Back on Egghead—
The smoke finally began to thin.
Shattered steel groaned. Broken lights sparked and hissed. Pieces of the lab's ceiling drifted down like glowing ash.
Six figures stood in the wreckage, shoulders rising and falling, eyes locked forward.
And from within the fading cloud... they walked out.
The Seraphim.
Unhurried. Unshaken. Flames burning steady on their backs, wings stretching slightly as they stepped over rubble and broken machines as if the earlier assault had been nothing more than a breeze.
Ryo felt his jaw tighten.
Beside him, Itsuki's claws flexed.
They didn't need to say anything.
They moved at the same instant.
Ryo and Itsuki shot forward, the ground cracking under the force of their launch as both vanished in blurs of motion, straight toward S-Wolf.
S-Wolf's eyes narrowed.
The green blood around his arms rippled, lifted, twisted—then hardened midair into dozens of razor-edged arrows.
With a single sweeping motion, he fired.
The lab filled with shrieking red streaks.
Ryo and Itsuki weaved through them at absurd speed—flickering in and out of sight, bolts of lightning and distorted air marking where they had just been. Blood arrows tore into walls, ceilings, shattered machinery—explosions of debris erupting behind them.
They reappeared at the same time, leaping upward.
Itsuki's claws glowed, venomous energy spiraling around his arms.
Ryo's sword ignited, black lightning crawling along the blade like living veins.
Itsuki: Tempest slash! Poison lotus!
Ryo: Shadow sever! Kurorai Ranzan!
They swung.
The air itself screamed.
A storm of black slashes exploded outward—Itsuki's compressed wind pressure layered with killing intent, Ryo's arcs forged from violent black lightning.
The blood arrows were erased.
Not deflected. Not broken.
Erased.
They were shredded into mist as the typhoon of slashes swallowed S-Wolf whole.
The Seraphim vanished inside the storm.
Shockwaves ripped through the lab, tearing more metal free, ripping floor panels from their foundations. The slashes overlapped, crossed, multiplied—so dense they looked like a living cage of darkness.
For several seconds, S-Wolf didn't even touch the ground.
Then the storm dropped.
S-Wolf's body pitched downward.
And Ryo and Itsuki were already there.
They appeared in front of him mid-fall and struck at the same instant.
A double impact.
Fist and claw drove into S-Wolf's gut.
The sound was not flesh.
It was steel splitting.
The Seraphim was launched like a cannonball, smashing across the room, skidding through rubble, slamming to a halt beside the others.
