The tires screamed first, a high-pitched wail that skipped across the asphalt of the Shinjuku crossing. Then came the dull, heavy thuds of metal meeting metal. Four cars crumpled into a jagged chain of glass and steam, but the air remained strangely still around the center of the intersection.
A boy stood there. He couldn't have been more than sixteen. His black hair was a matted nest, and his face was a roadmap of thin, silver scars that didn't move when he breathed. He wasn't looking at the wreckage. He was looking at nothing at all.
Three officers moved in, boots crunching on shattered headlight glass. They kept their hands near their belts, shoulders hunched in that universal posture of men trying to look bigger than they felt.
"Hey, kid," the lead officer said. His voice was forced, the pitch too high. "What's your name? You hurt?" He reached out, a tentative gesture meant to guide the boy toward the curb.
The boy's eyes dropped to the hand on his uniform. He didn't flinch. He slowly tilted his head back, locking eyes with the policeman.
In a heartbeat, the hazel in his pupils was swallowed. A thick, viscous black flooded his eyes, turning them into two holes in the world. He grabbed the officer's wrist. It wasn't a human grip; it was the clamping force of a hydraulic press.
The officer let out a strangled cry. The other two lunged, grabbing the boy's shoulders, pulling with their entire body weight. The boy didn't even sway. He was an anchor.
"I. Am. The Oni," the boy whispered. The voice didn't come from his throat. It felt like a vibration in the officer's own skull, a dry, rasping hiss of ancient air. "And I have come to destroy you all."
Crack.
The sound of the wrist snapping was loud enough to carry over the idling engines. The boy let out a single, sharp bark of a laugh—jagged and wrong—and then he simply wasn't there anymore. He vaulted, a blur of shadow that hit the side of a glass skyscraper and vanished into the upper smog.
The phone hummed on a mahogany desk. A hand, manicured and steady, picked it up.
"Hello?"
Shinjo stood by the floor-to-ceiling window of his Tokyo office. He looked like the city itself—polished, expensive, and cold. His black suit was tailored to the millimeter, and his round glasses caught the afternoon light, masking his eyes.
"Yes. Who is this?"
"Sir, I'm the investigator. Regarding the man from the high-rank dungeons."
Shinjo's posture didn't change, but his fingers tightened on the receiver.
"Kurozawa?"
"Yes, sir. He's in Kyoto. Kamishichiken Street. I'm sending the coordinates now."
Shinjo's glasses flickered with a brief, white HUD display as the data synced. A thin smile touched his lips. It wasn't a happy expression; it was the look of a man who had finally found a missing piece of a puzzle he intended to break.
"Understood. Go ahead."
He set the phone down. The click of the receiver felt final. He opened his desk drawer. Inside, resting on velvet, were two identical short-barreled pistols. Gold snakes coiled around the black steel of the barrels, their emerald eyes glinting.
"I'm coming, brother," Shinjo whispered. He checked the action on the first slide. It was silent.
The Oni-host walked through the stagnant air of the tomb. He held a sphere of captured flame, the light flickering against walls choked with thick, grey cobwebs and piles of bone so old they looked like polished porcelain.
He didn't check for traps. He didn't care.
His boot hit a pressure plate. A mechanism hissed—a sound of oiled gears—and a massive iron pendulum swung from the darkness. The spiked head buried itself in the side of the boy's skull with a wet thunk.
He didn't stop walking. Blood welled up, thick and dark, staining his collar. He just laughed, a harsh, grating sound, and reached up to slide the metal out of his head as if it were a stray hair.
A moment later, a stone slab weighing several tons dropped from the ceiling. The impact shook the floor, pinning him flat.
He didn't scream. He simply pushed. The stone groaned and rolled aside. The boy stood up, his spine popping back into place, and smiled at the dark.
He began to run. He was a shadow now, a blur that triggered every trap in the hall—arrows, poison darts, falling blades—shredding them with his own body as he bypassed the puzzles of the dead.
He reached the final hall. The altar was a slab of cracked stone, stained a deep, permanent rust-color.
"Your soul will be mine," the boy hissed. "It will not be for the Monarch."
He looked at the engraving on the stone. The Altar of the First Vessel. To breach the gate, a sacrifice of life. He drew a knife and dragged it across his palm. The blood that hit the stone wasn't red; it was black, like ink.
The chamber began to scream. A swirling blue light tore open on the far wall, a rift in reality itself. White lightning arced from the ceiling, illuminating the skeletons on the floor in strobing flashes. A gale-force wind roared out of the portal, carrying a storm of ancient scrap—broken spears, rusted swords, jagged shards of steel.
The metal rained down, impaling the boy over and over. He stood in the center of the storm, unmoving, as smoke poured from his mouth and nostrils.
"Flesh to Vessel, Soul to Void—Naraku Hōkai!"
The smoke surged into the blue light. The wind died. The lightning faded into a low hum. The boy opened his eyes, the wounds in his chest and arms sealing shut, pushing the metal shards out of his skin like splinters.
"I'm coming for your soul, Lord of the Abyss."
He stepped into the circle. The world snapped shut behind him.
Renji lay on the couch, his eyes heavy. The house was too quiet. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw his father's face or the blood on the floor.
[WARNING!]
[WARNING!]
The red text burned into his retinas. He sat up, his heart hammering against his ribs.
"What now?" he rasped.
[Intrusion Detected. A hostile entity has activated the Ancient Void Gate.]
Renji stood up, pacing the small room. "The soul seal? You said that was locked."
[The Soul of the Abyss Lord. The relic is being breached. Someone has bypassed the protocols. They are heading for the Hall.]
[You are the Guardian, Renji Kurozawa. The soul belongs to the inheritor. If it is taken, the world falls. Your System is bound to this.]
Renji paused, his hand gripping the back of a chair until the wood groaned. "If they got in that easily... they aren't human."
[Portal Authorizing...]
[Transfer Initiated.]
"Wait, Hikari is—"
The room vanished.
The sensation was a crushing weight on the bridge of his nose, a sudden, sickening drop through a vacuum. Renji hit the ground hard.
He stayed down for a second, his head throbbing. The air didn't smell like Kyoto. it smelled like sulfur and burnt hair. He opened his eyes and pushed himself up.
The ground was a cracked, scorching expanse of red earth. Everywhere he looked, arcs of violet lightning danced between jagged obsidian rocks. The landscape was a graveyard of giants—massive, scorched skeletons and the rusted remains of armies that had died before the world was mapped.
[Welcome to the Soul-Scorched Catacombs.]
Renji drew the Obsidian Greatsword. The heat was a physical pressure against his skin. Somewhere in the red haze ahead, he could hear a rhythmic, grating laugh.