Extra is the Heir of Life and Death

A woman lay on the ground.

What remained of her, at least.

The lower half of her body was gone, not destroyed, not torn away by brute force, but erased, cleanly and utterly, as if reality itself had decided that everything below her waist no longer deserved to exist. There was no rubble where her legs should have been.

No shattered armor.

No torn fabric.

Just absence.

Blood flowed freely from the place where existence ended, spilling across the broken earth in slow, glistening streams. It pooled beneath her, dark and thick, steaming faintly as it touched remnants of warped vespera and shattered glass from the collapsed Domains.

Belle Ardent did nothing to stop it.

She could have.

Under normal circumstances, this level of injury would have been meaningless to her. A nuisance at best. Flesh was replaceable. Bodies were temporary. Death, to her, had always been negotiable.

But now.

A sword darker than darkness itself was embedded deep in her chest, driven straight through her heart.

It pulsed faintly, not with mana, not with vespera, but with denial. A weapon forged to refuse regeneration, to tell life itself that this soul was not allowed to recover.

Two more swords pinned her arms to the ground.

Not impaling, anchoring.

Each blade was sunk through bone and muscle and into the ruined land beneath, locking her in place with absolute finality. They hummed softly, resonating with the same authority as the blade in her heart.

Black had been thorough.

Her long black hair, once flowing, once radiant with impossible color, was matted now, soaked in blood. Strands clung to her face and neck, heavy and lifeless. Her armor was gone entirely, erased along with her Domain, leaving her exposed to the cold, ruined world.

Her eyes were open.

Glassy.

Purple-pink, dulled now, their glow faint and uneven.

And wet.

Not with rain.

Not with blood.

But with tears.

They slid silently down the sides of her face, cutting clean paths through the grime and crimson.

Belle didn't sob.

Didn't shake.

There was no dramatic grief, no screaming into the void.

Just tears.

Slow.

Endless.

Belle Ardent had lost.

Not narrowly.

Not heroically.

She had been overwhelmed.

The fight had not ended in a mutual retreat or a fragile stalemate. It had ended with her Domain shattered, destroyed, not suppressed. Death Without Witness had been torn apart piece by piece, its black moon cracked and extinguished, its endless waters boiled away into nothingness.

A Domain was the soul made manifest.

And Black had broken hers.

The backlash alone had been catastrophic.

When the Domains collapsed, the release of authority and conflicting concepts had detonated outward in a wave of annihilation.

Belle's lower body had vanished in that instant, consumed by an explosion of gore and erased matter, her soul screaming as reality punished it for daring to exist without a foundation.

But even that was not the worst of it.

Her soul was damaged.

Not wounded, fractured.

She could feel it.

Deep within herself, beneath flesh and mana and vespera, she sensed the cracks spiderwebbing across her soul's surface. A once-smooth, obsidian expanse now marred by jagged fractures that leaked something cold and wrong.

She had never felt this before.

Not truly.

Soul damage was rare. Almost unheard of at her level. And when it occurred, it was permanent.

Something that never healed quite right.

Something that followed you forever.

Black had done this to her.

After she fell, after she could no longer stand, after her Domain died screaming, he had approached her calmly.

No urgency.

No rage.

He had looked down at her broken form, his expression unreadable.

And then he had driven the sword through her heart.

Not to kill her.

But to stop her.

To ensure that she would not regenerate. That she would not chase him. That she would lie there, helpless, forced to listen.

The swords in her arms had followed, pinning her in place like a specimen on display.

Just to be safe.

He had knelt beside her then.

Close enough that she could hear his heartbeat again, still steady, still unhurried.

And he had spoken.

"Sebastian isn't here," Black had said casually, almost gently. "Not on this planet."

Belle had stared at him, blood bubbling at her lips, vision swimming.

"He's gone," Black continued. "Far beyond your reach. In the forgotten Domain of an Elven Goddess."

She had known he was telling the truth.

Black was many things.

A monster.

A tyrant.

A mass murderer.

Her greatest failure.

But a liar?

No.

He did not lie.

If he said Sebastian was not here, then he wasn't.

If he said Belle could not reach him, then she couldn't.

That knowledge hurt more than any damage.

That was why she cried.

Not because she lost.

Belle Ardent had lost battles before. She had tasted defeat more times than history remembered. She knew that loss was inevitable, that even she would one day fall for the final time.

No.

She cried because she couldn't reach him.

Because no matter how powerful she was, no matter how much death bowed before her, there were still places she could not go.

Worlds she could not cross.

Because Sebastian, her beloved Sebastian, was somewhere she could not follow.

The tears fell faster then.

Her lips trembled, just barely.

She had failed again.

Failed as a master.

Failed as a protector.

Failed as the one person who had sworn, silently and absolutely, that she would never let her students be taken from her again.

The world around her was quiet now.

The storms had faded. The glass and blood and warped reality were settling back into something resembling a battlefield rather than a god's grave.

Black was gone.

He had left her alive.

Mercy?

No.

Punishment.

He wanted her to live with this.

To heal slowly.

To remember.

Belle's fingers twitched weakly.

She could remove the sword from her heart.

Eventually.

Once he was far enough away.

It would hurt.

It would take time.

And even then—

Her soul would never be the same.

She stared up at the ruined sky, at the place where her Domain's moon had once hung.

And she whispered, voice barely audible, cracking with pain and something dangerously close to fear.

"Please…"

Not a prayer.

Not a command.

A plea.

"Come back alive."

The tears kept falling.

And for the first time in forever, Belle Ardent felt something she had long believed herself immune to.

Helplessness.