The Extra's Rise - Chapter 949
949: Hellflame Emperor (1) 949: Hellflame Emperor (1) I never liked kneeling.
It always felt like a performance-a show of humility for an audience that wasn’t there.
But I was on my knees now, because some things demand it.
Because the name carved into the granite in front of me was one I didn’t get to say out loud anymore.
Elara.
The stone was colder than my hands, holding a deep chill that had nothing to do with the night air.
A small, careful bouquet of paper flowers rested at its base.
They trembled slightly, though the air was dead still, as if the ground itself was taking a slow, shallow breath.
The world was quiet, save for the tiny, secret sounds it makes when it thinks no one is listening.
The rub of grass against my shins, the damp smell of old soil, the sharp press of gravel into my kneecaps.
I felt him before I saw him.
The night gained weight, the silence grew heavy, like someone had put their thumb on the scale of the world.
Arthur Nightingale.
His presence settled over the graveyard, a pressure as steady and absolute as gravity.
Good.
I’d wanted him here.
I’d wanted him to watch.
My mind, without permission, dragged me back three years.
The last time I saw him, he smiled, and I knew I was going to die.
It wasn’t a cruel smile.
It was calm, patient, almost kind, and that was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.
I had built a fire in my soul, a storm of Nirvana and Abyssal flame hot enough to turn a city block to glowing glass.
I threw it all at him, a roaring spiral of purple-white certainty.
Everything burns, if you’re stubborn enough.
He lifted one hand.
My fire forgot how to burn.
It wasn’t blocked or deflected.
It wasn’t even countered.
It simply… wasn’t fire anymore.
The roaring storm unraveled into a cloud of monarch butterflies that drifted away on a phantom breeze.
The concrete street beneath us softened into a garden path.
Trees sprouted from the asphalt, their leaves made of crisp, turning pages.
Flowers bloomed, lit from within, their glowing veins tracing stories in the air.
The world smelled of fresh paper and rain.
“Mythweaver’s Garden,” he said, and the name alone was a law of physics.
I screamed, a raw, useless sound.
I swung my fists.
I poured every last drop of myself into another attack, and it dissolved into a shower of cherry blossoms.
Every move I made, every trick I tried, he didn’t counter it; he simply decided it was something else.
A punch became a gust of wind.
A blast of heat became a flock of doves.
He wasn’t fighting me.
He was editing me out of my own story.
The worst part was his expression.
He wasn’t angry.
He wasn’t straining.
He was just… doing his work.
That was what broke me.
I didn’t even matter enough for him to hate.
“You loved her,” he said, his voice still calm, and then he broke my ribs with a precise, indifferent strike.
I felt the bones give way, the world tilting as the air was punched from my lungs.
He wasn’t wrong.
The killing blow came down like the final punctuation at the end of a sentence.
But it never landed.
It stopped, an inch from my face, on the petal of a single black rose that had bloomed from nothing.
It wasn’t an illusion.
It was a flower that drank the light, its texture a paradox of silk and iron.
A voice slid out of it, smooth and poisonous.
Not yet, young Nightingale.
This story requires a different ending.
The garden shuddered.
Arthur drew his hand back, his eyes narrowing, searching for a thread in his perfect tapestry that didn’t belong to him.
The black rose unfolded, its petals opening into a door with a hinge that wasn’t there a moment ago.
I fell through it, because I had no other choice.
I fell because my story had just been bought and paid for by a woman who thinks in knives and prayers, and never wastes either.
The door spat me out into a room deep beneath the city.
The air tasted of old blood and chalk dust.
In the center of the stone floor was a complex circle of layered white lines, intricate as spun glass.
Her Holiness Evelyn sat on a simple stone chair, her back ramrod straight, her hands folded in her lap.
She looked at me not like a person, but like a problem she had already solved and was just waiting for me to catch up.
“You failed,” she said.
It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” I answered.
The truth was all I had left.
“You lived,” she said, and the words landed with the weight of a verdict.
“Yes.” “Get up,” she commanded, her voice like chipping ice.
“Then get better.” I did what she told me.
Back in the present, my fingers traced the letters of Elara’s name.
The cuts were deep and final.
My other hand rested on my knee, palm up, empty.
I kept my breathing slow and even, my shoulders low.
Don’t startle the Redeemers patrolling the paths with their lanterns.
Don’t give the Saintess a reason to look this way.
I felt Arthur’s gaze settle between my shoulder blades, steady and heavy as a physical touch.
He didn’t have to speak.
The pressure said stand.
I stood.
The pressure said leave.
I stayed.
“I loved her,” I said to him, the words ugly and true in the quiet air.
“You killed her,” he replied, his voice calm.
Uglier.
Still true.
He was usually right.
That had always been the problem.
Three years is a long time to be afraid.
I used every single day.
I ate fire for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I held embers under my tongue while I slept, waking up choking on heat, my mouth tasting of blood and iron, until I learned to breathe smoke as easily as air.
They had broken my power, unraveled it strand by strand.
I rebuilt it from scratch, tying every channel into a knot, weaving them over and under like a sailor’s rope, building a power that could never be so easily undone again.
If someone tried to turn my fire into butterflies, this time, the knot would catch the trick and grind it to ash.
I wrote seven oaths on seven pieces of bone, not in blood, but in an ink made of soot, regret, and something Her Holiness gave me without naming the price.
Each oath was a promise to kill a cowardice I knew by name.
First: I will not bargain with my own joy.
Second: I will not apologize for the strength in my hands.
Third: I will not pretend I was just a victim.
Fourth: I will not speak her name to buy pity.
Fifth: I will not accept a small victory while the great failure still stands.
Sixth: I will not ask the wrong people for forgiveness.
Seventh: I will not forget that I loved her.
When I pushed my new, knotted fire through those bones, something else woke up inside me.
It wasn’t the bright, holy light of Nirvana.
It wasn’t the hungry dark of the Abyss.
It wasn’t a color at all.
I call it Requiem Ember.
It doesn’t burn things.
It burns choices.
It eats the path a thing intends to take.
If someone decides my fire is now a butterfly, the Requiem Ember sets that decision on fire.
For three years, I trained it until my jaw ached.
I pictured his garden every night until the memory lost its terror and became fuel.
I failed a hundred times, a thousand, waking up on the cold stone floor of my cell, coughing, lips cracked, and trying again.
He would be stronger now, of course he would.
The world paid heroes in miracles and applause.
I had to build a fire that didn’t care who was watching.
Not to beat him.
I wasn’t that much of a fool.
Just to stand.
To be able to stand up straight when he looked at me like I was a problem that needed solving.
A low hum started under my knees, a vibration only I could feel.
Six simple coins buried under six small stones around her grave.
It wasn’t a bomb.
It was a bell.
A bell tuned to grief, because grief pries things open better than rage ever could.
He heard it.
Of course he did.
I heard the soft whisper of his blade in its sheath, the sound of steel talking to his hand.
“Don’t,” he said.
Too late.
The coins answered, one by one.
No fire, no light.
Just a slow, deep thrum that tilted the world, a sound like a great iron gate groaning on its hinges.
Not his gate.
Mine.
I laid my palm flat against the cold granite of Elara’s stone.
I let every lie I’d ever told myself burn away at once.
My throat was raw with the taste of ash.
The world above my head folded like paper.
These weren’t his perfect, elegant doors.
My gates were black iron, heavy, ugly, and honest, edged in lines of chalk and ash.
They smelled of wet matches, old rain, and promises that cost more than you could ever afford.
They fit me.
The Gates of Transcendence ask a single question: Are you ready to be crushed into a shape that will not break?
Three years ago, I would have run.
Now, I didn’t.
The iron parted just a finger’s width.
For a single heartbeat, through that narrow seam, I saw her.
Violet eyes and that patient, gentle smile.
The sight was a clean, sharp pain, the way only the truth can hurt.
I let it hurt.
I didn’t look away.
Requiem Ember ignited in my ribs, a small, absolute coal that burned away fear.
My new power, my knotted, stubborn power, finally settled through me.
It wasn’t a rush of joy or relief.
It was the feeling of a key finally turning in a lock that had been rusted shut for years.
It was heavy.
It had weight.
I stood.
My knees didn’t creak.
The stone under my palm was warm now.
My hands were steady.
Arthur watched me, his expression unreadable.
He was still stronger.
He would probably be stronger tomorrow.
That was what he did.
That was what the world built him to do.
But for once, I hadn’t asked the wrong person to forgive me.
For once, I brought my own door.
I opened my right hand.
The new flame appeared, hovering over my palm.
It wasn’t purple or white or black.
It was a color the eye didn’t know how to register, a word from a language you almost understood.
It didn’t flicker or dance.
It wrote lines in the air, thin and exact.
Requiem Ember.
“Watch me,” I whispered to the stone.
Not to him.
To her.
“I’ll pay for it all.” I looked up at him, and for the first time in three years, I smiled.
It felt strange, like teaching old muscles a new trick.
“Round two,” I said.