A single shout, a guttural and absolute command, echoed through the warehouse: "BLUE!"
Immediately, the very space seemed to groan and contort violently, as if an invisible tarp were being pulled with brutal force. Silk Acrobat, who just moments before was savoring victory, felt a sudden, agonizing pull on her scalp.
It was as if a steel anchor had buried itself in her hair and was pulling with the intention of tearing her head from her body. Panic froze her spine, but it was too late.
RAGH!
A wet and repulsive sound of hair being torn out by the roots filled the air. A sharp, hot pain exploded in her skull, forcing a gritted scream from her teeth. When her eyes, blurred by agony, managed to focus again, Kouki had simply vanished from her reach.
In the blink of an eye, the scene had transformed. A few meters away, Yohan now stood, solid as a rock, with Kouki's fragile, unconscious body held firmly in his arms. The albino allowed no time for reaction. His feet seemed to slide across the ground, and his figure became a blur, dissipating into the air like smoke before anyone could blink. He had used "Blue" to increase his speed, pulling himself to a point elsewhere.
The brief moment of safety outside the warehouse was enough for a single act of tenderness amidst the chaos. Yohan adjusted Kouki in his arms, his impassive face hiding a glacial fury. With a gentleness that contrasted with the recent violence, he ran his fingers through the girl's disheveled hair, wiping the dust of battle from her pale face.
"Hold on," his voice was a whisper, a thread of steel wrapped in velvet. "I'll end this now."
Without further delay, his figure reappeared and he turned towards the mouth of the abandoned warehouse, his eyes determined to put an end to that threat.
Inside the warehouse, the situation was a moving nightmare. Okarun was the epicenter of a desperate ballet. His lungs burned, and sweat streamed down his face as he ran, carrying the precious weight of Momo and Aira's inert body. His arms were beginning to fail, but the instinct to protect was stronger.
The darkness was cut by silver tentacles that hissed through the air. Silk Acrobat's hair attacked like enraged serpents, piercing the concrete floor and cracking against the metal pillars.
"Give me my Aira!" the Yokai shrieked, her voice pure rage, unleashing another volley of her hair filaments.
Okarun, his muscles screaming, forced his legs to propel him sideways.
"Not interested," he retorted, breathless but determination unwavering. The threads whistled past his shoulder, so close he could smell the scent of old iron and rot they carried.
Spotting a low metal support beam ahead, he didn't hesitate. He crouched in a fluid motion, his knee nearly brushing the ground. Mid-movement, in an act of pure dexterity, he swapped Momo and Aira's positions in his arms, ensuring neither would be crushed or scraped by the structure.
And then—
A dry thwump, like the pop of an over-pressurized air balloon, split the air. At the sound's epicenter, space folded once more and Yohan materialized like a vengeful ghost, his fist already cocked and loaded with power. Without a warning, without a grunt, his precise punch connected with Silk Acrobat's torso with a dull, bony thud.
Before she could even process the blow, Yohan's right fist began to pulse with a blue glow, a dazzling flare that briefly illuminated his white knuckles and the Yokai's contorted face.
Boom!
This time, the impact was a visceral thing. The sound wasn't just that of a punch, but of a small, contained explosion. Silk Acrobat's face deformed under the force, and her feet left the ground for a fraction of a second before her body was hurled backward in an ungainly stagger. She stumbled, nearly falling, one hand flying instinctively to her chin where a trickle of pitch-black, energy-like substance began to seep from a split lip.
The Yokai's eyes, once filled with possessive desire, now burned with a primordial hatred. With a sharp shriek of rage, she unleashed a wave of her silver hair, which hissed like poisoned lances toward the albino.
Anticipating the counterattack, Yohan didn't retreat. Instead, he swung his arm in a circular, dismissive motion, an aura of incandescent Blue enveloping his forearm. The air in front of him seemed to compact and then violently expand, creating an invisible yet tangible rebound wave, like a shield of pure force.
The clash was inevitable. Silk Acrobat's chaotic energy collided with the ordered, explosive force of Blue. They were opposite polarities, negative and positive. The result was a violent repulsion. A dull explosion of dispersed energy threw both combatants back like ragdolls, their hair and clothes whipping from the force of the impact.
Yohan, propelled backward at high speed, felt the air hiss in his ears. He braced to collide with a stack of rusty toolboxes, but suddenly, the motion ceased. Two firm arms grabbed him by the torso, cushioning the final impact.
"It's exhausting saving everyone," Okarun's voice echoed, dry and laden with an existential fatigue, right beside his ear. "When is someone going to save me?"
Yohan, still panting, turned his head and came face-to-face with Okarun. The expression was the same, but the eyes... the eyes held a dark, resigned depth that wasn't his. Then, it clicked.
'Ah, crap. He's in yokai mode.'
The boy's personality was decaying, leaving behind this depressive, theatrical cynicism that always surfaced when his powers came out.
"Dammit, this old hag is a pain to deal with," Yohan grumbled, ignoring the comment and focusing back on Silk Acrobat, who was already rising with a snarl.
The moment of relative calm was shattered by a new commotion.
"Let me go, you demon!" Aira shrieked, desperate and completely oblivious to the situation. She thrashed in Okarun's arms with surprising strength, and her elbow, by accident, hit Momo in the face with a loud smack.
"Ow! Hold still, you bitch! We're trying to save your life here!" Momo yelled back, her eyes wide with fury. Without a second thought, she retaliated, slapping the back of Aira's head.
Yohan felt a thick drop of cold sweat trickle down his temple. He looked at the surreal scene: the powerful yokai regrouping for another attack, his possessed ally holding two girls who were hitting each other in his lap, and him, in the middle of it all, trying to prevent everyone from dying.
"Yep... definitely one of those days." He sighed, rolling his shoulders and readying himself for the next round.
"Damn you!" the Yokai shrieked, hurling her hair in his direction.
The storm of silver blades hissed toward him, a deadly whirlwind promising to slice through flesh and bone. Yohan narrowed his eyes, and the air in front of him seemed to thicken and crystallize.
The sharp filaments, which moments before had flown with murderous speed, suddenly stopped, frozen in the air like insects in amber. A buzz of static energy filled the space as the Infinity held the attack immobile, centimeters from their faces.
"Any ideas here? I'm accepting anything," said Yohan, his voice strained from the effort of maintaining the barrier.
Momo, still holding the metal rod she had ripped out with her psychokinesis, had her eyes lit up with a flash of determined fury.
"Hit her with everything we've got!" Momo yelled, raising the rusty bar like a primitive spear.
"Just let me die," Okarun mumbled, his voice a languid, defeated whisper that contrasted absurdly with the fury of the battle. His head was hung forward, his hair hiding his empty eyes.
At first, Yohan kept his expression neutral, ignoring the self-deprecating comment. But then, as if a switch had been flipped in his brain, his eyes widened.
"Brilliant," he whispered, a slow, sharp smile stretching his lips. "I feel stupid for not thinking of it sooner."
With a decisive movement, he ripped off his sunglasses. His eyes, now fully exposed, blazed with an intense inner light.
The negative energy began to boil and churn visibly. The air rippled around him, and dust and debris on the floor started to vibrate and slide in his direction.
He stretched his palm forward. In its center, a point of blue light appeared, small and innocent like a firefly. But then, it began to grow. Not slowly, but with a voracious hunger, expanding from a particle to a sphere the size of a basketball, then to one larger than his own head. A deep, low hum emanated from it, a sound that seemed to come from the very vacuum of space.
"What?..." Silk Acrobat whispered, her arrogance giving way to disbelief. But then, she felt it. A gentle tug at first, then an undeniable, powerful traction. The air was being sucked into the blue sphere, dragging dust, scraps of paper, and, to her absolute horror, the loose strands of her own hair. 'With greater size, its area of attraction increased...' The thought cut through her mind like a blade.
'MY AIRA?!—'
Her eyes, wide with panic, darted towards the girl, expecting to see her being dragged toward annihilation. Instead, she witnessed a scene that solidified her despair. Okarun, Momo, and Aira herself were all clinging to Yohan's body, their clothes whipping violently toward the sphere, but their bodies, secured by contact with the albino, remained firm. They had anchored themselves to the very source of the power.
As Silk Acrobat fought to dig her claws into the concrete floor, the sphere began to change. It didn't stop growing.
It did the opposite.
Instead, it began to contract rapidly, growing smaller and denser. The central point became a singularity, a spot of pure, voracious darkness, while a ring of swirling blue energy encircled it. The pull became overwhelming.
Yohan, his eyes locked on the yokai being dragged toward him, declared, his voice echoing with the power consuming the environment:
"Maximum Output: Blue!"
With the Six Eyes fully uncovered, the world unfolded before Yohan in a way no other being could comprehend. He didn't simply see matter or energy; he saw the very rules of reality, the flows of negative energy, the vectors of force, the points of tension in space. This absolute perception allowed him not just to release the Maximum Output of Blue, but to reshape it.
As the sphere grew, his mind calculated at superhuman speeds.
'Increasing the size expands the area of attraction, but dissipates the power's density. What if... I compressed it?' It was a lightning-fast thought, a bold speculation only the Six Eyes could conceive and execute. He wouldn't be content with merely attracting; he wanted to consume.
And so, the Blue didn't just expand. It reached a peak size and then, with a whoomp that distorted sound, imploded upon itself. What was a large sphere became a sphere the size of a tennis ball, but its color changed from a vibrant blue to a void surrounded by a swirling ring of energy—a point of density that seemed to tear a hole in the very fabric of the warehouse.
Around it, a ring of sky-blue energy swirled violently, a stunning contrast to the core of pure annihilation. The pull it emanated was no longer a tug; it was a gravitational claw, so powerful that chunks of concrete tore from the floor and were sucked into the void.
The Maximum Output Blue didn't fly—it simply ceased to be in one point and began to be in another, moving in an instant that defied perception. It was a flash of darkness, a cosmic blink.
Silk Acrobat couldn't even process the movement. One moment, she was fighting the pull. The next, a portion of her body simply... was torn from reality. There was no clean cut. Her arm and nearly half of her torso were ripped away, a pull so powerful it had passed through her.
The edge of what remained of her body wasn't severed; it was ragged, frayed, and smoking, as if the matter had been unmade at the most fundamental level. The shock was so absolute that for a fraction of a second she felt no pain, only the horrifying vacuum where a part of her had been.
"Better be careful..." Yohan's voice broke the charged silence, sounding casual, almost a weary whisper. His white hair fell over his face, hiding the Six Eyes that had orchestrated such devastation. Then, between the silver strands, one of those vibrant, sky-blue orbs blinked, fixing on what remained of the youkai. The light emanating from it was not comforting; it was the icy light of an abyss.
"That blue," he continued, his voice laden with a dangerous sweetness, "will kill you just by touching it, unlike the others."
It was a simple statement, but loaded with terrifying meaning.