With Fenrir’s arrival, Axel quietly powered down whatever he had been building up. No need for a suicide attack anymore.

"No—Axel!"

"Sir Axel...!"

"...Husband."

A few more familiar voices rang out from just behind him.

Before he could even turn to look, something soft collided with him from multiple directions at once. Both arms, his back, the top of his head—all claimed within the same breath.

He looked left. Beatrix was there, tears clinging to the corners of her eyes, arms wrapped tight around his.

To his right, Ria held on just as fiercely, her lips trembling, brows drawn into a deep frown.

And above him, Nina pressed herself over the crown of his head, her chest against his hair, silently sobbing at the state he was in.

"You girls..."

He whispered. Not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Nina quietly wiped her face before uncorking a potion and tipping it over Axel’s ruined back. The wounds closed fast, his HP Pool climbing back toward something reasonable. The lethargy, though, stayed put. Whatever Envy’s weapon had done to him, it wasn’t something a potion could simply wash away.

"Thanks. I’m fine now..."

He murmured, pulling out a mana potion and draining it himself. He’d poured nearly everything he had left into the God’s Mineral pillar, after all.

Meanwhile, Fenrir was handling things on her end.

No—she was owning him.

Off the back of that first swing, she’d landed another, and then another, until two of the copies fizzled out of existence. Recalled, more accurately, by the main body.

Watching it happen, Axel felt his earlier guess solidify.

Those copies carry the same strength because they’re all real bodies. Shared pain. Shared HP Pool, split and divided between however many exist at once. The more copies Envy makes, the thinner that pool gets spread.

Now Fenrir was down to one—the original—and it wasn’t anything like Axel’s earlier fight. She had the upper hand completely, with Envy doing little more than scrambling to dodge. Each swing she threw was fast enough to superheat the surrounding air, small explosions crackling outward on the near-misses. The club was lighter than a pillar. Easier to move, easier to redirect.

If Axel had grabbed that instead from the start, things might’ve gone differently. Too late to dwell on it now.

He watched her work and thought, quietly: even with higher stats, Fenrir was still the better fighter. Raw numbers, he’d win by a landslide. But a real fight wasn’t just numbers. She had something harder to measure—a natural, almost instinctive command over her own body that he simply didn’t.

"Alright. Let’s help Fenrir wrap this up."

He moved to stand. His legs buckled almost immediately.

The weakness was getting worse, not better—even with the rest, even with the potion. Not poison; the Ultimate Recovery Potion would’ve dealt with that. Something else, then.

A quiet unease crept up the back of his neck.

"Nina. Can you check my back?"

He reached into his inventory and stowed his shirt. One moment clothed, the next topless.

The girls—Nina included—went briefly pink at the sight. But Nina’s expression shifted fast.

"T-This is...!" Her fingers hovered over his skin. "A demon’s sigil!"

Axel couldn’t see it himself. From the outside, with his shredded suit still on, it hadn’t been obvious. But now, with his back bare, it was right there—a complicated mark sitting dark against his skin, pitch-black like tattooed ink, its pattern too intricate to have been cut freehand. Nina touched the edge of it carefully. No mana she could sense. No obvious mechanism. Just the certainty, bone-deep, that it was doing something to him.

"So that’s what’s draining me."

No proof, technically. But it was the only strange thing on him, and the weakening had no other explanation.

"Can you erase it?" he asked, half-expecting the answer.

Nina shook her head. "Sorry, Sir Axel. It’s fused into your skin—like a real tattoo. I can’t just wipe it away."

"I see." A slow exhale. "Then scrape off the skin and take it with it."

"...!?"

The shock on her face was immediate. She stared at him like he’d said something unhinged—and, taken out of context, he had. Shaving off a section of his own back just to remove a mark. Brutal, blunt, and efficient, given that any wound could be healed with a potion after the fact.

The pain of the process, though, was another matter entirely.

For a moment she searched his face, looking for some sign that he was joking or delirious. She didn’t find one. Whatever burned in his eyes was dead serious.

She nodded, slowly. "...Alright. I’ll do it." 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

"Good." He turned to Ria and Beatrix. "Hold my hands. Both of them. And—" he reached into his inventory again, pulling out a towel, rolling it tight, "—I need something to bite on."

He knew exactly what he was agreeing to. But leaving the sigil alone wasn’t an option he could afford. He already had a theory about what it was doing to him, and if he was right—if it kept compounding—then he wouldn’t last long enough for it to matter either way.

Fenrir, reading the mood without needing it explained, immediately drove Envy further from Axel’s position.

Axel bit down on the rolled towel.

"Axel..."

"Husband..."

Beatrix took one hand. Ria took the other. Both held with both of theirs, their brows knitted tight, eyes locked onto his—wordlessly offering him somewhere else to put his focus.

"Ugh...!!!"

A short, muffled sound escaped him when Nina started.

Scalpel in hand—bought straight from the System Shop—she worked slowly and without hesitation. Precise. Methodical. Blood sprayed across her face whenever she cut a fraction too deep, and she didn’t flinch once.

She wasn’t thinking about what it looked like. She was only thinking about the lines.

"Done."

Thirty seconds, roughly.

The sigil was gone from his skin, the wounds already closing as his HP Pool quietly spent itself on the healing. But one problem remained.

"Sir Axel..." Nina’s voice dropped. "I’m sorry. The sigil is still there."

She’d shaved it off cleanly—along with large chunks of his meat, even—but it still had simply grown back. Like it had roots beneath the skin or somewhere else. The moment the flesh healed over, the mark reappeared on the same spot, unchanged.

Axel stared forward. "Damn. We’re out of time."

At the rate the weakness was compounding, he had five minutes. Maybe. Before his strength gave out entirely. Before his body reached the end of whatever the sigil was quietly, steadily counting down toward...

Death.