I sat across from my little brother, Keiko Kuriguri, and watched him smile.
That smile—warm, open, ridiculous in a court of teeth and iron—was the rarest thing in the Demonic Kingdom. We are a race forged by strength; weakness is a stain you rarely survive. If someone showed the slightest falter, they were ignored, beaten, or fed to the dogs. Yet Keiko, even beneath the weight of whatever he carried, still managed that light. It made me ache.
"Keiko," I said.
He answered with the same soft brightness he always wore. "Yes, True?"
If I'm honest, I was scared for him. Neither grandfather nor I would be here. "Will you be all right by yourself?" I asked. "If anything happens, tell me. Promise?"
He smiled wider, like the worry was nothing more than a cloud to be brushed away. The warmth in his face could have melted a lesser man. I left the room with that image pressed into my ribs—my brother's smile a small rebellion against the cruelty of our world.
The throne room smelled of iron and old smoke. Father sat upon his black dais as always, an island of silent menace. Beside him lounged his prize—Yuri Kuriguri, the last of the younger sons, all frost-blood and pale teeth. His mother's lineage ran like cold lightning through him. He glared at me like a brand on my skin, but it didn't matter. None of them could touch me. They called me anomaly, even among royals. Some whispered I rivaled the first Demon King, Tartarus. I smiled at that rumor as I always did, and stepped forward.
"Hey, old man," I called light, letting gravity pool in my palms like a joke. A condensed beam of it spat from my hand and traced the air toward him.
He ducked with an irritation that made his voice brittle. "What do you want, True?"
I kept my tone casual—too casual for a court. "Don't touch Keiko. Not today. I'm asking."
That was it. I left without waiting for an answer.
Outside, at the rear of our border, the battlefield lay like a black scar. Hussars and footmen were strewn across the plain, the air still thick with the iron-sweet scent of spilled life. I let myself smile again—this one sharper, colder. I rampaged.
Heads came off like ripe fruit under a blade. Men fell in heaps, armor clattering, blood steaming like a promise. It wasn't a war to me in those first moments; it was an exercise—my body enhanced by passive skill that scaled with mana, my muscles tuned until they felt like living iron. Mana generation fed itself in an endless loop; my form was built to crush gods. Humans were children playing with knives, their movements staggered and slow to my violet eyes. The world dilated. Everything became a tableau moving in molasses while I moved in a wind.
It bored me.
True sighed—the sigh of someone who has watched an ant colony and found nothing to learn—and with a flick of his hand he released a gravity field that folded the earth in on itself. A hundred thousand souls were compressed into a heartbeat. They shattered. Silence fell like a curtain.
Pathetic, I thought. I prepared to leave, to tilt my center of gravity and launch myself upward and sideways until I tore through the sky.
Then the flame hit.
A wall of fire rose, sudden and absolute, a dome of light that made me squint. It boiled the air, and the brightness forced me to pull my steel glasses to protect my eyes. The flames didn't lick or dance; they hung like a statement. Domain fire. Ancient, practiced, controlled.
When I saw the figure inside that fire, I knew who wore the heat like armor—a lord of flames. A hero-construct, maybe: a human façade strong enough to justify the kingdom's faith. Or perhaps a genuine lord, wrapped in flame and arrogance and a justification for slaughter. Either way, the presence was deliberate.
"What do you want, Lord of Flames?" I asked, dismissive as you speak to a lesser god.
He sighed as if I'd bored him. The smoke around his mouth curled like a contemptuous smile. "To inform you," he said, voice like coal shifting under wind, "that your father sent us."
My hand tightened. The world narrowed. "He what?"
"To keep you busy," the lord continued, as if ticking items off a list. "And the Lord of Shadows was assigned to your brother." He paused, and something like relish slid from his tone. "Oh—he forgot to tell you that your beloved brother is on the battlefield, a few kilometers away. Too bad you won't be able to protect him."
Those words were a blade sharpened on a whetstone of intention. They were not news. They were an accusation, a trap set in syllables. I felt my fingers close until the knuckles popped. The gravity around me tightened, responding to the sudden spike of my will.
I released the field. The flames fought the pull, collapsing inward, steam hissing as heat met force. They shrieked like women woken too early; their edges flared, trying to escape, but my gravity chewed at them. For a moment it looked as if I might tear that flame dome apart.
Then anger broke me.
Not the quiet simmer of irritation, but a bright, patient, volcanic rage. It was not just anger for myself—it was the stab of betrayal for the brother whose smile I had left, the protector who would not be here. The realm tightened around my heart like iron bands and I let the power fall.
The flames vibrated. The lord of flames' face hardened. "You will not—" he began.
I answered without words. My gravity filled the air like a sea and then slammed into the fire like a tidal wall. Sound bent. Heat warped. For the first time in my long life, something threatened to unbalance me.
And I lost it.
The flame domain strained and I could feel it fraying—something I had not intended. The world began to answer back in patterns I hadn't expected. The lord stood firm as a mountain in a storm, his eyes unblinking. It was then I understood this was never meant to be a battle of might alone. It was chess. My father had moved his pieces and the board was already set.
My breath came shallow. Fury gave way to cold calculation and then to a raw, simple terror: perhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps this was not my victory. Perhaps this was the first domino.
The flames peeled back a fraction, enough to show not his eyes but a sliver of something behind them: a blackness that smelled of old bargains. He had told the truth. My brother was on the field. My father had sent them both—disposables, distractions, or something worse.
I tasted iron and promised myself then and there I would not be the reason Keiko fell. Even if I had to tear the kingdom down to save him.
But the truth pressed against my teeth: I could not move until I sealed the gap the lord of flames had opened. The battlefield was a web and I had been caught mid-stride.
"Fine," I said, voice low enough that only the winds heard it. "Have your victory."
Then I pushed. The gravity around my chest collapsed inward, launching a shock through the plain—my answer, my warning. The lord of flames clenched his fists. The field between us brightened like a wound.
And as the world convulsed, I thought only of Keiko's smile, bright and fragile, and prayed—more bitterly than any king—that it wouldn't be the last thing I ever saw of him.