Chapter 501: The Maiden Of Fate And Fortune

If you asked the public which Battle Angel was the leader, you would get a hundred different answers.

Some would say Yeena—she was the most normal of the five, the most approachable, the one who handled the media and often served as the group’s public face.

The public felt close to her, and they attributed her competence to strength.

Others would say Fauna.

Her optimism and cheerfulness were infectious, and her plague ability was genuinely terrifying.

She could kill armies with a thought. Surely, that made her the strongest.

Nadia had her own supporters.

Her diplomatic power was unmatched, and her control over gravity and earth was so absolute that she could literally reshape continents.

When she got angry, the whole world shook.

And then there was the Maiden of War, the fourth sister.

She was destruction incarnate, a one-woman army who could crush nations.

Her strength was obvious, undeniable.

But if you asked the Battle Angels themselves, they would all give the same answer.

The oldest sister was the strongest.

She had been leading them since childhood, herding them like cats, imposing order on their chaos.

She was strict, authoritative, and utterly terrifying.

She did not tolerate mistakes.

She did not accept excuses.

She pushed them harder than anyone else, trained them more brutally, and expected nothing less than perfection.

In the past, before the war, she had beaten them bloody during training sessions—all, she claimed, in the name of love. To make them stronger. To prepare them for what was coming.

They believed her. But that didn’t make it hurt any less.

Even though they were technically born at the same time, she was their older sister in every way that mattered.

She led them in battle, made the final decisions, carried the weight of their survival on her shoulders.

And her blessing...her blessing was something none of them could truly comprehend.

[Arbiter of Destiny]

It sounded simple. Almost humble. But it was one of the most powerful blessings to ever exist.

She controlled fate itself—luck, destiny, karma, the invisible threads that wove through every life, every event, every possible future.

If she wanted to, she could walk into a casino and win every single game, no matter how low the odds.

If an attack came toward her from a powerful opponent, she could simply change her own fate to make it miss or cause a random coincidence to block it for her.

If she wanted someone dead, she could rewrite their destiny.

A person who was supposed to live to seventy-eight would suddenly die the next day in a mysterious accident with no connection to her at all.

She could even make enemies fall in love or best friends become strangers.

She could reshape the web of fate that connected every living being, bending it to her will.

She was a God playing among mortals.

And she was the main reason they had beaten the Eternal Queen.

Without her, they would have lost the war.

There had been countless moments when they could have died—when a blade should have pierced a heart, when an explosion should have torn them apart.

But she had been there, constantly rewriting their fates, ensuring they survived by the narrowest of margins.

And unlike her sisters’ blessings, which were straightforward—Fauna’s healing and curses, Nadia’s control over earth and gravity—hers was vague. Mysterious.

She couldn’t fully understand it herself.

One moment, she could change her own fate to have a really good day—good food, good weather, pleasant encounters.

The next, she could change the fate of an entire city so that everyone in it suffered through a tsunami.

A blessing with no visible limits.

But with that power came constraints. She was not allowed to change the world too much.

Too many alterations would cause cosmic disturbances, chaos that would ripple through reality and negatively affect everyone.

There were lines that couldn’t be crossed, fates that couldn’t be touched without backlash.

Her sisters didn’t fully understand it. Every time she tried to explain, it came out as spiritual gibberish—talk of threads and karma and cosmic balance that made their heads spin.

And so, she kept to herself. She roamed the world freely, searching for mysteries, exploring the unknown.

She didn’t hold a position or form an organization.

Her existence alone was enough to disrupt the fabric of fate—just by being present, she risked changing things that shouldn’t be changed.

But she had one responsibility: maintaining the safety of the world.

When anything catastrophic happened—something truly apocalyptic, something that threatened the very existence of humanity—she would appear.

She would solve it. And then she would disappear again.

That was why Nadia hadn’t been as scared as she could have been during the bombing.

Even if Mika hadn’t been there, even if everything had gone wrong, her sister would have arrived at the last moment and saved them.

But Nadia was also terrified of that.

Because her sister hated getting involved. She preferred to stay aloof, to watch from afar like a goddess who didn’t entertain mortal affairs.

If she was forced to intervene, she would be...unhappy.

And her unhappiness was something none of them wanted to experience.

Nadia had thought they had avoided that fate.

Everything had been handled. The bombs were disarmed. The city was safe. Her sister wouldn’t need to appear.

But here she was.

Her hand, at least. Her actual body hadn’t come through—she probably didn’t want to intertwine her fate with others, not even her own sisters, not at a moment like this.

But the fact that even her hand had appeared was significant.

Both Nadia and Fauna exchanged nervous glances, wondering what they had done wrong, if their sister was angry at them for something.

They were genuinely scared.

But little did they know—it had nothing to do with them.

She had come for Mika.

The hand turned slowly toward him.

Mika wasn’t as frightened as his mothers, but he was nervous. Definitely nervous. His heart rate had ticked up. His palms were slightly damp.

Just then—the hand crooked its finger.

’Come here, Mika.’

Mika felt a shiver run through his body. Something was about to go wrong. He could feel it.

But nonetheless, Mika stepped forward until he was directly in front of the hand.

It loomed over his face, hovering there as if it had invisible eyes, scanning him from head to toe.

Nadia and Fauna watched with a mixture of anticipation and something almost like amusement.

They expected head pats. Cheek pinches.

Maybe even a full embrace, the kind their oldest sister bestowed upon Mika whenever she deigned to show her softer side.

Because even though she was strict. Even though she ruled the family with an iron fist and rarely showed mercy to anyone who crossed her—she absolutely cherished Mika.

Blatant favoritism, some might call it.

Her sisters could complain all they wanted; the nieces could pout; even her own daughter could throw tantrums.

But Mika remained firmly at the top of her hierarchy.

He was her pet, her darling, her golden boy.

There was a story, told in hushed whispers among the family, that illustrated this perfectly.

When Mika was around four years old, the family attended a formal party with a host of important officials and dignitaries.

Mika, being a curious child, had been wandering through the crowd when someone jostled him from behind.

He stumbled, and the drink in his small hand spilled across the gown of a woman from a powerful noble family, one of the families that had contributed significantly during the war and still held considerable influence.

The woman looked down at her ruined dress, then at the trembling child before her. And instead of recognizing an accident, instead of showing any grace, she slapped him.

Right there in front of everyone.

"How dare you!" She shrieked. "Do you know how much this dress cost? Do you know who I am? What kind of ill-mannered brat—"

She went on, berating him, humiliating him, while Mika stood there with unusual calmness despite his age.

No one intervened. The other guests shifted uncomfortably but said nothing. The woman’s family was too powerful, her connections too deep.

But one person was watching.

Their oldest sister.

She didn’t react immediately. She didn’t storm across the room or make a scene. Instead, she simply watched.

And she began to cut threads.

The fortune lines, the karmic bonds, the threads of fate that connected that noble family to everything good in their lives—she severed them all.

One by one, quietly, methodically, like a surgeon removing a tumor.

The woman left the party in a huff, satisfied that she had put that "little brat" in his place.

But in the weeks that followed, her family’s fortune reversed.

Her brother was hit by a truck.

Her cousin fell from a building under mysterious circumstances.

Their business empire collapsed overnight as scandals emerged, deals fell through, and partners abandoned them.

The woman herself discovered that her husband had been cheating on her—with multiple women, for years.

The resulting divorce was messy, public, and devastating to her reputation.

Within weeks, the once-proud family was on the streets.

Begging. Broken. Destroyed.

All because one woman had slapped a child.

The other Battle Angels would have taken revenge, yes.

Yelena would have made the woman kneel and apologize.

Fauna might have cursed her with a lingering illness.

Nadia would have ruined her power holding.

The Maiden of War would have challenged her family to combat and humiliated them publicly.

But their oldest sister? She didn’t believe in mercy. She didn’t believe in proportionate response.

She believed in annihilation.

She owed the world nothing. After everything her family had sacrificed during the war, she had no debt to humanity.

Her loyalty was to her family alone.

So Fauna and Nadia were not worried about Mika. They expected coddling. They expected affection.

Instead, the hand pulled back.

Then it pointed—directly at Mika’s feet.

Mika blinked. He looked down at his shoes, then back at the hand.

"You want to see my feet? Check if my socks are stinky or something?"

He forced a nervous laugh. "I’m wearing the same brand I used to wear in the past. They’re not that bad—"

The hand shook slowly shook side to side like the women on the other side was shaking her head.

It pointed again, more insistently.

Mika’s brow furrowed. "You want...my shoes?"

The hand nodded. Up and down, emphatically.

Confused, Mika hesitated for only a moment before bending down and pulling off his shoe. He handed it over.

The hand grabbed it immediately, turning it left and right, examining it like a detective inspecting evidence.

Fauna tilted her head. "Why does she want his shoe?"

Nadia opened her mouth to respond—

BANG!

The sound cracked through the air.

Mika’s head snapped to the side. His cheek was red, a thin line of raised flesh forming where the shoe had struck him.

It was also then he realised that he had actually been slapped by his own shoe!