In a hollow glade nestled deep within the forest of Fallcry, Mesh stood alone at the front of a vast military formation. Behind him, five thousand soldiers waited in silence, their armor glinting dimly under the overcast sky. The air was cold and thick with tension—this was not a battle against the enemy faction. No, this confrontation was far more personal.
Today, they would face the very monster they had created.
Across the field stood a lone figure. Draped in a tattered cloak, her long hair whipped in the wind. A massive sword rested on her back, nearly as tall as she was. Crimson eyes glowed beneath the shadow of her hood, their intensity piercing even from a distance. That was Shina Mariposa—the once-child soldier, the blade of Fallcry, the girl they had stolen from a village and forged into a weapon.
Now, the weapon had turned on its masters.
Mesh watched her approach, a smirk curling on his lips. He could still remember the day she was just a defiant little girl staring him down in that abandoned building. Now she was seventeen and had become something far more dangerous than even he had imagined.
"So," Mesh called out, his voice echoing unnaturally in the clearing, "I take it you finally paid your little village a visit?"
His words cut deeper than any blade. Shina stopped in her tracks. Her fingers twitched near the hilt of her sword. Her voice, when it came, was quiet but sharp as ice. "Did you… really do it?"
Mesh raised an eyebrow. "Do what?"
"You destroyed my home. You killed my mother. My uncle. Everyone."
A silence hung in the air. The soldiers behind Mesh remained tense, sensing what was coming.
Mesh chuckled softly. "I did what I had to do. Loose ends make for dangerous threads."
There was no denial. Only the cruel satisfaction of a man who believed himself untouchable. Shina's expression didn't change, but the temperature around her dropped. Frost began to form on the blades of grass beneath her boots.
With no warning, Mesh raised his arm. The signal was given.
His army surged forward.
Like a wave of steel and fury, five thousand men screamed and charged toward her. But Shina didn't flinch. She drew her greatsword in a single motion. The blade hummed with power. Her cloak burst behind her as she moved—a red blur tearing through the charge like wind through leaves.
Her movements were impossible to track. She ducked, spun, and weaved, cutting down soldier after soldier in her wake. Each slash precise. Each step deliberate. She was no longer a girl—she was the storm.
But five thousand was still five thousand.
The numbers began to weigh on her. Even as dozens fell to her blade, more surrounded her. Spears lunged, arrows rained, swords clashed against her steel. She leapt high into the air, escaping the suffocating press of bodies, and with one hand, brought her greatsword around in a powerful arc.
"Crimson Wind," she whispered.
A black horizontal vortex exploded from her sword. It roared through the battlefield like a hurricane of blades, tearing through rows of soldiers and carving a straight path toward Mesh himself.
The commander barely dodged in time, the force of the blast flinging him backwards. He hit the ground hard, coughing and laughing at once.
"Magnificent," he wheezed, staring up at the sky. "You really did become a monster."
But Shina wasn't done. She landed with the force of a thunderclap and began cutting her way forward. The battlefield was chaos—flames, screams, blood—but her path was clear. Every step was aimed at him.
And yet… Mesh was still smiling.
He had planned for this. Trained counter-specialists, laid traps, scattered hidden casters. But watching her tear through his army like an angel of vengeance, something cold gripped his chest.
Maybe… just maybe… he had gone too far.
The battle raged on for hours. Shina's aura grew darker with every wound she received, her power more violent, her movements more ruthless. The girl who once begged to see her mother again was now a sword without mercy.
And in the end, the battlefield was stained red.
They would say later that five thousand had come to the forest, and only a few hundred limped out alive.
They would say a crimson-eyed reaper fell from the sky.
They would say that was the day Fallcry's blade turned against its own.
And the world would remember:
That battle marked the beginning of Shina Mariposa's tale of Heroism.
{Chapter 48 end}