At last... she could rest.
The Charlotte Family's sixteenth daughter lay collapsed in a pool of blood.
The instant the puppets stopped, the resolve keeping her going abruptly crumbled, and her whole body sank limply into the sticky red.
Below the castle, two figures were surrounded so tightly by crimson puppets that not a gap remained.
They had no way of knowing what had happened above and could only turn their eyes toward their elder brother standing beside the ruined wall.
The taut string inside Katakuri's chest finally loosened a little.
A few steps away, a man with a bloodstained abdomen sat slumped on the ground, his two longswords nowhere to be seen.
He pressed his wound, warm liquid seeping continually between his fingers-he was Bram Stoker, the Door-Door Fruit user.
"Heh... looks like I've scraped through alive."
Stoke tugged at the corners of his mouth, his smile tinged with a gritty bitterness.
He felt no pity for himself.
As the former captain of the Impaler's guard and his current butler, he had long regarded life and death as no more than a thin sheet of paper.
Another figure flickered in his eyes.
"Elizabeth..."
Alucard murmured the name.
Emotions churned like dark currents across his middle-aged face.
His beloved, only just awakened, now had a blade pressed against her throat.
If he abandoned resistance and fell into the hands of the white-robed man and the second Charlotte son, it would be the same as being delivered into the hands of Golden Lion and Big Mom-the outcome was easy to imagine.
If he kept swinging his swords... never mind whether he could defeat that white-robed assassin, she, so recently resurrected, would certainly never see tomorrow's sunlight.
Beneath his white robe, Rossi's Haki had long since run dry.
If the fight dragged