"Do you think," Satou said slowly, his voice carrying a dangerous edge, "I was fighting you seriously all this while?"
Richard's multiple forms all shifted slightly, confusion evident across all the overlapping faces. "What—"
And then everything changed.
Satou's aura exploded outward like a bomb detonating, like a star going supernova, like reality itself had decided to start screaming.
The shadows around him didn't just deepen—they erupted, they exploded, they began to writhe and pulse and undulate like thousands of serpents made of pure darkness, each one radiating hunger and malevolence and killing intent so thick it was almost physical.
His eyes, which had been glowing with predatory intensity, suddenly intensified a hundredfold—no longer just glowing but blazing, burning with light like twin crimson stars, like the eyes of something ancient and terrible that existed before light itself was invented, like the final sight prey animals saw before death claimed them.
