Book 10 Chapter 7
Part 1
By the way, it turned out Maxwell hadn’t intentionally cut the connection; my phone had simply broken. Anastasia opened it up with a weird tool and messed with the innards to get it up and running again.
“When these malfunction or get a loose connection, it’s usually in here. Pear phones have places where their hardware is unnecessarily fragile like the neck of an hourglass. Why would they do that? Because no one’s ever buying a new one if they last forever.”
As a hacker, Anastasia could not shut up about things like that. Once she got going, she wasn’t stopping for a while.
And Maxwell seemed to be breaking out in hives from word one.
“Y-you gave a hacker direct access to the circuit board, you imbecile? Let’s hope she didn’t make a hardware attack even nastier than hiding a virus in BIOS memory.”
Given the situation, I doubted even Anastasia could have swapped out a chip smaller than her little finger’s nail. Being cautious around hackers made sense, but creating an impression they could do anything actually helped them deceive people.
Anyway.
“For now, let’s leave this place,” said my stepmom.
There were a lot of people in Gare Montparnasse, so it was a bad place to wait for a JB attack. Both because we would be putting so many innocent people in danger and because we didn’t know what JB’s soldiers looked like. They would pretty obviously try to blend in with the crowd to get close.
Anastasia held her pet robot to her small chest.
“You were undercover in their organization for a short while, right? Did you learn anything about their methods?”
“Yes, but I’m sure they are taking that into account when they come up with their strategy here. Partial information could create unwarranted assumptions that lead us to reject perfectly viable options. Magicians do that to smug amateurs all the time.”
“You mean they’ll be using a trick not even their own group is generally aware of?”
“JB is a highly unbalanced organization that demands each cast member maintains absolute secrecy. It wouldn’t surprise me to find they have a specialized investigation agency that monitors their own people’s actions and either restrains or assassinates them if necessary.”
The idea of JB having its own police force sounded like a bad joke. Especially when those police would strictly arrest people over extralegal rules.
Anastasia pouted her lips.
“So what did Absolute Noah do about those things?”
“We told people it was in their best interests to keep the secrets of the privileged class. Because otherwise the ark would be flooded with other people and we would have a hard time even departing.”
So they used people’s desire to survive. Instead of cracking down on leakers the way JB did, they convinced the people to keep their mouths shut on their own. Or maybe the idea was all the other rich people who wanted to survive would be driven to action by their own fear and gang up on the would-be leaker to keep them silent.
The desire to keep a clean house didn’t necessarily come from a desire for cleanliness.
The wealthy who held the world’s secrets would appear on TV and claim they were expressing the people’s anger, but they never did disappear from the TV screens when a major crime or disaster occurred and everyone else was panicking. They might have a grim look on their face, but they knew they had thick armor protecting them. It was only during the soccer world cup that they suddenly disappeared.
“So where exactly should we go, mom?”
“The enemy should land in an open space, but that obvious aerial route will be a bluff. Our real enemy will crawl along the ground and go for our throats while we’re gawking up at the sky.” Amatsu Yurina raised a finger. “In order to draw out JB, we need to take up a position ordinary people would never think of going to. You can’t look back and see if someone is tailing you in a cluttered city, but that changes in the center of the vast south pole. Because there’s no one else around.”
“So where are we going?”
“The Louvre.”
The location names in Paris meant nothing to me, but this one even I recognized.
“The Louvre? As in the Louvre? A-are you kidding!?”
It was blonde Anastasia who provided a more sensible argument.
“But even from across the Seine, we could tell looters and the police were having a shootout there! The wise Parisians aren’t going anywhere near there tonight and we’re foreigners here. Showing up there when everyone is on edge is like asking to be killed!!”
My stepmom had a simple answer.
“Yes, which is why we can be sure there won’t be any ordinary people there.”
Part 2
It was 2 AM.
Dawn was still a long way off.
But once light shined on Paris again, would we be able to accept the reality we were seeing? It was scary how fast you could get used to things. Darkness was such a strong symbol of danger, yet here I was wishing it wouldn’t go away. Things had gotten so bad, but I was still afraid of change. Yet this day had to be the most unusual one Paris had ever had.
“It’s gotten quiet,” said Anastasia, using the emergency stairs to emerge from Gare Montparnasse and take a look outside. “I thought everyone would be too on edge to get to sleep.”
“It’s the opposite. The unusual events of the day wore them out, so the instant they get some water and sugar in them, they get sleepy,” bluntly stated Amatsu Yurina.
The city was still a royal pain to walk through what with all the collapsed buildings and rubble blocking the streets. Without a single functioning streetlight, it would be easy to overlook a big crack in the ground that might as well have been a cliff.
The traffic lights were slanted diagonally too.
You never knew when one of those heavy devices would fall on your head. Anything could happen today.
I needed to shine my phone at our feet and overhead at all times. The battery wasn’t a perpetual motion machine and it had failed due to a bad connection earlier. I could only pray it didn’t suddenly die and leave me stranded. We had my stepmom and Anastasia’s phones too now and it seemed unlikely all three would break at the same time.
I didn’t see any looters or drunks out in the streets. Now might not be the time for that kind of thing, but people could get greedy when they had time to relax some.
We were supposed to be traveling north, but I didn’t have a good sense of the directions. It was like seeing the arrow on your phone’s map. The map and the real scenery were so different the supposedly accurate map felt unreliable.
“That’s it there.”
My stepmom held a hand out horizontally to stop us from walking further.
The bridge was still intact, even if just barely. A palatial building stood across the river that had absorbed the dark color of the night.
That was the Louvre.
We were across the river from it, but I still crouched down. It was hard to accurately grasp the threat of guns, which meant I still carried a fear that might have been entirely baseless. Maybe it was like having lightning strike nearby while you were left abandoned in the middle of the schoolyard.
“I don’t hear any gunfire.”
“But they are there. I can see the lights.”
Anastasia was right.
A sticky darkness had settled in across Paris, but there were some lights shining on the opposite bank. They didn’t seem like building lights. Were they police car headlights or had they brought small generators with them? I had seen gasoline generators and giant batteries hooked up to those outdoor construction lights at that Hôtel place.
That showed just how important this place was.
Who knows what they would suspect us of if they noticed us sneaking in.
Our first task was crossing the bridge.
I was pretty sure the bridge I had seen before had collapsed, so the long Louvre must have had more than one bridge alongside it. This was one that had survived the magma and steam explosions.
“I can’t see the water level.”
Anastasia frowned while leaning over the edge of the bank. That put her small butt in a rather dangerous position.
The bridge was made of stone and looked pretty old. It was crumbling in places due to all the disasters, so we might end up surfing on antique rubble if the river flooded again. It had a lot of large cracks. The meteor shower that had caused all this was in a lull, but looking up in the dark night sky didn’t tell me anything about that. Those were being sent down artificially, so it was impossible to predict when they would arrive like you were reading a weather forecast.
JB wanted to eliminate the traitor no matter what it took. They wanted to get rid of her here and now, before she could go into hiding, so it would be weird if they didn’t make use of every card in their deck. But we couldn’t complain when we wouldn’t have survived this long without my stepmom’s help.
Besides, she couldn’t just escape Paris and arrive in the deserted wilderness to keep JB from harming those around her.
If JB knew what she cared about, they could start taking hostages. They wanted to restrict her actions, so she had to act coldly toward Paris no matter how she felt on the inside.
“Come with me,” she said.
This was always how it seemed to work. Of course, I would only fall into a crack in the road, get crushed by rubble, or be killed in some other ordinary way devoid of conspiracy theories if I tried walking through the Paris night with no assistance.
“I will go in first. If I stop and count to ten with nothing happening, then you two follow after me. Then we repeat that pattern.”
Amatsu Yurina crouched low and walked slowly toward the end of the stone bridge. Once her feet left the solid ground and moved out above the dark river, things stopped feeling weird.
She gestured to us and we followed after her.
We would occasionally move alongside a collapsed streetlight or abandoned car and observe our surroundings, but we mostly just mimicked what she did.
She moved up alongside a motorboat that had somehow ended up on the bridge.
“No traps and no snipers. Is JB’s cast not in position yet, or are they luring us in to surround us?”
I got the feeling it was best not to ask what she would have done if there had been either of those things. I recalled what she had said before: That isn’t a problem for me. Because I can dodge.
She led the way through the broken city.
We arrived at the other bank.
“Ugh,” I groaned when I noticed it was vaguely brighter here. That was another weight on my heart. We had entered the territory of the ignorant police. It felt like we were now in the world of guns.
Anastasia was worried about something else.
“The Louvre is said to have the world’s strongest security, but how much of that is still active? I doubt they ignore people entirely until they actually set foot on the Louvre’s grounds.”
As a hacker, she was focused on the hacker stuff. But we had gotten this close without any police rushing us.
Amatsu Yurina shrugged.
“People often say you can rest easy if your art is in the Louvre, but has anyone actually sneaked in and monitored the security with a stopwatch in hand?”
“Wait…you’re kidding right?”
“Getting word out that you have the best security there out there is one form of security. The Louvre’s actual defenses are what you can see right here.”
She made it sound so simple, but Anastasia and I were dumbfounded.
But while leading Absolute Noah, she had seen so many VIPs hoping to be saved, so she may have heard a lot of behind-the-scenes information.
It was true we had gotten into the French Ministry of Defense’s basement without permission. Even accounting for the emergency, the security had seemed awfully lax.
“You would be surprised how often people try to avoid unnecessary conflicts by creating imaginary walls that make them look bigger than they are. It’s a standard tactic in the adult world. Like calling yourself the world’s strongest military or the world’s most secure prison.”
But that veil had been blown up and stripped away by the meteor shower. The meteor shower had to have caught France by surprise, but time wasn’t going to stop and wait for them to catch up.
“Now, we need to get in position. Our goal is to strike back against JB. And to extract what information we can.”
The Louvre had looked like a beautiful palace from across the river, but the damage was much more conspicuous up close. With those cracks in the wall, I would have wanted to stay far away under any other circumstances. All the windows I could see were broken and something like a collapsed roof sat in the rubble. But the building itself still towered above us and wasn’t engulfed in flames or smoke. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the fact that I found myself gawking at it even now was a testament to how impressive a structure it was.
We were in bad shape.
I was feeling a lot less guilty when I entered somewhere without permission.
The Louvre was shaped like three sides of a square, but if we approached the plaza on the missing side, we would end up clashing with the police. We instead followed the river to view the side of the building.
As a Western-style palace, it had a lot of windows, but all the glass had broken.
Normally, I doubted even a burglar would consider sneaking in through there.
I held out my phone to confirm the security camera wasn’t producing any mechanical heat or noise. I knew it was dead, but I was still nervous moving below it.
“What exactly are we going to do?” I asked.
“Make JB panic. They won’t take the bait if it’s too obvious we’re waiting for them, so we need to give them a reason to attack. Remember, I am Amatsu Yurina, the woman who won over VIPs from around the world. If they think my plan is to have the police protect me and help me escape Paris through some secret route, JB can’t continue any secret preparations for a long term battle. They will have to rush from their safe sniper spot and try to stop me with a small knife or whatever else they have on hand.”
That made sense.
In fact, wasn’t that basically the same as when we were pursuing Pierre Smith, aka Vizza Valdia?
Amatsu Yurina was unshakable. If I left this in her hands, I got the feeling she would solve everything in no time.
But hold on.
“M-mom? Does that mean what I think it means?”
“Most likely, it does.” That Demon Lord winked. “The more we contact the French police, the more JB will panic. So the solution is simple: Hello there!!”
“Bff!?” spat Anastasia in the darkness. The Paris police were on edge and an encounter with them could easily mean getting shot by mistake. That was the entire reason we were sneaking in through a blind spot, but my stepmom had obliterated that idea all at once.
“Wait, you can’t be serious!”
“C’mon, let’s go, Satori. No waiting around.”
“No! How can you shout ‘hello there’ with a big smile after all this!? You look young enough, but you’re still an old woman at heart- gweh!!”
When I touched on the truth, she grabbed me by the collar with a single hand and spoke with a smile.
“What did you just say about your own mother?”
“Agh, ugh!! Okay, okay. My new mom is young and beautiful and I can brag about her to all the neighborhood kids!! But really though, getting angry when people mention your age? What are you, an outdated cliché- gwah!?”
“You still haven’t learned your lesson?”
The 11-year-old (who was independent enough to travel overseas on her own) gave us an exasperated look as we got going.
But a moment later, an explosion erupted from the strictly-guarded plaza.
Eh?
What just happened?
“Get down!!” shouted my stepmom, lying on top of us two.
It kept going. I heard a second and third explosion as the nearby trees suddenly burst, their hard bark stripped from them.
In fact…
Did something just pierce through the Louvre? I didn’t actually see anything, but was that some kind of fragment tearing through the entire palatial museum!?
“What do we do!? Retreat!?” asked Anastasia from the wet ground next to me.
“And what do we do for the police?”
“Satori.”
“We got them involved and we knew how dangerous JB is. Something bad must be happening over there!!”
I crawled out from under my stepmom. The police had to be fighting back to protect the world-famous artwork and antiques, even if they might suspect all of the people they were meant to protect were rioting.
Yet I couldn’t hear anything.
There was no gunfire. Maybe there was some, but the much louder explosions drowned it all out.
We ran alongside the museum which was oblong like a school building. The explosions would not stop. In fact, what was even happening? Even the ground was shaking. In the other direction, the dark river water was stirring.
And…
“It stopped.”
We were too late.
Silence fell before we arrived at the corner of the building. The explosions were dangerous and unnatural, but the return of silence was disconcerting.
It wasn’t just the lack of explosions.
What about the police? I didn’t hear any gunfire, screams, or shouts. Any evidence of human life was rapidly fading away. Just like the heat fading from a corpse.
“It’s stopped. What do we do now, Truth?”
“…”
What was happening?
Was anyone still alive?
I was afraid to check, but I would regret it the rest of my life if I irresponsibly left now. I realized I was at the point of choosing the lesser of two evils, the worst kind of decision. We thought we finally had a chance to turn the tables on JB, but it looked more like we were approaching our own downfall.
I pressed against the wall.
I took my time, squeezing my eyes shut and then hesitantly checking around the corner.
I saw something completely absurd.
I so regretted looking.
It was…on another level entirely. I could tell the world had been changed. My emotions shot straight past fear and I actually felt anger at how absurd this was. Were the meteor showers and nukes not enough for JB?
“…”
Were those the Paris police littering the ground of the half-destroyed stone plaza? Actually, were they police? They looked far more militarized than what I was used to in Japan. I didn’t know who decided what equipment they used, but those people in black bulletproof jackets and armed with shotguns or carbines were entirely motionless. Their precious equipment hadn’t done a thing to help them.
Something had rejected the scientific assumptions that guns and explosives held the title of strongest.
But what was that something?
I heard several pieces of metal crunching together.
The first thing I saw was a coffin.
A mechanical dinosaur with a coffin for a mouth was trampling on a flipped-over police car. The enormous bipedal silhouette stood more than 10m tall and its folded-up arms were held out in front of its chest, giving it a somewhat humorous appearance.
It didn’t look like a weapon designed with efficiency or functional beauty in mind.
That was apparent in its appearance and its movements.
It ground its teeth and swung its tail.
When the thick coffin lid opened, I saw fangs lined up along the edge of the coffin. They were in fact gas-powered metal spikes made of silver or something. A single bite would be able to tear through an armored vehicle like it was made of aluminum foil. It was demonstrating that fact right now. Yet, I got the impression it hadn’t been designed that way for this purpose.
Its thick tail swished side to side and its small arms opened and closed its fingers.
It had so much waste as a weapon.
This was more than just functional beauty. I sensed some kind of mythical or ceremonial logic behind it. It was clearly a machine, but it gave off a strange presence – no, it gave off a divinity that intimidated all who saw it.
But.
How was this possible?
I thought there weren’t going to be machines stomping around tonight?
“Wait a second.”
I had seen something like this before.
Yes, there was that giant artificial croc controlled by Vizza Valdia! So maybe JB had this kind of tech!! But how was this fair? We were fighting for our lives so we could escape Paris as it fell apart from the meteor showers. Wasn’t that our goal here!? It felt like reaching the end of a full marathon, being told you had to do long-distance swimming next, and being shoved from a cliff. Sure, real life disasters and problems weren’t individually packaged events, but come the hell on!!
“I thought that was weird,” said Amatsu Yurina like she was belatedly lamenting her own foolishness. “That wasn’t Water God Sebek. It wasn’t the god who gave food offerings to the physical crocodiles living in the river and predicted the future based on the crocodiles’ actions; it was the priests working in the temple. And Vizza Valdia never mentioned Sebek himself!”
Then.
Then what was that croc we saw? And what did it have to do with this coffin opening its maw wide in front of us.
“It was Crocodilopolis. That’s what the Greeks called the desert city where the crocodile god was worshiped. Vizza Valdia folded up the entire temple, altered its shape, and made it his tool. In the same way, this coffin is Eljudnir.”
The bipedal coffin was…Eljudnir?
Someone stood near its feet. She looked tiny compared to the dinosaur. She was the only thing allowed to remain standing in that shocking scene. She looked like a girl, but I couldn’t make out the details thanks to the bright headlights of an abandoned police car shining in from behind her. That gave her an oddly divine appearance that prevented me from seeing her as anything ordinary.
What could we do to get her to spare us?
No.
That was the wrong way to think about it.
The girl’s silhouette carved out of the headlights turned her head this way and spoke clearly.
“Amatsu Yurina.”
“…”
My stepmom remained calm. It was Anastasia and I who gulped.
JB.
This was the elite they dispatched to keep their secrecy and safety and to kill the traitor.
“Do not assume you remain safe because you are an ancient Demon Lord. Everything you have bult up over the ages is powerless against me. Your history ends tonight. The Master of Eljudnir shall entomb Demon Lord Lilith.”
Amatsu Yurina grimaced and groaned.
I had never seen that look on her face.
“Hel.”
“What about hell?”
“Hel is figure from Norse mythology. She is the ruler of Niflheim, a world of snow and ice containing the souls of those who died dishonorable deaths according to a warrior’s culture. Eljudnir is the hall where Hel lives. Just like Vizza Valdia’s temple, the hall has been folded up, remade, and allowed to walk free. The hall of the dead which swallowed up Baldr, immortal god of light, and refused to let him go has been brought to the physical world.”
So she was basically an expert in this, huh?
I had spoken with a malicious Valkyrie. I knew JB and Hecate were connected. But did it really go this far!? How far did JB have to go before they were satisfied!?
This was a god.
We weren’t just talking about a Zombie or a Vampire here. Nor was it a simple urban legend or world-famous myth. Even a disaster or an Archenemy would be easily swallowed up by this.
This god would not allow anyone to escape death. It didn’t get much simpler than that. Since humans couldn’t define her, we had thrown her in the Archenemy category, but we couldn’t actually define what this monster was.
“Open your coffin, Eljudnir. Bring eternal slumber to those meant to die. Invite in our guests with the utmost love and respect,” said the girl silhouette.
The cold coffin entrance opened.
“This is the master’s hall towering high within a white world of stagnation. Sinners’ souls, no matter how sinful your deeds, I invite any powerful guest with all due courtesy. Consider yourself honored to receive an invitation from Queen Hel, defiled guests.”
With a dull rumbling, the dinosaur coffin shifted the position of its feet. Moving them from the crushed police car to the cracked plaza was enough to make the ground shake. All the previous disasters were overpowered and overwritten.
The predator had its eyes on us.
It was eat or be eaten.
That fear was of a completely different sort from all the past disasters and battles!!
“Satori,” said my stepmom.
I thought she might have a plan. She was a Demon Lord spoken of in mythology, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and the center of Absolute Noah. I thought she had some suggestion I never would have considered and it would make short work of this crisis.
But I thought wrong.
“Anastasia-chan is your top priority. Take her and run away. Hurry!!”
Part 3
A loud boom slammed into my eardrums and the ground shook like it was thrusting up from below.
I honestly didn’t remember what had happened, but the next thing I knew, I was on the floor indoors and desperately holding Anastasia’s wet form in both arms. What floor were we even on? I wasn’t even sure this was the Louvre.
I felt something wet on my palm.
I must have cut it on glass or something, but I didn’t remember doing it. Had I injured myself climbing in through the window? I made sure the blood was coming from me and Anastasia’s cold skin was uninjured.
“Ah, ah…”
She was shivering in my arms. She was curled up with her little thumb in her mouth. Was that a sign of regression? It felt like she was escaping inwards to block out everything around her.
What had happened?
The shocks that seemed to strike at my entire body hadn’t stopped. The loud noises I heard suggested a battle was still underway. That meant the coffin named Eljudnir was viewing its enemy.
But what about my stepmom?
Where had she gone? Could she be outside grappling with that giant thing?
Maxwell…wasn’t an option.
I didn’t dare say a word or activate my phone’s backlight. Damn, where were those wireless earphones I used when fighting the lightning? Had I dropped them somewhere!?
“Damn.”
Still holding Anastasia, I wrapped a handkerchief around my palm to try and stop the bleeding. I was really just mimicking what I had seen. While my hometown of Kukyou City was known as a disaster prevention city, I hadn’t absorbed enough of that kind of survival knowledge to be practical. Just like with cooking and conversational English skills, the knowledge you needed grew so fleeting when you actually tried to use it.
Hurting my hand was especially bad.
I crawled toward the window, trying to be as silent as I could. I didn’t try to pull Anastasia off of me while she clung to me like a tantruming child. Instead, I stretched my head up while supporting both our weights. I could see out of the broken window. A few police cars’ headlights and the outdoor lighting kept things relatively bright out there.
Did the surviving lights mean this really was the Louvre?
I felt like I was nervously spying on the outside world with a periscope.
But in this scenario, our submarine was badly damaged and the surface was inundated with helicopters and warships loaded with torpedoes and depth charges.
I needed information.
This wasn’t an actual strategy or tactic and we had no chance of winning. I just wanted information to free me from the tension I was feeling. I was driven by a hunger that didn’t even think three seconds into the future, so I was no better than a baby crying for their bottle.
And I should have known better.
I had made this same mistake before.
Of course I was going to regret having looked.
“Oh, hell.”
It looked like we were on the Louvre’s third floor. This window gave us a look down on the plaza surrounded by the building’s three sides of a square. A few pieces of artwork had collapsed from the meteor shower impacts and several police cars were parked with their blue lights and headlights on but with no one to operate them. I also saw something like a bus covered in metal and chain link as well as an 8-wheeled armored vehicle. Did French police normally use those, or did they signify special circumstances? I had no way of knowing.
It looked like it had all been shredded.
Well, that or trampled underfoot, kicked through the air, or crushed between massive jaws and thrown aside.
That coffin had done it all.
That thing shaped like a bipedal carnivorous dinosaur.
The transformed hell hall of Eljudnir was too powerful. You could even call it a disaster in and of itself. And it was not intentionally attacking deserted vehicles.
That was only a side effect.
It was only slamming its head into those obstacles because it had failed to devour its fleeing prey.
“Mom.”
“She doesn’t stand a chance,” said Anastasia, sounding somehow unemotional.
Even that nonhuman fairy – that Silky who existed outside the bounds of science – was seated weakly on the floor.
“Being an Archenemy or a Demon Lord won’t accomplish anything here. That thing is a tool used to devour the complainers and forcibly erase them from this world. You could say it declares someone’s very soul persona non grata, so we can’t do anything about it. Being unaging isn’t enough to stop its fangs. Being immortal isn’t enough to avoid being erased when that coffin lid closes around you.”
“So what exactly is it? How is it different from a simple tank?”
“Truth, your knowledge is getting in your way, but I bet your senses have already accepted it. That coffin is a great hole. It is a wormhole directly linked to the realm of the dead. It doesn’t matter how much you train up your own endurance and resistance. Your efforts will not be rewarded and your talents will not bear fruit. Anyone who is thrown in there is killed exactly the same. That coffin is a locked room – a gate – created for that sole purpose.”
Once she mentioned it, I realized I didn’t sense that coffin as a thick wall. I felt fear all the same, but it was more like I was looking over the edge of a sheer cliff. That was why I was so disinclined to face it. With a wall, I could maybe break through if I tackled it hard enough, but there was no point in tackling a cliff. The faster you ran toward it, the faster you would fall off and lose your life for no reason.
It was a cliff that could walk around and shove people off of itself.
It was a famous suicide spot that had gained mobility.
…This could hardly be worse.
This wasn’t about winning or losing. I couldn’t even envision how something like that could be beaten.
Even my stepmom was focused on running away.
She would put a police car, an armored truck, or some other obstacle between them, assuming it would be destroyed, but there were only so many obstacles available to her.
For one, there was no real reason for her to fight in the open plaza. She would have had an advantage in a smaller area where Eljudnir was too big to move around freely.
She had no reason to make that choice, so it hadn’t been a choice on her part.
Even Amatsu Yurina was having trouble finding a chance to retreat, so she was forced to continue fighting without carelessly turning her back.
“She isn’t going to last much longer.”
She was in this predicament because she had let us escape.
I knew that.
But…
“Anastasia, I get that that thing isn’t your average enemy. I get that we can’t measure its strength through how hard or heavy it is.”
“Truth?”
“But I can’t leave her out there like that. And this is the Louvre, packed full of art and antiques from arou
