Chapter Fourteen - The Array of Black Fire

A World without Misery (Interitus 1: Book 0)

Chapter Fourteen – The Array of Black Fire

 

            People dashed through the crowded streets of the island city Procella. It was once a calm island in the steamy sea, but now ash and dust tainted the ocean air. The wind felt weaker here than on the Agrideī mainland, but the pressure in the air had never been this strong. Though people desperately tried to run through blocks of homes and rows of trees, they all understood the grim reality that a simple escape did not exist. The city of Procella sat upon a lightly-forested island, meaning that people could only evacuate reliably by boat.

But as helpless citizens flooded the streets, relying only on speed to save them from the monster, Hatasuko and Vaida decided to fight the Interfectus themselves. They were the only line of defense. Vaida kept her twin swords sheathed in an X-shaped holster on her back. Both fighters kept a whip clipped to the left side of their lower back; they both kept their sack of rocks dangling from their right shoulders. Hatasuko and Vaida both clenched an Interfectus shield in their hands, though he refrained from drawing his sword.

“Hatasuko, are you alright? You look like you’re hurting,” Vaida whispered.

A grimace fell upon his face, but Hatasuko continued to glare at the golden eyes of the Interfectus. The monster levitated in silence over the rooftops as smoke lifted from the buildings beneath it. The layer of transparent blackness hung as motionless as ever before; it almost looked like the Interfectus was in a state of deliberation.

Hatasuko answered, “I am hurting. I think the tempest can sense how I feel. It knows that I feel more vulnerable than ever before. I’m still scarred by my failure, and they remember. The lost souls know that I probably won’t win. They know that their deaths will be in vain, and they know that their sadness will never end.”

“Is that the only reason you feel vulnerable?” she asked in her quiet voice.

“Well… no, no, it doesn’t matter. The Interfectus is exposed; let’s go.”

            Suddenly, a golden shimmering symbol appeared on the dirt beneath Hatasuko. As he glared at the demon from blocks away, a sudden burst of black fire erupted from the ground and engulfed his whole body. Vaida watched from a short distance with her eyes open wide as his glowing body accepted energy from this array. Once the black fire faded, the glow and the symbol disappeared, and so Hatasuko was ready to fight using his Astrodeus power.

With a mystified gaze, Vaida watched as Hatasuko activated his power and catapulted a rock he had received from Caelicola. These rocks resembled bullets more than any other shape, and they were harder and smoother than other rocks in Agrideī. The bullet-like rock blasted through the air, unleashed a sonic boom, and nearly struck the Interfectus, but the monster blocked with a shield of swirling shadows. Now that its shield had been summoned, the Interfectus could not deploy its other weapons. Therefore, Hatasuko seized the chance to approach the monster.

Vaida tried to keep up with him, but they both struggled to run since the crowd fled in the opposite direction. Once they broke through the fleeing citizens, Hatasuko reached out with his right hand; Vaida grabbed onto it. With their hands clenched together, they ran between a tall building and a group of three small trees.

“Vaida, throw backward!” Hatasuko suddenly yelled, letting go of her immediately.

Vaida did not even try to slow down; she simply agreed and pulled a rock from her sack. At the same time, Hatasuko stopped running and threw another rock into the sky with a deafening crack. The Interfectus launched a cluster of shadow balls just a split-second after it had summoned them, but Hatasuko had reacted with perfect timing. As soon as the shadow spheres shot off into the sky, his high-speed rock struck the monster’s hip and shattered its black armor.

Before the Interfectus even had a chance to roar, Vaida’s rock struck a sphere which would have otherwise hit a crowd of evacuees. As the scattershot detonated in the sky with a massive flash of fire, Hatasuko spun to face the explosion. He and Vaida both clenched their shields as the fiery shockwave struck them. The shockwave forced her to stumble, but Hatasuko caught her with his left hand before it knocked her to the ground. The flames diverged harmlessly around their shields.

“Oh! Catch me!” Vaida yelled with a sense of urgency.

Before Hatasuko could figure out her plan, Vaida jumped off the ground, jumped again off his hips, twisted in midair, and pulled her shield upright to block a sudden lunge of the shadow spear. Hatasuko dropped his shield and threw his arms in the air. The monster’s blade-arm struck Vaida’s shield with so much force that it threw her backward at a disorienting speed; he caught her in his arms before she could fly too far. He stumbled as he caught her, but he stabilized in a split second. He then let go of Vaida, unsheathed his sword, and counterattacked with a mighty slash. His whole body glowed from the force of his power as his sword tore through the air; it struck the shadow spear and shattered it without even slowing down. He shattered a tremendous section of the demon’s arm, so the Interfectus hurriedly retracted what remained of its weapon.

“You just saved my life!” Hatasuko exclaimed with a surge of adrenaline.

“And you just saved mine,” she said back, but then a loud sound startled them.

The Interfectus tried to attack again with the jagged remainder of its broken arm. As the arm tore through the air, it transformed into an extremely long spear, so Hatasuko prepared his Astrodeus power and pulled back his sword. Vaida stepped aside, but she watched carefully with her good eye; she found it strange that the Interfectus would attack into an obvious trap. Despite his curious trepidation, Hatasuko activated his power, slashed his sword, and destroyed the monster’s arm with an extraordinary crash. The slicing impact reduced the entire appendage into falling shards of shadows. Hatasuko then bent down and picked up his shield with his left hand.

“I’m out of quintessence again! I hear all of your screaming voices as you yell into my skull; I can taste every drop of your misery. Please, please give me your strength. We’re all in this together,” Hatasuko said, speaking directly to the tempest inside himself.

            Vaida watched again as a shimmering symbol appeared on the dirt beneath his feet. A sudden burst of black fire engulfed Hatasuko and illuminated the nearby trees with an ominous flash, but the Interfectus seized this opportunity to unleash its next attack. Vaida noticed this and equipped her hands with a shield and a rock, but the Interfectus did not target them; it instead launched shadow spheres at the island’s north shore.

Since her one eye struggled with depth perception, Vaida knew that she had virtually no chance of striking a shadow ball from this angle. As the black fire finally faded from his body, Hatasuko saw countless bursts of blue fire; the northern sky illuminated with a bright flash of light. Hatasuko and Vaida could hear this attack destroy numerous ships in the distance. Countless screams rang out into the sky, but they were too far away to help anyone. As the tempest became invigorated with a surge of pain and terror, Hatasuko and Vaida charged toward the Interfectus so that they could retaliate. Once again, he held her hand as they ran at the monster.

Vaida asked, “Where does that energy come from? What fuels the array of black fire?”

“The energy comes from the lost souls in the tempest. I know this may sound weird, but the tempest has always been my curse and my fuel. Just now, it’s my fuel in a very literal sense! I think that symbol uses the energy of a lost life and transforms it into quintessence. I know that the voices in the tempest feel more hopeless than ever, but I guess they’re still willing to work with me. I think they still believe in my dream,” Hatasuko explained.

Hatasuko suspected that this would confuse Vaida since she usually dealt with energy in a physical sense, but she thanked him anyway. They continued running between the trees and through the blocks toward the Interfectus.

“Wait, stop!” Vaida said, letting go of his hand.

Hatasuko immediately stopped running and glared at the monster’s golden eyes, but it appeared to be motionless. It remained still so that it could regenerate its broken left arm, so Hatasuko looked back over his shoulder at his friend. Illuminated by the starlit smoke and the glow of distant fire, Vaida stood beneath a tree with her whip in her right hand. She rapidly looked around in all directions.

“Vaida, what’s wrong?” Hatasuko asked.

“Someone’s here! I know I heard somebody. But they shouldn’t be here; everyone should have evacuated by now! What if someone’s trapped?” Vaida asked with a frantic look.

Without meaning to, Hatasuko’s mind flashed back to Vaida’s story about the night when the Interfectus took everything from her. Since she glanced frantically around for someone who might be trapped, he wondered if she imagined it in her head; he wondered if she wanted to save someone else from the same fate she suffered. Nevertheless, Vaida gave up searching for the voice and kept running.

“Never mind. The wind is strange when we’re off the mainland. It was just the wind,” Vaida muttered with a troubled look on her face.

“It’s coming down!” Hatasuko shouted, pointing the tip of his sword straight ahead.

As she started running through the street, Vaida glanced up and saw that the Interfectus stopped levitating; its giant armored feet now fell toward the city below. She knew that the crash-landing would create an earthquake shockwave, so she searched both sides of the street for any sign of danger. There were only trees up ahead for her, but then she noticed an old belltower at the corner of this block. Hatasuko would be running beside it in a matter of seconds. The Interfectus had planned this carefully. Her whole system flooded with fear when she realized that Hatasuko was in danger, but she fought through her trepidation.

            “Hatasuko, the belltower! Look out!” she yelled out in the moment of impact.

The feet of the Interfectus crashed down in the street with so much power that the entire city shook at once. While it struck the ground, the Interfectus summoned and launched a scattershot of shadow spheres, knowing that its attackers would be preoccupied. As the fragile tower crumbled from the shockwave and collapsed like a rockslide, Hatasuko lifted his shield to block the rocks, so it was up to Vaida to stop the scattershot.

As the city streets shook violently, Vaida jumped off the ground, jumped a second time by pushing off the wall of a house, and threw a rock with all her strength at the top of her jump. The shadow ball cluster had almost flown overhead, but her rock struck the second-fastest in the cluster, and then every sphere detonated with a tremendous blast of blue fire. The fiery shockwaves were so forceful that they struck Vaida in midair and slammed her down into the street. She crash-landed on the hard dirt road with so much speed that she became disoriented, so she started rolling. Even though none of the flames had ignited her clothes, she continuously rolled until she bumped into a tree.

In the moment that Vaida looked up at the Interfectus again, she saw that the shadow demon had locked its golden eyes on her. She let out a quick scream and tried to pull her shield forward, but she was lying on top of it. The Interfectus noticed her inability to defend herself, so it transformed its right arm into a shadow claw. The shadow arm of flashing blades shot down from the sky at a tremendous speed, but then Hatasuko unleashed his power from beneath the rubble of the belltower.

With a single swing of his supersonic sword, a storm of shambles and broken stone shot into the shadow claw’s path. This was not strong enough to dent or break the Interfectus’ weapon, but it did knock it off-course. The shadow claw instead crashed into the street on the other side of the tree. Vaida stumbled to her feet, hooked the prongs on the shield onto her back, and then started running toward Hatasuko. A cloud of ash and rubble had nearly hidden the smoke-stained Astrodeus, but Vaida could see his silhouette despite her dizziness. 

            “VAIDA, LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU!” Hatasuko roared.

But he was too slow. Hatasuko watched with horror as the Interfectus ripped its shadow claw out of the street; it swung its dagger fingers so swiftly that it tore straight through the ground. The shadow claw shot through the air, struck the shield on Vaida’s back, and sent her flying through the smoke; the impact was so swift and sudden that she felt many joints crack. With a gaze of horror in her bright blue eye, Vaida flew toward the cloud of debris, so Hatasuko flung his whip into the air.

“GRAB ON!” Hatasuko shouted, though his voice was hidden by the crack of his whip in front of her body.

In midair, Vaida grabbed onto the whip with her little hands. Hatasuko used all his strength and suddenly pulled in on the whip. She changed direction so quickly that she feared the whip might snap. But before she even got the chance to realize her own speed, she crashed into Hatasuko’s chest with her forearms. Right after impact, as Hatasuko stumbled backward, he wrapped his arms around her so that she would not fall onto the street.

“I’m dizzy, I’m so sorry, I’m dizzy, I can’t see,” Vaida stammered.

In the background, the Interfectus slammed its massive foot into a row of four homes. Three of the buildings crumbled on impact, but the fourth one both crumbled and flew into the sky like a high-speed storm of debris.

“Vaida, it’s alright! I’ll protect you. Remember, every time the Interfectus tries to kill us, everyone else has a chance to escape! People are fleeing the island constantly, and once they’re safe, we can fight the Interfectus without playing defense. We’ll win for sure,” Hatasuko said with an enthusiastic smile.

“Wait, Hatasuko, I have an idea! Can you try to hurt the Interfectus? I need it to regenerate,” Vaida said when she saw a pen in the dusty rubble.

“Yes! Try to run after me but please stay safe!”

Hatasuko burst forth from the dusty cloud and sprinted between the trees toward the Interfectus. With their golden eyes glaring at each other, Hatasuko swung his shield around and hooked it onto his back. With a mighty stomp, the Interfectus slammed its giant left foot down and shook the city, but Hatasuko ignored the jarring ground. He extracted two bullet-like rocks as he ran forward, so when he came within three blocks of the shadow demon, he spun his hips and threw his left rock with all the power his muscles could supply. Though he had not launched it with his power, his left arm was strong enough to make the shimmering weapon sail through the sky. When the monster shifted its gaze toward this first rock, Hatasuko activated his power and threw the second one with so much force that the recoil knocked him down.

With a deafening shockwave, this second bullet-like rock blasted through the armor on the Interfectus’ left thigh with a burst of shadow shards. As it let out an earthshaking roar from the pain, Hatasuko exhaled with an ambivalent sigh. He celebrated that his attack was successful, but he also knew that the Interfectus would not fall for this again. Still, he had thrown the rock with such incredible speed that it seemed to have pierced halfway through the demon’s body.

With a chorus of still-screaming voices in his head, all overloading his senses, Hatasuko hardly noticed when Vaida ran up to him from behind. As soon as she reached him, she reached under the shield on his back. She pulled his sword out of its sheath and handed him the pen which she had taken from the rubble.

            “I think the black fire array is like a catalyst! I think that you use it to get your quintessence energy. Do you remember what it looks like? Draw it on your sword, quickly! Maybe you can steal energy from the Interfectus itself,” Vaida said at a strangely rapid pace.

Hatasuko nodded and grabbed the tip of his sword with his left hand. Vaida steadied his blade so that he could write on the starlit metal just beneath the tip. He closed his eyes for just a moment and recalled the shape which had appeared under his feet five times now. And as soon as he remembered it, he drew it on his weapon.

            “I don’t know if this works, but I’m sure we’ll get the chance to test it. The Interfectus almost has its whole left arm back. As soon as it tries to attack, I will destroy it!”

But before Hatasuko and Vaida even had the chance to run closer, the shadow demon slammed its right foot on the dirt road directly out front. The shockwave destroyed two small homes and shook the ground enough to throw Vaida and Hatasuko into the air. Vaida let out a startled scream, but she pulled off her shield and held it tightly as she fell onto the shuddering street. The island trembled so powerfully that a cloud of smoke and dust lifted over the city.

Above the cloak of smoke, the Interfectus summoned a scattershot of shadow spheres, so Hatasuko prepared to throw the rock in his left hand. The Interfectus launched its shadow balls at the east side of the city, so Hatasuko activated his Astrodeus power and hurled the rock at a supersonic speed. He watched the bullet-shaped rock fly between two shadow spheres and then shoot off into the sky. He had missed altogether. Hatasuko wasted no time on his failure, so he raced forward once again, but Vaida stood frozen in the street. She watched with anxious terror as the scattershot fell upon the east side of Procella; an orchestra of explosions echoed across the sky. The cluster was so widespread that the nearest blast was just three blocks away; it blew away a tree and a house. A jolt shook through her body when she heard a screaming voice from the nearby flames. She knew that someone was trapped in the fire.

            Holding her shield in her right hand as she ran, Vaida toward the shouting voice. As she approached, she heard the scream become louder and more urgent. It was a scream of unparalleled agony; it was the scream of a human body burning to death. Before she could reach the blazing home, the voice had gone silent. Ash and smoke drifted away in the wind, and another lost soul fell into the vortex of misery.

Hatasuko could feel this soul and several others as their screams echoed in the abyss, so he grimaced as he ran at his maximum speed. While the Interfectus regenerated the damage to its left thigh, it separated from the ground and started to levitate. However, Hatasuko was determined to knock the demon down from the sky, so he jumped on top of an overturned wagon; he then jumped a second time onto the roof of a building. As he ran and jumped from rooftop to rooftop, he glared at the floating foot of the Interfectus. It quickly lifted away from the ground, so Hatasuko knew that he could not slow down for anything.

He glanced up ahead, right beside the place where the monster had stomped the ground, and he saw that a chimney stuck out of the roof of a half-crumbled home. As he closed the distance between himself and the chimney, he threw his sword directly upward, and then he jumped with all his strength. This jump launched him upward while his momentum pulled him forward. His hands grabbed the chimney’s edge, and he pulled his body up before he could hit it; he then jumped again by kicking off the chimney. As he flew into the sky at an impressive speed, he caught the golden handle of his sword in his right hand. He then activated his power and slashed at the massive foot of the Interfectus just before it flew away.

            The glowing sword in Hatasuko’s hand struck the monster’s foot so swiftly that it instantly shattered the entire extremity. The recoil of this strike sent Hatasuko flying backward through the sky at a diagonal angle. Before he could fly too far, the shield on his back slammed against a tree branch at the corner of the block; the branch snapped on impact. He fell a short distance and landed clumsily on the street below, though he was dazed from this high-speed motion. His whole body ached deeply, but he had not suffered any major wounds. As soon as he started to regain his senses, he realized that the Interfectus went silent; it had not made a single sound after losing its left foot to his attack.

“It didn’t work,” Hatasuko grumbled as he climbed to his feet. The golden symbol remained on the edge of his sword. Even after slicing through the foot of the shadow demon, the array had not triggered. Hatasuko wondered if this meant that the symbol only functioned because of his hold on the tempest. However, he soon dismissed this idea; it would mean that only a person touched by the darkness could become an Astrodeus.

“I’m out of quintessence again. Tempest of lost souls, please hear me and please know-”

But before Hatasuko could finish, the levitating monster attacked with the first weapon of the Interfectus. Its shadow sword slashed so swiftly through the sky that Hatasuko could not even grab his shield; he merely spun around so that the shadow blade struck the shield on his back. The clash was startlingly loud, and the impact threw him forward and slammed him onto his knees at a high speed. He skidded so quickly that the dirt street destroyed the fabric on his pants and skinned his knees, but at the end of the skid, he somersaulted forward and dashed away from the Interfectus. He could hear the whoosh of the shadow sword slashing at him once again, but without any quintessence, he had no way to fight back. Right before his shins would have been ripped from his body, Hatasuko jumped up and over the slashing sword of shadows; it instead tore through a home on the left side of the street.

“I can’t recharge if I can’t stand still,” Hatasuko exclaimed, but he began to suspect that the Interfectus had figured this out first.

The Interfectus transformed its right arm into a shadow claw and suddenly attacked again. Hatasuko jumped away from it and spun in midair so that he could block the claw with his shield. But the claw blades were curved, so two of them reached around his shield and tore gashes in his stomach. He let out a startled shout as two scraps of bloody skin fell to the ashy street, but he also knew that this wound changed nothing. When he landed on the ground with a stumble, he glared at the outstretched blade-arm and tried to recharge his power. However, he was too slow; the monster’s shadow claw lunged at him again. This time, the weapon struck his shield and threw him against the door of a smoke-stained home.

Hatasuko struck the door so quickly that it blew open from the force of his collision. He fell onto his bloody knees on the hardwood floor, wishing that the array of black fire would appear beneath his body, but there was no time. The Interfectus stomped its left foot elsewhere in the city. Everything shook from the shockwaves; they threw Hatasuko off the ground before he could even catch his breath. As the whole house shook from the tremors, he saw that another person stood in this room. A middle-aged man clenched the wooden table in the middle of the room with both hands.

Since the Interfectus knew exactly where Hatasuko was hiding, it unleashed another attack with its deadly sword of shadows. Hatasuko knew that the nightmare demon would try to strike now, but he could not see through the wooden walls of the crumbling house. With a desperate dive, he threw himself to the floor since he anticipated an eruption of blue fire, but he was wrong. The high-speed sword of shadows sliced swiftly through the wooden walls without slowing down at all. It tore through the air right above his head and sliced through the stomach of the middle-aged man. Just the wind from this attack launched the table and the man’s bottom half into the far wall of the house.

“The Interfectus will surely strike again to finish the job. I need quintessence, and I need it right now. But there’s no time! The roof is collapsing; I’ll die if I stay.”

Hatasuko suddenly remembered when Madeline said that quintessence comes from the spirits of the dead. He could not access the lost souls in the tempest because he could not stand still, so he realized that he only had one choice. He would have to use the spirit of a person at the edge of the afterlife. He had no time to think about it. With countless screams roaring on in the abyss, Hatasuko charged forward, barely dodged the falling roof, and tore his sword swiftly through the top half of the middle-aged man’s body. 

            The symbol on his sword triggered even though he was in motion. He carried the glowing array with him, and black fire ravaged the corpse of the man left in his wake. The quintessence recharged him even as he threw himself out of the crumbling home. However, his body protested with a layer of cold sweat and a pulse of adrenaline; on a subconscious level, he knew what this meant. He knew that he had just killed a person for the first time ever. It was a bit of a stretch since the man was seconds away from dying anyway, but the victim still never had a choice in the matter.

But since the array of black fire had faded so quickly, the shadow demon had not seen it; the Interfectus still believed that Hatasuko was defenseless.

In the next moment, when the Interfectus struck again with a high-speed diagonal slash, Hatasuko pulled his shield forward while pulling back his sword. Right before the shadow sword would have struck his shield, he used his power and slashed with his sword. The right arm of the Interfectus shattered and burst into a shower of shadow shards, even though its armor was said to be impenetrable. The Interfectus roared again and appeared to stumble as it stood upon one foot. Without its left foot and right arm, the monster seemed unable to balance its own weight, so Hatasuko took advantage of its vulnerability. He pulled his right sword back, activated his Astrodeus power, forced his body to glow with a mystic aura, and then threw his sword into the sky. The weapon pierced through the air and unleashed a sonic boom that echoed across the city. Countless eyes watched as his sword struck the monster in the chest.

The demon’s armor shattered instantly as the sword blew through its body. Despite its massive size, the Interfectus stumbled backward from this one attack. In slow motion, Hatasuko watched as it appeared to start falling onto its back. The transparent layer of blackness in the sky trembled and slowly receded. As it retracted, the black armor on the Interfectus began to grow translucent. It was fading away. Though he had not killed it, Hatasuko knew that this meant he had defeated the Interfectus, and now it would retreat from existence. He watched with pride in his golden eyes as the shadow demon faded into nothingness. Once the monster and its transparent layer faded, a cheering roar emerged from the distant crowd.

             “I know I have no right to sacrifice anyone else for my reasons, but I sure can’t say I regret it. He may have had no choice, but at least he was sacrificed for the greater good. There’s no telling how many lives I saved because I was willing to use something that wasn’t mine,” Hatasuko whispered as he fell to his knees.

Hatasuko set down his weapons as his sweat quickly dripped into the dirt below. His body felt terribly exhausted because he had been in constant motion for a very long time. His bones and joints ached from the sudden impacts and injuries.

“It feels wrong, but it still feels justified. Even the voices in the tempest, even they seem to support me. They should. I defeated the Interfectus. It’s a steppingstone to freeing this world from misery.”

Though his pounding head concealed the cheers of Procella’s citizens in the distance, Hatasuko realized that he had not seen Vaida since he went on the attack. His whole body heaved from exhaustion and ached from injuries, but he climbed to his feet and stumbled toward the place where he last saw her. As he walked through an intersection which was strewn with debris, he realized that many buildings still smoldered in the city; the steamy air hung heavy with ash and smoke. He stretched out his back so that he could use the full extent of his height to search the ashy streets for his best friend.

“Vaida’s really an amazing girl. She’s more afraid of the Interfecti than anyone I know, and yet she still does this. I’ve seen her take off running just because Lazaro cooked some agilus meat. The poor girl’s haunted by the memory of fire, but she still fights the Interfecti. She fights them in a battleground that’s rife with ash and embers. She runs headfirst into her nightmare just so she can save lives—so that she can stop the monster that created her nightmare.”

As Hatasuko thought about this, he pushed his semiconscious body to a jogging pace. His shoe nearly slipped on a thick pile of ashes, but when he regained balance, he saw a woman crouching in the street up ahead. Though the starlight illuminated the dark hair on her, she was just a silhouette since she knelt beside a burning home. The smoke in this area smelled especially foul, but after many years of fighting Interfecti, Hatasuko recognized this odor with ease—it was the stench of burning flesh.

             “Vaida, are you ready to go? The Interfectus is gone,” Hatasuko said to her.

Vaida threw her head over her shoulder and looked back at Hatasuko. She could not see him with her blind eye, so she had to turn a little more just to see him. Ash lightly coated her face, and a trail of dried tears meandered down her cheeks.

“I’m so sorry… I didn’t want to shut down. I didn’t mean to shut down. I just heard the scream, and by the time I got here… it was already too late to save her,” she said.

Hatasuko knew that he could not say anything to make her feel better; this was not the type of pain that words could allay. Instead, he walked up to her, crouched down beside her, and opened his bruised arms. Without a word, Vaida pushed herself into his arms and nuzzled her face into his chest.

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