Shuu.
No motion preceded it. No shadow. No sound.
One moment the alley held two silhouettes, concrete, the thin strip of sky overhead.
The next, everything shattered.
Thunder without lightning. The crack of displaced air, of reality tearing at the seams. The walls vanished behind a mass of scale and meat and bone, colossal fangs descending like the closing of a door that had never been open.
The snake's head filled the world—building-sized, impossible, its jaws already shut before Kori's nerves finished registering the movement.
Darkness slammed around him.
Pressure. Wet heat. The stench of copper and rot and something older, something that had been digesting things since before humans learned to scream. His ribs compressed. His lungs emptied.
The inside of the snake was muscle and membrane and absolute black, crushing inward from every direction. No up, no down, no air.
He was gone. Swallowed whole. The alley, Mori, the city—erased.
Just meat now. Just something being eaten.
His spine shrieked. The thing inside him thrashed against the compression, flooding his skull with signals that had nowhere to go. His hands couldn't move. His legs couldn't move. The pressure was too complete, too total.
And in the darkness, a voice.
Run.
Hina's voice. The last thing she'd said. The command he'd failed to obey.
Run.
Her brown eyes. Her parting lips. The way she'd turned back to face the devil because he wasn't moving, because his legs had locked, because his body had chosen stillness over survival.
Run.
He couldn't run. He was being digested. He was inside a snake the size of a building and his bones were grinding against each other and his lungs had nothing left to give and—
Purple.
The color bloomed in the darkness like a bruise spreading through black water. Two points of light, deep and old, watching.
Not amber. Purple now.
The black cat.
It sat in the darkness as if darkness were a floor, grooming itself with the casual indifference of something that had seen universes end.
It finished, set its paw down, and stood up.
That was enough.
Kori's mouth opened. The pressure crushed his chest, his throat, his jaw—but the word came anyway, clawing up from somewhere deeper than lungs, deeper than breath, from the place where the cat had fused with his spine and dissolved and left only this.
"Scythe."
The blade erupted from his palm.
He cut.
One stroke. Two. Black against black, obsidian against meat. His arm moved—not because he told it to, not because he decided, but because the thing in his spine had stood up and now his body remembered what it was.
Nothing.
The snake vanished. No spray of ichor, no parting flesh. One moment it was there, crushing, digesting, absolute.
The next—gone. Like it had never existed. Like the two thousand feet of scale and fang had been a hallucination shared by an entire city block.
Kori tumbled out of empty air and hit cement.
The impact jarred through his shoulders, his spine, his skull. He rolled, came up on one knee, scythe still in his grip, slashing at nothing. His heart slammed against his ribs. His breath came in ragged gasps.
Adrenaline flooded every nerve, screaming for a threat that had simply stopped existing.
The alley was gone.
Where two buildings had stood—four stories each, brick and concrete and the small lives of people who had nothing to do with devils—there was sky.
Rubble spilled across the street in drifts of shattered masonry. Glass glittered everywhere, catching the sunset light. A car alarm wailed. Someone was screaming, thin and distant.
And Mori danced through the wreckage.
Not walked. Danced. Tiptoeing around chunks of debris like a child avoiding puddles, arms out for balance, head tilted to watch her own feet.
The sunset caught her from behind—orange and gold streaming through the dust, silhouetting her against the destruction.
She spun once, light on her feet, and came to rest facing him.
"Kuroshi-san." Her voice was warm. Pleasant. The same voice from the kitchen, from the patrol, from every moment before this one. "You disobeyed the first rule. Naughty, naughty boy."
She tilted her head.
"But you were already dead, weren't you? Only then did you summon that scythe of yours."
Kori's knuckles were white on the handle. His body was still flooded with the need to fight, to cut, to kill—and there was nothing left to kill. The snake was gone. The threat was gone.
Just Mori, dancing in the sunset, giggling about rules.
He weighed his weapons. The scythe in his palm. The words in his mouth.
"This was all a test?" His voice came out harder than he expected. Angrier. "You destroyed half the street."
Mori's eyes widened.
Not with shock. Not with offense. With something else—something bright and hungry that made her emerald irises catch the dying light.
Her smile crept wider, showing teeth.
"Oh," she said. "I like that look."
She walked toward him. Not dancing now. Direct. Purposeful.
Kori's grip tightened on the scythe but he didn't move, didn't step back, didn't do anything except watch her close the distance.
"Are you going to kill me now?"
She stopped in front of him, close, too close. One hand landed on his shoulder—light, almost friendly. The other wrapped around his wrist, around the hand holding the scythe, and guided it upward.
"Go ahead."
She pressed the blade against her own throat.
The obsidian edge dimpled her skin. One twitch and she'd be bleeding. One real stroke and she'd be dead. Her pulse jumped visibly in her neck, rapid, excited.
"Feel that?" Her voice was softer now. Her eyes never left his. "How fast my heart's beating?"
She leaned into the blade, just slightly, just enough to make the edge bite.
"You excite me."
Kori held the blade steady. Not pressing. Not pulling back. Feeling her pulse through the obsidian, through his palm, through whatever connected him to the weapon that had grown from his spine.
"You killed people," he said.
"Probably." She didn't sound concerned. "Does that make you want to press harder?"
It did. The contract pulsed in his spine—she was a contractor, bound to a devil, and the terms said all devils, no exceptions. The line between "devil" and "person who uses devils" was blurrier than it should be with her pulse jumping against his blade.
He lowered the scythe.
Mori's smile softened into something almost like approval. She released his wrist, patted his shoulder twice, and stepped back.
"Good boy," she said. "You're learning."
She turned and walked toward the mouth of the ruined street, picking her way through debris, humming something tuneless under her breath.
Kori stood in the rubble and watched her go.
His hand was still shaking. Not from fear. From something else—the aftermath of adrenaline, the weight of the choice he'd just made, the memory of her pulse against obsidian.
She'd wanted him to do it. Or she'd wanted to see if he would. Or she'd just wanted to feel the blade against her throat and his anger behind it.
He didn't know which was worse.
The street was a wound.
A woman stood frozen on the sidewalk, grocery bags at her feet, oranges rolling into the gutter. Her mouth was open, soundless.
Beside her, a salaryman had stopped mid-stride, briefcase dangling from fingers that had forgotten how to grip. A child on a bicycle had fallen over and wasn't getting up—just lying there, staring at the sky, at the space where something had been.
They'd seen it. All of them. The snake materializing from nothing—two thousand feet of scale and fang and impossible mass, there and gone before the brain could finish processing what the eyes had witnessed.
But the destruction was real.
The buildings weren't there anymore. Rubble spilled across the street in drifts of shattered concrete and twisted rebar. The surrounding structures leaned slightly, their integrity compromised.
Dust hung in the air, turning the destruction into something almost beautiful.
A car alarm wailed. Then another. Someone was screaming—high and thin, the sound of a mind trying to reject what it had just witnessed.
A shop owner stumbled out of his door, looked at the crater where two buildings used to be, and sat down on the curb like his legs had stopped working.
An old man stood in front of what had been an entrance to an apartment complex, now just a wall of debris, crying without sound. His hands hung at his sides. He didn't wipe his face.
Sirens in the distance. Getting closer.
A mother pulled her child away from the debris, moving on autopilot, her face blank. A teenager was filming with his phone, hands shaking so badly the footage would be useless.
Someone was praying—Kori could hear the words, rapid and desperate, a man bargaining with gods who hadn't been watching.
Mori kept walking. Picking her way through the debris with the same casual pace she'd used on the patrol route.
"Don't worry," she said over her shoulder. "They'll say it was a random devil."
Kori stared at the destruction. The buildings that had housed people. The cars crushed under falling debris. The old man crying soundlessly in front of what used to be his home.
In an alley. On a patrol route. In the middle of the afternoon.
The woman with the groceries finally moved. Bent down. Started picking up her oranges, one by one, placing them back in the bag with the careful precision of someone whose mind had gone somewhere else entirely.
Mori glanced back at him. That smile still in place.
"Coming, little scythe?"
She raised her hand to brush hair from her face. Casual. Automatic.
And Kori saw it—the ring finger of her right hand, the nail bed raw and pink where a nail had been minutes ago.
One fingernail.
That was the cost. Two buildings erased. Dozens of lives upended. A crater in the middle of a city block.
All of it—the two thousand feet of scale and fang, the destruction that would take months to clear—purchased for the price of one fingernail.
The cartilage was already forming. In a week, maybe two, the nail would grow back.
And she could do it again.
She was a monster.
Not like the devils. Not like the things that crawled from fear and hunger and the dark spaces of human imagination.
Something that wore a soft voice and a warm smile and could erase two buildings full of people to see what a new hybrid would do. Something that paid for apocalypse in fingernails and called it a fair trade.
There was no going back.
Kori understood that now, standing in the rubble. This was the world he'd stepped into. Not Class D devils and routine patrols.
The world where people like her existed—people who could level city blocks for the cost of a manicure, who smiled while civilians wept in the wreckage.
There were levels to this. And he had just glimpsed how far up they went.
Kori stepped over the rubble and followed her toward the sirens.
Behind him, the woman finished collecting her oranges. Stood up. Walked away in the wrong direction, bag clutched to her chest, not looking back.
Somewhere in his spine, the cat had settled back down. Patient.
Waiting for the next time it needed to stand.