Location: Sunken Citadel Beneath the Yangtze Rift 8:12 AM
The silence after the Lord of Ghostly Calamity's death didn't last. Not even for a breath.
Something ancient groaned beneath the riverbed. The mud cracked like breaking bones. The sky above twisted with blackened clouds that refused to move. A scream one that didn't belong to anything living rattled through the citadel ruins.
Katzuki stood still. His ribs still broken. His blood still running like ink. But something was calling… deeper.
The Plague Doctor moved beside him, his mask twitching subtly, like it could hear. "There's something below," he said, voice low and vibrating. "A cage. A throne. Something… alive."
Katzuki said nothing, but his eyes glowing with that hateful, golden fire turned toward the chasm torn into the ground where the Lord had been swallowed by his own dying power. There was something underneath, and it wasn't finished.
The two descended.
The wound in the earth led into a corridor of rotting flesh and bone, a forgotten tomb older than time, a place never meant for mortals to see. Faces human faces were embedded in the walls, mouths open in screams, forever silent. The floor was soft, spongy. Like walking on old muscle.
At the end of the corridor, the air turned cold. Too cold.
A massive altar stood before them, carved from the skeletons of giants, draped in banners stitched from human skin. And on that altar, breathing, twitching, laughing was a thing neither of them had seen in centuries.
The Plague Doctor froze. "It's him."
Katzuki narrowed his eyes. "You mean…?"
Urz Gha'al.
The Blood-Father.
The Architect of Sin.
He sat if such a thing could be called sitting on a throne of twisting iron fused with living corpses. His form was neither man nor god. A writhing cathedral of limbs, mouths, and burning sigils. Horns crowned his head like an inverted halo, and his face oh, gods his face was a mirror, reflecting your worst sin back at you, screaming it into your soul.
"You've come so far," the thing smiled, though no mouth moved. His voice scraped inside their heads. "But all gods fall… and now you bow to me."
Katzuki unsheathed his blade, blood already dripping off its jagged edge. "We didn't come to bow. We came to end you."
The Plague Doctor's mask split open, not physically but spiritually. An aura of death poured from him, thick and choking. The ghost light in his sockets screamed, and the dagger in his hand drank that scream in full.
Then Urz Gha'al moved.
Faster than thunder, he exploded forward, a tower of limbs slamming Katzuki into a bone pillar. The impact crushed the stone and his shoulder on contact. Blood spurted, and the bones snapped with wet, meaty cracks.
The Plague Doctor hurled himself into the air, hurling six vials in a circle. They burst into clouds of screaming ash, shielding him. His dagger glowed, then split into two, each blade hissing like vipers in heat.
Urz Gha'al roared. It wasn't a sound it was a command. The walls bled. The ceiling spat out crawling spine-beasts. The floor screamed and grew mouths that bit at the doctor's feet.
But the Plague Doctor moved with surgical fury a blur of death, slicing tendons, nerves, and eyes. His blade ripped through reality itself, each cut severing something deeper than flesh souls.
Katzuki rose, his left arm hanging limp, shoulder dislocated. But his other hand gripped the hilt of his blade, the gold-veined armor singing with dark harmony.
He roared.
And charged.
The sounds crashed together in a chaotic symphony steel slamming into steel with bone-jarring force, bodies hurled through broken stone, and flesh ripped open with savage precision. Sparks burst like fireflies in the smoke-choked air as blades rang out, walls crumbled beneath the weight of brute strength, and blood sprayed in heavy arcs with every tearing strike. The battlefield was a living storm of violence, echoing with the raw sounds of war at its most unforgiving..
The battle turned into a nightmare symphony.
Katzuki's sword embedded itself into Urz Gha'al's back, sending veins of golden plaguefire spiraling across the demon-god's body. The beast shrieked, entire faces across its form melting into melted wax. In return, Urz slammed him with a spike-tipped limb, ripping open his stomach and spilling entrails onto the bone-soaked floor.
Katzuki didn't fall.
He laughed.
The Plague Doctor landed beside him. "He's weakening."
"No," Katzuki growled, voice gurgling with blood. "We're consuming him."
Then came the final act.
The Plague Doctor stabbed both blades into the altar. The mask's eyes flared. And from it, spirits screamed upward a torrent of souls bound by plague and rage. They swarmed Urz Gha'al, entering his body, burning it from the inside.
Katzuki leapt, sword reversed, and drove it straight through Urz's skull down to the hilt.
"Die with your sins, beast."
The god shuddered, spasmed, and his entire form began to implode, twisting into a black sun of rotting matter, collapsing in on itself.
And then.
Silence.
Only the smell of blood and smoke remained.
Katzuki dropped to one knee, coughing viscera. The Plague Doctor knelt beside him, mask cracked, but still intact. "He's gone."
"No…" Katzuki whispered. "He was just a gatekeeper."
From behind the altar, a strange sound began a heartbeat, slow and not human. A circle of symbols on the floor began to glow.
The Plague Doctor turned. "Another seal…?"
Katzuki nodded grimly. His blood was still dripping. But his eyes burned brighter than ever.
"Then we keep going."
---To Be Continued…