Seeing Abaddon pinned to the earth like an insect in a collector's jar, his consciousness trapped in Mayuri Kurotsuchi's perceptual hell, the surviving Princes of Hell ignited their corrupted cores.
Their charred, blistered carapaces fractured with the brittle sound of breaking porcelain. Shards of blackened hide sloughed away, revealing raw, newborn demonic flesh beneath. Aside from a noticeable drop in their demonic reserves, their physical bodies appeared entirely restored.
Yet across the scorched perimeter, none of the watching Shinigami reached for their hilts or shifted into combat stances.
There was zero necessity. The Captain-Commander had taken the field, reducing their role to that of mere spectators.
Before the demons could reorganize their vanguard, the ambient air snapped taut. A suffocating stagnation settled over the valley, so dry and blisteringly hot that drawing a single breath felt like inhaling ground glass.
"Oh, my..." Shunsui Kyōraku murmured, his lazy smile faltering as he nudged the rim of his woven sedge hat. "The old man is genuinely displeased. Everyone, withdraw immediately. Linger within his perimeter, and you won't even leave a tooth behind for a burial."
Though Shunsui's tone retained its customary levity, the other Captains had already vanished in synchronized bursts of Shunpo, putting kilometers of distance between themselves and the valley floor.
They had witnessed this absolute, atmospheric drought once before within the Seireitei. The protocol was simple: retreat beyond the horizon, and pray the Captain-Commander brought the slaughter to a swift close.
"Well, look at that," Shunsui chuckled softly, gliding backward through the scorched air alongside Jūshirō Ukitake. "It seems everyone is as sharp as ever."
At the epicenter of the valley, the walking sun advanced.
The air warped and buckled around Genryūsai Shigekuni Yamamoto in shimmering heat distortions. Without a spark of kindling, dead roots and petrified scrub combusted spontaneously into white ash. Bare-chested, his sinewy frame carved with ancient scars, the old man advanced with measured, unhurried strides.
In his right hand rested a blade that bore no roaring inferno.
The flames of Ryūjin Jakka had vanished entirely, compressed into a blackened, worn katana that looked like a piece of burnt driftwood faintly shimmering with an ember's red hue.
Yet the spiritual pressure radiating from that humble edge bent the desert floor, making the lungs of every demon seize in sheer terror. Sweat burst from their pores, only to vaporize into hissing steam before a single droplet could touch the stone.
The shadow of absolute oblivion was upon them.
"Wait!" Azazel shouted, raising both hands high as his monstrous horns and leathery wings melted away, retreating desperately into a fragile human disguise. "I yield! Old man, our dispute was merely over the covenant of the Holy Spirit! This was never a blood feud! The valley, the contract, the territory—take it all! I shall return to the pit this very instant!"
To demonstrate his utter lack of hostility, the fallen angel stood unarmed, his posture completely open.
Yamamoto's eyes did not waver. They remained cold, dead, and ancient as the void.
[Zanka no Tachi, Higashi: Kyokujitsujin].
The charred, silent blade flicked forward in a clean, effortless arc.
There was no sound of tearing flesh. No eruption of roaring flames. No splash of blood.
The blackened edge merely kissed Azazel's shoulder, and the fallen prince was wiped from the fabric of reality. His physical form, his corrupted soul, and his ancient divinity vanished into nothingness, erased entirely without leaving behind so much as a stray ember.
The remaining Princes of Hell went pale as corpses, their slit pupils shrinking to needlepoints.
'Damn that arrogant fool!'
'He surrendered his true form and died like a dog!'
'Silence! Look for a breach—we run, now!'
'Azazel's death wasn't meaningless... it proved this ancient butcher cannot be matched! Run!!'
A frantic flurry of telepathic screams bounced between the surviving fiends. There was no longer any debate regarding pride or dominion.
Only escape remained.
Yet someone had to anchor the old man's stride. Instinctively, their frantic gazes fell upon Dagon.
"Do not look at me!" Dagon hissed, clutching her coral trident as scales rippled along her neck. "His spiritual density has multiplied dozens of times over! There is not a single particle of moisture left within a hundred miles! The concept of water does not exist in his presence—my divinity is entirely snuffed out!"
Under normal circumstances, an aquatic sovereign would have torn apart any fire-wielder. But standing before this primordial deity of ruin, elemental hierarchy was utterly meaningless.
Power belonged solely to the one who commanded it.
"Then every beast for itself!" Asmodeus snarled.
The demon dissolved into a streak of foul crimson shadow, bolting toward the eastern horizon. The other lords scattered simultaneously, vanishing in diverging trajectories across the sky.
In an instant, Dagon was left standing alone in the clearing, as abandoned as a wounded animal.
Her true form—a predatory, scaled siren from the waist down and a pale woman from the waist up—was built entirely for oceanic warfare. With the atmosphere stripped bare of humidity, her hydrokinetic arts were rendered useless.
Relying on physical locomotion, she had zero hope of outrunning a God of Death.
Yet her hesitation proved to be her salvation.
The precise millisecond Asmodeus breached the sound barrier, Yamamoto vanished from the earth.
When the Captain-Commander's silhouette rematerialized a mile out, Asmodeus was already a fading smear of gray powder drifting against the wind.
Yamamoto flickered like a phantom of judgment across the darkened heavens.
Step.
A Hell Knight disintegrated into vapor.
Step.
Another abyssal prince was erased from existence.
With every silent flash of the blackened blade, Dagon's heart hammered violently against her ribs. She stood petrified on the scorched dirt, her trident trembling in her palms. She was terrified to the marrow of her bones—terrified that the cold, half-lidded eyes of the old warrior would suddenly appear inches from her face, followed by that soundless, absolute swing.
'Move, damn it... think of something!' Dagon screamed within the silence of her mind. 'Think of a way out!'
[Washington, D.C. — The United States Capitol]
Following the catastrophic anomalies surrounding the Meliodas incident, the President and the Joint Chiefs had placed Congress on permanent remote protocol.
The grand congressional chamber stood entirely empty, yet the digital holo-conference channels were shrieking with deafening pandemonium.
The exact second Yamamoto unleashed the absolute heat of his Bankai, the thermal equilibrium of the entire North American continent violently shattered.
"Ladies and gentlemen, Chicago is currently sitting at 112 degrees in the dead of midnight!" a senator yelled, frantically loosening his silk tie as sweat poured down his neck. "I stepped outside to jump into my pool, and the surface water is literally boiling into steam!"
"Houston is registering the exact same spike!" another voice shouted over the comms. "The power grid in Texas just blew its primary transformers! The regional cooling stations are dead!"
"The Great Lakes are producing thermal fog banks! Someone put an end to this madness!"
"If this exchange drags on for another ten minutes, half the civilian population will succumb to heat stroke before sunrise!"
The representatives, who had previously watched the satellite feed of the New Mexico ruins with detached political amusement, were now in a state of absolute, shrieking hysteria. They had viewed the battle between the Shinigami and the demons as an isolated foreign incursion to be contained and audited by intelligence agencies.
Nobody had anticipated that an old man drawing a sword in the southwestern desert would heat an entire continent like an oven.
"Director Fury!" a senior council member bellowed into the secure channel. "This falls directly under S.H.I.E.L.D.'s specialized jurisdiction! Deploy your assets and pacify that valley immediately! They cannot be permitted to continue this duel!"
"Look at the regional news feeds! Protests are erupting across major metropolitan areas! People believe an orbital strike has hit our soil! S.H.I.E.L.D. needs to bring this under control right now!"
In the high-security director's office at the Triskelion, Nick Fury stood before the primary tactical theater screen.
His dark, weathered face seemed to sink an octave darker beneath the dim fluorescent lights. He glared at the satellite thermal readings painting the entire continental United States in blinding, nuclear crimson, then dropped his gaze to the screaming holographic faces of the political elite.
Fury slowly leaned forward, planting both leather-gloved palms onto the steel desk.
"Motherfucker."
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Give me powerstones.
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