The air didn't just grow cold; it curdled.
Behind Renji, the space between the ruins of the city and the sky rippled. Something was tearing through from the underside of reality. Eight shapes pulled themselves out of his shadow—not with a flash of light, but with the wet, grinding sound of stone being crushed. They were towering silhouettes, armored in plates of matte-black shadow that seemed to drink the red glare of the sky.
"What's that!" a hunter screamed, stumbling back.
The shadows didn't breathe. They didn't wait.
"Eliminate them," Renji said.
Seven of the figures vanished. They didn't run; they simply occupied a different space, reappearing in the center of the demon swarm. The first contact was a dull, heavy thud followed by the spray of black ichor as a shadow-blade halved a winged demon.
Renji kept the eighth back. A beast of a soldier, encased in aetherite plate that looked like it had been forged in the heart of a dead star. A spiked helm hid everything but the two pinpricks of emerald light where eyes should be.
"Venerated Knight," Renji rasped, his lungs burning with every word. "Follow me. To the King."
Oni didn't move his feet. He simply opened his palms. The street beneath them groaned, then buckled. Concrete slabs, rusted rebar, and abandoned sedans rose into the air, caught in a tide of purple gravity. He didn't throw them; he launched the entire landscape at Renji, a tidal wave of the city's own bones.
Renji dove into the mess. He pushed his mana into his legs, the Voidmancer energy turning his movements into jagged, frame-skipping leaps. He bypassed a flying bus, pivoted off a suspended girders, and drove a fist toward Oni's temple.
The Demon King didn't even shift his gaze from the palace he was building out of the sea. He reached out and caught Renji's fist.
The collision was a dry, cracking sound that resonated in the teeth of everyone within five blocks. Steam and grey smoke hissed from their locked hands, the smell of scorched leather and ozone filling the gap between them.
"Rubbish," Oni sneered.
His eyes were flat, hard with the memory of Zhar's blood on the palace floor. He didn't punch; he drove his palm into Renji's solar plexus.
The force was astronomical. Renji felt his ribs flex to the breaking point before he was launched. He hit the air like a stone skipped across a lake, finally snapping a hand out to catch the edge of the obsidian palace. He skidded along the black stone, his boots leaving a trail of sparks, and stopped.
"Your turn," Renji coughed.
The Knight was already there. It moved like a weightless mountain. It drove a kick into Oni's ribs that sounded like a sledgehammer hitting a steel vault.
Oni stumbled. It was only three steps, but the ground shattered under his boots to compensate for the momentum. He reached down, brushing a smudge of grey dust from his side. His face didn't change, but the muscle in his jaw was working.
"Not bad," Oni admitted. The words were a low growl. "Not bad."
He sprinted.
The three of them became a blur of static and sonic booms. It was a rhythmic, punishing geometry—Oni blocking a sword-stroke from the Knight while catching Renji's ankle mid-air. Every missed strike hit the buildings around them, turning the ward into a graveyard of falling brick. Oni was a machine of refined violence; he caught the Knight's shoulder and hurled the massive soldier into a bent structural beam with a sound that shook the foundations of the city.
Renji vanished into the void, reappearing behind Oni's neck, his leg cocked for a killing blow.
Oni caught it without looking.
"Useless tricks," the Demon King growled.
He spun Renji like a discarded rag, launched him into the red clouds, and then met him on the way down with a kick that sent the Mortal King straight into the asphalt.
Below, the ward had become a slaughterhouse.
The Obsidian Academy students and the Special Hunters were being drowned. For every demon the seven Shadow Soldiers turned to ash, ten more dived from the clouds. The air was a thick soup of screams and the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of military rifles that did nothing but irritate the skin of the invaders.
A group of police officers, their uniforms scorched and torn, tried to drag a wounded civilian behind a barricade. A demon landed among them. It didn't bite; it simply walked through them, its serrated blade leaving a trail of red mist. The ground was no longer stone; it was a slick, dark mire.
Renji pushed himself up from the crater. His hands were shaking. The green flame of his aura was thin, guttering like a candle in a draft. Clearing Gehenna had been a debt he was paying now in blood and exhaustion.
Oni landed ten feet away. His battle-robes were shredded, hanging off his frame in tatters. Beneath the silk, his body was a nightmare of corded, hyper-defined muscle—a six-pack carved from obsidian and a chest that didn't seem to rise or fall with breath.
He didn't speak. He just moved.
He was faster now. Merciless. He traded a blow with the Knight, shattering the aetherite gauntlet, then pivoted to hammer Renji into the dirt before the Void blast could leave his fingertips.
It was an endurance test that Renji was losing. He felt the reddish sword slip from his numb fingers, clattering onto the debris. The Knight tried to intervene, but Oni reached out, grabbed a slab of the obsidian palace, and used it like a mallet to bury the Shadow Soldier into the rubble.
Renji sank to one knee.
Blood ran from a gash on his forehead, stinging his left eye and mixing with the grit on his teeth. His power flickered. The world was beginning to tilt.
Oni walked toward him. His shadow fell over Renji, long and cold. He raised his hand, and the air itself seemed to bleed into a wicked, curved blade of hellfire.
"This ends," Oni spat.
He drove the blade down, a straight line aimed at Renji's heart.
A shape blurred into the space between them.
Elder Kael.
The man didn't use a shield or a spell. He used his chest.
"No!" Renji's roar was a wet, broken sound.
The hellfire blade punched through Kael's sternum. But the momentum didn't stop. The force of the strike was so absolute that the sword passed through the Elder's body and continued, the tip burying itself deep into Renji's own chest.
Kael coughed. A spray of red hit Renji's face, warm and smelling of copper. The Elder looked down, his eyes glazed but focused with a final, fierce clarity.
"The Obsidian Star..." Kael whispered, the words bubbling through the blood in his throat. "Remains loyal... to the King."
His grip on Renji's shoulder loosened. "Live, Renji. You must..."
Kael's body went limp, sliding off the blade like a discarded coat. Renji staggered, his vision turning to grey wool as the blood loss hit his brain. He collapsed into the dirt, his eyes rolling back.
Oni stood over them. The silence was absolute. He pulled the sword free, the hellfire instantly consuming Kael's remains until nothing but grey ash blew away in the wind.
He looked at Renji—prone, bleeding, and silent.
Oni raised the dripping blade high, the red light of the sky reflecting in the steel as he prepared to drive it through the Mortal King's throat.
(To be continued...)