The second I saw that black smoke I knew what it was. The tears streaming down Louise's face evaporated with the hazy heat rolling off her body, and a dark fire began to consume her wand. Its wooden surface began to char and crack, as the clothes on her body began to catch fire. The Sin of Wrath's appearance was so sudden, and so unexpected that all I managed to do was shout a banal warning to Louise as she whispered the words to her spell.

Wardes never seemed to realise the danger he was in, as the last expression I saw on his face seemed to be one of pity. Then he disappeared behind a wall of black. I was standing far enough away from Louise that the backwash from the spell only washed over my ankles, stinging painfully, but not killing me.

CONGRATULATIONS! 41'154'212 XP ADDED!

YOU'VE LEVELED UP!

YOU'VE LEVELED UP!

YOU'VE LEVELED-

I ignored the endless stream of notification and tried not to think about how high that number was, as I surged forward to grab Louise. Or at least I tried to. My head spun with the first step I took and I nearly tripped over my own feet. When someone levelled up too quickly, they began to feel dizzy and faint until their body had a chance to process all the new mana it had acquired. This was by far the most I had leveled up at once in my entire life.

When I looked up, I saw that Louise had collapsed onto the ground in a boneless heap. My head was pounding as I just barely collapsed to my knees next to her, and I struggled to keep myself from throwing up.

I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing. Where once stood a city was now a glassy, spherical crater, with plumes of dark smoke rising from its edges. Only the walls and streets at the very southernmost edge of Londinium still stood, though they were blackened and rapidly burning down under the spreading wrath fires as their citizens fled. The army that had been encamped outside its Western Gate was gone, leaving no trace of it, not even bodies.

"Louise." Just her name made my stomach lurch with pain as I began to connect the dots and realised that I was responsible for this. "Oh, Louise, I should have known."

The condition for unlocking the Sin of Wrath was to believe the entire world had turned against you, and hate it in return. Of course she believed all stood in opposition to her, when even I had been treating her badly these past days. Between the bullying at school, her failure to live up to the legacy of her parents, or even meet her own expectations, she had spent her entire life struggling against the world and her own destiny, with the marriage to Wardes as the only safety net she had.

When she extended his presumably false offer to help me find a marriage, I hadn't even explained to her why I was opposed to it. Instead I just stormed out of the room like a tantruming child. To Louise, it was offered as a way for us to stay together, and so it must have seemed like I was rejecting her as well.

And now the results were to be seen all around me.

My eyes stung from the smoke and my face grew hot with tears. I would have begged for her forgiveness, but my throat had closed over. I couldn't even begin to imagine how I could have made things worse for her.

Then I heard a loud crack. I rubbed the blur from my eyes and blinked to see the crater in front of me had what looked like fractures spreading down the middle of it. At first I was ready to dismiss it, but then I felt the ground begin to shift under me.

Albion was an island, floating in the sky, and that spell had just burned through a good part of it. We were both on a thin ridge of land, with nothing but open air behind us and the great crater in front of us, and the ground we were on was about to fall away from the island itself.

I tried to stand again, to grab Louise and get her out of here, but my sense of balance was so disrupted by the leveling sickness that I only tipped forward and sprawled on top of her. My head was spinning, but I knew if I didn't think of something we were both going to die. Mind racing, all I managed to do was to grip Louise by the shoulder and throw us both forward to roll and slide down the wall of the crater. Somehow I managed to hold Louise over my chest so her bare skin wasn't torn up by the friction, and instead my back grew warm as my shirt was ripped and shredded. The steep incline leveled off, and we both came to a rapid stop, and I winced in pain at the friction burns on my skin.

I looked back to see the ridge we were on collapse and fall away, dragging more pieces of Albion with it as it did. The line of crumbling earth spread, growing closer and closer to us, and I scooted backwards on my backside as fast as I could, dragging Louise with me away from the spreading gap. It was moving too quickly though. My eyes widened with horror as my ankles went over the edge, and my stomach lurched as gravity seized me and we both dropped into the open air.

We were buffeted as we fell, the air rushing past tossing us about and twisting us nearly apart, though I never let go. All I could do was clench my eyes shut and hug Louise close to me. I don't know how high above the ocean we were, but I knew neither of us were in a fit state to swim ashore even if we survived the fall. There was nothing left but to wait for it all to stop.

Then we came to halt, and Louise was nearly torn from my arms. Rather than the cold chill of the ocean, something was gripping me around my waist.

After a moment I opened my eyes, to find pink had blanketed my view. I twisted my head around to look past Louise's hair to see a pair of blue scaled talons gripping my waist. It took me a long time to recognise them as Sylphid's. I looked up to see the underside of the dragon's scaly body and head, focused forward as we gently drifted over the ocean down towards the coastline of what I could only hope was Tristain. We slowed over the beaches, and Sylphid gently let us down in the sand before landing in front of us.

Tabitha slid down off the dragon's back with practiced ease, followed a moment later by Kirche who staggered a little as she hit the ground. I could only gape at the two of them in disbelief, as Kirche came forward to crouch in front of me.

"I say Raphtalia, are you doing alright? You look unwell."

In reply I threw up over her shoes, before the leveling sickness caught up with me, and I finally passed out.


AN: Sorry for the long wait between chapters. I have all sorts of excuses prepared, like losing my job and my normal writing space, but the most important part is we're getting back into the swing of things and we should be looking at updates once or twice a week for the foreseeable future.

Thank you to Enid for his contribution to the GREATER GOOD in editing this chapter.