The sky bled red.
Smoke drifted in ghostly ribbons across the treeline, and in the distance, the sea moaned like a wounded god. Ash rained gently, falling like snow over the ruins of a nameless village carved into the coast. The fires still burned, hungrily licking the shattered bones of huts and corpses alike.
Tanya von Degurechaff opened her eyes beneath a splintered longboat, blood matting her golden hair to her scalp. Her breathing was shallow, ragged. Every muscle ached as if she'd been torn apart and stitched back together by drunk gods. She tasted copper and sea salt.
No mana circuits. No computation jewel. No rifle. Just the taste of iron, and the sound of screaming.
She sat up slowly, ignoring the pain as her mind adjusted—no, recalibrated—to the chaos around her. This wasn't the Rhine. This wasn't Earth. She didn't know what it was.
But it was real.
A man stumbled toward her—bare-chested, caked in war paint and blood, eyes wide with rage and confusion. A Viking? He raised an axe over his head, lips curled in a feral snarl.
Tanya didn't flinch.
She whispered. Not to a god. To herself. To war.
"Ratione voluntatis. Calculus ignis."
The man burst into flame before the axe could fall. A plume of fire bloomed like a dying star, consuming flesh and steel in a single, precise inferno. The scream died before it could finish.
She stood, steam hissing from her skin where the magic burned off the blood. Her breath crystallized in the cold, her eyes scanning the landscape.
Corpses. Dozens. Warriors, women, children—all dead or dying. Whoever had attacked this village had been slaughtered in return. By her?
Fragments of memory snapped back like broken glass being forced into shape. She had been reborn. Again. Somewhere beyond the reach of the Empire or Being X. And yet, as she stared at her scorched hands, she felt it—the curse of godhood lingering like static in her bones.
"This isn't a battlefield," she muttered. "It's a graveyard."
Another figure moved in the mist—another raider. This one younger, not yet bleeding. He hesitated when he saw her. Perhaps the fire had made him believe the stories. Valkyrie. Witch. Demon.
Tanya tilted her head.
"Who sent you?" she asked in crisp, unaccented Old Norse. The tongue came to her like instinct—another gift from whatever entity had deposited her here.
The boy didn't answer. He ran.
She raised her hand.
"Magnum exitium."
The ground beneath him ruptured. A narrow column of flame exploded upward, turning him into a blackened shadow that collapsed into the mud.
The silence afterward was deeper than before. Only the wind and surf remained.
Tanya lowered her hand and sat on a broken shield. Her heartbeat slowed. Her body was still adjusting to the mana in this world, but it worked. The language, the magic—everything had reformed itself around her.
She was still the Devil of the Rhine.
But here, no one knew her name.
She stared at the sea. The waves looked like knives, and the sky like an open wound. She flexed her fingers, feeling the wet stick of blood and ash beneath her nails. Her magic hadn't dulled. If anything, it felt sharper—more intimate. As if whatever governed this place had rewritten the rules for her alone.
That thought made her stomach turn.
"Being X," she said, voice quiet but venomous. "What cosmic joke are you playing now?"
No reply came. Only the faint caw of a raven overhead. It circled her once and flew off toward the forest, vanishing into the rising smoke.
Tanya stood again. Survival. That was the immediate objective.
She didn't know how she'd arrived—there was no memory of a portal, no transitional phase, no judgment from the gods. Just fire, a flash of pain, and this.
But the world wasn't kind enough to give second chances.
It gave tests.
She moved cautiously through the village remains, stripping gear from the corpses. A cloak. A small axe. Dried meat, half-burned, still edible. She took everything of value, discarding sentiment with surgical coldness.
When she found a cracked bronze mirror, she stared into it.
Her face was as youthful and cruel as ever—those of a child molded by war. Her eyes still held that calculating hunger. But there was something else. Something jagged in her gaze now. Not confusion. Not fear.
Possibility.
The primitive society here, the reliance on myth and superstition—it was fertile ground. If the people here thought her a goddess, so be it. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
She picked up a broken sword, tested its weight, and kept it.
A scream echoed through the hills.
Not fear. Fury.
Three men burst from the woods—raiders or survivors, she didn't care which. They rushed her with axes and spears, thinking her a child left behind.
They didn't die quickly. She made sure of that.
The last one begged in Norse before she split his jaw with a burst of thermal pressure. The mud soaked up the red.
When it was done, Tanya sat on a rock and stared at the blood on her hands again.
Alive. Alone. And in a world that had never seen her before.
"I'll survive," she said softly, not to herself, but to the world around her. "I always do."
The wind answered with a howl.
And the devil smiled.