Dimensional Descent

Aina’s pupils trembled violently, pulses of red peeling out from her.

She could feel the changes immediately. She didn’t need to think about them, her clairvoyance was already able to pick up on every little thing.

She had already used all nine of her Rebirths, but the end result wasn’t as great as she wanted. As great as it was to rely on clairvoyance to get through everything, there was a limit to what her Ability Index was capable of. Ultimately, the Life Tablet only rated it as Gold.

The real reason Aina was so powerful wasn’t because of her clairvoyance, but because she had two forms of it, one for her body and the other for her soul. Together, they were able to fuse and work off of one another, forming a resonance that was akin to something the Life Tablet would rate at the Life Grade.

This was great.

In any other era, this would be enough to protect her own little corner of the world. But... in this era... it was far from it. Not if she wanted to stand by her husband’s side, not if she wanted to help him hold up the skies as well.

It wasn’t enough.

If she wanted to reach the level those Ancestors stood on, that Gervaise stood on, that Nilrem did, that her husband did... that the Demoness certainly did...

Relying on innate talent wasn’t enough.

She had to break past it, she had to form her own comprehension or soar beyond what mere intuition could give her.

But by the time she realized this, it was far too late. Or more accurately, it could be said that all this time, she had no choice but to keep doing things this way. If not for her clairvoyance, how could she have ever kept up with Leonel’s footsteps? She would have been left behind long ago, and the pain of experiencing such a thing would have killed her slowly.

Now that she stood near that peak, and could feel the enormous gap, she felt that sort of despair once again.

She knew that her husband had allowed her to come here only because he had perfect control of the situation, because he was confident that should things not go the way she hoped, he would be able to interfere.

However, that sort of realization only made her feel more helpless and powerless.

She wanted to really push herself, to give it her all, to break through one final time and reach the same platform as her husband...

10:09

But in the end, it was her father that gave her that chance, unwilling to see her suffer one final time to grasp what she needed.

Shackles that held Aina down shattered one after another. She gained the benefits of her father’s deep, diligently laid out foundation to match with her overwhelming talent.

As her power swelled, her eyes brimmed with tears that seemed to refuse to fall, almost as though she knew that the moment she shed that first tear, it would mean that he was really gone.

She had already felt his soul blink out, but maybe denial had set in more fiercely than anything before it. A trepidation, a feeling of guilt that weighed on her soul and made her wonder if she was too cruel.

But then she felt her father’s smile. It wasn’t one of subterfuge or even just one of kindness... it was one of relief.

The relief of a man who felt that he had given his daughter the final push she needed, the relief of a man who trusted his son-in-law, the relief of a man who was happy to have gotten the opportunity to be a true father at least once in his life.

If he had waited any longer, he knew his daughter would have found her path to break through on her own. He believed in her more than she knew, and he had watched more of her childhood than she knew as well.

He knew his daughter had a grit and determination few could match. She had the heart of a lioness and the pride of a Queen, the regal temperament of a Goddess and the grace of a mother.

Ilis daughter had grown into every bit the woman his wife had once been, stepping into all the potential her mother had once had that he stripped from her.

The last fading of Miel’s consciousness reflected a clear image both daughter and father shared, the image of a woman tied to a stake, her flesh rotting and a pained smile adorning her once gorgeous features.

Even while experiencing pain a mortal woman like her should never have to endure, she wanted them to live on without her, not for revenge, but to find happiness. Even in those last moments, she never blamed a single one of them.

It was the last flicker of humanity she had left before the pain rotted her mind and consciousness. What happened afterward, Aina never thought about normally. But in this moment, she did...

She had watched as her mother lost her sense of self, as the pain corroded who she was and corrupted her very being, how her attempts to remain the loving, caring mother and wife crumbled before their eyes as her screams tore through her throat like pale hands clawing up from moistened soil.

By the time she had died, she was no longer the mother Aina remembered, and that was what was the most unforgivable to her, the most unforgivable to Miel, the one thing neither of the two could ever forget.

Miel let go, allowing his daughter the grace of this revenge herself. He didn’t deserve

it.

And in the end, Aina stood in silence, her aura dimming down and her hair darkening to its jet black hue, her golden eyes piercing through the veil of space and time with the ferocity of a burning sun.

Her crimson pair of wings spread out in a sudden flap, feathers cascading down from their wide bodies.

This little hint of red... she would hold onto it not for the sake of the Brazingers, but for the sake of her father.