*...rrrooooooaghghg?...* A round of chills ravaged the back of my spine as I felt the creature's inquisitive growl reverberate through the flimsy door keeping us separated. I could practically hear the damn thing breathing down the back of my neck as I fought my best to stop shivering too much from the haunting aura seeping through the cracks. Meanwhile, I was still doing my best to wake the twins up with as little to no noise as possible. The howling winds outside were preventing me from leaving the blasted door with just my foot keeping it down; the force of the gales already too intense that even a split second of easing up on my guard would cause the door to fly right open. If this situation didn't improve, or worse, even escalated, the two would be caught off guard by this thing. Not to mention there would literally be no escape for us without the handy dandy power of Lov

Overlooking a part of the city, a lone woman stood in satisfaction as she watched Crimson interact with the twins that the girl had been traveling with for a while. She knew that it was dangerous for her to be this close to the girl that she swore to herself she would protect, but with the way that the said girl was acting, she had no choice but to intervene lest she ended up being a victim to this city's resident anti-robbery system. "How predictable that you'd get yourself entangled in this mess~" Arya chuckled to herself as she exerted her power on her own body. Not having a functioning heart had been a novel experience, but with almost two years passing ever since she let herself get stabbed by her former charge, it had become second nature to the former Prime to manually circulate the blood inside her body. It was honestly a blessing in disguise, with the practice enablin

A loud bang echoed between us as the rifle discharged a shot as soon as I let go of it. Understandably, I was shocked as fuck as I stood frozen with my ears still ringing. In front of me, Lace looked... unsurprised as she sighed in resignation? Did this happen often even back then? "As I was about to say, don't let go of the trigger rune if you had it charged," the older woman shook her head as she relieved me of my weapon, the muzzle still smoking despite the lack of gunpowder. Curious, but I won't question it anymore. "How did you even not notice that? It was already primed and glowing even before you moved to give it back to me." My jaw remained agape as I felt my mind still rebooting itself from the shock of the explosive shot. Processing Lace's question at the speed of a dial-up connection, I smacked my lips together as my consciousness finall

"O-Oh! O-Of course..." Regaining my composure as the phoenix-turned-woman grabbed my attention, I couldn't help but still admire the form she took for this to even happen. "The form I took is simply what you wanted for me to take in the first place, Master; your subconscious deemed this." the phoenix glared at me, this time with an intensity of a woman scorned. "Don't delude yourself into thinking that I willingly wanted to look like this, nor did I even want to change my form at all." Ouch... "Sorry..." "Don't be," the phoenix tutted as a ball of flame engulfed her hand in a split-second, revealing what looked to be a clipboard while a pen materialized in a burst of flame on her right hand. "You're not sorry at all. And stop addressing me as 'the phoenix' or 'that creature'. You're more creative than that."

Time moves forward. That was the very essence of the world, right? Time and space were the two fundamentals laws of the universe. Movement would not be possible without time moving, nor is it possible without space existing. The two immutable constants of the world... It was always a daydream of mine to utterly break them for my own benefit. "How much for this pot?" "Two silvers, sir." Oh, how I wished for the ability to control time; to stop it, or even make it slow down in the littlest sense. Such a power was world-breaking, to the point that it was constantly portrayed as the ultimate ability. A literal World that one could access with but a simple thought. Hehe... Get it? it's the World? "What're you giggling about, Crimson?" Sigh