The Madman's Guide to Miracles

The heat in my chest had finally settled into a quiet, steady thrum.

I stretched my arms, feeling muscle knit, bone realign, and every remnant of fatigue wash out of my system. Whatever the monster’s heart was doing inside my ribs, it had done its job—I was fully recovered, my body brimming with dark Ether and feeling sharper than it had since I was pulled into this godforsaken world.

Reaching down to my hip, my fingers brushed the familiar leather of the Pouch. It was secured tight to my belt, my cleaver, Mercy, resting comfortably at my side. Everything I had gained, survived, and bled for was right where it needed to be.

I looked down the winding, fog-choked trail leading into the valley, where the jagged spires of Blackbriar Manor pierced the heavy gray mist.

This was it. The Broodmother was dead. The Ferryman had stepped aside. Aldren was gone. Only one Regent remained to fulfill my Living Pact with the Merchant.

It’s all or nothing, I thought, my jaw setting as I tightened the grip on my weapon. No second chances. No backing out. Either I take her head, or my soul belongs to the Merchant.

I turned back to look at Aurelia. She was standing a few paces behind me, her dirt-caked clothes damp from the drizzle, leaning heavily on her makeshift staff. Behind her, Nia stood like a silent shadow, her dark eyes fixed on the path ahead.

"Aurelia," I said quietly, stopping her in her tracks. "You don’t have to do this."

She blinked, her childish posture stiffening. "What are you talking about?"

"This isn’t your fight," I said, looking her dead in the eye. "I’m going down there because I have to. I have to kill the Lady of Steel. But your original goal was just to investigate the corruption and find answers for your house. You’ve done that. You can turn around right now and go your own way if you want."

Aurelia stared at me for a long moment. Her lips pressed into a tight, pale line, and for a second, the haughty, arrogant noble girl vanished completely.

"Go where, Aseren?" she asked, her voice quiet, almost hollow against the sound of falling rain. "My family is dead. Sir Richard is gone. My house has already fallen into ruin... I have nowhere left to return to."

She took a slow, deep breath, wiping a streak of dried mud from her cheek before looking up at the silhouette of the manor with a sudden, fierce resolve.

"If my family’s legacy ends with me, then I am not going to spend my last days running away," she said, her voice steadying as she raised her chin. "I can do at least one meaningful thing before the end. I can help you rid this land of that corrupted entity. I am coming with you."

I looked at her for a second, seeing the quiet determination behind her eyes, then nodded once.

"Alright then," I said, stepping forward into the tall grass. "Let’s go finish this."

"One thing. Let’s not rush in all at once. I’ll go first. I want to try something," I whispered.

They nodded.

I left Aurelia and Nia hiding in the brush a few hundred yards back. Bringing them along was suicide; the Lady of Steel would pick up their presence the second they crossed the threshold.

I crouched alone behind a gap in the outer stone wall, looking down into the courtyard.

She was standing near the center of the yard, staring down at a glowing, metallic ore resting atop a rusted altar. She was attempting to refine a Catalyst—some dense chunk of raw metal—while visibly trying to force back the thick, black corruption creeping up her armor. Every time her Ether surged to suppress it, heat radiated off her frame, making the surrounding air shimmer.

She seemed weaker than when we first ran into her at the manor grounds. The constant strain of holding off the blight was wearing her down. Even so, the sheer density of her aura was suffocating.

Even weakened... she’s still at least a Dreadful Grade Horror, I thought, swallowed by the weight of her presence. I can’t fight that.

A head-on clash wasn’t an option. If I tried to trade hits with something at the Dreadful rank, I’d be dead in seconds. It had to be an ambush. One strike to the neck while she was distracted.

I watched her from the wall, waiting for an opening. Every few minutes, as the heat inside her forged body spiked from processing the Catalyst and fighting the corruption, the heavy plates along her upper spine split open with a sharp hiss to vent scalding steam. For roughly five seconds, the bare skin at the base of her neck was wide open.

That was my target.

I unbuckled the pouch and lined up the glass vials I’d bought from the Merchant—every single alchemical stimulant I had left.

My hands hovered over the glass. I hesitated.

If I take all of these at once...

My stomach churned. The Merchant had warned me about stacking these. The sheer strain on my Soul Core could erode my sanity, permanently fray my Ether Veins, or just melt my brain before I even reached her. Was I really about to risk tearing my own mind apart just for thirty seconds of borrowed strength?

I looked down at the courtyard, feeling the cold, stolen pulse beneath my ribs.

I don’t have a choice. It’s either lose my mind for a minute, or lose my heart to the Merchant forever.

I uncorked the bottles and drank them down back-to-back.

A sickening, liquid fire hit my stomach. My blood boiled. My ribs throbbed so hard I nearly doubled over, gasping for air as the Elder Beast’s heart devoured the brew. Darkness edged my vision as a wave of violent, unhinged rage slammed into my thoughts, screaming at me to tear everything around me to pieces. I gritted my teeth, digging my fingernails into my palms until they bled just to stay grounded.

Text flickered wildly across my retinas as the SIGIL forced an update over my vision.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

SIGIL

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Name: Aseren Voric Azthal

Classification: ?????

Status: Awakened

Rank: Lesser Beast → Demon

Evolution: Infant → Mature

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Power flooded my limbs, raw and terrifying. My veins felt like they were about to snap under the pressure, but I forced the madness down, burying it under cold focus.

I grabbed the last vial—the grey concealment powder.

I rubbed the dust across my chest and shoulders, feeling my presence, scent, and soul signature instantly fade into nothing. Forty-five seconds before the powder wore off or an attack broke the spell.

I drew Mercy, dropped silently over the stone ledge, and sprinted toward the archway directly above her head.

The wind cut off completely the moment my feet hit the stone floor of the archway.

Thirty seconds left on the concealment powder.

Below me, the Lady of Steel stood rigid over the altar, her body trembling slightly as a fresh wave of black blight veins crept across her neck plates. A sharp, mechanical hiss echoed through the courtyard as her spine unsealed, venting a thick plume of burning steam into the damp air.

Now.

I dropped.

No battle cry. No wasted motion. I fell like a lead weight, channeling every drop of the violent, potion-stoked Ether burning through my limbs directly into the edge of Mercy. The cleaver hummed with a vicious, dark pressure, aimed straight for the exposed gap between her neck and shoulder.

Ten feet. Five feet.

The blade was inches from her skin when the world came to a dead stop.

The concealment powder didn’t fail—she didn’t need to see me, smell me, or sense my soul. The sheer atmospheric pressure surrounding her simply registered a displacement in the air, and her body reacted faster than thought.

Clang.

A sound like a shattering mountain exploded through my skull.

She hadn’t even turned around. A single, jagged steel tendril—sprouting straight from her spinal plate—had whipped upward and caught Mercy mid-air. The force of the impact transmitted straight back into my arms, snapping my wrists backward and shattering the stone archway behind me from the shockwave alone.

I was thrown backward, crashing hard onto the cobblestones, the breath ripped from my lungs. The grey powder washed away in a puff of worthless dust as my presence slammed back into reality.

Slowly, deliberately, the Lady of Steel turned.

Her gaze locked onto me, glowing with a cold, blinding crimson light through the slits of her metal helm. The raw pressure of her existence descended like an iron slab, pressing me flat against the ground until the stone beneath my chest cracked.

"You," her voice ground out, heavy and reverberating like iron plates sliding over grit.

A cold, mocking recognition settled in her visor. She remembered me from the grounds. She remembered letting me live.

"I spared your pathetic life once," she hissed, taking a heavy, deliberate step toward me as the cobblestones pulverized under her boots. "I allowed a crawling primate to scurry away like the vermin you are. And you use that grace to return and strike at my back?"

I tried to push myself up, my Demon-rank strength roaring against her aura, but every breath felt like inhaling liquid metal. The alchemical fire in my blood screamed, fighting her suppression, but she barely seemed to register it.

"Disgusting," she spat, her gauntleted fingers tightening into a fist. "Vermin. Absolute, wretched vermin."

The metal plates along her throat buckled under a sudden spasm. Thick, black veins of rot crawled across her steel surface, and she staggered, a harsh screech tearing from her chest as she forced her Ether inward, beating the corruption back by sheer, brutal will.

Even fighting the blight, her pressure held me pinned to the stone.

"A crawling mongrel," she sneered, stepping closer, visor blazing with crimson light. "You bring your cheap poisons and stolen blood to my doorstep, thinking you can strike the Lady of Steel twice?"

Her hand shot out.

Metal fingers clamped around my throat, lifting me off the ground. My airway crushed instantly. The alchemical fire in my veins stuttered under the weight of her Dreadful-grade strength, and my vision blurred at the edges.

"I showed you mercy once," she murmured, raising her other hand as a jagged blade slid from her gauntlet, aiming straight for my skull. "A mistake easily corrected."

Black water crept over my eyes. The oxygen ran out. My body went heavy.

Then, deep inside my ribs, a sharp, metallic rhythm struck.

Clang.

She stopped, her gauntlet halting inches from my face.

Thump-thump.

The stolen heart hammered against my ribs, a brutal, desynchronized double-beat that made the dust on the ground jump. Dark Ether surged through my veins, hot and blinding.

I grabbed her wrist, my fingers digging into the gaps of her armor.

"Not yet," I rasped.

"Not yet," I rasped.

Darkness poured out of my chest.

It wasn’t normal Ether. It was thick, liquid soot—the raw, unrefined blight of the Broodmother’s heart, forced into motion by the second pulse inside my ribs. It surged through my arms, staining my skin black as it spilled over her gauntlet, sizzling against her steel like acid.

The Lady of Steel froze.

The crimson light behind her visor flared, locking onto the dark slush eating into her armor. For the first time, her arrogance cracked.

"What... is this?"

She tried to fling me away, but my fingers locked around her wrist like iron clasps. The double-beat in my chest slammed against my sternum—CLANG-THUMP, CLANG-THUMP—and with every strike, the pressure built until my vision cracked into red and gold.

"You..." She stared down at me, her voice dropping into a harsh, disbelieving rasp. "You hold the source of the blight inside your ribs? How? How could a crawling primate, a insect not even born of the Great Houses, survive carrying such filth?"

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

The alchemical cocktails, the Demon-rank strength, and the second heart were tearing my head apart. The antlered voice in the back of my brain—the shadow that had been whispering since the Broodmother’s nest—finally snapped its leash.

Look at her, it laughed, wild and breathless inside my mind. Look at the shining knight. She thinks she’s untouchable.

A violent, hysterical grin stretched across my face. Blood leaked from my nose, but I couldn’t feel it. Pain was gone. Sanity was gone. There was only the furnace in my chest and the desperate urge to break the thing in front of me.

"You talk too much," I giggled.

I kicked off her sternum with both feet.

The force of the double-heart burst exploded behind my boots, shattering her grip on my throat and sending us both flying backward. I hit the dirt, rolled, and sprang back up before the dust even settled, dragging Mercy through the cobblestones.

The cleaver wasn’t just humming anymore; it was screaming, wrapped in a thick aura of black Ether.

She recovered instantly. Three steel tendrils whipped out from her spine, slicing through the air with a high-pitched whistle.

I didn’t try to dodge. The void-stimulant in my system accelerated my perception until the blades looked like they were moving through water. I leaned my head back just enough for the first tendril to graze my cheek, parried the second with the flat of Mercy, and stepped directly inside the reach of the third.

CLANG!

I slammed the heavy cleaver straight into her midsection.

The impact rattled my teeth, but the black Ether coiled around the blade bit deep, cracking through her outer armor and exposing the glowing metal beneath.

She snarled—a sound of pure, unadulterated rage—and brought her gauntlet down like a hammer.

I took the blow on my shoulder. Bones crunched, pain flared bright and white, but the second heart hammered once—CLANG—and my muscle forced itself back together, knitting through sheer kinetic violent output. I threw a left hook straight into the slit of her visor, black Ether bursting off my knuckles like a grenade.

She staggered back two steps, her boots tearing trenches into the stone.

"Insolent worm!" she shrieked.

The iron plates across her body peeled open. A wave of raw, white-hot heat erupted from her core as she abandoned suppressing the corruption, directing every ounce of her remaining Dreadful-grade power straight at me. Spear-like shards of living steel burst from the ground around her feet, shooting toward my chest.

I laughed, teeth coated in blood, and sprinted straight into the storm.

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