The forest no longer whispered.
It breathed.
It pulsed with something ancient and watching—as if the trees themselves had borne witness to the transformation that took place just days prior. Oni crouched on a jagged outcropping of stone, his golden eyes dim but never dull, glowing faintly through the canopy of dusk. The blood from the Chimera Titan had long since dried on his skin, but he hadn't bothered to clean it. There was power in that stain. A memory of survival. Of dominance.
Rain sat a few meters below, sharpening his sword with a rhythm that spoke more of war than meditation. He no longer swung it like a child pretending to be a warrior. He was the blade now—each movement refined, silent, exact.
Their bodies had changed. Maturation beyond what any ten-year-old should've known. Muscle corded around growing bones, and power shimmered beneath their skin, barely restrained. Oni's voice had deepened. Rain's eyes had lost the lightness of youth. They had become something… feral.
Peace, as they were about to discover, is only the silence before a scream.
Out of nowhere a purple portal appeared and Raphata stepped out. Looked at both of us, and said. "It's a war."
The words were iron — cold and heavy. Not metaphor. Not exaggeration. A verdict.
Oni didn't flinch. Rain didn't blink. The silence that followed wasn't stunned. It was sharpening.
"A war?" Oni said. His voice wasn't confused — just venomous. "With who?"
Raphata's jaw clenched. The room, which had just recently been filled with laughter and breath after the Chimera Titan victory, now felt like a tomb. Still. Cold. Hollow.
He spoke slowly.
"They call themselves the Alterez Bandits. But they're not bandits. Not really."
He started pacing, his coat dragging over the stone.
"They're… demons. Real ones. Not by blood — by choice. Murderers, torturers, cultists. All branded under one name: Yatari."
That name sat foul on the tongue. Like bile.
"Your mother is gone. Taken. Your father… left for dead."
Oni's fist hit the wall before he even realized he'd moved. The entire room shook — cracks spider-webbed through the stone. He didn't say a word. But his breath came faster. And hotter.
Rain just closed his eyes. The silence in his head was deafening — but something beneath it was rising. Something primal. Something… wrong.
"Why didn't you stop them?" Rain asked. He wasn't accusing. Not fully. But it was there. The edge.
Raphata looked at the floor. He didn't answer.
He didn't have to.
You were too late, Oni thought. You're the strongest demon alive… and you were too late. So what the fuck are we supposed to do?
And that's when it started — not a thought, but a feeling. Something in Oni's gut uncoiled like a whip. The beast. The one beneath the skin. The thing that didn't mourn.
It hunted.
Raphata finally looked up.
"Their trail was fresh. I followed it north. Into the Ashlands."
He held out a blackened piece of leather — scorched, cracked. Oni recognized the embroidery.
His mother's cloak. "She fought," Raphata said. "But they overwhelmed her."
Oni took it from him. Said nothing. Just stared.
And in his chest, something snapped.
Rain stood beside Oni, silent. He looked different now. Older. His pupils had narrowed into slits.
"We're going after them," he said. No emotion. Just fact.
Raphata stepped forward.
"You're not ready."
Oni looked up, and when he did, his eyes weren't red — they were black. Glowing at the edges with silver cracks of inner light.
"Too fucking bad."
Raphata didn't argue.
But as he watched the two boys — barely ten, yet standing with the poise of killers — he thought:
I could crush those bandits myself. Turn them to ash before sundown. But if I do… they'll never grow into what they're meant to be.
This world doesn't need princes. It needs monsters with purpose.
So show me, Oni. Show me, Rain. Show me what the hell you're really made of.
He nodded once. That was all.
They didn't speak as they left the sanctuary. And stepped back onto Neifriet. They didn't take food. Didn't pack gear. They didn't need to.
The Ashlands weren't far — maybe a few hours east. They felt light due to the gravity change between the two worlds. As they ran the closer they got, the worse it smelled.
Smoke. Char. Rotting flesh. Rain crouched and brushed his fingers across the black soil.
"Still hot."
"They burned everything," Oni muttered.
"No," Rain said, standing. "They enjoyed it."
The trees were skeletal. What few animals remained were nothing but bones and fur. Entire homes had been reduced to slag. And at the center of it all, somewhere in the haze — they felt it
Not just heat.
Presence.
A pulsing, distant, radiating evil.
Like the heartbeat of a god they hadn't met yet.
Oni tilted his head.
"You smell that?"
Rain nodded.
"Smoke. Blood. Sulfur."
They followed it.
Over the hills. Through the ash.
And as the sun dipped low, they came to the edge of a burned chapel.
Blackened stone. Melted glass.
And standing there, basking in it, arms stretched like a messiah…
Was Threxil.
The burned chapel loomed like a tomb from another world — twisted stone, melted stained glass, skeletal arches groaning against the wind. The Ashlands whispered death with every gust. The sky wept soot.
And in the middle of it all stood Threxil.
He was taller than any man should be — gaunt, blackened like obsidian, with ribs carved open to reveal an inferno inside. His arms were wrapped in iron bands seared into his flesh, and flames crawled through the cracks of his charred skin like worms made of hellfire. His face was just a skull — no lips, no eyes, just teeth and heat behind a melted hood.
He didn't move. Just grinned.
"Took you long enough."
Rain's hand went to his sword.
Oni said nothing.
Threxil took a step forward, and with it, the ground sizzled. The chapel behind him cracked.
"You're Oni and Rain, yeah?" he rasped. His voice sounded like smoke through bone. "The kids with the famous mommy?"
Neither answered.
"Ohhh," Threxil chuckled. "Right. You don't like jokes about family right now, do you?"
He extended one skeletal arm — a necklace of scorched teeth dangling from his wrist.
"Want to guess which one of these was hers?"
That was it.
Oni didn't roar. Didn't scream. He just vanished in a blink — and slammed into Threxil like a meteor, both of them crashing through the wall of the chapel in a violent explosion of stone and fire.
Rain followed.
Inside the chapel, the fire was still alive — a blaze that never died, twisting and licking the ceiling. Dozens of corpses were melted into the walls. Some were praying. Others had their mouths wide open in final screams.
Threxil burst out of the rubble laughing — half his chest crushed in, but reforming instantly, the fire inside stitching him back together.
"YES!" he howled. "FUCKING YES! LET'S DANCE, YOU LITTLE SHITS!"
Oni lunged again — claws raking for his throat — but Threxil ducked low and drove his elbow into Oni's gut with enough force to lift him off the ground. Bones cracked.
Rain was already mid-air, sword gleaming — and slashed downward.
Threxil caught the blade with his bare hand.
"Nice swing," he hissed, the fire in his palm flaring and melting the edge of the sword. "But you're not your mommy."
Rain didn't hesitate. He twisted his wrist and yanked the sword free, dragging Threxil's molten palm with it. Flesh tore. A hiss. Steam.
Threxil staggered — and grinned wider.
"You're gonna make this fun."
As they clashed, memories bled into the chapel like ghosts.
"They called me cursed," Threxil muttered, ducking under Oni's fist. "Said I was unclean. A sinner."
(FLASHBACK)A village. A temple. Torches raised high. A man — Threxil, younger — bound to a stake. His own family lighting the fire.
"So they burned me. Alive. Screaming like pigs."
He slammed Oni into a pillar. It shattered.
"Yatari found my ashes. She whispered something into the dark."
He turned to Rain.
"Want to know what it was?"
Rain lunged — his sword sank into Threxil's shoulder, but Threxil didn't flinch.
"'You weren't cursed. You were chosen.'"
Then he exploded.
A shockwave of fire erupted from his body, blasting the boys backward into opposite walls. The flames burned cold — like death wearing heat as a mask.
Rain hit the floor coughing, flames clinging to his coat. Oni stood — his body trembling.
But it wasn't pain.
It was rage.
Oni's eyes pulsed silver. His arms bulged. Muscles tearing, reforming. Something beneath the skin — a different shape — was trying to get out.
He stepped forward. Not like a boy.
Like a predator.
"You like pain?" Oni growled, voice deeper now. "Good."
He vanished again — but this time, it wasn't speed.
It was instinct.
He moved like a beast.
Threxil barely blocked the next strike — claws ripping into his ribs, black blood spraying. Oni didn't stop — one slash, two, three — tearing, ripping, chewing through molten flesh like paper.
Rain circled wide. Sword still glowing. He muttered something — a spell?
No.
A name.
"Mother."
He charged — blade angled for the neck. Threxil turned to parry—
Too late.
SLASH.
Rain's sword severed half of Threxil's jaw — flame spewed from the wound like a geyser, shrieking as it hit the ceiling.
Threxil howled.
"I'LL GUT YOU BOTH!"
"Do it," Oni snarled. "We'll carve your fucking heart out while it's still beating."
The chapel was a furnace now. The walls had collapsed. Fire everywhere. Smoke thicker than blood.
Threxil was falling apart — one arm gone, flames leaking from his mouth, skull cracked open.
But he wouldn't die.
"Yatari will eat your souls," he coughed. "You think I'm the worst? I'm the weakest."
Rain stabbed him through the spine.
Oni grabbed his head.
And together — one pulling, one twisting — they ripped it off.
The fire went out.
Just like that.
Threxil's body crumpled. Head still smiling. Flames curling out of his eyes.
Oni dropped it to the ground.
"One down."
Rain didn't speak.
Ash swirled like snow as the heat finally began to die.
Oni stood still, the last drops of Threxil's molten essence dripping from his claws. His chest heaved with deep, slow breaths—rage still churning inside, barely contained beneath his charred skin. Across from him, Rain slowly pulled his blade free from the blackened earth, face blank… but his knuckles were white.
They stared at the spot where Threxil's ruined form had disintegrated into nothing but soot and crackling bone shards.
And then Oni whispered, so low it almost got lost in the wind:
"We're coming, Mother."
Rain didn't reply, but he didn't need to.
He looked up. The sky was still black with smoke.
The hunt was far from over.
Their journey to the next target was not long, but every step felt like a descent into hell.
Gone were the black trees and burning skies of the Ashlands. Now, the ground hardened into jagged iron plates bolted to the flesh of the earth. The air reeked of rust, oil, and blood. Towering monoliths of warped steel loomed overhead, chained to one another by massive iron links that groaned with every wind-blown creak.
The Iron Maw.
This was his domain.
A place where even the sky looked tortured — smoke funneled endlessly upward through broken chimneys, casting long shadows across shattered statues of celestials impaled on hooks.
Rain's boots echoed on a twisted catwalk as they moved forward.
Then the sound came.
Clink… clank… clink… clank…
The sound of dragging chains.
They rounded the corner — and stopped.
He stood there in the clearing below. A monster of steel and sinew, blind but seeing everything. Karnyx.
His body was fused with metal—bolts hammered through his spine, jagged plates stitched into his flesh with rusted wire. His jaw was torn open, hanging slack, held apart by hooked chains fastened to his temples. No eyes—just two blood-soaked screws where his sockets should be.
Chains. So many chains. Miles of them, dragging behind him like a writhing serpent pit — some bound to corpses, others to still-living victims twitching and moaning with hollowed-out throats.
Karnyx tilted his head to the sound of their footsteps.
Then he smiled.
"I heard the fire go out," he rasped, voice like grinding gears. "Did my brother scream when you gutted him, little worms?"
Rain said nothing.
Oni stepped forward. "You're next."
Karnyx chuckled. A sound like broken glass spinning in a blender.
"Oh, how precious. Still bleeding for Mommy? Let me guess… you think she's waiting for you?"
"She's screaming, little demons."
"But she won't be for long. Yatari's turning her into something beautiful. Something… obedient."
Rain's blade was out in a second.
Oni didn't wait.
Oni rushed first, claws out, eyes flaring. Karnyx jerked his head sharply, and a half-dozen chains snapped forward like whips.
CRACK!
One wrapped around Oni's torso mid-air, pulling him to the ground like a bear trap snapping shut. Another slammed across his back, ripping open flesh and scattering blood across the metal floor.
Rain darted in next, blade flashing with momentum and fury. He slashed down hard toward Karnyx's side—metal met metal.
CLANG!
Karnyx barely moved. He turned his torso—slow, deliberate—and raised one massive arm wrapped in chains. With a grunt, he brought it down.
Rain parried—but the force knocked him to the floor, his shoulder dislocating with a sickening pop.
"You're not warriors," Karnyx snarled. "You're meat with magic. Screaming meat!"
He tugged one chain.
Behind him, one of the still-living victims moaned in agony. Their mouth opened wide—but instead of a voice, Karnyx's own scream tore out of their throat, multiplied a hundred times over as each chained soul echoed it.
A fucking choir of the damned.
Oni roared, demonic energy flooding through him. His pupils narrowed into slits. His muscles swelled. The berserker was waking up.
"DON'T—" Rain shouted, clutching his shoulder.
Too late.
Oni lunged again, wild and snapping—biting. He tore through one chain, slashing through two more. His body was a blur, but his mind was fracturing. Karnyx laughed, backing away like a predator toying with its prey.
"Yes! Let it in! Let the beast off its leash!"
"What do you think you'll find at the end of this trail, cub? Your mother? No… no, you'll find her bones."
He lashed out.
Two chains wrapped around Oni's neck and lifted him off the ground.
The pressure tightened—spikes along the inner links dug into his throat.
Oni clawed, gurgled—but the blood dripping from his mouth wasn't his own anymore. Something else was trying to surface.
Karnyx dragged Oni closer. Inches from his hideous face.
"You know what I used to be?" he growled. "A jailer. Before Yatari, I worked pits—tortured prisoners in the deep holes of the war camps. They made me kill children. Break them."
"I hated it… at first."
"Then I realized: pain is the only truth."
"Yatari showed me how to become the pain."
He slammed Oni to the ground. The catwalk cracked beneath him.
Rain lunged again. Dislocated shoulder and all, he stabbed Karnyx in the thigh. Steel met flesh—this time it dug deep.
Karnyx shrieked. One chain lashed out and ripped Rain backward into a pillar.
BAM!
Rain crumpled, coughing blood.
"I'll take your bones and use them to whip the next runts that come looking," Karnyx hissed.
"And your mother? She'll forget your names before Yatari's done peeling her soul apart."
That did it.
The last chain snapped—not Karnyx's—but inside Oni.
His mouth opened wide, fangs bared.
He howled.
The sound wasn't human. It wasn't even demon.
It was feral. A sound that cracked metal. The Iron Maw trembled.
Oni surged forward, all chains tearing from his flesh. His body began to shift—his fingers lengthened into claws, his back arched, and eyes blazed gold.
This wasn't berserk anymore.
This was primal.
Karnyx recoiled—not out of fear, but anticipation. The sound Oni made was no longer a scream. It was a war cry dredged up from the depths of some ancient abyss.
Veins blackened and pulsed beneath Oni's skin, his muscles expanding. His hands split open at the knuckles as his claws grew jagged and curved. His spine cracked, contorting with each breath, until it arched like a wolf mid-lunge.
"YESSS," Karnyx bellowed, arms outstretched. "THAT'S IT, LITTLE MONSTER! SHOW ME THE FUCKING FANGS!"
He whipped his chain forward—aiming to crush Oni's skull.
But this time, Oni didn't dodge.
He caught the chain mid-swing.
And ripped it from Karnyx's arm.
RIIIIIIP!
The metal-stitched flesh along Karnyx's forearm peeled off like wet bark. Bone, muscle, wire — all exposed.
"You little shit—"
Before the sentence could finish, Oni was on him.
Claw met rib.
Oni drove his hand into Karnyx's gut, fingers plunging deep, then yanked upward in a savage arc. Blood sprayed across the iron walls like a ruptured fire hydrant. Karnyx's scream wasn't just pain—it was humiliation.
He swung with his remaining chains, flailing blindly, but Oni was too fast now. The beast within him moved like a shadow soaked in murder. Each chain Karnyx cast was torn apart, one by one, until the demon warlord stood half-naked, twitching with severed limbs and dripping organs.
"You think this is over?!" Karnyx hissed. "She's already GONE. You're too fucking LATE!"
Blood trickled down Rain's chin as he staggered to his feet, shoulder re-socketed by sheer will and blunt force trauma. He gripped his sword tighter.
His vision blurred — not from pain, but from rage so intense it began warping the edges of reality.
He didn't charge in screaming.
He walked.
Slow. Deliberate. Like Death collecting a name.
Karnyx turned too late.
Rain disappeared—then reappeared behind him mid-swing.
SHLUNK!
The blade sliced through Karnyx's spine diagonally, from lower hip to upper shoulder, in one clean motion. His body twitched, half-severed, falling to one knee.
But Rain wasn't finished.
"You want a scream?" Rain said, voice low. "Here's one."
He spun the blade in his palm—and rammed it into Karnyx's mouth, driving it through the base of his skull and out the back.
Silence.
Then a wet gurgle.
Karnyx tried to move.
Rain kicked him forward—driving the blade deeper as the celestial collapsed on all fours, choking on his own tongue.
Oni stood over him, breathing heavy, covered in blood—none
Karnyx's body came apart like rotten cloth, limbs detaching, spine snapping, flesh unraveling.
Chains collapsed in a pool of black blood and twitching metal.
The Iron Maw was silent.
Oni fell to his knees, his breath ragged. The beast inside him retreated—just a little—but it left claw marks on his mind. He was different now. That boundary… it had been broken.
Rain stood still for a moment, watching the blood soak into the floor, then whispered:
"Two down…"
Their heads turned toward the horizon.
A scream echoed in the far distance.
Not one of pain.
But laughter.
It was thick. Wet. Hungering.
The wind howled through the Iron Maw, echoing the violence that had just unfolded. Rain pulled his sword free from Karnyx's crushed skull with a sickening shlurk, the chain-clad corpse now just twitching meat.
They didn't say anything for a while.
There was no point.
They both felt it. A shift in the air. The scent of ash and rot trailing from the next nightmare. It came from the south—a sunless trench that no map marked. The Glutton Pit.
Oni wiped the blood off his face and stood. His eyes were sharper now. Hungrier.
He didn't feel like a boy anymore.
"Three left before her."
"No," Rain corrected him coldly. "Four."
They turned away from the corpse of the Chainhowler and began their descent into madness.
The world changed the deeper they went.
Rocks became bone.
The earth turned wet and sticky.
The air… wasn't air. It was breath. Hot, foul, and alive. Flies danced in thick clouds around pools of bile and bloated corpses — some demon, some beast, and some still fucking breathing.
The pit itself yawned before them like a living mouth — ringed with teeth carved from stone and bones. The walls pulsed. Groaned. Somewhere, deep inside, something chewed.
"This has to be it," Rain muttered, covering his mouth from the stench.
"You feel that?" Oni asked. "Like we're being… watched."
Then came the voice.
Or rather, voices.
"Fffffresh ones…"
"Mmmmh, two bites."
"No. One for tongue. One for guts."
"Let's taste them… slow…"
The pit split open.
And Zarrok rose.
He was obscene. Taller than both brothers combined, but hunched like an ape. His belly was a grotesque face, mouth gaping wide enough to swallow a horse. Dozens of smaller mouths lined his shoulders, arms, legs — each snapping and drooling independently.
His skin looked like rotting meat, pulsing with black veins. His eyes were bloodshot and bulbous, and in one hand, he held a spine, fresh and still twitching.
"You're late," Zarrok gurgled through his stomach-mouth. "She screamed for hours. They made me wait. Made me watch. I begged to eat her soul first."
Rain froze.
Oni did not.
He charged, claws bared.
Zarrok moved faster than anything that bloated should.
He dropped to all fours and launched himself forward like a cannonball of flesh. Oni slammed into him with full force — claws sinking into his shoulder — only for Zarrok to laugh and bite Oni's arm with a second mouth that opened from his back.
Blood sprayed.
"You taste like rage," Zarrok slurred. "Like raw meat. Delicious."
Rain lunged in, sword arcing for Zarrok's throat.
He caught it. With his teeth.
CRUNCH.
Rain's blade shattered, half of it swallowed instantly.
"You should've brought a bigger sword, pretty boy."
Zarrok vomited bile in a wide arc, melting the bone walls around them. Oni threw Rain out of the way, his own arms smoking from the acid.
"FUCKING DIE!" Oni screamed.
He leapt again — this time clawing at Zarrok's eyes — but Zarrok spun, using his bloated arm to smash Oni into the rock wall.
Then he paused.
Sniffed the air.
Licked his lips.
"Your blood," he said. "It's old. Ancient. There's a beast in you."
"Let me EAT it."
Zarrok remembered the chains.
He remembered the cage.
Buried under rock for centuries, punished by his own kind. They called him unclean. A glutton. A freak.
They threw scraps down to mock him — fingernails, broken bones, still-warm babies.
But he waited.
Then Yatari came.
She looked into the hole and said, "You still breathing?"
And then she dropped an entire village in after him.
He ate everyone. He didn't even ask why.
He didn't need a reason.
Oni clawed his way up, blood-soaked but furious.
He lunged again, teeth bared — but Zarrok expected it this time.
Zarrok opened the main mouth — the gaping chasm that split his body in two — and tried to devour Oni whole.
Rain, battered and weaponless, acted.
He shoved one of the nearby corpses into the pit-mouth mid-bite.
It bit down — and choked.
Oni slid out, covered in gore.
"Use that," Rain hissed, tossing him a broken chain from the pit.
Oni wrapped it around his claws.
"Let's cut this bastard open.
Zarrok roared. Three mouths screamed "SHUT UP!" while two laughed.
"She's still screaming, you know! Your mother—tastes like regret!"
That was it.
Rain tackled him.
Bare-handed.
He drove his thumbs into Zarrok's eye. Zarrok screamed — not in pain, but joy.
"YEEEESSSS!! GIVE ME HATE!"
Oni slashed open one of the belly-mouths — GORE ERUPTED — and a half-digested demon corpse spilled out.
Oni didn't stop.
He kept slashing.
Rain tore his way out of Zarrok's grip, face smeared in black bile, grabbed a shard of his broken sword, and stabbed it through one of the throat-mouths.
Zarrok howled.
And finally—fell.
The Pit shuddered.
Zarrok's mouths twitched.
But he was still breathing.
Too hurt to fight. But not dead.
"We have to kill him," Oni said.
"No. We can't."
Rain turned to his brother, eyes wide.
"If we keep pushing like this… we'll lose ourselves. Look at you."
Oni's claws were still extended. His jaw still half-shifted.
He didn't deny it.
Zarrok gurgled laughter.
"Run, little cubs. Mommy's waiting…"
They turned and left the Glutton Pit.
For now.
But when they came back…
They'd bring hell with them.