The shadows could no longer swallow the mounting butchery.
Jin stepped over three fresh corpses, their blood spreading in thick ribbons across the polished stone tiles, just as the second squad rounded the blind corridor.
There was no time to hide the mess, and no need to.
The lead guard's eyes widened, his chest heaving as his jaw dropped to shout an alert. The cry died before it reached his tongue. A black kunai struck true, burying itself to the hilt in the back of his throat. The Devil collapsed like a marionette with severed strings, choking on iron and silence.
The remaining guards surged forward, their boots hammering the floor. They drew broad, rune-etched blades . Jin didn't break stride. His gait was steady, an unhurried walk through .
The first Devil threw his entire weight into a crushing overhead cleave. Jin tilted his chokutō by mere degrees. He didn't meet the mass head-on; he let the massive edge screech harmlessly down the flat of his blade, effortlessly redirecting the momentum into the stone floor. As the brute pitched forward off-balance, Jin's blade slid across the exposed neck in one seamless, rhythmic glide.
From the dying man's shadow, a second guard lunged with a short sword aimed at Jin's eye. Without looking, Jin pivoted his heel, caught the strike on his guard, and reversed his grip, driving steel up beneath the jawline until it scraped the roof of the skull.
He moved through the hallway like a master butcher parsing soft meat—efficient, detached, entirely lethal.
A high-pitched hiss cut through the air. On the open roof above, a sentry fired a crimson flare into the sky, bathing the courtyard in blood-red light.
The clock just ran out.
Deep within the fortress, the Head Captain's communication orb pulsed frantically with panicked, half-finished transmissions. The outer ring was silent. The inner ring was drowning in blood. The single-man invasion was no longer an infiltration; it was an open culling.
Jin kicked the corridor doors open and walked out into the courtyard.
Heavy, overlapping shields locked into place instantly. Dozens of frontline knights formed a suffocating steel perimeter, their enchanted plate gleaming under the courtyard braziers, while mages behind them wove defensive barriers. A textbook kill box.
Jin smoothly sheathed his sword. His fingers flashed in a blur of hand seals.
Tiger. Snake. Ram.
"Fire Style: Fireball Jutsu."
A colossal sphere of red-hot, condensed flame erupted from his mouth. It smashed into the mages' hastily raised barrier with the force of a solid warhead. The magical dome screeched, buckling violently under the thermal shockwave. Sweat poured down the mages' faces as the air turned to dry ash, their mana burning out just to keep the inferno from scorching them alive.
As the fireball shrank, the knights braced their shoulders, muscles tensing to charge the moment the smoke cleared.
Jin didn't give them that breath.
Before the embers even touched the stone, his hands dropped to his pouches. He whipped his arms outward, releasing a hailstail of dark steel that moved faster than the human eye could process.
The knights snapped their heavy shields forward. But Jin hadn't aimed for the shields.
Clang-clang-crack.
Mid-flight, the kunai struck each other at precise angles, deliberately ricocheting off one another. The altered trajectories curved viciously around the shield rims, embedding deep into throats, knee joints, and helmet visors. The frontline shattered instantly, drowning in their own blood.
They had lured jin here and it didn't look like it was doing them good.
From the surrounding balconies, high-tier mages stepped forward, weaving dozens of intricate, overlapping magic circles that illuminated the courtyard like a dying star.
Jin took a massive, chest-expanding breath, his hands locking into the final seal.
"Fire Style: Majestic Destroyer Flame."
The collision was cataclysmic. A tidal wave of pure, fire slammed dead-center into the concentrated bombardment of demonic mana. For a split second, the air compressed into dead silence—before the courtyard detonated.
The shockwave blew the balcony balustrades to powder. The sheer overpressure shattered stone, sending an omnidirectional ring of red fire, superheated shrapnel, and pulverized rock tearing through the courtyard. The heat instantly vaporized the moisture in the air, melting enchanted iron and halting approaching reinforcements .
Surviving guards scattered in sheer panic, but Jin was already moving. He cast a barrage of shuriken coated in residual flame with help of wind jutsu.
"Wind Style: Great Breakthrough."
The wind fed the scattered fire, whipping the embers into a roaring, courtyard-wide firestorm that began swallowing the adjacent wings of the estate.
Along the perimeter, civilian staff and non-combatants were already fleeing at supernatural speed. Devil society was fundamentally militaristic; they recognized an uncontainable catastrophe the moment the sky turned to fire.
As fresh heavy platoons funneled through the iron gates to contain the breach, the three tomoe in Jin's crimson eyes spun into a furious blur.
He didn't target a single mind. He blanketed the entire burning perimeter in a wide-area Genjutsu.
Perception fractured.
A squad leader screamed, driving his greatsword through the chest of the "intruder," only for the illusion to bleed away, revealing his lieutenant coughing blood onto his boots. Madness spread instantly. To every guard in the courtyard, their comrades wore Jin's face, Jin's eyes, and Jin's cold, pitiless smile.
The formation dissolved into frantic, fratricidal butchery. Soldiers wept and screamed as they hacked their own brothers apart, paralyzed by the terror that anyone breathing next to them was the killer.
Jin walked through the self-destructing mob without drawing his blade.
He moved between the sobbing, hallucinating Devils like a ghost, casually slapping paper tags onto breastplates, shoulders, and helmets.
He stepped out of the kill zone and snapped his fingers.
A rhythmic chain of concussive detonations tore through the courtyard, painting the scorched stone walls red and wiping the screams from the air.
Silence settled over the smoking ruin.
Most high-tier assassins would have bypassed the foot soldiers entirely, saving their reserves to strike directly at the Clan Head. Striking from the bottom up was an exhausting, bloody anomaly.
Why was Jin fighting this way? Perhaps it was simply a habit from his previous battles. Or perhaps it was his cruelty.
Jin had a colder calculation.
The Gremory Clan drew their dominance from the absolute, outlier power of Sirzechs. But the ancient House of Naberius drew its true power from its deep bench—a vast, militarized foundation of mid-to-high-tier combatants that gave the clan its political and military weight.
Jin wasn't just assassinating a target. He was methodically cutting the clan's legs out from underneath them, exterminating their foundation root and branch.
The smoke began to part, and the heavy, suffocating pressure of the true Naberius elites finally descended upon the courtyard.