The air inside the fractured Nether didn't just heat up; it grew heavy, thick with the scent of unrefined ozone and absolute authority.
Kidan stood before the gathered front of Company 8, his hands loosely out of his sleeves, a casual stance that screamed utter disrespect.
Against him stood a wall of the Fire Force's finest veterans of a dozen explosive conflicts. Yet, looking at the youth with the white hair, Captain Akitaru Obi felt a primal, instinctual chill cut straight through his heavy, heat-resistant bunker gear.
"You talk big for a kid wearing a fancy white coat," Obi growled, adjusting his grip on his massive tactical shield. "But you're standing between a brother and his family. That's a dangerous place to be."
Kidan's jagged smile only widened, his eyes glittering with a mocking light. "Family? What a fragile, pathetic little word. Let me show you how easily it burns."
Without a sound, Kidan vanished.
He didn't move with the concussive, explosive roar of Shinra's ignition. It was a silent, terrifying glide. The unmistakable iaido stride of the Asakusa style. Before Lieutenant Takehisa Hinawa could even register the displacement of air, Kidan was already in his blind spot.
Kidan's right hand formed a rigid, flat blade, a Hand Sword. With a swift, blinding arc, he struck.
"Sun-Wheel: First Form."
A localized ring of white-hot plasma erupted from his fingertips, spinning like a buzzsaw. Hinawa, a seasoned soldier, reacted on sheer muscle memory. He pivoted, pulling his custom handgun and firing a burst of high-velocity rounds designed to suppress pyrokinetic ignition.
"Bounce," Hinawa muttered, activating his Second Generation ability to manipulate the trajectory and speed of the bullets, curving them perfectly to intercept Kidan's vitals.
But Kidan didn't dodge. He didn't even raise his arms.
With a subtle twitch of his left eye, the air around the flying bullets warped. The kinetic energy within the gunpowder flames didn't just dissipate; it reversed.
Kidan seized control of Hinawa's own thermochemical reaction, using Second Generation manipulation to freeze the bullets mid-air, stripping them of momentum until they clattered uselessly to the stone floor. Simultaneously, using his Third Generation trait, he expelled a concentrated blast of pure, concussive heat from his palms, sending Hinawa flying backward into the wreckage of a stone pillar.
Obi's eyes widened behind his visor. "What the... He stopped Hinawa's control over his own bullets? But he just threw a fireball!"
Hinawa struggled to his feet, coughing through the dust, his glasses cracked. He looked at Kidan, then back to Obi, a cold sweat breaking out across his forehead. "Captain... that wasn't just a fast counter. He generated the flames himself, and then he directly commanded the thermal energy of my ammunition. A hybrid... A composite pyrokinetic."
Obi's mind raced, a sudden, terrifying realization striking him. There was only one other man in the entire Tokyo Empire known to possess such a freakish, god-like anomaly of biology. "No way... Just like the King of Asakusa. Shinmon Benimaru."
"Do not speak that name so casually in my presence," Kidan said, his tone instantly dropping its playful edge, turning into a freezing, razor-sharp edge.
In a terrifying display of choreography, Kidan moved through Company 8 like a dancer through a ballroom. He didn't even look serious. His hands remained mostly relaxed, shifting into seamless Hand Sword strikes that deflected every counter-attack.
Arthur Boyle surged forward, his plasma blade Excalibur humming a fierce, righteous tune. "A false king! A demon of the dark! The Knight King shall cleave your shadow!" Arthur yelled, executing a brilliant, overhead vertical slash that cut a line of blue light through the dark cavern.
Kidan simply stepped to the side, the blade missing his shoulder by an inch. With a casual flick of his wrist, he slapped the flat of Arthur's plasma blade with an open palm. The collision didn't create an explosion; instead, a strange, celestial white light rippled from Kidan's hand.
Bzzzt.
The brilliant, blinding plasma of Excalibur flickered. Then, like a lightbulb being switched off, the blade completely vanished. The plasma was snuffed out instantly, leaving Arthur holding nothing but a cold, empty metallic hilt.
"What?!" Arthur gasped, staring at his hilt in absolute horror. "My blade... My legendary sword! It's been banished!"
"Arthur, fall back!" Vulcan screamed from the rear, desperately trying to calibrate his magnetic launcher, but his sensors were going haywire. "The ambient energy around him... it's not just high temperature. It's completely flatlining the local thermal field!"
Kidan stood perfectly still, his white cloak fluttering in the draft of the Nether. He looked down at his own hand, where a faint, ethereal glow of the Adolla Grace pulsed beneath his skin.
"You fools understand nothing of the true nature of fire," Kidan said, his voice echoing with an eerie, dual-toned resonance. "Through the Grace of the Evangelist, I have been granted the ultimate authority. Fire is the movement of atoms, the dance of energy. And under my Grace... I can command that dance to stop. I can nullify any pyrokinetic ability within my domain. Your flames are nothing but toys to me."
The revelation struck Company 8 like a physical blow. A pyrokinetic who could generate fire, manipulate existing fire, and turn off the fire of his opponents? He was a walking god of the battlefield.
"I don't care what kind of god you think you are," Captain Obi roared.
Despite knowing he was entirely outmatched, despite knowing he had no superpowers to rely on, the Captain of Company 8 charged. He threw his massive shield aside, relying entirely on the raw, unadulterated strength of his human muscles, honed through thousands of hours of intense weightlifting and unstoppable discipline. He ducked under a casual, whipping fire-kick from Kidan, his boots skidding across the debris as he drove his shoulder straight toward Kidan's midsection for a tackle.
"A regular human?" Kidan muttered, a look of genuine boredom crossing his face as he raised a single hand to intercept Obi's massive frame. "How tedious."
Just as Kidan was about to sidestep and drive a lethal hand-sword strike into Obi's exposed neck, a sudden, chaotic blur of orange and blue stumbled into the periphery.
"Hold on! I'm coming to help, w-woah! Ahhh!"
Tamaki Kotatsu, who had been trying to flank Kidan from the shadows, suddenly tripped over a loose wire protruding from a smashed piece of Nether machinery. Her legendary, reality-bending curse. The Lucky Lechery activated with catastrophic precision.
As she fell forward, her uniform jacket inexplicably snagged on a jagged piece of rebar, tearing open completely. Her boots flew off her feet, launching through the air like unguided missiles. One of her flying boots struck Kidan square in the back of the head, while Tamaki herself crashed directly into Kidan's waist, her limbs flailing in an incredibly awkward, compromising tangle that pinned his arms to his sides for a split second.
"What in the name of the Evangelist—?!" Kidan sputtered, his absolute composure completely shattering as he found himself suddenly blinded by a flurry of flying fabric, hair, and a thoroughly embarrassed fire soldier crying at the top of her lungs.
It was the one, impossible variable Kidan's cold calculation could never have predicted.
"Now or never!" Obi bellowed.
With Kidan's focus completely derailed by the sheer absurdity of the Lucky Lechery, Obi found his opening. He drew back his massive, heavily armored fist, channeling every ounce of his unyielding resolve, his love for his squad, and his duty as a protector into a single point.
*BOOM!*
Obi's fist connected squarely with Kidan's jaw. The sheer, mechanical force of the punch delivered by a human who trained to fight devils with raw muscle sent a massive shockwave through the air. Kidan was violently lifted off his feet, thrown backward through the air, crashing hard into the stone floor and skidding several yards before rolling to a stop.
Tamaki scrambled away, face bright red, desperately trying to cover herself. "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! It just happened!"
Obi stood panting, his knuckles bruised, a wild, fierce grin on his face. "Don't apologize, Tamaki! That was the best assist I've ever seen!"
For a moment, a heavy silence fell over the cavern. Arthur managed to reignite a flickering, unstable spark of Excalibur, standing defiantly in front of the injured Shinra and Sho. Obi took a defensive stance, his breathing ragged but his spirit entirely unbroken. They had landed a hit. They had proven the monster could bleed.
But the triumph was short-lived.
From the shadows of the dust cloud, Kidan slowly stood up. He wiped a small streak of crimson blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his thumb. His hair fell over his eyes, casting a terrifying shadow over his face. When he looked up, the jagged, sinister smile was gone. In its place was a cold, terrifying vacuum of pure, murderous intent.
"Amusing," Kidan whispered. The ground beneath him began to literally melt into slag, turning to liquid stone from the sheer, passive heat radiating from his body. "You actually managed to touch me. I suppose I should stop treating you like insects and actually erase you from existence."
Before Kidan could take a step to unleash hell, the sound of rapid, heavy footsteps echoed from the southern tunnel entrance.
"Company 8! Hold on!"
Maki Oze burst into the chamber. Her uniform was torn, covered in soot, and she was visibly exhausted, clearly having just fought her way through a brutal gauntlet of White-Clad cultists in the outer tunnels. Her breath came in short, ragged gasps, but the moment her violet eyes swept across the room. Seeing Hinawa injured, Arthur struggling, and Captain Obi standing defiantly against a monster her resolve hardened instantly.
She didn't hesitate. She dropped into a flawless, powerful military close-quarters fighting stance, her muscular arms raised, her iron owls hovering around her shoulders, ready to command the flames to the absolute death to protect her family.
"I won't let you hurt them!" Maki shouted, her voice ringing clear and fierce through the smoke.
Kidan froze.
The terrifying, apocalyptic aura melting the floorboards instantly vanished, snuffed out as if it never existed. The murderous glare in his mismatched eyes dissolved, replaced by a wide, completely vacant, and utterly stunned stare.
To Kidan, the entire universe suddenly slowed to a complete crawl. The dark, grimy, blood-stained Nether was violently replaced by a hallucinatory vision of falling cherry blossoms and a golden, ethereal light. Maki didn't look like a battered Fire Soldier in a ruined uniform; she looked like an absolute goddess of war and beauty, her fierce, determined expression striking a chord deep within his soul that he didn't even know existed.
His heart, usually a cold, steady metronome of tactical calculation, began to hammer against his ribs like a trapped bird. A strange, completely unprecedented warmth bloomed in his chest, entirely unrelated to his pyrokinetic abilities.
'What... what is this feeling?' Kidan thought, his mind completely short-circuiting as he stared at the muscular, fighting-ready woman who had just entered the fray. 'Is this... an enemy attack? A mental distortion? No... she's... she's perfect.'
Haumea, watching from the platform above, facepalmed so hard the metal of her visor let out a loud *ping*. "Oh, you have got to be kidding me. Not another one. Hey! Kidan! You idiot! What are you doing?! Snap out of it and grab the Pillar!"
But Kidan didn't hear her. He was entirely lost in the profound, utterly catastrophic phenomenon of love at first sight, completely paralyzed by the fiercest soldier Company 8 had to offer.