My Wives are Beautiful Demons

Chapter 827: Face your own demons, Sapphire.

Sapphire returned to the final floor of the Abyss alone.She brought no guards, did not call Vergil, did not ask Itharine to accompany her, and accepted no presence that could turn this into protection.

The place still carried marks of recent destruction. The ceiling was open in several places, the floor remained cracked, the walls had lost part of their ancient runes, and the air was still impregnated with residues of death, sin, and crushed demonic energy.

This was where she had been imprisoned.

This was where her will had been bent.

This was where Lust had reduced her to something defenseless, hanging like an insignificant piece until Vergil arrived and turned the entire hall into an execution.

Sapphire walked to the center of the chamber and stopped exactly where she remembered falling. Her entire body trembled with fury.

Not a noisy fury, nor some childish outburst of wounded pride. It was something heavier, more humiliating, because it was not directed only at Victoria.

The Sin of Lust was already dead, erased, devoured, and reduced to a subjugated Authority inside Vergil. There was no more revenge to take from her. The problem now was Sapphire.

What trembled in her muscles was the absolute refusal to accept that she had become someone capable of being crushed like that by an enemy so inferior.

She could have screamed.

She could have destroyed the rest of the fortress, reduced the ruins to dust, and tried to convince herself that it would be enough to cleanse the shame.

She did none of that.

She only took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and sat on the floor, assuming the lotus position at the center of the place where she had been defeated.

The cold stone touched her legs, the residual energy of the Abyss tried to react to her presence, and Sapphire ignored everything. If she wanted to recover what she had lost, it would not be through an empty explosion.

It would be by descending to the deepest point within herself.

Her breathing slowed.

The distant sound of the Abyss gradually disappeared.

The cracks, the smell of burned energy, the memory of the chains, and the weight of humiliation began to drift away, not because she rejected them, but because she decided to pass through them.

Sapphire sank into her own mental world with the discipline of a martial artist who had trained enough to know the body was only the first layer of war.

True combat began long before the blow. It began in will, in memory, in instinct, and in the restrictions a person created without realizing it in order to keep living.

It was time to remove all of them.

Not partially.

Not carefully.

Not only the locks placed by enemies, seals, or old wounds.

Sapphire wanted to tear out the restrictions she herself had built over the years, the invisible chains created by comfort, love, fear of loss, and the light life she had allowed herself to experience. She did not hate love.

She did not blame Vergil. She never would. But she needed to know whether she was still capable of being the woman who had existed before all of that without destroying the woman she had become afterward.

The answer required a fight.

And the only worthy opponent was herself.

When Sapphire opened her eyes, the Abyss had disappeared.

She was in another time.

Twelve thousand years in the past.

The Genesis War roared around her.

The sky was a violent mass of fire, smoke, torn holy light, and demonic energy colliding in unstable layers.

Armies clashed on every side.

Angels descended in luminous formations, wings spread, spears raised, war chants crossing the field like hammers.

Fallen angels came from the opposite direction, stained with black energy, some still carrying remnants of light in their eyes, others already completely consumed by rebellion.

Demons advanced between both sides, roaring, destroying, dying, and killing in a war that seemed to have neither beginning nor end.

Sapphire remained still in the middle of it, observing.

She knew this place.

She knew this day.

She knew the smell of burned blood, shattered celestial metal, and dust raised by thousands of falling bodies.

The Genesis War had been one of the first great marks upon her existence.

At that time, she was not yet a woman domesticated by any idea of peace. She did not carry family in her heart, did not think of home, did not adjust her power to avoid frightening those she loved.

She was a living weapon, a queen in formation, a calamity beautiful enough to draw eyes and cruel enough to make those same eyes go dark a few seconds later.

Then she saw herself.

The old version of Sapphire crossed the battlefield as if the entire army around her were only scenery for her passage.

Her red hair was long, intense, loose in the wind like a living flame, moving in violent waves as she spun between enemies. Her face was younger, but not more innocent.

There was arrogance in her eyes, an absurd, almost offensive confidence belonging to someone who knew exactly how dangerous she was and made a point of allowing everyone to realize it before they died.

The armor she wore was magnificent and aggressive.

Golden pieces covered her arms with long, angular plates, reflecting the light of the battlefield in warm and cruel tones.

The shoulders had sharp structures, projected like decorative blades that also seemed ready to wound anyone who came too close.

The breastplate did not hide the shape of her body, but there was no fragility in it either; it was a composition of black metal, gold, and rigid lines, making it clear that beauty and war were not opposites in that version of her.

Her waist was protected by segmented plates, and dark strips fell around her hips, moving with every turn of her body. Everything about her seemed made for combat, but also to be remembered.

In one hand, Sapphire carried a long spear, irregular and cruel in appearance, with a complex blade, almost organic, as if it had been forged from the bones of ancient creatures and infernal metals.

In the other, she wielded a thin sword, precise, too elegant to match the brutality of the spear.

The combination was strange, almost impractical for any ordinary warrior. One weapon demanded range, axis, rotation, and broad control. The other demanded precision, speed, and short-range reading. Together, they should have gotten in the way. In her hands, however, they seemed like parts of the same language.

The current Sapphire watched in silence as her old version advanced against a formation of angels. The spear opened the way first, tearing through shields of light and breaking the defensive line as if the celestial soldiers were made of glass.

The sword came immediately after, fast, exact, cutting only what was necessary to prevent any reaction.

There was no waste.

No hesitation.

The old version of Sapphire spun among her enemies with dangerous joy, smiling sideways whenever someone tried to surround her, as if the attempt were a courtesy offered by very polite opponents.

She was extravagant.

Youthful.

Eccentric.

And absolutely terrifying.

Sapphire felt a strange pang while watching it. It was not envy. Not exactly.

It was admiration for a part of herself that had grown too distant. That woman was everything she liked having been: audacious, violent, beautiful, vain, undisciplined in the eyes of others, yet fiercely loyal to her own style.

She did not ask permission to occupy space. She did not diminish her presence to make anyone comfortable. She did not justify her strength. She simply existed, fought, and left the world to deal with the consequences.

With every movement, the old Sapphire seemed to prove something the current version did not want to admit.

The problem had never been loving Vergil.

The problem had been allowing peace to steal her practice, her hunger for combat, and her particular joy in being dangerous.

The woman before her did not fight only to survive.

She fought because she liked it.

Because there was pleasure in mastering her own body, in testing limits, in making an impossible weapon seem natural. Sapphire had forgotten that for far too long.

Then, not far away, another presence drew her attention.

The old Sepphirothy was on the same battlefield.

For an instant, Sapphire almost thought she was seeing a distorted reflection of herself.

The structural similarity was evident: posture, grandeur, sharp beauty, and that presence of a woman who did not need to raise her voice to be feared.

But the differences made Sepphirothy impossible to confuse with her. Her hair was white, long, and shining like living silver, falling around the chrome armor that covered her body with an elegance far nobler than Sapphire’s aggression.

Where Sapphire looked like a red flame cutting through the field, Sepphirothy looked like a cold star descending to crush the war beneath authority.

Her armor was entirely silver and chrome, formed by refined plates that reflected the chaos around her in surfaces far too clean.

There was not the same wild excess Sapphire carried.

Everything about Sepphirothy seemed calculated, royal, superior.

Her shoulders had high, almost regal lines, and the breastplate was adorned with ancient markings that shone softly every time she moved energy.

Unlike Sapphire, who seemed to invite the battlefield to try to keep up with her, Sepphirothy imposed order over the entire field simply by existing within it.

In her hands was a titanic staff.

It was not a delicate priestess’s staff, nor a ceremonial weapon made only to channel magic.

It was an enormous weapon, heavy, too long to seem practical in ordinary hands, with its ends reinforced by holy and demonic metal mixed into a structure that looked capable of crushing walls.

Sepphirothy wielded it with absurd naturalness, using the colossal weapon’s reach to bring down entire groups of enemies without changing her expression.

When the staff struck the ground, impact waves broke formations. When it spun through the air, wings were shattered, barriers were destroyed, and soldiers were thrown away as if gravity itself had chosen to obey her.

Sapphire watched the two old versions fighting on the same field.

Herself and Sepphirothy.

Red and White.

Fire and Ice.

Extravagance and nobility.

Two women similar enough to confuse the gaze of those who did not know them, but too different in essence to occupy the same place.

The old Sapphire laughed as she advanced, provoked enemies, changed the rhythm of combat only to test her own creativity. The old Sepphirothy did not laugh. She judged. Every strike of hers seemed like a noble and cold sentence, as if the battlefield had been placed before her to be corrected by force.

The current Sapphire felt her throat tighten, but did not look away.

This was not only a return to the past.

It was a cruel mirror.

She had entered her mental world to remove restrictions, but the first challenge was not to fight. It was to look. To look at what she had been before love, before home, before the fear of loss, before the gentle life she now protected with such force. To look at her old beauty, her old violence, her old freedom, and admit that part of it was still missing.

The old Sapphire, covered in light, blood, and fragments of wings, finally stopped fighting for an instant.

Then she turned her face.

She looked directly at her.

The smile that appeared on her lips was arrogant, amused, and cruel.

As if she already knew she was being watched.

As if she had waited twelve thousand years for that meeting.

The current Sapphire remained motionless in the destroyed field, feeling the hot wind of the Genesis War strike her face. The old version of herself rested the spear on her shoulder, spun the sword in her other hand with insolent lightness, and walked a few steps toward her.

"You took long enough," the old Sapphire said, her voice carrying that beautiful and unbearable mockery she recognized far too well. "I was starting to think I had died inside you."