Midnight Star fell asleep.
Once again, she dreamed of strange, fantastical scenes.
Ever since meeting Belobog, she had experienced a dream so vivid it felt real every night.
When she woke each morning, the grief, hatred, helplessness, screams, darkness, and cold she had felt would gradually fade from memory.
In the end, only a faint melancholy and an inexplicable sadness remained.
Did any of this really matter?
As her body neared its limits, she felt exhaustion set in. She had fought for two days without rest, simply to train her newfound power.
She fell endlessly through a dark abyss. Countless shattered emotions withered alongside the flowers of life.
But within that cold, silent nightmare, a ray of light pried open a crack and poured down from an immeasurable height.
It was warm, as though she were drifting with the currents of a golden sea.
She looked up and saw a solemn, flawless six-winged figure standing amid the boundless radiance of the heavens. Though the abyss's maw swallowed everything with insatiable hunger, it alone could not taint the light the figure shed.
Layer upon layer of voices sounded in her ears. Cries of resentment and despair echoed through the abyss, rising in waves with the dark tide.
Then that sacred, flawless, towering figure, formed from all the light of countless ages, glanced down at her and made a proclamation in an eternity where all things stood still.
She saw it.
She heard it.
"If you're tired, go to sleep. Destiny doesn't even pay Valkyries a salary. Why are you risking your life?"
Midnight Star opened her eyes to find the [Archbishop] looking at her. She was back in the training space they had created.
"Archbishop..."
"No need to be so formal. You can call me Captain, too."
Su Lin had wanted