She spun, her winter-moon eyes wide with shock, then narrowed into dangerous slits as they fixed on Azrael. "Who are you? How did you bypass my wards? Speak, wretched disciple!"
She saw Han Xiao, the unassuming inner disciple, yet her spiritual senses screamed a different truth. The aura radiating from him was a chilling vortex of primordial darkness, cloaked in a fragile veil of borrowed light. Her hand instinctively went to her waist, where a spiritual blade, thin as moonlight, manifested in a flash of silver.
"Your wards are as flimsy as your goddess’s lies," Azrael countered, stepping fully into the faint moonlight. Nightfall's fragment, still sheathed, pulsed against his chest, a hungry, rhythmic beat. His eyes blazed, no longer Han Xiao’s mundane brown, but twin pools of abyssal vi
