The people of the Fiefdom of Affnaria looked with fear from within the town’s outskirts as the sky atop the duchy was turning black. Black clouds continued to spread out, covering the bright starry night sky, and the bright white moon illuminating the land with its faint gleam. Their hearts were filled with fear as they sensed the monstrous and ever-growing presence of something truly and utterly unstoppable.
It was an if a being that should had never stepped into the realm of mortals had suddenly emerged. No matter how much they prayed to their gods, nothing changed. The darkness continued to spread out, and as some people continued looking, they couldn’t help but feel utter terror as two glowing red eyes, the size of houses, glared down at them viciously…
“What is happening right now?”
“That thing… Did anybody else saw two red eyes in the sky?!”
“T-This is bad! Is Lady Julia alright?!”
“T-The evil god! I knew it! You all should had prayed more to the light god! You all shouldn’t had embraced the Majin as people, fools! I knew it! T-The Evil God has come to reap our souls! This is our punishment! Punishment I say!” An insane priest began to scream out loud. Some people believed him while others called him a madman.
However, a shadow mass emerged before everyone else, as Julia and her two maids suddenly popped out of these shadows, in the middle of all this people.
“Eh? Ah! W-What happened? Weren’t we inside of Maria’s Shadow?” Asked Julia, surprisingly being surrounded by a lot of her citizens.
“Thank to god she’s alive!”
“E-Everyone…!” Julia said in surprise, finding most of the survivors refuged in the outskirts of the town, right behind the walls.
If they ran away too far into the wilds they would easily get picked by monsters at this hour of the night. Although there were adventurers and mercenaries here protecting the people, they were probably not organized enough nor willing enough to protect so many people.
Julia quickly realized that Maria had sent her back here after she decided to fight off against whatever Agatha had ended turning herself into. She didn’t wanted to risk Julia and her maid’s life any longer, so she sent them all the way back here by cutting a piece of her shadows and controlling it by turning it into a Phantom Familiar.
“Lady Julia! Are you feeling okay?” Wondered Faerie.
“Lady Julia… I am scared…” Cried Faire
The two half-elf twins ran towards Julia and hugged her tightly, as she felt slightly calmed when the two of them, who had been at her side since she was a tiny baby, were at her side hugging her .
“Things have escalated even more now… From the Graveyard to the Dungeon, and the Vampire Invasion, and now… there’s a giant demon thing in the sky… By the gods, just how unlucky I am?” Cried Julia, containing her tears. She had been simply doing her best to maintain the mess that her uncle left behind, but the only thing she was getting back was a lot of problems one after the other, as if what her uncle had left in this half-destroyed fiefdom wasn’t enough.
“I-It’s all up to them, to Mary and her friends.” Said Faerie.
“W-Will they do it? I heard that the others came to her side, based in the voices we heard before being sent here!” Said Faire.
“Yeah, I hope they can manage… Somehow. I know she can do it; she defeated that Undead and even tamed it, and then cleansed that Dungeon, and I’m pretty sure that Vampire died to her but suddenly… that thing appeared out of her corpse, somehow… Just what are the Vampires doing now? This presence alone… I’ve felt it before, this is the damn Evil God Fragment my uncle took away from the Fuentes Family.” Sighed Julia. “…Or at least something related to it.”
“But isn’t that fragment taken by the government?”
“What’s happening here?”
“Why would the Vampires openly have parts of such a thing?!”
“Is the royal family and the vampires working together…?”
“What? No way that’s a thing!” Said Julia. As someone from the royal family, if this gets spread out, her citizens might begin to get suspicious about her. Despite the rest of her family being quite suspicious, she was innocent about these things. “This is probably something more than what you think, please don’t make any assumptions out of nowhere… I was attacked by these Vampires, I am obviously not cooperating with them.”
“R-Right that made little sense…”
“Lady Julia, should we run away?!”
“But the demon.. What do we do?”
The people began to swarm Julia, surrounding her and asking her for her help. But as of now, she was completely alone, she had no money in her bag, she barely had a broken rapier, she was covered in blood and barely healed wounds. What could she even do now? What could she do to change this fate, and to calm her people’s hearts?
Was trusting Mary all she could do now, while sitting powerlessly? Perhaps going back to the capital could be a possibility, but these people… they wouldn’t have it that easy. Julia didn’t wanted to leave them either. It was a thing of honor, perhaps. But at this point, she was willing to die for her people, or die with them.
“I won’t leave you… I don’t really know what will happen. I’ve paid Mary, and she’s strong. I am putting my soul into her, because I know she could pull it off, somehow…” Julia said. “I know I could run away if I wanted, I know I could even go back to the capital, and just ignore everything… But I don’t want to. I prefer to die with all of you than to live knowing my people die while I abandoned you… I am sorry for being so unexperienced and foolish… and weak…”