"What did you say?"

"What are you, really?"

The words rippled over a sea of blood, a tide built from severed limbs and scattered remains.

A red slick, thick as meat pulp, pooled and rose to the Black Knight’s ankles. Bones gleamed like moonlit gravel. Guts bobbed like drowned snakes. Shredded lips and broken eyes drifted like wilted masks.

All of it was the handiwork of the girl in the black dress, lounging lazily on a crucifix like a wind-tossed ink painting.

To be exact, all of it was… her.

Just moments ago, black light had swallowed Lustrous. She became a black Witch. She lifted a hand, and countless copies of herself swarmed at Long like a locust cloud.

Those “Lustrous” weren’t much stronger. To Long, each was a skull under a hammer. One punch, and a body burst like a ripe fruit. The terror was the flood. The copies never stopped coming. Even killing the girl on the cross did nothing.

She was reborn, again and again.

And the grind had worn even Long thin.

Not in muscle, but in mind. He had killed many in a breath before, using a magic cannon to erase a city like a candle snuffed. He had never done this—cold, mechanical, one punch at a time—killing the same person over and over.

He stepped. He stomped. Shockwaves rolled like concentric rings in a lake. Dozens of girls were minced into red foam again. The Black Knight finally asked, a stone dropping through still water, “What are you, really?”

...

...

“Didn’t you say I was a [Spirit]?”

Her black skirt fluttered like a raven’s wing. Her skin, dark as polished onyx, caught the moonlight and turned pure, deadly beautiful.

Lustrous smiled.

“Not just that.” Long stared into the pitch-dark girl. His gaze pressed through cloth, skin, meat, and bone, like a drill biting toward the soul. “Something else is hiding inside.”

A man doesn’t live this long by being brute alone. While he crushed each girl, he listened to the way force sank into flesh, the rhythm, the grain.

Beyond blood and meat, he felt something both weightless and heavy.

He had thought it was a soul. Only a soul could be that light in mass and that grave in nature.

But just now, something slipped. It wasn’t—no, it wasn’t only—a soul.

Because that thing was too—

“Orderly.” The tall knight let his eyes sweep the blood-lake, a storm made of bodies. “I’ve seen many souls. No soul—especially a human’s—is pure black or pure white. Life isn’t that. Not pure black, not pure white. Not neat good and neat evil, not clear right and clear wrong. It’s a twisted rainbow that dries into gray.”

Long looked at Lustrous. The girl kept smiling, a crescent moon over a dark well.

“But you’re different. Every ‘you’ I break has a soul that’s pure, a purity of—black.” His fist curled. After so much killing, even iron carried the smell of wet rust. “It’s like—”

“It’s like I’m made entirely of [Black],” Lustrous said.

“No.” Long shook his head. “Not only that.”

He couldn’t pierce it all the way, but he felt it. Inside the black Witch who stood on the cross and smiled with lazy eyes, there was more than [Black]. In one accidental instant, while his punch blew her apart again, he felt a cold so deep it burned. It leaked out of her shattered flesh and soul like night wind from a grave. It brushed his knuckles and then was gone. It set his bones chattering. It dropped him into hell.

Long had seen the worst pictures the world could paint. Even so, that cold made his body tremble.

He stared at her.

What horror had nested in that girl to breed a chill so despairing?

She had called herself [Misfortune]. What kind of Misfortune?

“Whatever it is.” He drew in a breath. His voice rolled like thunder trapped in a drum. “Let me—help you—”

He thrust his right arm to the sky. Fingers spread. Then one by one, they closed toward his palm.

Boom.

Wind exploded from him like a hurricane torn from its chain. The trees bowed and hissed. The blast swept blood and meat clean from the earth. Only a thin skin of red-stained dry grass clung to the dirt like stubborn fingers.

Long frowned and sank his breath. His muscles bulged like coiled ropes. His black iron armor cracked with a dry k-k-k sound. He looked like a man hauling an anchor from the heavens with an invisible chain.

The girl tilted her chin. A thousand meters up, black light blossomed, like a thunder-tree in flower, like a dragon rolling in clouds. A hint of scale and claw broke the mist and bled dread into the air.

“Wow. Pretty,” Lustrous said, head cocked, voice like a cat batting yarn.

It was a spear.

The black spear Long had thrown into the sky before stepping into this forest.

His fists were fearsome. But on the continent, his name rode on his spear.

A spear that, in legend, could sink an island with one strike.

Clang.

Metal kissed metal in the high blue.

He caught it.

He caught his spear.

Man ran on earth. Spear coursed in sky. When man and spear were one, that was the true—【Apocalypse Knight】.

Long’s right hand closed on emptiness. A black thunder-dragon coiled under the firmament and froze, lowering its head to heed its master.

In the Void, black sigils spread like a starry net, dropping from the sky to bind man and spear together.

“Let me help you,” Long said. “Be free.”

Boom.

...

...

“What are you looking at?”

A voice as gentle as water rose, curious and soft.

Silent, the girl with ash-gray short hair lifted her face. Her eyes fixed on the sky as if it were a stranger she almost remembered.

Two identical skies overlapped there, mirage and world folded together, dream kissing waking.

The black 【Demon King】 and the swordsman’s 【Demon King】 stood in opposition, like twin storms staring across a valley.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” The hidden 【Knight】 chuckled from the Void, his tone a smile you couldn’t see. “A battle between two eras’ 【Demon Kings】. We won’t see this again. What’s fun isn’t who plays which part. It’s the law of it—no matter who you are, no matter how strong, you don’t get away.”

“No one can escape this cage of a 【World】.” He paused. The words fell heavier, like rain turning to hail. “Thinking that way makes it feel hopeless.”

“But.” His voice suddenly brightened, like a lamp relit in fog. “A night-blooming flower opens for a blink. To this 【World】, to 【It】, our lives are that blink. A flash of fragrance, a flash of bloom. Even under a sky this heavy with despair, we should burn bright.”

“So, forgive me…” His voice dipped, guilt threading the lightness. “I still want to live a little longer.”

Steel slid from its sheath in the Nothing.

“You can’t hear this, or see it, can you?” he murmured.

The blade eased into the gray-haired girl’s heart, slow as a needle through silk. The 【Knight】 sounded almost tender, almost ashamed. “I’m sorry. I have to let you die.”