Kaaz lunged forward, blade-arm howling through the wind—obsidian teeth churning in his wake like a grinder of glass. His Fracture still spun, razors shrieking around him in a lethal storm.
But the air wasn't his anymore.
The wind was wet.
The snow was red.
And the battlefield had become hers.
From beneath the frost, a forest of thorns rose, crimson and coiling, veined with flickers of glowing mana. Vines lashed upward, not wild, but deliberate and calculating. They surged into the gaps between his razors, threading through the spaces between his counters.
Kaaz turned, but the ground itself betrayed him. It split open in a blooming spiral, and from its depths, blood poured—not thin, not airy—thick, viscous, heavy. A sea.
It swallowed his legs. Then his waist.
"Tch…!" He slashed downward, carving a shockwave through the flood, but the blood reformed, shifting around him like it had a mind, like it knew.
Above him, Asmodea hovered—no wings flapping, no feet touching ground.
