Flashes of lightning from the Sasha's brother tore through places in the tent as emotions overwhelmed him. He found himself weeping, his composure crumbling as he shouted, "Don't leave me alone, Sasha! I can't live alone. All I did, all I'm doing is because of you... please. Don't leave this pitiful brother of yours."
Through the torn fabric, Elias caught glimpses of Sasha's deteriorating condition. Her body had gone limp, her hair saturated with murky liquid that seemed to pulse with malevolent life. Her eyes filled with the same viscous darkness, and black veins adorned her once-smooth skin like cultist tattoos. Most disturbing was her face—twisted into a grin of sadistic pleasure that belonged to something other than the girl he'd come to respect.
Elias watched as her brother stopped offering words of courage and instead fell into reflection, his face a map of grief as he contemplated a future without his sister—a future that, to him, was no future at all.
In a burst of desperate anger, her brother grabbed Sasha's neck and shook her. "LEAVE her body!" he commanded the entity within her, before his voice broke. "Sister, wake up please. Don't leave me." His shoulders trembled as he pleaded, "PLEASE, don't leave me." The proud hunter collapsed against her chest, ear pressed to her heart, clinging to the faint rhythm that signified her tenuous grip on life.
All strength seemed to leave him then, the realization setting in that there was nothing more he could do.
Elias had witnessed many people losing loved ones, but never had he seen despair as complete as what now showed in her brother's eyes—hollow, empty vessels that no longer reflected light or life.
Elias recognized that emptiness. He'd seen it once before, in a man who had lost his wife to a tragic accident. That man hadn't even waited to bury her before walking off a building the very same day, choosing oblivion over existence without his beloved.
Those same lifeless eyes now stared out from Sasha's brother's face.
The hunter raised a trembling hand toward his sister, then let it fall. This was beyond him, beyond his considerable power.
Elias startled slightly when he noticed the hunter watching him, but his gaze remained hollow—beyond anger, beyond despair, in a place where emotion itself had died.
Then, slowly, terribly, his body began to glow from within, light seeping through his skin as power built inside him. Everyone around them panicked, flashes of movement erupting as people rushed to evacuate the tents.
Through the chaos, Elias understood with sudden clarity what was about to happen.
"No, sir, please," someone begged. "You'll destroy everything."
"Run," Elias Thunderspark replied, his voice unnaturally calm yet somehow audible everywhere at once. "This ruin will turn to dust for taking her away from me."
A roar of primal rage tore from the man's throat, but even that sound of fury was dampened by the bleak certainty that permeated the air.
People fled in panic—trainees, officials, even Buddhist Hand, who had to be supported by others as they helped him escape.
"Please, I beg you." The receptionist who had made Elias sign the form, but he wasn't listening. He stood beside his sister, gazing into her murky, fluid-filled eyes with terrible resolve.
"You are the only Platinum Rank 2 Hunter in the world," she pleaded. "Your sister wouldn't want this!"
"You don't understand," he replied, finality ringing in each word. "I lost everyone. She is my world, and nothing makes sense if she is not in it."
This was a man who had nothing left to lose. His entire world lay before him, possessed by something beyond his control, and he had made his decision.
"Why are you still here?" he asked, finally noticing that Elias remained while others fled.
"Is that how siblings love each other, or is it that you are just not normal?" Elias countered, unable to comprehend the depth of devotion he was witnessing.
"I don't know and I don't care how others do it," the hunter replied simply, the glow around him intensifying.
The receptionist rushed to Elias, grabbing his arm. "Let's go, young man. Your namesake is beyond reason!"
Elias felt himself being pulled away, his vision blurring as they fled, leaving behind only two humans inside the ruins where roars upon roars now filled the air.
Inside, the hunter leaned close to his sister, cradling her corrupted form with infinite tenderness. "You did nothing wrong, sister," he whispered. "But I won't allow you to leave alone. I will follow you and protect you in the afterlife."
His eyes, no longer hollow, now brimmed with emotion and care. As his body glowed brighter, memories flooded through him—their parents' death, how he had been born crippled, able to move only his head.
It was Sasha who had cared for him all those years. She who pushed him around in his wheelchair, told him stories when the world seemed too dark to bear. Even when he couldn't laugh but only manage weak giggles, even when speech failed him and only garbled sounds emerged, she had laughed and pretended he was telling her stories of his own.
She had been so young—too young for such responsibility—yet she had become his entire life.
The day he awakened his powers at fourteen marked the day he finally stood on his own. His S-rank Lightning talent had healed his broken body, and their roles had reversed. He had vowed then to give her the best possible life any princess could want—fame, wealth, power, and his eternal protection. He wanted to make her a Queen.
That singular goal had driven him to aim at turning their family into a Clover Leaf, the highest noble ranking that would transform the very name of their country. He would stop at nothing but death to achieve that dream.
"Without you," he whispered as the light within him reached blinding intensity, "there is no world for me."
Kilometers away from the gate, Elias witnessed a massive pulse of lightning pierce the sky, so powerful it seemed to split the heavens themselves.
"Oh my God," he gasped, his legs giving way beneath him as he fell to his knees. Tears streamed unbidden from his eyes as understanding crashed over him like a tidal wave.
In that moment, he knew that both Sasha and her brother were gone—and that he had witnessed a love so powerful it defied comprehension, a devotion so complete it had consumed them both in its terrible, beautiful fire.