The morning sun filtered through Yuhon's window, painting warm stripes across his floorboards. He stretched, feeling the pleasant, residual hum of power from the previous night's "pest control." The world felt sharper, brighter. At school, the chatter was a comfortable background noise. He found Mei and Jin under their tree.
"You're in a good mood," Mei observed, her analytical eyes missing nothing.
Yuhon shrugged, biting into his apple. "Just a good morning. The carrots are coming in nicely."
Jin, however, was vibrating with a different energy. "Dude, are you seeing this?" He shoved his phone under their noses. The screen showed a live news alert, the ticker at the bottom screaming: BREAKING: MAJOR INCIDENT AT OBSIDIAN SYNDICATE HEADQUARTERS IN SHANGHAI. UNCONFIRMED REPORTS OF AN ATTACK.
"Obsidian Syndicate?" Yuhon's eyebrows shot up. "That's one of the big ones. S-rank, right?"
"Worse," Mei said, her face grim. "They're a blight. They don't just run protection rackets; they're into monster-parts trafficking, slave trading, you name it. The Guild has had them on the 'sanctioned for elimination' list for years, but their headquarters is a fortress. Five S-rank hunters are stationed there permanently."
"Five S-ranks?" Yuhon whistled, impressed despite himself. "Who's crazy enough to attack that?"
As if in answer, Jin refreshed the feed. The headline updated. CONFIRMED: DISASTER DUO ENGAGED AT OBSIDIAN SYNDICATE. MASSIVE ENERGY SIGNATURES DETECTED.
A jolt, equal parts excitement and a strange, inexplicable pride, shot through Yuhon. "The Disaster Duo? They're hitting an S-rank syndicate?"
"They're not hitting it," Mei whispered, her eyes wide as she read the updating report. "They're raiding it. They've been inside for over four hours."
---
Four hours earlier,
In the heart of Shanghai's fortified underworld, two figures stood before the obsidian-plated monolith that was the Syndicate's central tower.
One was tall and sleek, a predator carved from shadow and ember. His hair was not hair at all, but a living corona of burning golden flames that cast a hellish light on the polished black stone. He was the Flame Demon, and he cracked his neck with a sound like splitting rock.
The other was his opposite: short, slim, almost delicate in comparison. Her long, vibrant purple hair cascaded down her back, seeming to shift and move with a life of its own. She was the Abyssal Witch, and she hummed a soft, tuneless melody as she examined the tower's magically reinforced front door.
"Reinforced with dwarven steel and hexed by a dozen warlocks," she mused, her voice a light, almost playful chime. "How tacky. It doesn't match the décor at all."
The Flame Demon's voice was a low, rolling inferno. "Are we critiquing or conquering, my dear?"
"A little of both," she said, placing a pale hand on the colossal door. "It's important to have standards."
Violet lightning, dark as a bruise and crackling with absolute malevolence, erupted from her fingertips. It didn't blast the door; it crawled over it, seeking every seam, every enchantment, every microscopic flaw. The complex defensive runes flared brilliant blue for a millisecond before overloading, shattering with the sound of a hundred panes of glass breaking at once. The dwarven steel, now superheated and brittle from the inside out, turned a dull red.
The Flame Demon didn't even throw a punch. He simply placed his palm on the smoldering metal and pushed. The entire door, ten tons of ruined magic and metal, exploded inward as if hit by a meteor, showering the stunned guards in the lobby with shrapnel and dust.
"After you," the Flame Demon rumbled.
"Why, thank you, darling," the Abyssal Witch said, stepping daintily over the molten threshold.
The chaos that followed was methodical, precise, and utterly terrifying. They moved through the tower not like a force of nature, but like a surgical instrument. The Witch's purple lightning would arc down corridors, disabling security systems and stunning entire squads of A-rank guards into twitching unconsciousness. Where heavier resistance formed, the Demon's fire would answer—not wild conflagrations, but focused lances of solar heat that melted weapons and armor into slag without touching the people inside.
They were a perfectly synchronized unit. He was the unstoppable force; she was the immovable, omniscient object. Their banter was a constant, eerie counterpoint to the destruction.
"Third floor, storage. Magical contraband," she'd say, her eyes glowing with amethyst energy as she read the building's digital and magical pathways.
He'd simply point a finger, and a beam of golden fire would lance upward, through the ceiling, through the floor above, to precisely incinerate a vault door three stories up.
"Ooh, their server farm is on sub-level two. It's so… last decade." Her fingers would dance across a tablet she'd produced from nowhere, and the entire building's lights, communications, and life support would flicker and die, only to be replaced by the hellish glow of his flames and the violent purple of her lightning.
They were there for one thing: the Syndicate's central vault. And they were taking the most direct route.
They finally reached the top-floor sanctum, a vast chamber of polished obsidian where the five S-rank leaders of the Syndicate awaited them. The air crackled with their pent-up power.
The leader, a mountain of a man known as Titan, stepped forward, his skin gleaming like granite. "Disaster Duo. You've overstepped. This ends here."
The Flame Demon's fiery hair flared brighter. "We were just thinking the same thing. We're on a schedule. The little one has a baking class in the morning."
The Abyssal Witch sighed. "It's a soufflé. Very temperamental."
Titan roared, and the fight began in earnest.
The four executives moved as one. One, a wind-user, became a tornado of cutting air. Another, a hydromancer, summoned a tidal wave from the plumbing. A third turned the very floor to grasping, acidic mud. The fourth vanished into shadows.
The Witch didn't move. She simply raised a hand. "So noisy."
A dome of absolute zero exploded out from her. The tidal wave flash-froze in mid-crash, a stunning sculpture of ice. The acidic mud solidified into harmless, frozen dirt. The cutting winds hit the cryogenic barrier and dissipated. The shadow-assassin was revealed, his body encased in a thin, glittering shell of frost, his eyes wide with shock.
The Flame Demon moved through the frozen battlefield. He ignored the frozen hydromancer, shattering him with a casual backhand. He breathed a plume of fire so intense it turned the frozen tornado into superheated steam, scalding the wind-user inside his own vortex. He grabbed the earth-manipulator by the face, the granite skin sizzling and melting under his touch.
Titan bellowed in rage, charging, his fist pulled back to deliver a blow that could level a city block.
The Flame Demon didn't dodge. He met the charge, his own fist lashing out. There was no flashy technique, no named attack. Just an impossible, concentrated application of force.
BOOM.
The sound was not of an explosion, but of reality itself flinching. The shockwave blew out the reinforced windows of the entire top floor. Titan's granite skin shattered like glass from the point of impact, spiderwebbing across his entire body. His eyes rolled back, and the mountain of a man dropped like a felled tree.
The entire fight had lasted forty-seven seconds.
The Abyssal Witch tsked, stepping over the frozen assassin. "Messy." She walked to the massive vault door behind Titan's throne. She didn't bother with her lightning this time. She placed both hands on it, and a hoarfrost so black it seemed to drink the light spread across its surface. The metal screamed as it contracted, becoming brittle. With a sound like a thousand bells breaking, the entire door crystallized and then collapsed into a pile of frozen metallic dust.
She peered inside at the mountains of gold, jewels, and magical artifacts. "Oh, lovely. This should cover the property taxes for a while." She began humming again, pulling out what looked like a small, black hole on a string and tossing it into the vault. It began to methodically suck everything inside.
---
Back at school, the final bell rang. The news was now dominated by images of the smoldering, partially frozen Obsidian Tower. Reports confirmed the total defeat of the five S-ranks and the complete liquidation of the Syndicate's assets.
Yuhon walked out with Mei and Jin, his head spinning. "Six hours. They took down five S-ranks and cleaned out their vault in six hours."
"They're monsters," Jin breathed, equal parts horror and awe.
"They're the strongest," Mei corrected quietly, her voice filled with a strange mix of dread and respect. "No one else could have done that. No one even comes close."
Yuhon nodded, a fierce, inexplicable smile tugging at his lips. "Yeah. They really are the strongest."