Vayne’s diagonal slash reached Lira’s neck.

And passed through her.

Not because Lira was intangible.

But because in the 0.4 seconds between Vayne launching the attack and the blade reaching its destination, Lira had moved exactly enough for the steel to pass three millimeters from her skin without touching it.

Unhurried.

With no visible effort.

With the economy of movement of someone who has spent eight hundred years being faster than anything that has tried to harm her.

Vayne completed the arc of the slash and repositioned in a single movement — the hip rotation of someone who has trained so that the inertia of a miss doesn’t leave her exposed.

Lira watched her from where she’d been, without having changed her base position.

"Good technique," she said.

Vayne launched the second slash.

Lira dodged it with the same principle — the minimum necessary movement, nothing more — and this time she spoke before Vayne repositioned.

"But predictable."

---

Valdris’s night-shift hunters weren’t decorative.

There were six of them, ranks between B and A, with the kind of coordination that comes from working together long enough not to need signals.

When Vayne lunged, two of them moved toward Lira’s flanks without anyone ordering it.

The other four spread out among the thirty vampires that had materialized in the plaza.

What followed in the side streets was real combat — Lira’s vampires were transformed from bats, without the rank of nobles, but they were still vampires and the hunters were human and the difference in base speed was a problem that tactics could compensate for but not eliminate.

An A-rank hunter took a corner with another and they worked in pairs — one drawing, one attacking — against three vampires simultaneously.

It worked.

Until it didn’t.

The fourth vampire came from above.

---

Lira’s right hand — the woman with pulled-back hair and vampire guard uniform who had materialized from a single bat — wasn’t participating in the combat.

She was observing.

Specifically, she was observing Aldric.

Not with hostility.

Aldric noticed after thirty seconds.

He’d noticed before, but the first thirty seconds he’d spent evaluating whether the problem of Vayne fighting Lira was more urgent or the problem of thirty vampires in the streets of his city.

Both were urgent.

There was only one Aldric.

"Is there something I can help you with?" he said, with the tone he’d developed for situations where the alternative to diplomacy was considerably worse.

The right hand looked at him.

"How long have the two Her Eminence seeks been gone?"

Aldric calculated.

"To my misfortune, two days. I feel like maybe something bad happened to them," he said.

"Is that concerning? Why?"

"For other hunters, it would take days." Pause. "For them..." He glanced toward the northeast direction involuntarily. "A mission normally doesn’t take them more than a day."

The right hand processed this.

"And they’ve been gone two days?"

"Yes."

"No contact?"

"That’s why I’m worried."

The right hand nodded slightly.

Said nothing more.

But Aldric noticed that the information had gone somewhere specific — it hadn’t been lost in conversation, it had landed in some internal record he couldn’t see.

Kai, Serah, hurry up.

He looked at Vayne trying to face Lira.

Otherwise I don’t know what our fate will be.

---

Kai had Serah completely in the air.

He held her with strong arms under her thighs, her legs wrapped around his waist as if she never intended to let go.

"Fuck, Serah... your pussy squeezes me so good," Kai growled against her chest.

"Mmm... these big, perfect tits," he murmured with his mouth full. "They drive me crazy."

Serah moaned loudly, digging her nails into his shoulders.

"Suck my tits harder... bite... yes, fuck, like that..."

Kai obeyed.

"You’re dripping," Kai said, releasing the nipple with a wet sound. "Look how you’re soaking my whole cock."

Serah clenched her pussy around him, milking him.

Serah trembled.

Her inner walls tightened and released, sucking him in.

"I’m close... I’m gonna come again on your cock... don’t stop sucking my tits..."

Kai switched to the other nipple.

He licked it, sucked it, and bit it while he thrust into her without mercy.

Serah’s silver markings exploded in bright light.

Her tail tightened convulsively around Kai’s waist.

"Kai! I’m coming! I’m coming so good on your cock!"

Her pussy contracted violently.

A hot gush of juices splashed Kai’s belly and balls.

He didn’t stop.

He kept fucking her through the orgasm, sucking her tits harder.

"Good girl... come all over my dick... I want to feel you milk me."

Serah panted against his neck, trembling all over.

Even with the orgasm coursing through her, she whispered:

"When do we go back to Valdris?"

Kai kept thrusting slow and deep, still carrying her, still with a nipple between his lips.

"Whenever you want."

"Tomorrow?"

Kai looked into her eyes — fixed on hers, his cock still buried to the hilt inside her throbbing pussy.

"Why tomorrow?"

Serah didn’t answer immediately.

She just smiled that wild, satisfied smile, squeezing her pussy around him once more.

---

Valdris — central plaza:

Vayne had attempted seven slashes.

None had connected.

Not because they were bad slashes — they were the slashes of someone who had spent twenty years perfecting exactly that movement, an A+ rank.

The problem was that Lira dodged them with the same principle as the first: minimum movement, zero effort, the expression of someone who is mentally doing something else while her body solves the physical problem without supervision.

The two flanking hunters had tried to coordinate with Vayne — triangle formation, force Lira to choose which of the three to respond to first.

Lira had responded to all three simultaneously.

Not with attacks.

With repositioning — placing herself at the exact point of the triangle where the three attack angles canceled each other out, so that any movement by one of them risked hitting another.

All three had stopped.

Lira had waited.

Then she had sighed.

"Do you have more?" she said.

---

Vayne tightened her grip on the hilt.

In the side streets, the sound of combat had changed — fewer exchanges, more pauses.

The hunters had found a rhythm against the base-rank vampires, but it was an expensive rhythm: each vampire neutralized cost more energy than it should.

One of the A-rank hunters had his left arm unusable.

Another had lost his sword and was fighting with a dagger.

They were still standing.

But the margin was narrowing.

---

Aldric looked toward the northeast again.

Two days.

This is very worrying. Could that mage have been more dangerous than we thought?

Would a mission in Mirfeld really cost them both this much?

He calculated the possible scenarios.

The most likely one wasn’t that something bad had happened to them.

The most likely one was considerably more specific and considerably more difficult to put in an official report.

Aldric filed that thought away and returned to the immediate problem.

---

Lira got bored on the eighth slash.

She didn’t show it with a gesture. She showed it by stopping dodging.

Vayne’s ninth slash reached Lira’s shoulder and connected.

The steel cut the fabric of the dress.

Not the skin.

Vayne felt the resistance on the blade — not the resistance of defensive magic, but incredible resistance for a Hunter of her rank.

Lira looked down at her shoulder.

Looked at the cut in the fabric.

Then at Vayne.

"That dress," she said, with a voice that for the first time all night had something beneath the surface, "took three weeks to make."

What came out of Lira wasn’t a visible attack.

It was pressure.

The kind of pressure that doesn’t come from one direction but from all — the aura of an SSS entity released without control, without the filter that beings of that rank constantly maintain so as not to be a permanent environmental problem.

It expanded from Lira outward in a thirty-meter radius.

And everything stopped.

The hunters in the side streets.

The vampires fighting them.

The merchants watching from closed windows.

The birds remaining on the rooftops.

Vayne felt her knees threaten to bend — not of her own will, but because the human body has automatic responses to certain presences and bending is one of them, the one that comes before collapse.

She stayed standing.

With effort.

But standing.

Lira looked at her with the expression of someone who has finished being patient.

"That’s enough of this," she said.

Her voice didn’t have the conversational tone from before.

It had the tone of something that has decided what to do next.

---

Aldric, from the edge of the plaza, felt the pressure like physical weight on his shoulders.

In his fifteen years as guildmaster, he’d been close to an SSS exactly once — when Serah entered the guild for the first time and leaned against the doorframe in her Primordial wolf form looking for food.

This was different.

Serah hadn’t released anything.

This was released.

Aldric looked at the sky in the direction of the northeast.

Please, he thought, without directing it to anyone specific, let them be on their way back.