The Gifted Divide

"To punish someone for your own mistakes or for the consequences of your own actions, to harm another by shifting blame that is rightly yours; this is a wretched and cowardly sin." - Richelle E. Goodrich (Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year)

* * * *

If Lucie wasn't careful, Raul thought wryly, she was going to gnaw her nails right down to the bone.

He glanced sidelong and reached out with casual ease, gently pulling her hands away from her mouth before she could do more damage. She blinked, startled, clearly not even aware of what she'd been doing, and then flushed when her gaze dropped to her lap. Her fingers curled inward with embarrassment, trembling slightly.

"You're going to bite your fingers off if you don't stop," Raul muttered with a smirk, golden eyes gleaming with amusement despite the tension in the air.

Lucie swallowed. "Aren't you worried?" she asked softly, gesturing toward the wide stone expanse of the Abyss arena, where torches in the high, damp walls threw flickering light across the polished obsidian floor.

The crowd was already swelling, the stands jammed with Gifted, exiles, and outlaws alike. Even more were watching from outside the Abyss, tuning into the secured, encrypted feeds that Hayder and Larissa had ordered broadcast through the secret networks only accessible to trusted underground circles.

It was a statement—not just of justice, but of survival. A reckoning. And in the heart of it stood Sera Kroix.

"Not really," came Letha's calm voice. She leaned forward, her pale blue eyes gleaming beneath her silver-blonde braid as she looked around Neil and Kailey to meet Lucie's nervous gaze. "You're still new to this side of the underground, so it makes sense you wouldn't know. But we've seen what Sera is capable of. Those of us who grew up in the depths know better than to doubt her."

Laura nodded quietly, her arms folded, the expression on her face unreadable. "There's a reason some of us used to believe the stories about her were exaggerated," she said. "Turns out, they weren't."

"You'll understand soon," Letha added with a razor-sharp grin that mirrored a memory more than anything else. "Just don't blink when the duel starts. You don't get to see Sera go all-out often. There's a reason the hunters put a flee-on-sight order on her for anyone ranked below A-class. That's not superstition. That's survival protocol."

Raul let out a low chuckle, more grim than amused, his arms crossed as he stared ahead. "They called her the Death Reaper in the outer rings for a reason," he murmured. "But back then, she still smiled more often."

The sound of growing whispers, sharp and fervent, began to swell around the arena like rising smoke. The crowd, once restless, was shifting to stunned silence, broken only by sharp intakes of breath and low, astonished voices. One by one, people leaned forward, murmuring to one another, craning for a better view.

And then, Sera stepped out.

From the shadows of the stone corridor, she emerged with the same slow, unhurried grace she had once carried in the bloodied streets of Elvryn.

Petite and clad in black from throat to boot, she looked like a phantom made flesh—raven hair brushing her shoulders, the ends curled just slightly as they danced in the faint stir of cold subterranean air. The arena's torchlight glinted off her scarf, the steel of her hidden weapons barely visible beneath its folds.

But it was her eyes, those strange, impossible eyes, that held the crowd still.

For the first time in years, the dead came back to life.

"Is that…?"

"It is! Goddess, it is her!"

"That's Sera Kroix!"

"The Death Reaper herself!"

"I thought she was a ghost. A myth. She's alive?"

"I haven't seen her since Blade fell! Not since Elvryn!"

"Then the rumours are true… It wasn't the ESA who took them out."

"Then it really was the hunters."

"She's going to tear that huntress apart."

"She better. It's justice. It's blood."

"She won't let Ivanor leave in one piece."

"She's not going to leave. Sera won't let her."

The atmosphere shifted, almost physically, like pressure building in a thunderstorm.

Awe warred with fury, and below the surface, an electric hunger rippled through the crowd—hunger for truth, for vengeance, for catharsis long delayed.

Blade had been legends. Their fall had been a wound to the underground's pride, to their mythos. If Sera Kroix had survived, then the truth had, too.

Zest stood hidden in the shadows of the tunnel from where she'd entered, leaning against the stone wall beneath the heavy hood of his dark cloak. The low rumble of voices rolled across the arena like waves against cliffs, but none of it touched him. His red eyes never strayed from her.

He didn't move. He didn't need to.

"I doubt I'll need to step in as your second, Sera," he murmured to himself, his lips curling in something close to a smile. "Let's give them a good show."

Here stood the one they thought dead. The one whose name still haunted the whispers of dark alleys and crumbling corridors. The one whose blade had once defended the underground in silence.

Sera Kroix wasn't just alive.

She had come home. And blood would follow.

* * * *

Alisa and Leroy sat a row above Aegis, pressed between weathered faces and old ghosts—men and women who had once stood shoulder to shoulder with Blade in the blood-slicked alleys of Elvryn.

These were survivors, hard-eyed and battered by time, who hadn't forgotten the name Blade or the fire it had stood for. Even now, the air around them trembled with restrained fury, like a storm forced into stillness.

They had been the first to rage when news of Blade's demise spread like ash on the wind, and many had drawn their blades without hesitation, ready to march on the ESA in blind vengeance.

It had taken every scrap of loyalty, and a full sweep of Sera's shadow, to stop them from lighting Eldario on fire.

Alisa could feel the tremble beneath the surface again now. That old fury hadn't left. It had simply been waiting.

She leaned forward slightly, whispering to Leroy, "We're going to have our hands full if they decide to rise. If the underground moves on the hunters now, there won't be anything left of Eldario but rubble and ash."

Leroy nodded grimly, brown eyes scanning the restless crowd. "Especially not when the country's still barely crawling from the last war's grave."

Unlike Sera and Zest, and now Leroy, this was Alisa's first time stepping foot into the Abyss—into the infamous Pit she'd heard whispered about since her earliest days on the fringe.

It was more than she imagined. A relic of an older world, built in blood and dust and silence. The Pit was no mere arena. It was a statement—brutal and primitive, carved into the bones of Eldario's forgotten catacombs.

It reminded her of the gladiator trials from the Dark Ages: raw, lawless exhibitions of violence where honour was earned not through mercy, but survival. And here, in the bowels of the city, nothing had changed.

The Abyss still answered to older rules, and the Pit was its altar.

The murmurings had followed Alisa and Leroy from the moment they entered the stone stands—suspicious eyes, hushed names, and the weight of old affiliations. But it wasn't until Sera entered from the far tunnel, shadowed and silent, that the murmurs sharpened to a low, restless roar.

The crowd shifted. Someone spat. Others leaned forward, tense, breathless.

Next to her, Leroy exhaled a long breath. "I hope she knows what she's doing," he said, his voice barely above the ambient thunder. "Eldario's going to find out she's alive soon. With how active Aegis has been… Hell, it's already a miracle she's stayed hidden this long."

Alisa tilted her head slightly, her gaze never leaving the tunnel. "She knows. And so does Zest. You think they'd let something like this go?" Her voice dropped lower. "They're still seething over what happened in Elvryn."

If Earl, Lleucu, and Jamie were still alive, if they'd survived the massacre, Alisa knew with certainty they would've torn their way into the Pit themselves, demanding vengeance with their bare hands.

This wasn't just justice. This was personal.

Leroy didn't reply. He didn't have to.

His eyes flickered toward the tunnel again, where Sera had stepped out, and lingered. Zest was there, somewhere in the shadows, still hidden, still watching. And Leroy understood now why.

If the hunters wanted Sera dead… Then Zest? Zest was something else entirely. What they wanted from him wasn't death.

It was control.

The crowd began to shift again, their voices faltering as Hayder stepped into the arena, his sharp silhouette marked by the grey trench coat and the black eyepatch that gave him the air of a war-worn judge. He didn't speak right away.

He didn't need to. His presence was enough to silence half the arena.

But then came the sound—metal on stone.

Chains.

The other side of the arena lit with the movement of guards. And there she was.

Ebis Ivanor.

Clad in manacles and ankle restraints, her movement was reduced to a slow, humiliating shuffle. Two Enforcers—black-coated and stone-eyed—flanked her like reapers.

A gag silenced Ebis's mouth, but not her fury. Her eyes, sharp and burning with a hatred both defensive and indignant, swept across the crowd. But she was met with nothing but contempt.

The shift in the atmosphere was immediate and violent. The fury that had been simmering beneath the surface now erupted in waves of verbal venom.

"That's her?" Letha's voice snapped as she twisted around in her seat to face Leroy and Alisa. Both nodded grimly. "I see," she said, and turned back, her jaw tight.

Hayder's voice cracked through the silence, amplified by a device that made his words echo like law through the carved stone walls. "No doubt that everyone here already knows why we gather at the Pit this morning," he began. "But this is not merely for spectacle. It is justice. It is truth made visible."

His voice hardened.

"This woman—this huntress—wove lies into the fabric of our world. She deceived the Abyss. She framed our brothers and sisters, those who bled for this haven, while shielding herself in our trust. She fed information to the hunters. She paved the road to our destruction. Our current situation can be laid at her feet, with her feeding the hunters information that goes through the networks of the Abyss, and threatening the safety of our brothers and sisters who call the Abyss home."

The murmurs deepened and darkened, buzzing like a hive disturbed.

"And worse still," Hayder said, his voice cracking like a whip, "she had a hand in the fall of Whirlwind. Of Dragonfly. And yes, even Blade."

That was when it broke. Screams erupted from the stands like flames lashing out from a crack in the earth.

"Why is she here then?!" A shout came from somewhere to the right.

"That's right! A huntress has no right to stand in the Pit and fight for honour!"

"She should be gutted where she stands!"

"Blade didn't fall for this! They were slaughtered! Used!"

"Let me in there! For Klein! For Yusa! For every damned soul she fed to the hunters!"

Even Raul, usually composed, had stiffened, his jaw clenched so tight it looked like it might crack. Letha's hands were balled into fists in her lap. Claudia, sitting not far from them, hadn't blinked since Ebis walked out. Her pale green eyes were fixed forward, deadly still.

And still, Ebis flinched.

For all her pride, all her defiance, those words hit like blades. The hatred in the Abyss was real. It was earned. And it was all aimed at her.

Hayder raised a hand. There was silence again. But this one was colder. Harder.

"I know what you're thinking. All of you. It was my first thought, too. Even the Premier's," he said, motioning toward Larissa, who sat in the front row, her arms crossed, and a cruel smile etched across her lips like a wound. "Why give this traitor the honour of the Pit? Why not gut her like the snake she is?"

He paused.

"Because this… This is the Abyss. And the Abyss demands truth. Sera Kroix brought this to light. Blade was betrayed. She was nearly killed in an ambush set up by this traitor, with six hunter squads waiting under the guise of a mission. And now? She gets her reckoning."

Hayder's voice deepened to a low growl. "This is not a duel. This is judgment."

The stands quaked with fury. Even the Enforcers beside Ebis looked seconds away from tearing her limb from limb.

"Sera has made it clear," Hayder continued. "She intends to show this woman no honour. Only pain. She wanted her to suffer. And I, for one, would like to see the Death Reaper rise once more."

Alisa felt it too—that strange, sick anticipation. Even now, years removed from Elvryn, the memory of Sera in motion still left echoes in the bones of the underground.

They remembered. And today, they would see her again.

Sera had earned her reputation for a reason. She had long stopped attending the regular duelling bouts held by the underground, given how there aren't many people capable enough to match her in combat. But there are still enough people alive who still remember what she is capable of.

Sera had not spoken once during Hayder's speech. Her face might as well be cut from marble—as expressionless and as unsmiling as she is. But now, she stepped forward, the click of her boots on stone sharp in the silence. Her hand rested on her sidearm, and her eyes were twin embers, with blood-red fire threading through both.

Her face betrayed nothing. But her presence was thunderous.

Hayder nodded once. "Any restrictions?"

Sera's voice was cold. Final. "None."

She turned her gaze on Ebis—so devoid of mercy it turned the temperature in the Pit to ice. "Let her come at me with everything. Let her bleed, fight, and crawl—do whatever she has to. I want this huntress to face me with everything she has. For too long now, the hunters have gone unchecked and unchallenged in Eldario. I want this hunter to know what it means to cross the underground. To betray the Abyss. And I want the hunters to see what comes of fucking with us."

The crowd roared.

Hayder made a curt gesture. The Enforcers moved in, unlocking the restraints.

Sera remained still, and calculating, already slipping into the rhythm of a fight that would be more than blood. It would be a reckoning.

Behind her, the members of Aegis watched.

Raul. Letha. Laura.

They had lived through the old ways. They understood.

But some of the others, Lucie, Neil, and Kailey, they would not see Sera the same after today. Sera knew this. And she accepted it.

The underground wasn't a myth. It was real. And today, it had teeth.

Finally, with a harsh clatter that echoed through the subterranean chamber, the iron manacles binding Ebis's wrists fell to the ground, a cold finality to them. The restraints around her ankles were released next, followed by the muffling gag ripped from her mouth by one of the Enforcers.

She rose with a kind of vicious grace, her lips twisted in a sneer, eyes gleaming with that familiar, hateful gleam the underground had come to recognise in those who wore the hunter's brand.

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"I'm going to kill you, freak," Ebis spat, her voice hoarse but soaked in venom, her posture tense with barely-contained bloodlust. One of the Enforcers handed her weapons back—twin blackblades that shimmered dully in the firelight of the chamber, before both Enforcers retreated to the tunnel's mouth, silently becoming shadows along the wall.

"You're going to die like the vermin you are," Ebis snarled, her words aimed not just at Sera, but at the crowd that loomed like a tempest above the Pit. "I'll butcher every last one of you Gifted maggots. I'll burn this filthy rat nest to ash!"

The words, bile-laced and cruel, rang out like a slap across the gathered Abyss. Sera remained still—unmoved and unreadable. She had long since become numb to the epithets flung by the hunters and their sympathisers. She had been hunted since childhood, branded and marked by their twisted ideology.

But the people of the Abyss… They were not so quiet.

"You're the freak, monster!"

"Murderer!"

"You killed our brothers and sisters!"

"She's a butcher! She butchered children!"

"End her life, Sera! She's filth!"

"She took our families! She wore their blood like medals!"

The crowd roared, the chamber rumbling with fury and grief that had festered for years.

The Abyss had seen too many die in the hunters' name. Too many stolen from their homes, dissected like animals, or worse—turned into subjects for cruel experiments.

Ebis wasn't just a woman with a blade. She was a symbol of the machine that had dehumanised them. To her kind, the Gifted weren't people. They were assets. Tools. Abominations. They weren't seen as sentient beings with families and souls, but as glitches in the order—creatures to be controlled, harvested, or discarded.

Sera drew one of her daggers with the smooth, practiced motion of a woman who had lived in shadow and blood. Her left pinky looped the hoop at the hilt's base, spinning the blade through the air until it rested neatly in her grip. The second followed swiftly, both blackened steel edges catching the flickering torchlight in ominous glints.

"Let's see what a huntress is really capable of, shall we?" Sera said coolly, her tone too calm, and too poised, as though she were bored more than threatened. "I'll even give you a handicap. No Gifts. Just a frontal assault."

A slow, mirthless smile curled across her lips—an expression that sent a wave of dread through those who knew the legends of the Death Reaper firsthand.

It wasn't arrogance. It was certainty.

"I don't need my Gift to kill you. You've never had honour. You'll find no mercy here."

In the stands, Hayder watched with thinly veiled anticipation. His golden eye gleamed as he flickered a glance between the combatants.

This wasn't just a duel. It was theatre. It was justice in its most primal, unforgiving form. And deep in his bones, he wanted to see what Sera would do when unleashed.

He let his hand fall with finality.

"To the death. Begin."

The word had barely left his lips when Ebis lunged forward with the speed of a serpent, pulling back the sleeve of her left arm to reveal a sleek black device latched against her skin. With a hiss of compressed air, three darts shot from the mechanism in quick succession—aimed directly at Sera's throat, chest, and thigh.

But Sera was already in motion, a blur of black and silver.

She twisted aside, the first dart slicing through the air beside her neck. The second missed entirely. The third, she caught—plucked between two fingers as if intercepting a thrown coin.

Her eyes flickered to it. She sniffed it lightly. The scent was sharp and metallic—a scent that Sera is more than familiar with.

"Poisoned," Sera murmured, more to herself than anyone else. Then she let it drop, crushing it beneath the heel of her boot. "So that's how you thinned our numbers. Coward's tactics. Poison in the dark."

Her eyes lifted, catching Ebis in a deathly gaze. "Doesn't matter. I've spent a lifetime surviving worse. My body's learned to filter poison out of necessity. You'll need more than dirty tricks to land a mark on me."

Around them, the crowd had fallen into a tense hush—not out of fear, but reverence.

There was a terrible beauty in Sera's stillness, in the way she stood like an avenging spirit, born of shadow and fire. The Abyss had seen countless fights in its bloodstained arenas, but this was different.

This was sacred. This was the reckoning they had waited for.

And Ebis, this huntress of the surface, this butcher in elegant clothes, had the audacity to sneer at them from atop the bones of their dead.

To her kind, the Gifted weren't soldiers. They were livestock. They were fuel. They were failures of nature to be dissected, cataloged, or extinguished.

Even now, Ebis's gaze was cold and predatory, not focused on a worthy opponent, but on a target. It was the same expression the underground survivors had seen too many times in the mirror of trauma. It was the last look many had seen before their loved ones were dragged off and never returned.

"You think this changes anything?" Ebis growled, circling now. "You're still abominations. You bleed like the rest. I'll make you scream."

"You won't make it to the end of this sentence," Sera replied, and her voice was softer now. Almost gentle. That frightened Ebis more than anything.

From the upper rows, Raul leaned forward, golden eyes burning with memory and rage. "The hunters murdered a dozen of ours near Greystone and laughed about it," he murmured to Laura beside him. "Left their bodies for show. I saw it with my own eyes. I'll bet that she was there, too."

"She's not walking out of here," Laura replied coldly, her fingers clenched tightly around the hem of her sleeve.

Among them, even the non-Gifted—Zest, Alisa, Leroy, Hayder, and Larissa, were silent. Because this wasn't just a clash of combatants. This was the moment the Abyss had demanded: a hunter, one of the apex predators of the surface, brought low into their domain.

And now, she would face their executioner.

And if the Reaper of the Abyss was anything, it was thorough.

Kailey, however, is alternating between hiding her face behind her hands and peeking between her fingers to see what's going on.

"What's Sera doing?" Kailey moaned.

"She's toying with that huntress." Alisa leaned forward from the row behind them to speak with Kailey. "Trying to get her angry. Not that Sera had to do a lot to rile her up. That huntress is desperate. And desperate people make stupid and reckless moves."

* * * *

Ebis Ivanor had just endured the most harrowing and humiliating week of her life—confined to the underground abyss of Eldario, locked behind the cold iron bars of a cell in the infamous dungeons of the Abyss.

Down there, beneath the city's rotting bones and forgotten catacombs, time lost meaning and the silence became a scream in her mind. The air itself felt diseased, saturated with the pain of the condemned, haunted by the whispers of traitors who had never walked out again.

The Enforcers hadn't laid a hand on her after her capture, at least not physically.

They had done nothing more than strip her of her weapons, her authority, her coat, and, perhaps most cutting of all, her illusion of superiority. One of the younger Enforcers, barely older than a teenager, had spat venom through clenched teeth as he tore the Enforcer's badge from her chest and flung it to the floor.

"You don't deserve to wear this," he had said. "Not when it's stained with the blood of our kin."

And maybe, in a different place, those words wouldn't have pierced her. But in the Abyss, even the air breathed judgement.

Ebis had worn the guise of confidence like a second skin in front of Hayder Beck, Larissa, and even the remnants of the feared gang, Blade.

But deep inside, beneath the rehearsed smirks and vicious barbs, she had been terrified from the moment the iron gate closed behind her.

Because Ebis, like all hunters, knew the stories. Knew what the underground did to enemies. To traitors. To monsters. The hunters were trained from infancy to believe they were above the Gifted. Beyond them.

But they were also taught to fear the Abyss, because even monsters knew when they were outmatched.

And now, that fear had taken shape.

Sera Kroix.

There were whispers among the hunters. Old field reports that had been classified and buried. A strict flee-on-sight order circulated behind closed doors.

Sera Kroix wasn't a target. She was a force of nature. Only five out of the forty original hunters who descended upon Elvryn during the Blade purge had lived to tell the tale. Ebis was just one of them, and she barely got away intact.

The remaining survivors had refused to speak of what they'd seen. They only muttered a name. Death Reaper.

And now, Ebis stood before her—disarmed, exposed, and desperate.

She didn't even wait for the official start. As soon as Hayder had begun to raise his hand to signal the duel, Ebis had moved, pulling back the sleeve of her left arm and launching a volley of darts toward Sera, each laced with a paralytic neurotoxin.

Not meant to kill, but to maim. To immobilise.

It was a coward's move. But Ebis no longer cared for honour. She cared only for survival.

Sera barely shifted. Like a shadow unfurling from the gloom, she pivoted with uncanny grace, dodging two of the darts with fluid economy of movement. The third, she caught between her fingers without even blinking. She sniffed the dart once—absently, almost amused, then dropped it beneath her boot and crushed it with a soft crunch.

"Poisoned," she murmured, her voice calm but cold, like frost creeping across iron. "So that's how you thinned our numbers. Coward's tactics. Poison in the dark." Her eyes lifted, catching Ebis in a deathly gaze. "Doesn't matter. I've spent a lifetime surviving worse. My body's learned to filter poison out of necessity. You'll need more than dirty tricks to land a mark on me."

She didn't elaborate on why it hadn't worked—on what poisons she had already endured, or how many times she had danced with death and come out untouched.

And then, she moved. Ebis barely saw her.

Sera surged forward like a flickering shadow born of rage and precision. Her daggers, curved and obsidian-hued, flashed in the low torchlight, each strike aimed with surgical brutality.

Ebis barely blocked one. The second carved a shallow line across her hip. The third—a sudden, merciless slash, left a gash along her upper arm that bloomed red almost instantly.

They weren't deep. Not yet. Sera was measuring her.

By the third exchange, Ebis was bleeding from six different places. Her breath was ragged. Her hands trembled. Her legs ached from retreating, from trying, and failing, to keep up with someone who fought like a living spectre.

Sera's eyes, those haunting, mismatched eyes, tracked her every movement with cold, analytical precision. There was no fury in them. No satisfaction.

Just execution.

The crowd in the Abyss roared like a beast awakened.

"She's butchering her!"

"That's for Del and Marissa!"

"You called us vermin, now crawl like one!"

"How does it feel, huntress," Sera said without breaking her stride, "to be helpless? Like the way you made so many of us feel?"

Ebis didn't answer. She couldn't. The blood in her mouth tasted like copper and shame. Her mind, trained to dehumanise the Gifted, to see them as targets, not people, couldn't reconcile what she was facing.

The woman before her wasn't some feral anomaly to be caged and dissected. She was a storm made flesh.

A chorus of anger thundered from the stands. Survivors of raids. Families of the murdered. Former gang members who had lost friends and blood to the hunters' experiments and purges.

In the Abyss, memory ran deep and pain never healed. And Sera, standing tall with twin daggers poised and her scarf fluttering like a banner of defiance, had become the vessel of their collective vengeance.

"You're about to learn," Someone shouted from the crowd, "why they call her the Death Reaper!"

Sera's movements were not flamboyant. They were coldly efficient, each strike designed not just to injure but to instil dread. The way she moved spoke volumes of her past—not just as a survivor, but as someone who had lived through pain, and made pain her language.

Ebis lunged, more out of panic than strategy, trying to drive a short blade into Sera's side.

She didn't even see the counter coming.

In the span of a heartbeat, Sera parried the blow, twisted Ebis's arm at the elbow, and slammed the pommel of her dagger into the huntress's ribs with enough force to send her stumbling back, gasping.

"Still alive?" Sera asked coldly. "You hunters are always so loud when you kill children, but so very quiet when the blade turns your way."

Her voice was low, sharp, and carried across the stone arena like a whisper of death.

Ebis dropped to one knee. Her breath came in shallow bursts. The blood from her wounds soaked into the dirt floor. She felt the glares of a hundred eyes boring into her like knives. Eyes that saw her not as a warrior, not as a woman, not even as a traitor.

But as what she truly was.

A hunter.

A coward.

A murderer who had never once seen the Gifted as human.

And now, faced with the monster she and her kind had created, she finally understood what it meant to be hunted.

* * * *

"What on earth is Sera doing?" Neil asked, his voice low but tense, his gaze never leaving the brutal display below. The barrier user's eyes flickered toward his comrades for some form of explanation, or reassurance. "She could've ended this a dozen times already."

Raul exhaled slowly through his nose, his eyes narrowed. He sat beside Neil, his arms crossed, the blue scarf around his neck fluttering slightly in the heavy, stale air of the underground arena.

He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he watched as Sera's blade slashed another thin, crimson line across Ebis's cheek—so clean it was almost artistic.

The crowd roared. A cacophony of rage, grief, and long-held pain filled the cavernous space. The Abyss had never been silent, but tonight, its fury was thunderous.

Raul's lips pressed into a thin line before he finally spoke. "Sera's not just fighting her," he said grimly, curling his fingers together like he was holding something in. "She's dismantling her deliberately, piece by piece. This duel wasn't about justice. Not only that, anyway. It's a message. A declaration. One meant for the entire hunter hierarchy, because there's no chance this wasn't leaked aboveground."

He paused just as Sera swept past the stumbling huntress with ghostlike precision, the tip of her blade tracing a shallow line down the woman's forearm, leaving a trail of blood like ink on a page.

Raul winced. "Besides…" he trailed off again, his voice barely audible over the uproar of the crowd.

Neil turned toward him, frowning. "Besides?"

Raul didn't answer right away. His eyes flickered from face to face—Neil's calm tension, Kailey's tightly clasped hands, Laura's stormy silence, Tatius's twitching fingers, and then back to the arena floor.

"…Attacks that aren't meant to kill or maim," he finally said, his voice low and steady, "are often the most terrifying of all."

A hush seemed to ripple across their section of the crowd, like his words had bled into the very stone.

"It's psychological warfare. Cruel. Calculated. But effective. Because the longer Ebis Ivanor remains conscious, the more time she has to feel every wound, to hear every scream, to see the faces of the very people she and her kind once reduced to lab rats and cannon fodder."

The woman in question, Ebis Ivanor, was barely standing now. Her once-pristine coat hung in bloody tatters. Her pale blue eyes, once haughty and cold, were glassy with a growing, unshakeable horror. Her every breath was a struggle, her skin glistening with sweat, blood, and shame. She didn't even look human anymore. Just a wraith in the process of being unmade.

A mass of shallow, clean cuts now crisscrossed her body like a web of guilt made visible. None were deep. None were fatal. But the pattern of them—meticulously placed, always just missing an artery or a nerve, was unmistakably intentional.

It wasn't just punishment. It was education.

"You see it, don't you?" Raul's voice was quiet now. "Sera's not trying to kill her. Not yet. She's trying to strip her down. Break her from the inside out. Because death would be mercy. But this… This leaves scars. Mental ones. Permanent ones."

Kailey flinched as another cut was made, this time along the huntress's thigh, causing Ebis to stumble with a strangled cry. "But… Why?"

"Because the hunters never see the Gifted as people," Raul replied bitterly. "We're assets. Or liabilities. Tools to experiment on. Targets to destroy. They don't give us names. Just numbers. Classifications. Test results. And now…" He motioned toward Sera with his chin, "now, she's giving them a taste of their own medicine. No more clean deaths. No more quick victories." He turned his gaze back to the arena. "Now they get to feel like specimens."

Behind Aegis, Alisa and Leroy were rigid. Leroy's hands gripped the edge of his seat so tightly that his knuckles had gone pale. The normally laid-back man was visibly seething.

"Come on, Sera…" he muttered under his breath. "Hurry up and end it. Before I jump in myself."

Alisa, quieter but no less intense, said nothing. Her eyes were locked onto Sera, her posture stiff and alert. She knew this side of Sera—the tactician born of the war-zones, the survivor forged by cruelty.

And though part of her hated watching it unfold, another part knew it was necessary. This wasn't just revenge. It was history being written in blood.

Below them, Sera moved like a phantom.

Not a single wasted motion. Every step was purposeful, every strike measured, designed to cut but not collapse. Her hair fluttered with each movement, her black and white scarf trailing like the banner of a shadowed crusade. Her eyes were devoid of emotion. Not blank, not vacant. Just…surgical.

She wasn't angry. She wasn't gloating.

She was dissecting.

And Ebis? She was unravelling.

The once-proud huntress, who had strutted into the Abyss with that arrogant tilt of her chin and that cruel little smirk, was now reduced to staggering back, blood-slicked and trembling. She had tried everything—tricks, poisons, and even desperation-fuelled lunges, and all of it had failed.

Because you couldn't kill something you didn't understand.

And Ebis didn't understand Sera. Didn't understand the Abyss. Didn't understand what it meant to be human in a world that had denied you even the right to be alive.

Now, for the first time, she was being forced to learn.

The crowd surged again, their voices a tidal wave.

"THIS IS FOR OUR FRIENDS!"

"YOU MURDERED OUR PEOPLE!"

"You hunted children!"

Their fury wasn't abstract—it was personal. These weren't spectators. These were survivors. Siblings of the murdered. Parents of the dissected. Friends of the stolen. And now, justice wasn't coming from a courtroom.

It was coming from the blade of a petite woman in black, with eyes that remembered everything.

* * * *

Ebis's scream tore through the arena, a sound so sharp and ragged it seemed to scratch at the bones of every soul watching. It echoed through the Abyss, through the ancient catacombs and into the dark, damp corridors beyond.

Her left eye split open beneath the slice of Sera's dagger, blood weeping freely through her fingers as she stumbled back, half-blinded and bleeding from half a dozen other cuts, each one placed with surgical, unerring precision.

"Y-You bitch!" Ebis shrieked, a wild note of disbelief in her voice—disbelief that she was bleeding, that she was losing.

Sera did not flinch, did not blink. Her breathing was steady. Her expression unreadable, a predator's mask. She lowered her blade arm slightly, voice low and smooth as silk, but laced with iron.

"An eye for an eye," she murmured, each word crystal-clear thanks to the amplifiers built into the arena's ancient structure. "What's wrong, Huntress Ivanor? Can't stand toe-to-toe with someone who can fight back? You can't fight someone who can fight back on equal terms? Where's your bravado now, without a dozen men at your back or a sedative-laced syringe in hand? Does the thought of an even fight frighten you?"

Up in the stands, the members of Aegis shifted uneasily. That voice—they knew it. Quiet, level, and calm. Too calm.

Sera was livid.

"When it comes down to it," Sera continued, her voice rising just slightly as she stepped toward the wounded huntress, "you hunters are nothing more than cowards dressed in armour. You prey on the helpless. You corner the weak. You cloak your fear in protocol and sanctimony, in numbers and tactics. You cage Gifted children like animals, break them down until they either beg for death or become weapons you can use. And when faced with a true opponent?" Her eyes gleamed under the arena lights. "You cower."

Lucie clutched Raul's sleeve from her place in the stands, her fingers trembling. Raul, seated beside her, covered her hand with his own.

Quiet reassurance.

He could still remember the sound of Lucie's cries the night after her father was executed, just another 'Gifted sympathiser' erased by the hunters.

"We did nothing wrong!" Ebis snarled, spitting blood onto the floor, swaying on her feet. "We're cleansing the world of vermin, of abominations like you! No human should wield that kind of power!"

"Except hunters, right?" Sera exhaled, almost tired. Her voice darkened. "You say that, yet your leaders brainwashed Gifted children that fell into your hands, turning them into your personal weapons, and you discard them when they're no longer useful to you. And you call us abominations?" She took a step forward. "Playtime's over."

Snap.

The sharp sound echoed through the arena like a gunshot. And Ebis froze. Not from fear, but from the thin glint of sunlight that suddenly caught across the air around her.

Steel wires. Gleaming. Deadly. Everywhere.

Leroy half-rose from his seat, his keen eyes narrowing. "Are those…?"

"Titanium steel wires," Alisa breathed, recognition dawning. "She hasn't used them in years."

Raul nodded grimly, his golden eyes narrowing. "Since the old days. Since Blade."

It had been Zest once. The first time they've met Zest in the streets of Elvryn. Sera had used them then to restrain him. It was only by inches, and mercy, that he'd survived.

Now? There would be no mercy.

"These wires," Letha said softly, "can slice through concrete. Through bone. Through air itself."

Those steel wires are made from titanium steel, one of the strongest steel in the world. The very same steel that Sera's daggers were made of.

It seems that some blacksmith whom she knew during their Blade days has made those weapons for her as a favour. The wires are strong enough, and even powerful enough to tear through metal and bone and flesh alike.

"They're laced through the arena," Tatius added, his fingers flexing with admiration. "She's been laying the trap this whole fight. Using her acrobatics, her footwork, her feints—every move she made was to guide that hunter into the center. The web."

"A spider's elegance," Claudia murmured, her pale green eyes gleaming. "But the venom is pure steel."

Ness whistled low. "It's checkmate. And I don't think Ebis Ivanor brought a resurrection clause."

Ebis stood paralysed at the center of the shimmering death field—thin, near-invisible wires were wrapped delicately around her wrists, her ankles, and even her throat.

Even a breath too deep might be the last.

"W-When did you…?" she whispered, her eyes wide with disbelief.

"For your information, I wasn't just dancing for show," Sera said calmly, coiling a loose end of wire around her finger. "This isn't a stage. It's a killing field."

"Y-You weren't going for the kill before…?"

"I told you," Sera said coldly. "I want you to suffer."

There was no bravado in her voice. Just fact. Iron judgment, delivered with unflinching precision.

Ebis Ivanor was a senior huntress. A butcher of Gifted. A woman with blood on her hands and ash in her wake. But now, here, she was a fly caught in a web, suspended in her last few seconds of life.

"I'm not the abomination," Sera whispered, her eyes locked on her prey. "You are. You all are. You strip children from their homes, slice them open to see what's inside. You measure their screams and call it progress. You don't see us as people. Not even as enemies. Just resources. Experiments. Cattle."

Tension flooded the arena like smoke. Not a whisper, not a breath stirred from the crowd.

"And even the Normals," Sera continued, her voice steady. "You slaughter them, too. The ones who protect us. Who hide us. Who believe we deserve to live. What sin did they commit, Ebis? Loving the wrong people? Refusing to look away?"

Sera didn't raise her voice. She didn't have to.

The ones in the stands were silent, watching this scene play out in front of them. The veterans, and even those who knew the reputation of the infamous street gang and their leader exchanged grim looks.

They knew what was coming.

Ebis's lips trembled. "I-I was just following orders…"

A whisper of steel. One twitch of Sera's finger.

The wire around Ebis's neck tightened instantly. Her breath cut off in a ragged gasp, her knees buckling as her body seized against the strangling pressure.

"You should have followed your conscience," Sera murmured. "Not your orders." She exhaled, using her index finger and pulling one steel wire downwards slowly. "The only good hunter is a dead hunter."

Raul reached up and gently covered Lucie's eyes. Leroy spoke up just loud enough for the rest of Aegis to hear, "Cover your eyes."

Then…

Snap.

Like dominoes collapsing in a perfect sequence, the wires lashed forward—dozens, then hundreds of them, glinting like threads of silver lightning. In an instant, they converged, slicing through the body of Ebis Ivanor like wind through paper.

Bone shattered. Flesh parted. Blood sprayed into the air in violent crimson arcs.

Her scream—shrill, piercing, and animalistic, echoed throughout the catacombs like the death wail of something wrong, something that should never have existed in the first place.

And then there was silence.

Sera stood motionless, bathed in blood.

In what seemed like hours, but in actuality, had only lasted a few moments, it was all over.

The steel wires were now visible to everyone in the stands, and even to the ones watching via the live feed in the underground affiliated bars; with red blood now coating the steel, dripping off it slowly.

The wires still hummed, their tremble subsiding. Ebis's corpse no longer resembled a person—just ribbons of flesh, torn fabric, and scattered bone. Her head, eyes glassy and wide with disbelief, rolled until it stopped at the toe of Sera's boot.

With a flick of Sera's wrist, the wires withdrew, snapping back into the wrist-mounted device hidden beneath her coat sleeve like serpents returning to their den.

Up in the stands, Hayder looked pale, ashen beneath the shock of his silver-grey hair. Sera glanced up at him, her voice quiet. "Call it."

Hayder blinked. "Wh-What?"

"Call the match."

It took Hayder a second to find his voice. "T-The match is over!" he announced hoarsely, hands trembling. "The challenger—Sera Kroix—wins!"

A beat of silence.

Then…

Applause. Deafening. Raw. It wasn't just a cheer for victory. It was a cry of relief. A roar of justice. A scream of vengeance. The Abyss had seen blood, but never a reckoning quite like this.

Sera turned. She didn't bask in it. Didn't smile. She was already walking toward the tunnel, each step trailing red droplets on the sand. Her boots squelched softly with every movement. She did not look back.

Zest leaned casually against the wall where she'd left him. Clapping. Slow. Purposeful. "You made your point," he said quietly.

Sera didn't respond.

"They know you're alive now," Zest added. "There's no hiding after this."

"I know," Sera murmured, not meeting his gaze. Her eyes stared ahead, hollow and distant. "But right now, I need a shower. And clean clothes."

Considering the amount of blood soaking her from collar to boots, Zest could only nod. "Yeah. That sounds like a priority."

She passed him, her shoulders squared but heavy.

"You did what you had to do," Zest called after her, the slow cadence of his voice echoing off the stone walls. "Nothing more. Nothing less. I wouldn't have done it any differently."

And in the silence that followed, it was clear to everyone watching: The hunters had just been sent a message.

And the Abyss remembered.

* * * *

Kailey understood exactly what she'd just witnessed—at least, on a logical level.

But as her eyes remained fixed on the darkened tunnel where Sera had just vanished into the shadows, her heart struggled to reconcile the memory of her friend with the figure who had just stood, blood-slick and unflinching, in the center of the Pit.

All around her, the murmur of activity resumed.

Hayder was already barking quiet orders to the remaining Enforcers, summoning the Cleaners and the designated crews to remove the carnage—scrubbing the blood from the sand, sweeping the broken remnants of Ebis Ivanor's body from the arena as though she were nothing more than refuse.

In minutes, Kailey knew, it would be as if the duel had never occurred at all. The sand would be even, the air would be cleared, and the Pit would return to its usual silence, awaiting the next soul to bleed within it.

The crowd in the stands had begun to filter out, moving in slow ripples, their voices low and hushed with a mix of awe and grim satisfaction. Many of them, Kailey suspected, would end up in the bars scattered across the Abyss, their glasses lifted high in bitter toasts to the woman who had finally ended a huntress.

Despite what her eyes had seen, Kailey couldn't quite banish the dissonance in her chest.

That was Sera down there. Sera, the same girl who had treated Aegis like family, who had once carefully bandaged Kailey's injuries after a reckless encounter. The one who always remembered to bring back water for Laura. Who had once sat silently beside Lucie when the girl had broken down, offering no words. Just presence.

But down in the Pit… The woman who'd stood there wasn't someone Kailey could have recognised. That Sera had moved like a shadow—elegant, swift, and merciless, cutting through Ebis with clinical, measured strikes, bisecting her cleanly before turning her back on the corpse without a flicker of emotion.

And yet, the whispers swirling around them were not horrified gasps, but the reverent murmurs of people who had just witnessed something righteous. A reckoning.

"That's what I call ruthless," Claudia finally muttered, her voice slicing through the silence among Aegis like a blade. Her pale green eyes were unreadable, her lips pressed into a tight line. "I think I understand now why she's called the Death Reaper. If this doesn't silence the hunters for at least a few months, I'll be surprised."

The others turned toward her in unison, all of them grim-faced.

"You don't think…" Lucie's voice was small and hesitant, as she slowly lowered her trembling hands from her mouth. "You don't think it was too much?"

"Not really," Ness replied, shaking his head, his voice quieter than usual, but colder. "Lucie, you have to understand something. Most of us here, Gifted and not, have seen firsthand what the hunters are capable of. The cruelty they inflict. The way they break people down, bit by bit. What Sera did down there?" He gave a humourless chuckle. "That was mercy. She made it quick."

His smile was hollow, an echo of pain poorly buried beneath bravado, as he rubbed unconsciously at his arm, fingers grazing the tattooed number burned into his bicep.

"They don't give quick deaths," Ness continued, his eyes shadowed. "They never do. They torture. They maim. They break bodies and minds until nothing remains. Most who end up in their hands don't come back. And if they do, they're not whole."

Tatius and Claudia both stiffened visibly beside him, their gazes hard and far-off. The expressions on all three Black siblings were dark—grim silhouettes shaped by memory.

None of them had ever spoken in detail about what had happened to them in the facility they escaped from, but they didn't need to. The brands seared into their flesh and the haunted edge in their voices told enough.

Stories whispered across Eldario filled in the rest. Their silence, in its own way, was louder than screams.

Lucie flinched as she looked at them, truly looked, and realised with chilling clarity the fate she might have suffered if Sera hadn't found her. If Aegis hadn't intervened. She had escaped the fate so many others hadn't. And now, she understood the price of survival more intimately than ever.

"You still think it was excessive?" Leroy's voice drifted down from the row above, the question more speculative than condemning.

His chestnut eyes flickered between the others. He'd seen blood before. Blade didn't rise to infamy by sparing their enemies. No, he was asking out of curiosity, perhaps to see where the line was drawn for those who still clung to some semblance of morality.

Raul didn't hesitate. "No," he said, firmly. "Ebis Ivanor got a man from our own underground to sell us out. She compromised the safety of the Abyss, the last safe haven we have. And let's not forget, she plotted to have Sera taken out. Not just threatened. Eliminated. With squads who knew they'd be slaughtered. They sent them, anyway."

His golden eyes burned, a fierce and protective fire behind them. "This was personal. For her. For all of us. It was a message. And not just for the hunters. It's for any bastard stupid enough to try and align with them." He jerked his chin toward the now-empty arena. "That was a warning written in blood. One that won't be easily forgotten."

Leroy glanced at Alisa, and the two exchanged a look. Raul was right, and they both knew it. It was likely also a call, a flare sent to the surviving Blade members scattered across Eldario, still in hiding from the hunters.

Lleucu, Jamie, and Earl—if they were still alive, they'd hear of this. And they'd understand. The message was simple: Sera is alive. And she remembers.

"Killing someone leaves a weight," Letha murmured, her voice quiet but steady, as she glanced from one companion to the next. Her pale blue eyes shimmered with something between sorrow and resolve. "It's a burden I know too well." Her lips twitched into a faint, rueful smile. "But sometimes, it's not just a solution. It's survival. Always, at some point in a Gifted's life, that is what we need to do to survive. Every one of us knows it. Eldario isn't a world that lets Gifted live in peace. It never has."

A hush settled over Aegis then, heavy and reflective. In that moment, beneath the flickering lamps of the Abyss, the air seemed colder. The damp stone walls loomed, indifferent to their thoughts. And the Pit behind them yawned open like a mouth waiting to devour the next sinner, the next traitor, the next sacrifice.

None of them said it aloud, but they all understood the truth behind Sera's ruthlessness. She wasn't cruel for the sake of blood. She was cruel because the world demanded it. Because kindness was not a luxury afforded to leaders in a land that hunted the Gifted like prey.

Sera Kroix had shown them what it meant to survive in Eldario.

And in doing so, she reminded everyone—Aegis, Blade, the Abyss, and the hunters themselves, that monsters weren't born.

They were made.