The ground split open like a wound.

A wave of dark flame burst outward, rolling across the battlefield in rippling distortions. The molten stone hissed and collapsed, unable to withstand the sheer pressure of the heat.

And from the heart of that inferno

a giant silhouette began to rise.

The laughter came first deep, cracked, manic.

Then came the shape.

Bakuza.

But no longer the same man who fought them moments ago. His frame twisted, expanded, and burned. Crimson veins writhed beneath charred black skin, each pulsing rhythmically like molten arteries. His armor reformed on its own jagged obsidian plates with glowing cracks, the molten light bleeding through every gap.

His eyes twin black stars with cores of violent red burned into existence, staring through the haze.

When he spoke, his voice carried the tone of a furnace and void blended as one.

"Voidart: Crimson Void."

The technique itself "The Crimson Void" felt less like a name and more like a curse.

Each word that left his mouth melted the air.

Kaen staggered backward, covering his face from the heat.

"That's, insane…"

Rael clenched his fists, aura flaring in resistance.

"He's pulling the Shadefire straight from the hollow dimension!"

Bakuza grinned, tilting his head.

"You finally notice? Took you long enough."

He raised one clawed hand black flames swirling into a growing sphere that hummed like a dying star.

"Now burn for me."

The sphere detonated.

A flood of flame and shadow burst outward, a tide of chaos that turned stone into magma.

Before it could reach the others

a blinding flash of stormlight burst from the side.

Shigeo Motome had moved.

He stood on a floating shard of rock, eyes half-lidded, one glowing faintly, the left iris shining electric blue.

The world around him flickered with glowing strings of light, threads of potential weaving through every motion, every breath, every heartbeat.

A thousand invisible lines intersected between him and Bakuza calculations collapsing and reforming faster than sound.

Thousand Way: Predictive Web.

Shigeo whispered,

"Probability: 32 percent survival if I act alone… 74 if I redirect his flames back through his weak zone. 100 if Khael engages at the same instant."

The light around him sharpened.

Electric stormlines crawled up his arms, blending with the mental web of prediction.

He raised one hand.

"Echo art: Storm Circuit - Overclock."

Electric arcs converged around his body, amplifying his brain's reaction speed beyond normal limits. His voice deepened with intensity.

"Counter-path calculated."

He aimed toward the inferno.

"Thousand Way: Storm Dominoes!!"

In a single motion, hundreds of storm pillars erupted across the field, striking the molten ground and redirecting the voidflame's trajectory. The redirected blasts carved a path that avoided the wounded bending space and heat itself into a mirrored corridor of safety.

Khael, still catching his breath behind Lira's barrier, watched in silent awe.

"He just… rerouted the explosion."

Lira nodded, wiping sweat from her brow.

"That's Shigeo for you. The boy who calculates the impossible."

But even Shigeo's calm expression tightened as Bakuza emerged from the smoke, unscathed and grinning wider.

"Predict all you want," Bakuza growled, "but can you predict despair?"

The ground trembled. The Titan raised his burning hand toward the sky and the entire field darkened as if swallowed by his will alone.

Khael's eyes narrowed, his aura sparking faintly blue again.

He looked at Shigeo and nodded.

"You plan. I strike."

Shigeo met his gaze, threads of light crossing between them in the web.

"Just like we trained."

Then the storm began again lightning, fire, and void colliding in one blinding instant, as The Dragon Knight and The Crimson Hollow prepared to decide whose power would consume the world first.

"Wait… what's that?" Kaen's voice cracked, half question, half alarm.

All eyes snapped to the clearing. Where the horde had writhed a moment before, a single figure stood motionless, hands stained in shadow-blood. The silhouette was familiar bent, ragged, the porcelain mask missing more and more of its face. Kero.

He didn't move like someone looting a corpse. He moved like someone drinking the last warmth of a dying world.

Voidborn after voidborn slumped; their black ichor hissed as it touched his skin and then drained, leaving only ash. With each intake Kero's chest rose a fraction higher, the dark veins at his throat pulsing as if they were being pumped by some new heart.

Bakuza's grin thinned. For once his amusement had an edge of impatience. He watched Kero with an expression that mixed contempt and relief.

"Tsk, so you really used your resurrection." Bakuza's voice carried easily across the smoke. "After all this, you pull that trick? You can't resurrect more than once, Kero."

Kero's head tilted. In the light of the inferno his exposed eye glittered like a distant planet. He didn't look like a man drawing breath; he looked like a shadow stitching itself back together.

"I had to," Kero said quietly, and the words felt like the scrape of metal. "If you fell here, I'd be the next to be hunted. I will not let your ruin be the end."

There was something almost tender in the flatness of the sentence, an old loyalty bared like a cracked tooth. Bakuza barked a short, amused laughcruel and delighted.

"Revive me, then," he taunted. "Rise me from the wreckage and I'll give you a horizon worth dying for."

Kero's hands tightened until the void-blood shivered through his palms. His jaw worked. From where they watched, Shigeo's face went unreadable; his left iris flickered with that faint analytical glow.

(Probability spike: Kero's resurrection will grant Bakuza a 23% immediate increase in output and change the attack vector. If uncontained, cascade failure across frontline: 12%.) he thought not aloud. His mind was already knitting contingencies, rerouting Storm Dominoes and pruning vectors.

On the ridge, Rael and Kaen froze. Kaen's flame guttered as if wind had been sucked from it.

"He's siphoning the voidborn to feed the reanimation," Rael said, voice flat. "It's not pure healing. It's anchor-binding. He's stitching the Hollow back into flesh."

Kaen's fists clenched until his knuckles whitened. "If he finishes, Bakuza won't just get up. He'll come back bigger. What the hell is he"

Bakuza's laughter grew louder, a sound that tasted like metal. "Then watch," he said, and made as if to rise.

Kero did not hesitate. He pulled whatever life the field would give him into himself in a slow, terrible siphon. The remaining voidborn some wounded, some barely twitching convulsed; their darkness thinned, and from it Kero drew formless nourishment. The veins beneath his skin shivered and then glowed an obscene, hot violet.

With a single, exhaled sound that resembled both prayer and curse, Kero slammed his palms to his chest. The wound there, the place where the mask had once sat like a lid stitched itself, silk-thread black. His spine arched, and for a breath everyone held their own.

Then Kero staggered not with weakness but with something worse: clarity. The madness at the edge of his eyes narrowed into a blade. The cracked mask pieces fell, clinking onto stone. He looked at Bakuza and, with a voice that now carried two tones at once the human and the ruin said, "Stand, brother."

Bakuza rose as if pulled by a rope. He towered anew: taller, the obsidian plates rearranged into a thicker carapace, the crimson veins now pulsing like the bellows of a living engine. Where before there had been raw hunger there was now a hungry calculation. The Crimson Hollow breathed, and the air around it went cold-hot, as if winter and summer had decided to share the same body.

Shigeo's fingers tightened on the hilt of a fallen blade; his mind raced through a thousand recursions.

(New variable: Bakuza augmented by Kero's anchor = Hollow Amplification Level 1. Secondary effect: Kero's life thread now links Bakuza's return to Kero's own stability, cut the anchor and both collapse. Best chance: simultaneous strike at anchor node while Khael draws fire.)

He looked up and found Khael already moving. The Dragon Knight's teal glow had steadied into intent; his shoulders squared; the Dragonite form's last embers pulsed around him like a ready engine.

"Everyone, brace." Khael's voice didn't shout; it ordered, and it pulled. "Shigeo, fold the web redirect his anchors to the south. Kaen, Rael hold him in place. Lira, give me a clear lane. I'll cut the cord."

Shigeo's answer was immediate, calm as circuitry. "Route collapse in ninety frames. Kenji, assist me with wind channels. Saya reinforce Lira's shield."

Kenji, blood streaking his face from earlier blows, pushed himself up on shaking legs and grinned like a lunatic. "Finally. My favorite kind of mess."

Lira's fingers shone violet-white; she planted both palms and spun Barrier Thorn into a lattice that pushed the first wave of newly risen voidborn away. Saya's blight petals snapped and burned, carving small sanctuaries through which Shigeo's lines could thread.

Kero turned, eyes finding Khael, and for a single, small, human beat his expression cracked like light through glass.

"Don't make me choose," he said not pleading, but warning.

Khael looked at him with something like pity and iron both. "Then don't," he answered.

And as Shigeo's web tightened and lightning danced along the redirected vectors, Khael took one step forward, wings folding to gather every current, every rune across his chest flaring in response. The Dragonite energy coalesced around him not as roar but as blade.

The field drew in a breath so long it felt infinite, and everyone, burned, battered, trembling readied for the strike that would either sever the anchor or doom them all to an amplification that would swallow Tildaroot whole.

To be continue