Olivia had never underestimated this fight, not for a second. Whisper, despite their numerical disadvantage, had always been a thorn in Eterna's side, not because of strength in numbers but because of the sheer quality of their elite.

Their five strongest operatives were monsters in every sense, and although Eterna held the upper hand on paper, Olivia knew well enough that each of those five could match, or even surpass, some of the Eight Pillars in power. And considering she was generally acknowledged as the weakest among the eight, it meant all five were stronger than her.

She had only faced two of them personally. One of them was the Bishop, this maddened zealot who now stood across from her, all twisted dogma and divine vengeance. The other, far more terrifying, was known simply as the Blood Demon.

That one still haunted her memory.

A monster draped head-to-toe in blackened clothes, his face always hidden, his movements feral but eerily controlled. He never spoke during battle, never chanted, never barked commands. Just that silence, and that sword. A blade that didn't shimmer with aura, didn't glow or hum with magic but cut through steel and flesh alike as if the two were made of paper. Even now, just the thought of him made Olivia suppress a faint shiver. If she were to place him on a scale, he stood just beneath the king himself.

'Terrifying doesn't even begin to describe him.'

But Olivia wasn't ordinary either.

She was, in many ways, a creature born of obsession. Her regenerative abilities far outclassed anyone in her bloodline, perhaps in the entire kingdom. If the family she hailed from could all reach such levels of self-sustainability, they could probably usurp the throne without ever lifting a blade. But Olivia had taken it a step further. She had pushed past natural limits, not with divine blessings, but with science. With experimentation. On herself.

Her body, at this point, could no longer be called fully human. It was a patchwork of biology stitched together with the cells and bloodlines of various beasts and sentient races known for high regenerative capacities. It was the culmination of years of painful work. And it had succeeded. She had become something close to immortal.

But that wasn't all.

Her mana, too, had been transformed. Where others honed it into spells, Olivia had reshaped hers into something new: an impure form of aura, born from mana but tempered to serve her physical instincts rather than magical finesse. It was something no one else could replicate, and it was exactly what coated her blade now, a sickly yellow energy twisting like smoke, gripping the metal and lengthening it from a dagger to a short sword with a low metallic groan.

She surged forward.

The ground beneath her feet shattered from the force of her leap, stone splitting as she flew through the air and slashed toward the Bishop with surgical precision.

He didn't flinch.

"As long as my god watches over my blade, it shall never stray," he whispered, and stabbed forward. Not toward her, his aim was absurdly off, completely unrelated to Olivia's path of movement. Yet as the blade moved, a white shimmer bloomed around the edge, something pure and nauseating, and despite the obvious misalignment, the tip of the scimitar twisted mid-air, guided by some unseen force. It buried itself into Olivia's skull just above her left eye.

Her vision flickered for a moment but she didn't stop.

Her smile widened even as the blade pierced through, a macabre grin splitting her face as her short sword came down, aura flaring.

Then he spoke again.

"I serve the will of the divine," he muttered, his tone soft and reverent, "and so long as heretics still walk, no wound shall blemish me. No weapon shall cut me. I am a vessel. You cannot harm me."

Olivia's blade tore across his cheek in a beautiful, arcing motion.

It should have opened flesh, drawn blood.

Instead, it passed like water over stone, meeting resistance but leaving nothing behind.

She cursed inwardly, lips twitching, teeth grinding behind her forced grin.

She stepped back, her skull already sealing shut, the puncture wound closing with wet sounds and tiny flashes of yellow light beneath her skin.

'This is going to be a long fight,' she thought grimly.

And the Bishop, seeing her heal and ready herself again, simply raised his blade in salute, his lips already mouthing the next prayer.

"There can only be one force in the presence of God," the Bishop roared, his voice ringing out like the toll of a distant church bell. "Faith! Faith alone reigns supreme!"

He raised his scimitar once more, its edge pulsing with pale light, and Olivia exhaled slowly, her lips pressed into a thin, resigned line.

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'This is going to be a bloodbath,'

The moment she tried to command her energy again, she could feel it resisting her, as if shackled by something unseen, something external, something absolute. Her body still regenerated with its usual monstrous speed, but the aura wrapped around her weapon was limp, unresponsive, like it no longer belonged to her.

And then came the pain.

The Bishop descended upon her like a divine executioner, his blade flashing again and again, remorseless and precise. He cleaved through her limbs without hesitation, stabbing through her chest, slicing open her skull, reducing her to ragged chunks of flesh over and over. Yet every time, her body stitched itself back together, bones cracking back into place, organs re-forming beneath blood-slick skin, as if she were nothing more than a puzzle snapping itself back into shape.

It wasn't just skill, this was divine law.

The Bishop worshipped no named deity, no established god revered in temples or etched into scripture. Yet this nameless god, this formless power, could impose laws upon the world itself, and the Bishop, through his unshakable devotion, could wield those laws as if they were weapons.

Were it the king, or Lazarus, or even Jeremiah standing in her place, their sheer force of will might have cracked through the imposed commandment, overwhelmed the law with raw power. But Olivia was not them. Her energy was artificial, mutated, imperfect and could not break divine fiat. She could only endure it.

Fortunately, endurance had always been her specialty.

The Bishop's face, once serenely devout, slowly twisted into something harder, more furious, his lips curling with disgust as he backed away to catch his breath.

"There shall be no abomination standing in defiance of human nature where God's blessing rests!" he spat.

And the moment the words left his mouth, the backlash struck.

Blood welled up from his throat, spilling over his lips in thick gouts as his knees buckled beneath him. He staggered backward, choking on the pain, the divine law he had just tried to enforce now rebounding violently within him.

"Finally," Olivia whispered with a grin, then surged forward.

Her blade, now thrumming with yellow energy once more, arced through the air and sliced into the Bishop's side. He tried to retreat, stumbling back with wide, stunned eyes, but her follow-up slash carved into his ribs, and a third tore across his arm, nearly severing it at the elbow.

She had been waiting for him to make a mistake, waiting for him to try and declare her regeneration forbidden.

But regeneration wasn't powered by mana or aura. It was biological, cellular, something buried in her marrow and muscles, the result of years of grotesque experiments and painful sacrifice. Whatever divine law he tried to impose, it could not touch the very nature of what she had become. And now, his failed attempt had opened him up, left him vulnerable.

"My god… my—" he began, trying to reach for a prayer.

Her blade cut him off, slashing across his mouth with surgical precision and severing his tongue. The word collapsed on his lips as blood poured freely, and he let out a hoarse, animalistic grunt.

He lashed out with a wild kick, she dodged to the side easily, but something about the movement, about the timing, set off alarms in her gut.

'Don't push your luck.'

She leapt backward without hesitation, just as a wave of blinding white light exploded around him. The divine aura washed over his body like a tide, searing away the damage she had dealt, mending skin, reattaching bone, restoring him to perfect form once more.

Olivia landed on one knee, breathing hard, gripping her weapon tightly as she watched him rise.

"No heretic shall sense any believer for the next two seconds."

Olivia's eyes widened. "Shit—"

And then everything disappeared. Her vision, her hearing, even her perception of the mana and aura around her, all gone, smothered beneath the enforced silence of the Bishop's divine command. It was one of his worst tricks: by placing a firm limit on the duration, he could enforce rules that would otherwise be impossible to maintain. And in a battle like this, where every fraction of a second could spell survival or death two seconds of blindness might as well have been an eternity.

Not death, in her case, but close enough.

She felt it before she saw it, first, a bloom of heat and pressure in her chest, then a sharp jolt as something tore through her skull. Her senses returned just in time to see the Bishop's scimitar protruding from her eye socket, her head split from jaw to brow, her chest carved open like a butchered carcass.

Blood fountained outward as her regeneration kicked in, muscles reknitting and organs reforming at breakneck speed, but it wasn't enough to stop the next blow. The scimitar descended again along the exact same path, slicing her open a second time, and again the ground was painted red in an instant.

Then his voice rang out once more, calm and devout.

"In the name of my god, I declare: all heretics within ten feet shall be judged for their sins."

Olivia froze. She had never heard that rule before. Not in her past fights with the Bishop, not in any recorded account of his engagements. And that alone made it dangerous.

She instinctively recoiled, dread prickling across her skin, and then the light appeared, soft at first, a harmless radiance that washed over the battlefield like sunlight breaking through clouds. For one moment, she thought he had failed, the Bishop doubled over and vomited blood, clearly paying the price for attempting a rule too heavy for his frame to bear.

But then came the second invocation, his voice cracked but triumphant: "All heretics shall be judged for just one sin."

Limitation again, precisely chosen, expertly enforced, and it was enough.

Olivia's mind was no longer her own. She felt something foreign sifting through her memories, peeling back thoughts like pages, digging for rot. And then it found one.

She saw herself in the lab, needles gleaming under sterile light, bodies suspended in runic glass, a tapestry of limbs and nerves and dying eyes. Human. Beastkin. Elves. Children.

No damage came with the vision only pain.

A deep, consuming pain that had no origin and no logic. It was not the pain of torn flesh or broken bone, but something worse, internal, existential, a punishment that made every wound she'd suffered before feel like a bruise.

She screamed. A hoarse, ragged scream that tore from her lungs without restraint.

Her body convulsed as she collapsed, pressing the bisected halves of her skull together with trembling hands, clawing at her own skin as if she could make it stop by tearing something out of herself.

The Bishop stood in silence for a moment, watching her writhe, his expression unreadable beneath the blood and dirt.

"I doubt I can kill you," he said, his voice slow and weary now, "but I hope these few moments are enough. Enough for you to understand what your sins feel like… when they're reflected back."

Then, with a grunt and a flicker of white light, he vanished.

And Olivia was left behind, kneeling in the grass outside the shattered banquet hall, holding the ruined halves of her body together as her scream echoed through the air. Whatever strength she still had wasn't enough to rise, not yet, and certainly not enough to deal with whatever chaos had broken loose inside.

Not now. Not like this.

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