The Spider Duchess tore across the rooftops of Tokyo, claws gouging into concrete as she launched herself from one building to the next. Neon lights flickered beneath her, city noise rising like distant static, blissfully unaware of the hunt unfolding above.

  She did not dare slow down because behind her, she could feel it.

  Natalya’s presence cut through the night like a blade. Not frantic, nor wild but controlled and closing in fast.

  She’s faster than I anticipated…!

  The Duchess fired a strand of webbing across a wide intersection and flung herself forward, landing hard enough to crater the rooftop beneath her. She adjusted instantly, pivoting mid-sprint and scaling a glass tower vertically, her limbs piercing through steel and composite without resistance.

  Three Inquisitors! How could I be so foolish as to allow myself to be baited by that anomaly.

  Her irritation bled into panic.

  She had survived fifty years clawing her way up from nothing. She had built territory, cultivated power, secured favour with her monarch. To die tonight, cornered in a foreign domain—

  Unacceptable.

  She vaulted from the tower and soared toward a communications spire that pierced the skyline. Halfway through the leap, something seized inside her chest.

  Her body spasmed.

  One leg missed its landing.

  She caught herself with the others, claws screeching across steel as she hung suspended against the structure.

  The pain tightened.

  Not a wound but a grip.

  Her eyes widened.

  “You wretched devil…” she hissed, voice trembling with fury.

  High above, on an even taller tower silhouetted against the moon, a lone figure stood watching. The wind tugged at his suit as though he were merely observing the weather.

  In his hand—

  Her heart. Still beating.

  His fingers curled slowly around it, just enough to remind her of its existence outside her body.

  He offered no grand speech, or theatrical declaration but a silence that was far more suffocating.

  Her soul raged, defiant.

  You despicable manipulating cancerous traitor!

  But her body stopped its escape and the tightening stopped alongside it.

  It was not a mercy but a warning.

  Her chest throbbed as blood circulation stabilised, and she forced herself upright again.

  Then she felt it. They were closer now.

  Two new and distinct signatures converging alongside her primary pursuer.

  One sharp and relentless. The other lighter but no less dangerous.

  She turned her head.

  Across the rooftops, cutting through the dark with controlled bursts of flame and frost, the girls were almost within striking distance.

  The Duchess’s jaw set, pride and fury warring with the instinct to survive.

  Pinned between the man who held her heart and the Inquisitors closing in, she understood her fate with bitter clarity.

  Yet she would still resist.

  Kinuko Tsuzuri had lived too long a life to die cornered on a rooftop like prey.

  Fifty years ago, she had been nothing more than a forgotten name in a forgotten district. A shrine maiden’s daughter who watched her family temple decline with each passing year as modernity swallowed tradition whole. She remembered incense smoke, worn tatami, the quiet dignity of rituals no one attended anymore.

  She also remembered the night it ended.

  The night a Lord, now her Monarch, passed through her town.

  The night she chose survival over sanctity.

  She had not been dragged screaming into vampirism.

  She had knelt.

  Offered her wrist.

  Chosen power over obscurity.

  The transformation had taken months to stabilise. Years to master. Decades to rise. She had endured hunger, betrayal, assassination attempts from rival vampires, and the constant suffocating hierarchy of monarch and duke alike.

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  Every inch of authority she possessed had been carved from blood and patience.

  Five decades of calculated growth. Five decades of evolution.

  She had not clawed her way to Duchess only to be erased because she underestimated a newly turned anomaly and three decorated Inquisitors.

  Her claws tightened against the rooftop.

  Her heart pulsed faintly in the distance, still gripped by the man who treated her life as a variable in an equation.

  You may hold my heart… but you do not yet hold my will.

  She turned fully.

  Natalya was closest, advancing across the rooftop with controlled bursts of thermal propulsion, blades ready, posture unbroken.

  From the adjacent tower, Beatriz vaulted into view, golden hair catching the city lights as she spun her twin sais into position, expression uncharacteristically focused.

  And further back, moving with deceptive ease across a steel beam as though strolling through a park, Ji-ae adjusted her hair and stepped onto the rooftop edge, bowstaff resting lightly across her shoulders.

  All three were closing in at once.

  Kinuko exhaled slowly, centuries of cultivated composure settling back into place.

  If she was to die—

  She would do so as a Duchess.

  Her limbs spread outward, anchoring into concrete as veins of dark crimson began to pulse beneath her pale skin.

  “Duchess’ Curse…” she murmured, voice low but resonant, ancient syllables coiling through the night air.

  Her abdomen convulsed.

  “…Crimson Binding.”

  From her body erupted a violent storm of webbing.

  Not mere silk.

  Blood-forged strands.

  Hundreds of thousands of threads shot into the sky at once, sticky and glistening, acidic where they thickened, each filament humming with cursed energy. They expanded outward like a blooming red constellation, swallowing rooftop space, stretching between buildings, weaving a suffocating net across the skyline.

  The air itself seemed to clot.

  The battlefield transformed in seconds into a suspended labyrinth of living crimson.

  But Beatriz reacted instantly.

  Her amber eyes caught the moonlight and, for the briefest instant, something shimmered within them. She twisted mid-air, body folding fluidly as she inverted beneath the crimson canopy. Her fangs caught the light for a fraction of a second as her lips parted in concentration, the moment so subtle it could have been imagination.

  Everything slowed.

  The webbing expanded outward in suffocating waves of red, sticky strands thick with blood and curse. The skyline blurred behind them as the Duchess’ domain threatened to swallow the night whole.

  Beatriz spun at the centre of it.

  The wind changed.

  It did not build gradually, no, it arrived.

  A violent current tore across the rooftop at impossible speed, a slicing gale that howled through the suspended webbing. Crimson threads snapped in chains, dissolving into droplets that rained down like diluted blood.

  The sky cleared in seconds.

  Natalya moved the instant the opening formed.

  A thermal detonation burst behind her, flame and frost colliding to propel her forward faster than sound. She crossed the distance in a blink, blades flashing in a blinding sequence of arcs.

  Left.

  Right.

  Up.

  Down.

  Her strikes were too fast to follow, too clean to counter.

  The Duchess barely registered the first cut before the second severed through chitin, the third through joint, the fourth through tendon.

  All eight legs fell in staggered succession.

  She twisted desperately, sacrificing everything below her torso to preserve her core. Stone shattered beneath her as she slammed backward, already forcing regeneration to begin.

  Too fast—

  She had only enough time to restore partial mobility before another blazing arc tore toward her.

  She flung herself sideways, barely evading the killing blow, and vaulted across the rooftop edge.

  Escape. Sewer access. Regroup.

  She dropped down the side of the building, claws carving grooves into concrete as she descended in a controlled slide.

  They cannot match my speed in vertical descent. No human can. I will disappear beneath the city and make contact with another Lord.

  Her heart throbbed violently in the distance.

  Just reach the ground. Just reach the drainage tunnels.

  The streetlights below blurred.

  For a moment she believed she was safe.

  Until she heard it.

  A cold voice, mercilessly devoid of haste. “Did you really believe that would save you?”

  Her body locked mid-descent.

  Utter fear flooded her veins.

  No.

  She turned her head.

  Red hair streaked along the vertical face of the building, not falling but flowing backward as the last inquisitor ran horizontally across the glass wall at a speed that defied gravity itself.

  There was no wasted motion, no visible strain in her posture, only controlled propulsion as she built velocity along the skyscraper’s side, the air screaming around her as she crossed the threshold of supersonic.

  By the time the Duchess fully turned her head, Ji-ae was already there, as the silver-coated bowstaff came down in a single, merciless arc before connecting perfectly with the base of her skull.

  The impact was catastrophic.

  Bone shattered outward in a spray of fragments. Vertebrae exploded apart. Tendons snapped. Her spine ruptured as the force tore her head clean from her body in one brutal motion.

  Her severed head rocketed forward like artillery, smashing through reinforced glass, concrete and steel as it barreled through the building. Windows erupted in cascading shards as her skull carved a tunnel straight through to the other side.

  Her body fell lifelessly down the facade.

  Inside the building, her head slammed against the far wall—

  And a silver sai pierced through her temple in the same breath.

  Perfectly thrown.

  It pinned her skull to the concrete, cracking it further as blood ran down the surface.

  Her vision blurred. The city lights flickered. She felt the connection to her heart weaken.

  I am—

  Darkness crept inward.

  I'm not going to heaven, am l…

  And for the first time in fifty years, Kinuko Tsuzuri wept.

  Tears slipped from her fading eyes as her consciousness dissolved into nothingness, her soul cursed to eternal damnation.