anger and hopelessness. It told Elisabeth all over again just how deep-seated their hatred of the world was. Now that their rebellion had failed, they were turning all their destructive cravings inward. If she were Kaito Sena, Elisabeth mused, this was where she would try to talk them out of it. There was no doubt in her mind that he would have used every argument he could have to try to save the oppressed. That was just the kind of good-natured guy he was. But the Torture Princess was not him. Elisabeth casually rose to her feet, then turned around and spoke. "So be it. If you seek death, then be my guest. I can see I'm unneeded here, so I'll merely take the demi-humans and be on my way." "We're...saved? But...we're the only ones who got saved..." Randgrof's murmur dripped with guilt. However, Elisabeth ignored him. By nature, the Torture Princess was one who oppressed. She had no capacity to play the saint, and the prospect of her trying to get in good with the wounded was laughable. Elisabeth had no more attention to spare for those who resented the world. The Torture Princess began walking as she spoke. "I shan't denounce your desire to end things. Let this bring a close to your hatred and your dreams." Resentment and sorrow and rage, despair and malice and suffering, for better or for worse, they would all come to an end. In a sense, it was a sort of salvation. It was sad, no doubt. It could be spoken of as pitiable. But the fact remained that death was a way for things to end. Elisabeth couldn't deny that, and she knew that speaking of hope when there was none would be nothing more than a base act of deception. She did, however, give Randgrof a dispassionate instruction. "Leave them your gun. 'Tis a wretched sight when one tries to end their life by the blade and fails to finish the job." "Ah, right, okay. I'll leave everything we have." Randgrof hurriedly acquiesced, gathering up the valuable weapons and piling them in the corner of the room. The Peace Brigade began taking the demi-humans outside. Cries of relief began rising up all over, and the middle-aged man made sure to tell the other mixed-race people not to interfere. Elisabeth cast a single glance their way. Still no reaction. Their appearances were wildly varied, but all of them shared a common rejection of the world that lay ahead. Elisabeth left those who'd chosen death behind and set foot on the staircase. And that's when it happened. A massive reeeet rang out like the world itself was creaking. The sanctuary started shaking. Chunks of rubble rained down from above. The vitreous sand scraped against itself, making it sound as though someone was screeching. It was as if the end of days had come again. However, it was too early for Alice to be back. Elisabeth paused, perplexed at what was going on. Not a moment later, the mixed-race man's eyes went wide as he realized what was happening. He opened his mouth as wide as it would go, and his ugly scars shifted about as he cackled at the top of his lungs. His laughter echoed about like the cries of some avian portent of doom. "Oh, I see, I see, I see! You would go that far... You would take and grant even that?! Oh, you adorable girl! It's to be death, then, death, death, death! An impartial massacre that casts aside every ideal we held true!" His voice rang with considerable amusement as he kept on laughing the laugh of a man whose fraying sanity had finally snapped. As the chaos swelled, Elisabeth thought back. She thought about the awe-inspiring presence she'd felt that day. And at the same time, she heard Alice's words repeat in the depths of her memories. "I didn't move, you know. But despair did." Her voice had rung with ridicule, as though mocking those who listened for expecting anything more of the world. Off in the distance, they could hear a roar they'd heard once before. Countless voices screamed, yet they were all one and the same. Die. Die. Die. The time has come. I have found you with my eyes. The heavens and earth shall be moved, and thou shalt come to judge the world by fire. This day, day of wrath calamity and misery day of great and exceeding bitterness. This day our master is resurrected. Randgrof and Lute both moved to protect Elisabeth from the debris, but she shook them off and rushed outside. It was there that she witnessed the series of changes for herself. A rain of black blood fell, and the toxic droplets melted the sand where they landed. Scales blurred as they healed, like the crystal once had when a pair of arms had extended from it. Off in the distance, the grand titanâ€”the one who had died, been forced to move again, then died once moreâ€”got up. It was thrice now that the Sand Queen had acted. However, something about this time was different. Her eyes swiveled, staring off restlessly in every direction. They were the eyes of one who had lost their mind. A corpse should have had no mind to lose, and that was enough for Elisabeth to discern what had changed. That's not the Sand Queen in there! Upon further reflection, it was odd how half-cocked a job Alice had done of destroying the Sand Queen. The Sand Queen was a fantastic weapon, but her mana had inherited her maternal nature toward the demi-humans. That made her a threat to Alice. However, she was still valuable as a tool of mass destruction. Simply killing her would be a waste, and that left two options: destroy her completely...or change her. What had Alice done, then? The diabolical answer to that question roused itself within Elisabeth's mind. If you wanted to modify a windup doll, all you had to do was bore a little hole, swap out the part you wanted, and fill the hole back up. And that was the exact same thing you did to a golem to implant a soul in it. The setup they used to make the Sand Queen's corpse move in the first place was similar to the way you would configure a stone golem. It stood to reason that Alice would be able to put a soul inside the Queen's body, and the mixed-race folk she had been working with would have had all the appropriate tools needed to put that idea into practice. On top of all that, Alice's "whimsical" magic had a troublingly strong affinity for "playing with dolls." It was a challenging feat, one that any mage from their world would've been hard-pressed to achieve, but Alice had done just that. By inserting a new soul into the Sand Queen's body, she had overwritten the nature of its mana. The rest was simply a matter of time. As soon as the soul became acclimated, the body would begin moving once more. It was unclear when the Sand Queen would break down, but until that moment, its rampage would continue unopposed. That, then, posed a new question. Who had Alice used? Their ego would have been an impediment, so Alice would have made sure to destroy it first, but even so, she'd have wanted to pick someone clever enough to act of their own volition. Someone capable of becoming an enemy of the world. Elisabeth stood amid the destroyed houses with her mouth agape. It was Lute, who had now caught up with her, who bellowed at the figure in the distance. Perhaps it was his bestial sharpness that had let him realize who it was. *** The man who had believed so firmly that he was just had been cruelly given up as a sacrifice. Now it was he who served as the Sand Queen's new broken mind. 3 Marching to Their Deaths Aguina Elephabred held heroes in disdain. He had loved to read when he was a boy, and that was how he had learned of the concept. In the tales he read, they always showed up at just the right moment. The vast majority of people who read the same books he did would have regarded them with admiration. But young Aguina knew. Heroes didn't exist. Nobody was going to swoop in at the last second to save them. The more he researched, the more he realized just how bleak the future of his people truly was. The demi-humans had spent their long history excluding the mixed-race folk and building a rigid caste system. At the beginning, there hadn't been any larger purpose to it. It was simply the result of the purebloods' obsession with aristocracy. Now, though, deviating from that system would spell disaster for them, and even so much as loosening it would lead to immediate repercussions. The pureblood caste would collapse, and the line that marked what it meant to be demi-human would grow blurrier and blurrier. Why, their country's very leadership might get supplanted by those whose blood had been sullied by that of other races. After all, their birth rate was declining. They might have been able to weather the losses they suffered from the demons, but the fact that humanity was multiplying like rabbits weighed heavy on them. They could hold fast to their pride, or they could perish. Those were the only choices the demi-humans had. This realization was what drove Aguina to his blood purity fanaticism. That was why he hated the concept of heroes. Whenever he heard a fairy tale, it filled his heart with scorn. He regarded them as ludicrous from the bottom of his heart. Such a person couldn't possibly exist. If there existed someone who had amended the injustices of the world, they would have seen his people's plight and helped them bridge that population gap. Ironically, the very fact that Aguina existed as a blood purist served to discredit the possibility that heroes existed. In a sense, he played the role of a villain, as his very life was the personification of how nonexistent and meaningless heroes were in the world. There were no noble crusaders or legendary champions. Or at least, there weren't supposed to be. But when the end of days came, Aguina saw a hero with his own two eyes. Sure enough, that boy pining for the peerless sinner that was the Torture Princess brought about a miracle. And Aguina witnessed a noble death, too. It was a ludicrous way to go, but the man's pure wish for a star of his own and the way his faith in God remained unshaken to the end were beautiful in their own right. Aguina Elephabred held heroes in disdain. Fools, though? Fools, he had a soft spot for. "And that, if nothing else, was why I wished I could be one." "That was all there was to it, I must confess." The Sand Queen's mind had been overwritten so that she would behave a certain way. Now there was a pitiful man inside her. Aguina had tried to protect the purebloods in the hidden settlement. Now, though, his soul had been twisted and placed inside the Sand Queen. For starters, his ego had probably been shattered, but even if it hadn't, contents placed in ill-fitting vessels had a habit of breaking. And if that vessel was the body of someone who exceeded mortal comprehension, then all the more so. By now, Aguina Elephabred was broken beyond repair. It was perhaps only a matter of time before the surviving demi-humans and Torture Princess alike were all burned to a crisp. Upon realizing that, Elisabeth dashed through the settlement. She raced between burning chunks of debris like a gust of wind and barreled out of the skull gate. Then she began setting up to launch a fierce point-blank attack on the Sand