Demonic Dragon: Harem System

The darkness responded.

The spit Daniela threw to the ground didn't fall. It was absorbed by nothingness before it even touched the surface. As if the world had swallowed her insolence.

And then, before she could react, the ground disappeared.

It didn't crumble, it didn't collapse, it didn't shatter into pieces—it simply ceased to exist. Daniela fell. Her body plummeted in freefall, swallowed by a formless void. The wind didn't follow her. There was no wind. There was no sound. There was nothing but the quickening of her stomach, her body's warning that she was falling, even without any sense of where she was going.

She didn't scream.

Daniela wasn't one to scream.

But the hand holding the sword clenched until the muscles in her arm vibrated.

And suddenly, the fall ended.

Not with impact.

Not with pain.

But with an absence so absolute it felt worse than any collision.

Daniela was standing. Her feet touched something solid, but textureless. It wasn't stone, it wasn't sand, it wasn't wood. It was as if she were stepping on a vague idea of ​​ground.

She lifted her face.

Nothing.

An infinite void. No light, no shadow. It was a darkness that could not be measured, that had no direction, that had no beginning or end. There was no smell. There was no sound. Nothing.

Daniela took a deep breath, but even the air felt artificial, tasteless.

The blade in her hand was the only proof that she still existed.

"…Tsk." She ran her tongue over her cracked lips. "Is that it? Is that the trick?"

Her voice echoed.

But it didn't echo back.

It spread in all directions and disappeared, without return.

The first drop of sweat trickled down her temple. Not from physical exertion, but from the discomfort of absence. Daniela was a warrior. She was Scarlet's daughter, forged in chaos. She was used to fighting horrors, armies, her own maddened mother. But this…

This was different.

She took another deep breath. Each beat of her heart was like a drumbeat against nothingness, reminding her that, of all things, only she remained.

Until a feeling took hold.

Something overwhelming, too intimate to ignore.

The weight of being alone. Not the ordinary loneliness of a battlefield. But a cosmic, primordial loneliness, as if she were the last living spark in a dead universe.

Daniela shivered.

Not out of fear.

But because it angered her.

"If this is some kind of test, I swear I'll slit the throat of the idiot who devised this trap…" she growled.

The sound of her own voice infuriated her.

It was the only sound.

And it echoed inside her like a mockery.

She raised her sword and swung it in a wide arc, striking the void ahead. The blade sang, its power unleashing a blast of crimson energy. The impact should have set the sky ablaze, opened craters, destroyed entire mountains.

But there…

Nothing happened.

The explosion died before it could even be born.

As if reality had swallowed its fury.

Daniela's eyes widened for a moment, and then she laughed.

She laughed out loud.

A hoarse, broken laugh, but full of defiance.

"So that's how it is, is it?" she spat on the nonexistent ground. "You want to take away my weapons? You want to leave me with nothing? You think you can break me?"

Her chest heaved.

She raised her sword again, even though a part of her knew it was useless.

It didn't matter. Daniela couldn't live without fighting.

And then… a second sensation came.

Not something from outside.

But from within.

Her body felt heavy. Her legs trembled. The arm holding the sword felt like it weighed tons. But it wasn't physical exhaustion. It was worse.

She felt herself.

She felt every scar. Every old fracture that had never healed properly. The taste of every defeat she'd rather forget. The emptiness she carried on nights when Strax wasn't by her side. The resentment she felt for Cassandra, for Bellatrix, for her mother, for him… and for herself.

Everything.

There were no distractions. There were no enemies to cut down.

Only Daniela against Daniela.

She gritted her teeth, sweat running in rivers down her face.

"…Damn you…" Daniela's voice came out as a hoarse whisper, cut between clenched teeth. "Is this what you want? For me to face this damned thing of myself?"

The void didn't answer.

But the silence answered for it.

It wasn't an ordinary silence—it was a silence that crushed, that seeped into the bones like rust. A silence that said, without words: "Yes. Look. See."

Daniela took a staggering step forward. Her heart hammered like a drum inside her chest, so loud it seemed the only real sound in all that absence. Her hands trembled. Not from the weight of the sword. But from what she saw behind her eyelids, even without meaning to.

The image of Scarlet.

Bleeding, laughing, maddened amidst a sea of ​​corpses.

Cassandra and Bellatrix, the two of them always together, so close and yet so far apart, carrying the same burden, but never sharing it with her.

And then… Strax.

The name burned in her mouth like acid.

The man who swore to protect her.

The husband who wielded enough power to annihilate worlds.

And yet… he wasn't there.

Daniela gasped. Her chest tightened.

It wasn't just anger.

It was fear.

The gnawing fear of never being seen.

Of never being a priority.

Of never being anything more than the madwoman's daughter, the duo's sister, the monster's wife.

Never Daniela.

Never just her.

She bit her lip until she tasted her own blood.

"…No." The word escaped, broken but firm. Daniela raised her sword with a hard, almost desperate movement, as if raising not a weapon, but herself. "I will not give in."

Her knees trembled, her throat burned, but still she spat the words like molten iron:

"If this void thinks it will swallow me... then I will swallow this damned void!"

She drove the blade into the nonexistent "ground."

The impact didn't shake the world—there was no world.

But it vibrated. A dull ripple spread through the void, circles of invisible energy reverberating like ripples in a dead lake.

And Daniela laughed.

She laughed loudly. She laughed hoarsely. She laughed with the fury of someone who refuses to disappear.

"Did you hear that, you wretch?" she screamed into the void. "It's still me! I'm still here!"

And then... the void reacted.

First, a sound. Low. Deep. Not a physical sound, but a vibration that made her bones creak.

Like the crack of the first crack in the eternal ice.

Daniela gasped. Her eyes widened.

The void had… heard.