No.
The thought didn't echo.
Time stretched.
Kouji stood frozen, knees locked, unable to scream, move, or even breathe. Every muscle in his body wanted to react — but something deep inside held the command hostage.
The children were just standing there, stunned, unaware of the string already in motion.
And then —
"Then I'll lend you a hand."
Kouji's vision snapped black, like someone dimmed the world.
When the light returned, everything felt wrong.
He moved without a thought, as if he'd possessed this power, since birth.
His feet were shrouded in black miasma, each step igniting a ripple of Kyokai through the cracked pavement. The space between him and the children vanished in a blink.
He landed in front of them, hand up, aura flaring like a wildfire.
Yorihito's string missed by inches.
It disintegrated on contact with the miasma.
Yorihito stumbled back, eyes wide. "What—what the hell—?"
Kouji looked down.
His legs still pulsed with darkness — like they weren't entirely his. The aura around his feet shimmered, unnatural. Alive.
Then his body shuddered.
From behind him — from his own shadow — something rose.
A creature.
Faceless.
Rising like smoke but shaped like a man draped in thorns and ash. Horns curled from the top of its head, but the face was a void, eyes flickering yellow in the middle of the silhouette.
It didn't move.
It just stood there behind Kouji, mirroring his posture.
Yorihito froze.
"What… what is that?"
He lashed out again — a string whip across the air.
It dissolved mid-snap — like it passed through a different atmosphere entirely.
Kouji raised his hand.
His arm now pulsed with the same miasma as his feet.
One step.
Yorihito panicked.
"Stay BACK!"
Another step.
Then Kouji's foot broke the ground — and he vanished again.
One black streak through the air.
One pulse of dark energy.
His arm connected with Yorihito's chest, a devastating punch amplified by the Devil's aura, and Yorihito went flying backward, crashing through rusted scaffolding and embedding into a wall with a steel-crunching thud.
Dust flew.
The world was silent.
Kouji stood, breathing slowly, eyes yellow-gold — but only for another heartbeat.
The miasma began to recede.
His shadow fell quiet again.
He walked toward the rubble.
Yorihito tried to crawl out — broken, trembling, his strings barely twitching.
Kouji's foot pressed forward.
He shaped a spear from a broken rebar and a bent pipe, forged in two seconds with absolute control.
No hesitation.
He hurled it.
It slammed into the wall, impaling through Yorihito's shoulder and pinning him, just shy of a kill.
Yorihito screamed — then whimpered, bleeding.
Kouji stood at a distance.
Then turned away.