The Sinner Hunting System-Chapter 65: Scarlet Monastery
Charvaβs taunt hadnβt finished leaving her mouth before she was already turning to go. π§ππππΈπ¦π£πππ·ππ.π€π°π
The thorns beat her to it, swinging across the doorway, wrapping around the edges of the gap sheβd torn in the air, and doing something that shouldnβt have been possible.
They pulled the opening closed.
The spatial tear sealed from the outside, the bramble mimicking the motion Charva used to create it, pressing the edges together until the door simply ceased to exist.
"How did you..."
She stared into the tangled depths of the thorn-forest with genuine disbelief.
Even in a completely uncontrolled state, Evelyn was observing. Thinking. That hadnβt been in the calculation.
A sharp sound from her throat. The wings came out of her back, enormous, membranous, the span of them filling half the room, pressing against the wall of thorns with a presence that demanded the space.
Her body began to expand, the scale of it changing visibly, the dragon-tail extending from her spine and thickening as it grew.
Horns broke through her forehead, curving backward, the purple sheen of the scales spreading across her face and neck and down her arms until there was nothing human left in her silhouette.
"Watch carefully. This is a proper witch-form. What you have right now is just power with nothing behind it, a beast, not a witch."
Even here, even pinned and bleeding, she couldnβt stop herself.
She opened her mouth and the fire came out purple, hot enough to make the air itself hiss where it touched.
Thorn and flame met.
Burning fragments fell in clumps, the smell of charred vegetation filling the ruined room.
For a moment the fire seemed like it would hold the advance, wide fans of bramble blackening and dropping, the fire moving in thick arcs that caught everything in its path.
Then the replacements came.
More thorns, always more, feeding from some reserve that didnβt seem to have a bottom, pushing through the smoke and the fire and the falling ash with complete indifference to losses.
They came from the walls, from the floor, from cracks in the ceiling that hadnβt existed a minute ago.
"What is this arcane reserve... Lv9? No, higher!"
Charvaβs composure cracked at the edges.
This was impossible by any framework she understood.
A newly awakened witch, regardless of talent, regardless of circumstance, should not have reserves that eclipsed her own.
The ceiling didnβt work that way. The ceiling had rules.
Then the rules clarified themselves, and the clarity was bad.
"The draught. The draught..."
Sheβd compressed years of emotional accumulation into a single detonation.
The intensity of a witchβs awakening scaled with the intensity of the emotional pressure behind it.
She had engineered the most extreme possible awakening for reasons sheβd found intellectually interesting at the time.
The thought didnβt finish before the thorns came through her in several places simultaneously, driving her back into the wall and holding her there.
"Damn youβ"
Her hands changed, the fingers extending past any human proportion, the dragon-claws coming out in their full size, sweeping through the bramble in broad arcs that cut dozens of vines at once. Clean cuts. Fast cuts.
It didnβt matter. The severed ends bled and the other thorns treated the fallen pieces as resources, absorbing them back into the mass, self-sustaining in a way that Charva had never seen from anything this young.
Blood was everywhere now, on both sides, from wounds that multiplied faster than either of them could track.
The thorns that pierced dragon-scale should have stopped at the surface.
They didnβt.
There was something running through them that operated outside the physical rules, a force that found its way between scales and into the tissue underneath and drew from it, steadily, the life flowing in one direction.
The thorns wrapped her waist and pulled inward. Her ribs registered a compression that threatened to go further.
Her wrists were bound. The vines ran upward to the ceiling and lifted, suspending her slightly off the ground, arms spread, weight distributed across the grip of the bramble.
A vine found her inner thigh, followed the line of it upward, and drove into the abdomen. Not deeply. Just enough to reach the source.
Her body changed. Not dramatically, not all at once, a slow, visible deflation, the vitality leaving her the way it had left the children in this building during the famine years:
Not through blood, but through the body simply having less and less to work with.
"You forced this."
Something changed in her eyes. A decision made.
She screamed.
The sound wasnβt sound, it was force, releasing outward from her body in every direction at once, a detonation that turned half the thorn-mass into ash before the echo reached the walls.
The near side of the monastery came down, stone and plaster dropping in sheets, the dust so thick the room disappeared into it.
When the cloud thinned, a dragon moved through the wreckage.
Brief glimpses, the scale-shimmer, the massive wingspan, the vertical pupils carrying something that was disdain with a layer of something else underneath it, something that looked like caution.
She didnβt press forward.
She was already leaving, the wingbeats pushing the dust outward as she cleared the ruined wall and was gone.
The room went quiet.
The thorns swept the space methodically, searching, finding nothing. Then they turned.
Sister Maria was the last living thing in the room.
She watched the bramble come toward her. Slowly she went to her knees, and she forced her voice into something as steady and warm as she could make it.
"Itβs me, Evelyn. Itβs Maria. Donβt you know me?"
The thorns were past the point of knowing anyone.
They wrapped around her and pulled her into the dark of the thorn-forest.
A single sound, not entirely pain, not entirely surrender, somewhere in the space between them, and then the blood reached the walls.
Without a target left, the bramble didnβt stop. It turned on itself, vines shearing other vines, the whole mass grinding down into smaller and smaller fragments.
The violence continuing past any purpose it might have had, running on something that had no name and needed none.
Blood splattered in every direction.
One drop caught the Harvest Goddess statue across the face. It landed at the corner of one eye, exactly where a tear would fall.
The thorns hit the statue twice and split it down the center. Both halves dropped to the floor.
The blood at the corner of the stone eye ran slowly downward.
