The world for Mito went dark, then flooded with a different kind of sight. The Essence Sensing Potion, interacting with his raging Nen and the final, desperate act of self-blinding, did not leave him in darkness. It translated the residual emotions, the lingering Nen signatures of his slaughtered tribe, and the predatory auras of the approaching Troupe into a ghostly, psychic landscape. He could "see" the hatred as crimson smears, the grief as cold blue pools, and the approaching hunters as three pulsing, violent stars of black and gold. It was a map of vengeance painted in pain.
He landed on the thick branch with the silence of a falling leaf, his body humming with the unstable, potent energy of Kevin's combined potions: Iron Wall hardening his skin, Blank Meteor supercharging his muscles, and others creating a volatile cocktail within his aura. He was no longer a man; he was a guided bomb, primed to detonate on a specific target.
Kevin, clutching the still-warm Scarlet Eyes in a blood-slicked hand, watched for a half-second longer. He saw Mito's head tilt, "looking" with his new, terrible sense towards the three approaching auras. There was no farewell, no final word. There was only purpose.
"Go!" Kevin screamed at Rosana, slapping the flank of her land bird. It leaped forward with a terrified squawk, Rosana clinging to Pairo, who was now silent, his small body shaking with suppressed sobs.
Kevin urged his own mount forward, but he didn't flee immediately. He turned, riding parallel to the trail for a few more seconds, watching the tree line.
Uvogin was the first to burst into the small clearing where the land birds had paused. He saw Mito standing alone on the branch, eyes hollow and bleeding, his aura a visible, swirling maelstrom of scarlet and unstable energy.
"HAH! The blind one came back to die!" Uvogin roared, not slowing, his fist pulling back for an earth-shattering blow.
Mito didn't dodge. He dropped from the branch, meeting Uvogin's charge head-on. But he didn't throw a punch. At the last possible instant, he twisted in the air, becoming a human spear. He channeled every ounce of the Blank Meteor's explosive force and the Iron Wall's unyielding structure into a single, focused point: his forehead.
BOOOOM- CRACK!
The sound was not of flesh striking flesh, but of a battering ram hitting a fortress wall. Uvogin's fist connected with Mito's reinforced torso, shattering ribs and pulverizing organs. But Mito's forehead, guided by his psychic "sight" of Uvogin's Nen core, smashed into the Enhancer's sternum with the force of a meteorite.
Uvogin's triumphant roar turned into a grunt of shock, then pain. The sound of breaking bone was deafening—his own. He was lifted off his feet and thrown backward, crashing through two saplings before skidding to a stop, clutching his caved-in chest, wheezing.
Mito's broken body landed in a heap. He was dead before he hit the ground, his mission complete: he had broken the spearhead.
Nobunaga and Phinks arrived a heartbeat later. They took in the scene: Uvogin down, groaning; the Kurta dead, his body a ruined testament to a suicide strike.
"The eyes," Phinks hissed, scanning. "He doesn't have them."
Nobunaga's gaze shot past the corpse, into the forest where the sound of fleeing land birds was already fading. "They split up. The woman and child went that way. The other one…" He looked in the direction Kevin had gone.
"You check the big guy. I'll get the eyes back from the other rat," Phinks snarled, and without waiting for a response, he blasted off after Kevin's trail, his Ripper Cyclotron already beginning to wind around his arm.
Nobunaga knelt briefly by Uvogin. "Idiot. You let a blind man do this to you."
"Shut… up…" Uvogin gasped, blood bubbling at his lips. "He hit… like a mountain…"
Nobunaga stood, his eyes narrowing as he looked at Mito's corpse, then towards the path Rosana had taken. The Leader's order was specific. He made his choice. He turned and sprinted after Phinks. The woman and child were secondary. Retrieving the stolen Scarlet Eyes—the Tribe's property—was paramount. And the other outsider had them.
Kevin heard the thunderous impact and knew what it meant. He didn't look back. He urged the land bird to its absolute limit, veering off the game trail and into a rocky, boulder-strewn slope where the bird's agility could shine. He could feel the single, focused aura of Phinks now homing in on him, a tightening snare of pure malice.
He had the eyes. He had a wounded, furious Spider on his tail. And he had a cliff and a raging river ahead, the same one he'd barely survived before. He had no potions left. His Nen was a guttering candle.
He patted the land bird's neck. "One more jump, friend. For him." He pointed towards the gorge.
The land bird, sensing the precipice and the water below, hesitated for only a moment before committing. With a powerful surge of its legs, it leaped from the edge of the cliff, not in a fall, but in a desperate, soaring glide towards the far side, a distance no land bird should ever attempt.
Behind him, Phinks reached the cliff edge. He saw the impossible leap, the bird and rider silhouetted against the mist of the falls. He saw Kevin look back, and for a moment, their eyes met across the chasm.
Phinks didn't roar. He simply stopped winding his arm and pointed at Kevin, a promise of future annihilation in the gesture.
Then Kevin and the land bird were gone, disappearing into the thick foliage on the opposite side of the gorge. They had crossed. For now.
Phinks stood at the edge, fists clenched. The eyes were gone, across an impassable divide. The mission was a partial failure. He turned and walked back into the forest, his rage a cold, silent thing. The Phantom Troupe did not forget. They would find him. They always did.
On the far side, Kevin slid from the exhausted, trembling land bird. He knelt by the river's edge, washing Mito's blood from his hands and the pair of Scarlet Eyes. They gleamed in his palm, no longer just a cursed commodity, but a father's final act of defiance, a legacy of unimaginable loss, and a debt of blood that now rested squarely on his shoulders. The alchemist had gone into the forest to find a flower. He had emerged carrying the last light of a slaughtered people and the unwavering hatred of the world's most dangerous criminals. The equations of his life had just become infinitely more complex, and the price of failure was no longer just his own.
Nobunaga's hand went to his sword hilt. This wasn't just rage; this was a release. The man's Nen had been a dammed reservoir, and now the dam had shattered. The Essence Sensing Potion's time limit was up, and with it, its emotional regulation had vanished. The grief, the fury, the screams of a hundred dead tribesmen—all of it, amplified and focused by the potion's lingering effects and Mito's own dying will, exploded outward in a wave of pure, corrosive hatred.
Wo Jin, caught in the epicenter, roared in both pain and exhilaration. The malicious intent wasn't a physical attack, but it was a psychic assault that screamed directly into his soul—murderer, defiler, beast! It was the condensed curse of an entire people. For a moment, it staggered him, not physically, but in spirit.
Mito used that moment. He didn't attack Wo Jin. He turned his blind, bleeding face towards Nobunaga, who stood at the edge of the clearing. He could "see" him, a calm, sharp silhouette of restrained violence against the backdrop of the forest.
"You… watch." Mito's voice was a guttural ruin, carrying the weight of the dying. "You watch him die. And you remember this feeling."
Then he turned back to Wo Jin, who was shaking off the psychic assault with a savage grin. "Is that all? Some ghost stories?"
Mito didn't answer. He charged, but not with a punch. He opened his arms wide, an embrace of death. His Nen, now completely unregulated and reacting violently with the remnants of the potions still in his system, began to invert. The Iron Wall property, meant for defense, turned inward, crystallizing his own aura. The Blank Meteor's explosive energy, instead of empowering his muscles, began to fuse with his life force, his very spirit.
Wo Jin, seeing the open charge, met it with a world-ending right cross aimed at Mito's head. "DIE!"
The fist connected.
There was no sound of impact. Instead, there was a silence, a sudden vacuum of noise, followed by a flash of incandescent white light that painted the forest in stark monochrome.
BOOM.
Not an explosion of force, but an explosion of will. A detonation of condensed malice, grief, and final defiance.
When the light faded, Wo Jin was standing, his fist still extended. But his arm was a mangled ruin of shattered bone and twisted flesh up to the elbow. His expression was one of blank shock. In front of him, there was nothing. No body. No blood. Mito had not been knocked back; he had been unmade, his physical form consumed in the catastrophic reaction, transformed into that single, purging burst of spiritual annihilation.
Wo Jin looked at his ruined arm, then at the empty space. He tried to flex his fingers, but only a gout of blood and a sickening grind of bone answered. The pain hit him a second later, and he bellowed, clutching the arm to his chest.
Nobunaga stood frozen, his usual calm shattered. He had felt it. The man hadn't just died; he had turned his own death into a weapon, a curse carved into the very air. It wasn't an attack that could be blocked with a sword. It was a statement. And the statement was: Your victory is ash. We will haunt you.
In the ringing silence that followed the psychic aftershock, Nobunaga heard the distant, fading cry of a land bird from the direction Phinks had gone. The eyes were getting away. He looked at Wo Jin, who was now swearing and raging in pain, his combat effectiveness crippled.
He made a decision. He sheathed his sword. "We're pulling back," he said, his voice flat.
"WHAT?!" Wo Jin roared. "I'll kill that bastard! I'll—"
"He's already dead. And he took your arm with him. The mission is compromised. The Leader will decide our next move." Nobunaga's tone brooked no argument. The eerie, total self-annihilation had shaken him. This wasn't a clean fight. This was something else, something that spoke of a people with a will to turn their own extinction into a scar on the world. Chasing further into these woods, after a foe who could inspire such an end, felt suddenly unwise.
He helped the seething, injured Wo Jin to his feet. They would return to the settlement, report the loss of one target (the eyes), the severe injury of a member, and the… peculiar nature of the resistance. The Phantom Troupe was not afraid, but they were pragmatic. This harvest had borne unexpected thorns.
As they limped away, the forest where Mito died felt different. The air was colder. The shadows held a whisper that hadn't been there before—a whisper of blood-red eyes and a final, silent scream that had scoured the soul of one of their strongest. The Kurta were gone, but in their last moments, they had proven why they were called devils. They had left a stain that not even the Spiders could easily wash away.
And somewhere ahead, carrying that stain's physical remnant in a box, Kevin rode on, the debt heavier than ever, the chase not yet over, and the ghost of a father's sacrifice a permanent fire in his memory. The alchemist had learned a new, terrible formula today: the alchemy of vengeance, where the ingredients are a whole people's pain and the product is a curse that maims monsters.