anymore, but she could still walk. Only a few more steps. A few more minutes.

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She stumbled from one spruce to the next, leaning her arm against them to not lose balance. Sweat was building on her skin, the breeze and temperature unable to dry it off. She could feel pain in her legs — the pain of having relied on them too long, too heavily.

As the rush of the fight left her body, a realisation dawned on her. She wasn’t just drained. She was spent. And, she was late. That creature had been her worst possible opponent — sapping all water from her, charring her entire being. Her legs shook, and despite everything, she felt strangely cold. She didn’t know how long she walked for — mere minutes, or more? All that kept her going was that she knew she needed to, and yet, her mind played through the scenario in all its possible outcomes and…

There was no way Emika could beat Maxime like this. There was no way Melisande could have persevered this long in her state.

Emika knew she was too late, and that thought sent shivers down her body, made her even shakier on her feet, and yet, step after step, she kept going. If only she had confronted Maxime at the premise. She might have exhausted him a bit before being killed, to the point where Melisande could have escaped.

She took a sharp breath. Yet again, she had messed up. Her limbs numbed, a dangerous prickling advancing through them.

Eventually, she saw the motorcycle abandoned at the side of the road, next to a path onto a clearing, and braced herself for the worst. Too slow to outrun the forest fire, she had brought it with her, and soon it would engulf the vehicle as well.

A few steps later, a foreign sound jabbed against her ears. It pierced her consciousness almost painfully — the clunking of metal on metal in the distance. Her heart skipped not just one, but two beats. A small explosion. The sound of something otherworldly, like a heavy electrical impact.

She heard a fight taking place. Stumbling on the clearing, she could finally see it. First, a wide brimmed hat lying on the ground a few meters away, torn. Raising her gaze, she saw her.

Melisande was still alive. A sword in hand, one side sharpened, she clashed blades with Maxime. She ducked, attacked. Got parried, retreated. It was one of the most amazing things Emika had ever seen. Melisande was attached to countless threads binding her to the trees and ground in the distance, enabling impossible manoeuvres, dodges, jumps and slashes, as she was essentially piloting herself by pulling the threads, being her own marionette. Maxime seemed not able to keep up, not able to cut the threads fast enough, hampered, hindered. Even when she received blows, she moved her hand over her wounds, and they magically closed back up, just like that.

By all means, it seemed like she was on the offensive. Melisande was viciously fighting, unrelentingly so, as if completely focused on just the single goal of ending this Cursebreaker’s existence.

For the first time since leaving her prison, Emika actually noticed and felt the forest ground at her bare feet. The moss her toes sunk into. The little twigs and needles gently poking against her skin. She could swear that she was able to smell the scent of Melisande’s tea be carried over to her, that only now the stars in the sky had come forth.

Truly, a world without Melisande was not worth caring for.

How? How was it that Maxime didn’t just take his thin and light sword, and cut her up? How was she so fast? Something about Melisande had changed.

Emika swallowed hard, trying to hold back the well of emotions spilling out inside of her. She had reached the edge of the clearing, slumping against a tree, knowing that she was too exhausted to even create a single branch right now.

“Oh, for god’s sake,” Maxime snapped, being the first one to notice her arrival. “Can’t monsters just do a single thing as told?” He delivered a strangely strong blow to Melisande, viciously knocking her several meters back, ripping off many of her threads in the process. His gaze was hard, annoyed, with a slight hint of disgust. “All you needed to do was stay put. Obedient. And you would have been allowed to live such long lives, in peace. But of course. Being the greedy things you are, you had to throw a fit. And now, I have to kill you both.”

“Emika!” Melisande yelped out, and in the blink of an eye, she’d recovered from the blow, with a gentle smile on her face. After a big leap, she slid across the clearing’s grass to reach Emika. As she came to a halt, she stretched out her soft fingers to graze through her friend’s black hair. “I’m so fucking glad to see you’re alive. God, what did he do to you?”

She threw a quick glance back to Maxime, who was quickly clearing out the threads to approach. Then, she turned back with a confident grin.

“I’m here to fetch you. I’m gonna slice this asshole up, and then we’ll go home.”

Emika’s lower lip wobbled, her body shivered. Vision started to escape her, sweat lingered on her cold skin, the burns still pulling at it. And yet, she forced her eyes to remain open, forced her mind to stay awake.

There really was a person here in this world who would make all hell break loose and face the worst of odds, just for Emika’s sake? Someone who would go straight through hell, just for her?

She let out a vibrant sob.