The Heroine is My Stepsister, and I'm her Final Boss
Chapter 189 - 190: On My Feet.

Chapter 189: Chapter 190: On My Feet.

Claire’s boots dug into the broken earth, scorched by blue fire and scarred by collapsing spells. Her breath came in short, sharp bursts, chest heaving not from exhaustion, but something far worse—panic laced with hatred. The scent of burned ozone filled the air, bitter and chemical. Mana crackled against her skin like static, an invisible flame licking her nerves raw.

Her satchel was nearly empty. Only a few scrolls remained. The ones she had collected obsessively over the years—across black markets, auctions, hidden chambers guarded by cursed things—each one encoded in runes old enough to make a high priest weep. The paper trembled in her hand now, not from fear, but from the power within them begging to be unleashed.

The healer at her side looked pale. Her hands were bloody. Her robes scorched from shielding too many soldiers already turned to cinders. "My lady...," she whispered, eyes wide with equal awe and dread. "You’re using them too fast. You’ll burn through your mana. You can’t use that serum again... it’s not good."

Claire didn’t answer immediately. A small tremor passed through her lips, unspoken emotion clenching her jaw. Then—

"...I have to do what I must," she said hoarsely, voice too calm.

The healer’s eyes glistened. She didn’t try to stop her. She just passed her another set of attack scrolls—this time bundled together, a suicidal multiplication. Claire didn’t wait. She activated five at once.

The air screamed.

Wind ripped outward with impossible violence, the scrolls feeding each other in feedback loops that fractured the sky. Tornadoes surged forward, not of nature but of magic—white-blue spirals swallowing everything in their path. Trees uprooted. Stones shattered. The heavens themselves seemed to recoil.

And at the end of the corridor of force, the target: a woman in silver and crimson, standing like a statue among the wreckage, her arms cradling the unconscious form of Atlas.

Claire’s heartbeat stuttered.

He was still alive. He had to be.

Meters away now, the two women faced one another.

Eli stood as if untouched by the chaos, her hair dancing in the wind, her armor charred but regal. Her eyes—those grey eyes—met Claire’s and didn’t blink.

There was a stillness.

A gaze long enough to span lifetimes. Jealousy—old, ugly, and intimate—flared in both women.

Claire had known, somewhere in the back of her mind, that something had happened between Atlas and the empress. A rumor. A whisper. A possibility she denied again and again. Why would she, the Empress of the Empire, look twice at a prince of a fallen enemy? But now... seeing her holding him like that, possessively, her expression something between wrath and grief—

Claire’s stomach twisted.

The way Eli held him wasn’t tactical. It wasn’t practical. It was emotional. She clutched him like something she had once lost and would rather burn the world than let slip again.

The kind of grip born not from command—but love.

"Who are you?!" Eli bellowed, her voice shaking the horizon.

Claire stepped forward. Her pulse pounded in her ears like war drums. She could feel the mana in her bones, in her teeth, burning under her skin. She didn’t need to ask what Eli meant. She already knew. A woman recognizes the gaze of another. Especially one that staked a claim.

Claire stopped walking.

She looked at Atlas—face slack, blood at the edge of his lip. Then at Eli again. Her fingers curled around the last scrolls she had. They trembled.

She could hear her own voice, from some memory before, where he finally noticed her hints:

....after this survey...let’s talk privately, Claire...

That night under the glooming moon, inside the carriage . The time he stitched her wounds without speaking. That time he had held her like she wasn’t broken.

She hated him.

She loved him.

And now, here, between her and the flame—this woman. This empress.

"Who am I to Atlas?" Claire’s voice cracked once, then rose. "Who am I, you ask?"

She took a breath that hurt her ribs.

"I... am... his... lover!!!"

Her scream was a blade across the field.

The sky shivered.

Eli’s expression didn’t move. But the flicker in her eyes—a silent twitch of something breaking—spoke volumes. A quiet shudder rolled down her throat, her grip tightening on Atlas’s body. Her lips parted. No words came.

Claire saw it.

She saw it and something cruel lit behind her eyes.

Eli’s eyes turned to crust and cinders—ash devouring gold—as fury overtook her. Her grip on Atlas’s broken body tightened like a vice, not from desperation, but possessive wrath. Bones creaked beneath her fingertips.

The warmth of Merlin’s healing magic surged around her, flooding through her armor in pale rivers of white flame. Flesh knitted, bones sealed, torn veins rethreaded by sorcery. The ground beneath her no longer felt like pain—it felt like purpose.

Merlin stood behind her, hands still raised, mana pouring in quiet hums from his palms. He was ancient, one of the last High Mages of the Old Line, a man who had healed emperors and slain gods—but even he hesitated now, staring at her, his pupils constricted. Not in awe. In fear.

Eli’s head turned toward the two high mages before her—, cloaked in purple and gold. Their spell circles still glowed around their feet, defenses raised, fingers trembling slightly at the sight of her face.

It was her silence that pierced them first.

Then her voice.

"I need her corpse," Eli said softly.

The flames curled up her spine.

"On my feet."

Her voice was not a scream.

It was prophecy.

It was the will of a woman who had ruled kingdoms and buried gods.

She took one step forward. The ground blackened where her heel touched.

Both high mages shuddered. Not from her threat—but from the sheer inevitability of it.

Eli’s hatred wasn’t theatrical. It wasn’t passionate.

It was surgical.

It was the kind of loathing born when love is spat back as betrayal.

"I don’t want prisoners," she whispered. "I want her teeth shattered on the rocks. I want her ribcage split open like a warning."

Her eyes glowed white now—not just from mana, but something older, deeper, unspoken.

Behind her, Atlas stirred, unconscious still—but twitching in protest, as if some part of him felt what she had become.

The wind died.

The two mages—one man, one woman—looked at each other briefly. As if calculating whether they could refuse.

They couldn’t.

Because they knew what she was.

Not just empress.

Not just scorned.

But she became wrath incarnate. A rare moment. But the moment nonetheless.

A woman who had buried her heart in a man now bleeding in her arms—and all that remained in her now was the fury of what had been taken.

Merlin finally lowered his hands. He stepped back.

He too had seen that look once, years ago, in the mirror of another woman crowned in sorrow.

"Go," Eli whispered again. "Bring me her bones."

And hell followed her command.