The morning after Ren's collapse was thick with a silence that wouldn't lift. Sunlight slanted through the curtains in pale bars, catching motes that spun like hesitant seconds. The house felt smaller, every footstep louder than it should be.
In Shoto's living room the remaining group gathered, drawn into their own private worries. Yumiko perched on the sofa, eyes red-rimmed from too little sleep. Shoto sat with the black sword across his knees—heavy, foreign, a thing he'd only ever held in passing. He'd favored the Zamorak blade in the past; now the pitch-black weapon seemed to hum as if remembering a promise it had once been given.
Neko padded in and leapt up onto Shoto's shoulder with feline ease, flicking his tail as if the news were nothing more than a nap interrupted. "Ren's injured," he said flatly, voice calm as spilled milk. "Out of the hospital for three months. Yuumo too." He blinked, unbothered.
The room froze. Hikaru rubbed at his forehead; Ryuji's usual smirk wilted. For a long moment no one could find language.
Neko, as if on cue, continued, sardonic charm dipping into something colder. "Two fights left… maybe we should give up while we ca—"
Hikaru jabbed a finger at his glasses and cut him off with a hard look. "Quit?" His voice was small but sharp. "Hina and Shoto are the only two left?"
The cat hopped down from Shoto's shoulder, tail flicking. "Follow me, Hikaru," he said, eyes oddly serious for the first time. He padded toward the front door and slipped out. Hikaru followed without argument.
Left in the quiet, Shoto drew the black sword across his palms. The metal drank in the room's light; it felt heavier than he expected. He stood slowly, every movement a reminder of last night's cost, and walked toward the back of the house.
"Tomorrow decides everything," he whispered, voice thin. He flinched as if admitting it aloud made it more real. Then he looked at Ryuji, cheeks burning from an impulse that had no patience for pride. "R-Ryuji… c-can you train with me?"
Ryuji's face split into a grin that could have warmed a winter night. He wrapped an arm around Shoto's shoulders in a half-mocking, half-protective hug. "Sure, Battz-Kazami! Anything for my sister's boyfriend." He gave the black sword a playful rap. "Let's try that one thing with our swords. Get you moving again."
Shoto managed a small laugh that dissolved as quickly as it came. They headed out back toward the practice yard, boot soles whispering on the boards. The sound was meant to be ordinary—walking, training—but every step felt like a countdown.
Hina did not follow.
She sat alone on the floor with the fire sword resting at her side. The weapon always carried a hum—today it thrummed like a heart in the dark. She absently traced a finger along the scabbard and felt the familiar tug of a voice curling under her skin: Not spoken aloud, but there. You know what you could do. You could end it. One clean strike—Zan-Xi and his puppets fall—no waiting. The voice was warm as coals and vicious as a blade.
Hina pressed her palms flat to the floor, grounding herself. "We're not doing that," she said to the empty room, more to steady her own pulse than to argue with the thought. The voice grinned, a grin that tasted like iron and victory.
She breathed in. "We just have to beat our opponent tomorrow. Whoever it is." Her jaw set. The voice's grin sharpened, but she flinched it down, holding the line she'd promised herself. Still—underneath her resolve something flared: a hunger, impatient and dangerous. She stared at the fire sword as if it might answer.
Outside on the front porch, Neko and Hikaru sat in a brief, weighty silence. The cat's tail wrapped and unwrapped like a metronome.
"All right," Hikaru said finally. "What is it?"
Neko didn't look up. "Watch him tomorrow," the cat answered. "Whatever happens to Shoto—watch. And if he loses, it's over."
Hikaru met Neko's eyes; there was a hardness there that had nothing to do with jokes. "And if he wins?"
"Then we press on," Neko said, voice softening almost imperceptibly. He pushed off the porch and walked away, leaving Hikaru alone with thoughts that wouldn't untangle.
Night fell like a curtain over the city. The abandoned school—scarred and skeletal—had become their arena. The broken bleachers, the cracked running track, the hollow gym: all of it smelled of dust and old battles.
A mechanical clank announced the arrival of the challenger at the main gate. The robot butler—faceplate smooth and expressionless—stood sentinel in the doorway as Hina, Neko, Shoto, Ryuji, and Hikaru filed in, the small procession moving like a funeral.
"STATE YOUR NAME!" the robot intoned in that same deadpan voice.
Hina stepped forward; the lights traced the flare of her red hair. For a brief second she looked every inch the polite student—quiet, composed. "Hina Shinako," she answered, voice steady.
The robot paused. The suit portion around its chest began to shift and shed like a second skin being removed. Hydraulic joints hummed, metal panels sliding open as the machine peeled back the Butler's façade.
"DESIGNATION: X-12," the machine replied when the transformation completed. Where a polite smile might have been, now there was only hard mechanics and clinical purpose. "I WILL BE YOUR OPPONENT."
At the word the calm in Hina's face broke.
Her soft demeanor fractured, and something animal—bright and hot—took over. Her red hair whipped as if it had its own wind. The room felt like it narrowed around her; the air grew thin and bright. The polite girl dissolved; in her place a blade of heat strode forward.
"Perfect." The word slipped from her like a match struck. The voice that spoke it was not the one they'd known yesterday; it was sharper, hungry—Hina braided with the sword's promise. Her eyes flashed, not with fear, but with a reckless, devouring light. In a single, blistering motion, Hina drew her fire sword and leveled it forward.
Her lips curled—not in fear, but in thrill—as she whispered the ignition word through clenched teeth.
"Éveiller."
There was no dramatic transformation. No flames bursting from the blade. No sudden glow.
But the world around them changed.
The ruined schoolyard air thickened, heated, as if someone had wrapped the entire battlefield in a furnace. The ground beneath their feet shimmered with mirage-like waves. Even Ryuji and Hikaru in the distance instinctively took a step back, sweat already forming across their foreheads.
The temperature hadn't just risen.
It was still rising.
X-12's optical lens shifted in calibration, its system registering the phenomenon. The machine did not flinch, but its cooling vents rattled open along its shoulders, releasing bursts of steaming air.
"THERMAL INDEX—ESCALATING. INITIATING DEFENSIVE PROTOCOL."
Before the words even finished echoing, Hina launched forward.
She didn't run—she ignited.
Her footsteps were sparks, her dash a streak of searing momentum. X-12's right arm unfolded with a hydraulic hiss, metal plates shifting and locking into place to form a large, concave energy shield.
The robot braced itself.
Hina didn't slow.
She thrust her fire sword with every ounce of force she could muster.
KRA-CHANG!
The impact wasn't just metal against metal—it was flame against logic.
A violent spark exploded outward like a sunburst, searing orange light flashing across the courtyard. The shield trembled, the force rippling up X-12's arm, its mechanical frame momentarily staggering.
Hina's grin widened into something feral.
The shield held… for a moment.
Then—
CRACK.
A fracture tore across the surface like spiderweb glass under pressure.
X-12's system stuttered for half a second before issuing its diagnosis aloud:
"SHIELD INTEGRITY: 2% REMAINING. DAMAGE—CRITICAL."
Hina leaned in, eyes burning like coals under the flame-lit haze.
Hina's grin split wider, teeth flashing in the heat-hung light. The air around her shimmered, every molecule trembling from the blade's latent hunger. The fire sword pulsed in her hand like a living thing, responding to the tiny command she'd given it — not by changing form, but by bending the battlefield to its will.
She pulled back a breath, slow and deliberate, letting the heat fill her lungs. Then she moved.
Not a single wasted motion. Her step was a coil, foot planting like a sprinter powering off the blocks; the motion was economy itself — everything directed toward the point of contact. She slammed forward again, the sword a comet of iron and intent.
X-12 had readied its remaining defenses, servos whining as it rerouted power to smaller stabilizers around the cracked shield. Its right arm held, trembling, but functional. On its HUD lines of diagnostic text scrolled like rain.
ENGAGE—COUNTERMEASURE: SUBROUTINE-GAIA.
DEPLOYING—AERIAL-SCOURGE.
X-12's frame flexed. From its back, two segmented panels snapped open with a harsh metallic rasp. Tiny nozzles exposed themselves and began vomiting compressed steam and a viscous, cold aerosol designed to rapidly lower local temperatures — a counter to Hina's thermal domain. Jets fired, hissing, scattering a cold mist that fought against the rising heat.
The two elements collided in mid-air: steam and flame, cloud and glare. For a heartbeat the courtyard was a roiling cloud — a white, wet storm pierced by orange embers.
Hina's eyes narrowed. She slashed horizontally, carving a line through the cloud. The fire sword cut through the cooled steam like a blade through silk, leaving a bright, smoking seam in its wake.
X-12 didn't relent. Its left arm extended, fingers splaying into a cluster of cables and metallic rods that whirred like a multi-pronged trident. The machine spun them outward in a sweeping arc aimed to entangle Hina mid-stride, to pin her and deliver a disabling shock through conductive metal.
But Hina anticipated the trap. She ducked low, rolling under the reaching rods, and used her momentum to come up behind the robot in one fluid arc. Her blade came up in a reverse grip, heel-planting against the robot's lower plating; she slammed it into a weak joint and leapt, using the force to vault off the machine itself—an acrobatic strike that would have burned lesser opponents.
She landed two meters away, pivoting instantly as X-12 retaliated with a hydraulic stomp that cracked the concrete where her foot had been. Sparks flew.
Hikaru called out from the sideline, voice taut: "Watch the — its core vents are exposed after every deploy! Hit the vents!"
Ryuji barked, "Don't get cocky, Hina! Keep moving!"
She heard them but she had already seen the opening; her eyes tracked the rhythmic twitch of an exhaust vent cycling beneath the robot's spinal plates—every cycle a fraction of a second where the vent's seam opened, exposing the cooling core.
Her sword sang as she ran.
She synced her breathing to the machine's mechanical tempo — step, breathe, strike — approaching as if running a track she'd known since childhood. At the lurch of the vent's next opening she fired a precision slash, striking not the metal but the seam, levering dirt and paint from the joint and releasing a plume of scalding air.
WARNING — COOLING SYSTEM COMPROMISED.
TEMP SPIKE: 47°C — RISING.
The robot's optics flickered; its balance faltered. X-12 reoriented, swinging its trident-like appendages in a panic, arcs of electricity dancing along their lengths as countermeasures kicked in—an angry, desperate flurry.
Hina used the distraction to charge. Her blade drank the air and spat it back as heat, carving a corridor of singing metal toward X-12's torso. She punched a thrust straight into the vent seam she'd targeted, and the resulting burst sent raw, superheated air back into the robot's belly.
Sparks. Flash. A short-circuit kiss that showered the courtyard with glittering metal flakes.
The robot howled—a sound like grinding gears and broken glass. It staggered, swayed, then violently pivoted, releasing a shockwave from its core in a desperate attempt to eject Hina.
The blast slammed into her, the force lifting her boots off the ground. Heat licked at her face, sweat stinging her eyes, the sword ringed with a halo of white-hot air. She gritted her teeth and planted herself, letting the shock roll through her like a wave. She had a second—less than a second—to close the distance before the machine could recalibrate.
She moved like lightning folded into flame.
A final, brutal combination: a low sweep to unbalance, a vertical chop aimed to clip the robot's servo housing, and a hammering thrust into the exposed vent. The sword bit into the seam and the robot's hull gave with an accusing shriek. Metal peeled, and a cascade of coolant and smoldering circuitry erupted outward.
X-12 convulsed, then went still—its movements slowing to a collapse as power drained from its systems. Sensors flickered, then blinked out in cold succession like stars in a clouded sky.
For a breath—there was nothing but the hissing of dissipating steam and the distant ragged breathing of the onlookers.
Hina stood over the ruined machine, chest heaving. Flame licked the tip of the blade before guttering as the humid air swallowed it. Her face was streaked with soot and sweat, eyes bright and unblinking. She started to laugh demonically.
Silence blanketed the battlefield.
Then—
Ryuji whispered, very quietly,
"…We're… all in agreement that she's horrifying, right?"
Shoto didn't blink.
Hikaru swallowed.
All three of them nodded immediately.
Hina's blazing aura faded, her posture softening as if nothing had happened at all. She blinked innocently, tilting her head.
"…Did I win?"
The group stared at her in total silence — not cheering, not responding.
Just processing.
Before Shoto could answer, the faint sound of footsteps echoed across the ruined battlefield.
Zan-Xi strode forward, hands in his pockets, stopping beside the sparking remains of X-12. He nudged the robot with his foot, unfazed.
"So this is it, huh?" His gaze rose, locking onto Shoto like a predator spotting prey. His grin widened. "Me versus little Shoto."
Hina's soft smile instantly vanished. Without a word, she turned and sprinted back to the group — practically diving behind Ryuji.
Shoto's hands trembled, but he stepped forward anyway, shaky breaths steadying with each step.
Zan-Xi stretched his arms lazily. "Let's skip the formalities. No names. No titles. No referee. Just this—"
His lips curled wickedly.
"—your fancy god sword, and the rest of those elemental toys… will be mine."
Shoto slowly released his grip from the pitch-black blade at his waist.
His timidness began to fade.
His eyes sharpened.
Zan-Xi raised one hand — a pitch-white sword materialized from pure light, mirroring the way Shoto conjured his Zamorak blade.
But before Shoto could respond, Zan-Xi's blade morphed with a metallic click — transforming into a sleek, futuristic gun.
He licked his teeth, excitement flaring.
BOOM
A beam of holy light tore through the air toward Shoto.
But Shoto's hand snapped up.
FWOOOM
The Zamorak Sword burst into existence, black flames spiraling around his fist as he cleaved the beam in two — the ground erupting on both sides of him.
The timid Shoto was gone.
Black scales crawled along his jawline, his posture straightened, and even his breathing shifted — calm, controlled, resolute.
He raised his sword in a traditional stance.