Near Yotsuya...
CRASH—!
A white-hot arc ripped the air.
Andre flew backward, boots tearing along cracked pavement, his coat fluttering wildly. His spine smacked a street barrier hard enough to dent steel.
A lamppost bent from the impact, creaking as he staggered to his feet.
Across the debris-strewn boulevard, the String Girl stood poised, her fingers curling through the air like a puppeteer. Red glowing thread spiraled from her knuckles, forming intricate webs that crackled with essence. Her eyes burned steady. Her smile was sharp, distant. Deadly.
Andre spat to the side, rolled his shoulder, then grinned.
"Y'know," he said, cocking his head, "you and Dancer Boy got a thing."
The String Girl's expression faltered for just half a heartbeat—eyes tightening, jaw ticking. The tension hit like a pin pulled from a grenade.
"We're coworkers," she snapped, voice a note too high. "That's all it is."
Then her hand whipped forward—CRACK!—a net of threads lanced toward Andre like a swarm of glowing vipers.
"Yikes," Andre laughed, ducking and weaving. "Struck a nerve, did I?."
She launched more—faster now, more chaotic without replying anything.
One thread cut the air where his head had been. Another grazed his coat sleeve, searing through leather.
Andre twisted midair, kicked off a fallen traffic light, and landed in a slide, barely dodging a slicing weave that sheared a nearby sedan in half.
Then—
BOOOOOOM.
A skyscraper—six blocks over—imploded. The entire structure folded inward as if crushed by a fist from the sky. Concrete and glass roared into the abyss.
A pulse of essence followed, rippling the air in translucent waves. Power like a star collapsing in slow motion.
Andre's eyes snapped toward the horizon.
"…Ren."
The word hit like a gut-punch. He felt it, even from here.
That burst of energy. Then—the silence.
"No…"
The String Girl struck.
Threads whipped forward—glinting razor-red in the streetlights. Andre moved on instinct, ducking low, then launching upward with a twist. His heel caught a wall and rebounded, pushing into a blur of movement.
She pressed him again.
Threads slashed the air like ribbons turned to guillotines. One sliced through a nearby street sign—CLANG—sparks bursting in a rain.
Andre deflected two, then reached into his coat and flung a disk of essence-infused brass—it burst into light midair, cutting through a portion of the web, giving him space.
The String Girl clicked her tongue.
"You won't be able to save him," she purred.
Andre bared his teeth. "You talk too much."
Then—a deafening WHUP-WHUP-WHUP overhead.
JSDF helicopters broke through the haze, spotlights passing over the battlefield.
Andre glanced up.
"Shit," he muttered. "The military's here too…"
As if on cue, one Apache launched a missile toward a group of winged yokai—and a massive beast, cloaked in cloud and barbs, intercepted it midair, devouring the explosion and growing in size.
The copter immediately banked to evade—too slow.
CRUNCH.
A tentacle of black essence wrapped around it, dragging it down as the camera feed from its belly flickered into static.
Andre grimaced.
"Gotta end this. Fast."
He turned back to the String Girl and cracked his knuckles.
"Time's up."
He lunged.
Elsewhere, high above the burning skyline of Tokyo's western edge—
Ren's body smashed through the side of a skyscraper, shattering glass and metal as he crashed through its floors, then burst out the far side—only to slam into the next tower. The impact left a deep, jagged crack across its upper floors. He barely had a second before gravity took him again. His broken body fell, bouncing off ledges and signs, before crashing down onto the hood of a parked car below. The vehicle crumpled under the force, alarms blaring uselessly.
Above, descending like a comet streaking with sparks, Trickstarr landed smoothly on the shattered rooftop. His new transformation shimmered in the air—taller now, leaner, outlined by trails of molten card-shaped energy.
He was still grinning.
"You're not getting it, are you?" His voice rolled out, casual, amused—almost disappointed. "You think this is a fight?"
Ren coughed blood, clutching his side, trying to push himself upright. His body screamed in protest.
Trickstarr stepped off the roof edge, dropped down like gravity was a suggestion, and grabbed Ren by the face, lifting him effortlessly like a broken doll.
"This is a lesson."
Ren struggled, bleeding and broken. One eye was swollen shut, his vision blurred in the other. Blood slicked the side of his face, dripping from his jaw to the shattered pavement. Every breath tasted like rust and smoke. His knees buckled under him as he tried to push up, the world tilting sideways.
His body was screaming for him to stay down.
But he didn't.
His Essence flickered dimly inside him—still there, still trying to hold his shattered bones together, but waning with every second. Every pulse of it felt like forcing life through a crushed pipe. He didn't know how much longer he could keep it up. How much longer his cells would obey. But he had to. He had to try.
Above him, Trickstarr hovered with a predator's stillness, arms crossed, expression darkening beneath the glow of his mask-like grin. His body, made entirely of flickering cards now, radiated heat and power like an engine running far too hot.
"How many times," Trickstarr said, voice low, trembling with barely-contained irritation, "do I have to teach you this lesson?"
Then—he vanished.
A sonic crack split the air.
Ren barely had time to raise his head before Trickstarr appeared directly in front of him, a blur that tore the ground apart as he stopped short. Ren reacted purely on instinct. With the only arm that still responded—his left—he threw a punch.
It connected.
Barely.
More a desperate swing than a real attack. A graze across Trickstarr's chest.
Then the pain came.
Trickstarr exploded into motion. A combo of brutal, pinpoint strikes slammed into Ren from every direction. A fist to the ribs—something cracked. A knee to the jaw—his vision whited out. Then an elbow to the sternum, another strike to his side, and a spinning kick that sent him crashing through a line of burnt-out vehicles.
"You can't win," Trickstarr growled between the hits. "You're not built to win."
He didn't even give Ren time to hit the ground. In a blur, he was already behind him, grabbing his collar and dragging him upward, only to slam him down again—once, twice, three times. The street shattered beneath them with each impact.
"This isn't a battle, Ren," he hissed. "It's mercy."
With one final blow—a palm strike to the gut surging with flaming card energy—Trickstarr launched Ren high into the air. His body flew like a ragdoll, twisting through the smoke-filled skies above the city.
"You're done."
He pointed.
A massive heart-shaped slash erupted from the cannon with a roar, white-hot and wreathed in flame. It screamed through the air like a divine blade. The heat from its passage alone turned nearby buildings molten.
It carved through the city like a guillotine from the heavens.
Skyscrapers were cleaved in two. Roads split. Glass vaporized. The air ignited.
The fire slash caught Ren mid-air—and the force behind it was catastrophic.
He was hurled like a meteor, streaking through the burning skyline, his body trailing smoke and embers. Every building in the attack's path crumbled, split cleanly in half or detonated from the sheer heat of impact.
Down below, in central Tokyo, the military had formed a perimeter—a last stand to hold the line while civilians were still being rushed into evacuation transports. Sirens howled. Commanders shouted orders into radios.
Then something tore through the horizon.
A streak of fire.
A shape.
A person.
Ren's broken body smashed through a cluster of armored vehicles, tumbled through a line of barricades, and finally skidded across the asphalt—digging a deep trench through it—before coming to a halt in the smoking crater that had once been a military command post.
Gasps rang out.
Soldiers froze, wide-eyed. One dropped his rifle in shock.
Smoke rose from Ren's back. Blood pooled beneath him, spreading in a slow, crimson halo. He didn't move.
"Is that…?" one officer whispered, lowering his weapon in disbelief.
Before anyone could react—
Trickstarr landed.
He dropped from the sky like a thunderclap, slamming into the perimeter with an explosion of cards and heat that tore through the soldiers like paper. Armored transports detonated in gouts of flame. Barricades vaporized. Screams rang out as men and women were flung aside or erased entirely, consumed by the inferno of arcane force erupting from his form.
The street split wide, concrete buckling like skin under pressure. Fires ignited along the wreckage, casting long, hellish shadows that danced across the crumbling skyline.
And in the center of it all stood Trickstarr—untouched, magnificent, monstrous. His cloak of embered cards fanned out like the wings of a fallen archangel, shifting and shimmering with violent energy.
"I told you," Trickstarr murmured, stepping over bodies without a glance. "You can't win."
He turned to Ren's crumpled figure in the crater.
Then struck.
A brutal uppercut wreathed in card-fire sent Ren flying once more, his body snapping upward like a ragdoll caught in a hurricane. He tore through the remains of a storefront, then a high-rise, before smashing through a complex still mid-evacuation.
"You couldn't save these people," Trickstarr said coldly.
The shockwave from Ren's impact shattered the windows of the building across the street. Glass rained down in deadly showers. A mother screamed as she tried to shield her daughter from the burning shards—too late. The storefront next to them ignited as residual energy from the earlier impact surged through the power grid. Flames leapt hungrily toward the sky.
A section of the building above gave out. Screaming civilians plunged from broken balconies. A teenager in school uniform reached for a railing that wasn't there anymore—then vanished in the smoke.
"You couldn't even save your own parents."
Ren's body collided with a steel support column, snapping it in half. The ceiling above crumpled like paper, and several floors collapsed in sequence. Screams echoed within the cloud of falling dust and concrete. A rescue drone was caught in the cascading rubble, bursting like a firecracker in midair.
Below, sirens wailed. Medics sprinted to drag people out—only to be caught in a secondary explosion from a ruptured gas line. Flames consumed the emergency triage setup in seconds.
A helicopter circled low, trying to stabilize and lower a ladder onto a rooftop where children waved desperately. But Ren's tumbling crash sent debris upward—steel girders, chunks of concrete—one of which slammed into the chopper's tail rotor.
The helicopter spun violently.
Its tail sheared off.
It spiraled downward in a scream of metal and terrified voices—straight into a hospital structure below.
The explosion that followed painted the sky in crimson and white, and for a second, the city went silent.
Trickstarr crouched beside the broken crater where Ren's shattered body now lay.
He reached down and grabbed him by the collar, lifting him like a ruined puppet until their eyes met.
"You couldn't save the people you care about," he whispered.
Ren's head lolled, blood dripping from his brow, his body limp. Trickstarr's eyes glowed with cruel delight as he leaned in closer.
"And now," he said, voice low, fangs bared in a cruel grin, "you can't even save yourself."
Then he hurled Ren's body aside like trash—this time not through walls, but into a small, intact building across the street. His broken frame tore through the upper floor, crashing through wooden beams and steel supports before slamming into the ground with a sickening crunch. The roof collapsed on impact, caving inward with a rain of dust, tile, and shattered concrete.