The Northern Shield was freezing, but the forest was burning.
Clarissa moved through the ancient, snow-dusted pines like a localized supernova. Her jet-black hair, laced with striking, natural golden streaks, whipped through the freezing air as she manipulated the heavy iron chains tethered to her wrists. She was a master of the original Sun Breathing—a five-foot-ten phantom wrapped in a fiery twilight haori, dancing in the lethal, snapping trajectory of her own weapons.
In her hands, a pure, unblemished crimson katana hummed with blistering heat. She was fighting Upper Moon 1, the apex predator of the continent, and she was winning. Clarissa had forged her body in volcanic heat and broken her muscles down under freezing waterfalls until they were like steel wire. Her defense was watertight. Her strikes were blinding. She was the Conqueror of the Sun.
But then, the demon’s multi-pupiled eyes snapped away from her blade and peered into the dark treeline.
Clarissa’s amber eyes widened in sheer terror. Hidden in the freezing brush, completely out of his depth, was a boy. Her younger brother, B. He had followed her.
The demon lunged, bypassing Clarissa entirely, aiming a lethal, reality-tearing strike straight for the boy in the trees.
Clarissa didn’t hesitate. She abandoned her flawless Rebound Momentum defense. Pushing her lungs past the absolute limit of human endurance, she burned her own life force to break the sound barrier. She threw herself into the path of the demon’s strike, taking the catastrophic impact directly into her body to shield her brother. Sputtering blood, she used the violent momentum of the hit to twist her body, bringing the blazing crimson katana around in a flawless, super-oxygenated arc.
The head of Upper Moon 1 separated from its shoulders, turning to ash before it even hit the snow.
She had achieved the impossible. But the victory lasted only a fraction of a second.
The air pressure suddenly dropped to absolute zero. The roaring flames of the forest instantly snuffed out, replaced by a suffocating, industrialized darkness. Stepping from the shadows of the falling ash was a god. Alistair Vane, the Arch-Hegemon of the Shadow Regime.
It wasn't a fight. It was an execution.
Before Clarissa could even raise her blade, Vane moved. There was a sickening CRACK. Clarissa’s left arm was cleanly severed from the elbow down. A second later, his boot connected with her leg, shattering the bone into jagged shrapnel.
She collapsed into the snow, bleeding out, her jaw fractured and her vision swimming. But as the Demon King stepped forward to finish her, Clarissa looked past him to where her brother was hiding.
She didn't swing her sword at the god. Instead, she slammed her bleeding, severed stump directly into the bedrock of the earth. She forced every remaining drop of aetherial energy in her soul into the stone, unleashing a blinding, superheated solar flare. The explosion of pure light caught Vane point-blank, carving a permanent, searing scar across the King’s chest and blinding him in a wash of white-hot plasma.
"Run!" Hours later, the moon sat high and indifferent over the hidden Wisteria Grove. B waited by the ancient stone archway, his hands trembling.
The rustle of the brush made him look up. Clarissa dragged herself into the clearing. She was a ruin of the warrior she had been. Her left arm was gone. Her leg dragged uselessly behind her. Her jaw was bruised and fractured.
But as she looked up and saw B, safe in the glow of the purple wisteria, her amber eyes softened. Despite the agonizing pain, despite the death creeping into her veins, she forced her bloody lips upward, offering him her signature, defiant smile.
"They don't get to break us," she rasped, her voice bubbling with blood.
She collapsed into his arms. With trembling, bloody fingers, she pressed her crimson katana into B's hands. On top of the hilt, she dropped a heavy silver ring—a keepsake from Elias, the rogue Slayer she had loved and lost.
"I'm sorry I fell short, B," she whispered, her radiant eyes finally beginning to dim. "But I believe in you." She weakly raised a bloodstained finger, pointing through the grove, toward the massive, hidden stone doors of the ancient Citadel built into the mountain.
Clarissa exhaled a final, shuddering breath, and the Conqueror of the Sun went still.
B knelt in the snow, clutching the crimson blade and the silver ring. He had lost a sister, but the shadows had just created their ultimate executioner. The Anchor was born.