Fragments of burnt sigils floated around Ren, breaking apart into dust that drifted away slowly. Then the maze spread an unseen wave of energy through its walls, carrying remnants of the broken curse in currents that blew through all the crevices and openings.
The walls turned inch by inch into ash. Chunks of it drifted upwards in different patterns before dissolving into nothingness.
Through all that haze, Ren stepped forward, testing the ground around him. His entire body still buzzed with the aftershock of his Kindling spell, but he kept steady, scanning the area around him until the last of the dust lifted.
Kagami soon appeared from one of the collapsing corridors. She stopped when she got close to where Ren was, sweeping with her gaze over the damage dealt to the place before finally looking directly at him.
"I felt that," she said without avoiding what mattered. "Your Kindling is now much more than it was before... when I last saw it."
Ren nodded slightly. He didn't know what else to call what had happened. To him, it was still Kindling. All he knew was that it had worked to break the sigils with it, and that the spell now felt more familiar, like a language he was beginning to speak more fluently.
"You did well," Kagami added.
Ren had crossed into a new stage of his path as a Pact Bearer, shaping the Pact's abilities to his will without breaking any of its laws. It was a fine line to walk, and Kagami knew most people lacked what it took to wield all of that at all.
He had been a gamble from the beginning, but even so, the boy seemed to have potential. She wondered how far he could actually go if pushed and what he would eventually become in time. Kagami smiled a bit at the corner of her mouth, thinking about it.
That brief moment didn't last, though. A scream tore through the air, and as Ren turned toward the source of it, he realized it had come from Shiori's lungs. And that scream didn't sound human at all. It was distorted and broken, yet carrying a force that shook the entire space around them.
Her eyes burned brighter than before. The black swirls inside of them twisted harder and faster as if they were readjusting, pushed around by inner forces that screamed to break free.
Suddenly, the change spread to the Kagemonos as well. Their eyes flared brighter alongside hers while the swirling patterns inside them spun faster until they blurred altogether. Their movements turned erratic. Some lunged forward without a real target in front of them, while others slammed into one another, tearing at whatever they could reach.
Ren and Kagami both stepped back, retreating toward the farthest area they could reach, in an attempt to avoid all that chaos.
But then Shiori lifted her hands. Her fingers bent slightly, pulling on her invisible threads. As soon as she did, all the Kagemonos stopped wherever they stood, locked in place by some unseen force. A moment later, their bodies began to twist unnaturally as if that same force inside them was redirecting them somewhere else entirely.
"Ren..." Kagami started, but wasn't able to finish.
One of the Kagemonos burst in a blinding flash of light and black mist. The force of that explosion tore one of the pylons next to where the Kagemono had been, crashing it down in front of them. A sudden cloud of dust covered everything.
Then, one after the other, more Kagemonos detonated. The bursts sent shockwaves through the entire area, fracturing beams and causing pieces of stone and wood to fly into the air.
Ren ducked under a collapsing arch using his Pact Blade to deflect some of the debris.
Kagami moved beside him, scanning for a safe path through all that chaos. But as she searched, her gaze kept returning to Shiori, the source of it all.
The balance she had once fought so hard to achieve for Naraku was now completely disrupted by the corruption within this witch. In her current state, though, stripped of her former power, there was not much she could do. Whatever her path to restoring herself would be, it needed to be done through the Pact with Ren. That was her only option.
As he moved through the wreckage, Ren caught sight of Shiori as well and figured out her pattern. Each pull of her hands triggered a new explosion. So the only way to stop this madness was for him to find a way to disable those strings somehow.
He adjusted his grip on the Pact Blade and worked his way toward her.
As he pushed forward, he moved between fallen beams and splintered debris. But those were not the only dangers. Kagemonos kept lunging in his path erratically, ending up detonating sequentially in bursts of energy and black mist.
Still, he slashed his way through, cutting down with his Pact Blade anything that closed in, all the while keeping his focus locked on Shiori's position ahead.
Then, with a calmness in her features that seemed entirely out of place for someone tearing down an entire valley, her masked face turned toward Ren as he forced his way closer. Her hands pulled once again at the invisible strings, and the energy around her became stronger. Suffocating even. The glow in her eyes had become blinding at this point, while the black swirls were no longer contained to her irises. Instead, they spiralled out over her skin like an infection.
A few moments later, her mask fell to the ground, shattering like glass.
The skin beneath was burned and warped, fused to the bone in places so that it didn't even appear human anymore. The corruption wasn't just inside her magic at that point. It had consumed her entirely. Her breathing was erratic and came in bursts as if something inside her was about to break free.
As he approached, Ren raised his blade.
The corrupted magic swirled faster around her, throwing lightning around.
She raised both hands to strike.