Rudra didn't waste his time. The revolver bloomed into his hand like an extension of his will—matte black, engraved with the sigil of the coiled serpent. He raised it before thought could intervene and pulled the trigger.
The bullet tore through the air, found Agni's diaphragm, and buried itself deep. For a moment, nothing happened. Then Rudra whispered—
"Agi."
The bullet pulsed once. Then again. Then it erupted, a dull thump followed by a violent cascade of miniature implosions.
"Agi."
Each repetition layered another detonation, the flesh folding inwards and expanding back out like a collapsing star.
"AGI."
By the third command, the explosions overlapped, red and frost intermixing in an unholy burst that painted the ground in vaporized blood and steam.
"AAAGIIIII!!!"
The final invocation ruptured the air. Agni's form vanished into the blast. For a moment, there was only the echo—then the silence that followed.
The blast cloud hung over the island like a phantom lung, inhaling snow and smoke, exhaling ash. Rudra stood amidst it all, coat frayed, eyes trembling with disbelief and hunger for confirmation—was it over?
The sea hissed where molten heat met frozen tide. Every instinct in Rudra's body screamed to stay alert, to reload, to prepare for the next wave. His breath came out in ragged bursts, each exhale forming steam that coiled and dispersed into the mist.
And then—through the fog—two silhouettes. One fading. One reforming.
Agni stepped out of the haze, his chest a hollow cavern where flesh refused to die. Frost crawled over the wound, knitting him back together with deliberate slowness, each thread of ice glowing faintly blue. His voice slithered through the cold—soft, distant, and too calm.
"Is that all… Red?"
Rudra froze, revolver trembling in his grip. "How the hell did you—" His words cut off mid-breath. "No… no, shit, shit."
Because Agni's hand was moving—trailing his fingers down the center of his torso, from sternum to navel. A faint line appeared, delicate as a scar, before it opened.
Inside, like a living wound, bloomed a crystalline lotus—seven-petaled, layered with impossible symmetry. Four petals already unfolded, each one refracting the cold light into prismatic shards that danced across the snow.
Rudra's crimson eyes dilated, disbelief snapping through his nerves like lightning.
"Bhen…chooo—"
"Language," Agni interrupted lightly, the corner of his mouth curling into a taunting smile. "You like it? My Zero Lotus."
Rudra's voice cracked, rage and horror knotting inside his throat. "You mutilated the Crimson Rose."
Agni only tilted his head, the frost haloing him like a saint of winter.
"Humanity is a boundary, Red. And I got tired of boundaries."
Rudra's hands trembled, the revolver sagging under the weight of a truth he didn't yet understand. His eyes burned—not with rage, but with that terrible ache that comes when memory collides with guilt."You gave up your humanity," he said, his voice thin, nearly breaking.
Agni's smirk was quiet cruelty made flesh. "To say that I gave up my humanity," he murmured, "would be to assume I had one to begin with." His steps crackled against the frost as he continued, tone now almost reverent. "In these years, I've found something—about me, about you…" His gaze flicked down, and then back up, shimmering with malice. "…and about Master."
The sea bellowed somewhere beyond the fog, a low, guttural roar, as if even the ocean couldn't stand to hear that name.
At the mention of Master, Rudra's spine stiffened. A phantom chill ran up his bones, his muscles locked, and instinctively he hugged himself, trying to trap the warmth inside."A… and what would that be?" he managed to whisper.
Agni looked at him then, not as a rival, not even as a brother—but as something beneath contempt. His expression drained of playfulness; hatred bloomed where cold had once ruled."That you," he said softly, almost tenderly, "are the cause of everything."
Rudra blinked, his mind emptying, confusion swelling where words should've been."What… the hell do you me—"
The sentence snapped off into a strangled noise as ice erupted around his throat. He fell silent mid-breath, choking as crystalline shards bloomed in his voice box, each one glinting like frozen thorns tearing through sound itself. His breath turned brittle. His body twitched in muted panic.
Agni's steps echoed faintly through the mist, deliberate, unhurried, each heel-click a punctuation of inevitability. Frost licked the floor where he walked, and his voice, when it came, was almost tender.
"Don't worry," Agni whispered, cold light tracing his smile. "I'll remind you what you forgot."
BANG!
The gunshot ruptured the silence—raw, jarring, impossibly loud against the ocean wind. A red bloom tore across Agni's torso, and for the first time, his expression fractured into genuine shock.
Rudra stood trembling, revolver raised, his breath ragged and steaming. His lips parted, and from the shattered ruin of his voice box came a single, torn word—"...Indra!"
The sound itself became power. Crimson lightning erupted from his chest, webbing through the air, alive with divine fury. It swallowed Agni whole, shredding through his ice barrier, turning the frost into vapor and the snow beneath their feet into glass.
Agni's laughter cracked through the steam and ruin like breaking ice—soft at first, then growing louder, more unhinged. Rudra's eyelids fluttered, exhaustion pulling at him, but he knew that sound—he had heard it years ago, before all of this, when they were still boys. When rivalry was still something human.
"You always were better than me," Agni said, his tone almost wistful as he stepped forward, each footfall leaving behind a bloom of frost on molten ground. His torso, torn open moments ago, was knitting back together—tendons freezing, muscle reforming, a grotesque resurrection shaped by sheer will. "Even when all you had were the basic mantras—Invisible Slash, Chronos Desist, elemental weaving… you made them dance."
Rudra's breath came out ragged. "Shut up…"
Agni ignored him, voice sharpening with something close to admiration, or envy disguised as philosophy. "You always fought like a man who knew the ending. Every move, every misstep, even your losses—they felt rehearsed. Like you were waiting for the right cue to win. A clown with a death wish, juggling despair into miracles."
The frost reached Rudra's knees again. His revolver shook in his grip, half melted.
"I could never keep up with you if we grew… organically." Agni's tone cracked into laughter again, the kind of laugh that carried no mirth, only confession. "So I cut my roots. I tore open the rose. I let the Zero lotus consume what was left of my soul. All because of you."
He gestured to his chest, where the crystalline lotus shimmered, seven layers of petals slowly rotating like a divine mechanism.
"This Zero Lotus," he said, "it's your fault, Red."
Rudra turned his head slightly, crimson eyes narrowing. "Don't put your madness on me."
Agni grinned, tilting his head. "Oh, but it was your Fated Shot, wasn't it? The bullet that always returns when the moment demands it. Your perfect metaphor for destiny. The technique you built from your own resentment."
His expression softened for a moment—sad, nostalgic, deadly. "You were supposed to be Master's heir. You were supposed to be the next sun. But you hesitated. You always hesitated."
Agni's words barely left his mouth before a crack split the air—then the smack. His hand, huge and searing with frost, clamped around Rudra's face. The cold burned like acid. Steam hissed between their skin. But through the gaps between Agni's fingers, he saw something that made his grin falter—Rudra's eyes, no longer purely red, but flickering with an embered orange glow, molten and unstable, as if fire itself had begun bleeding through his veins.
Agni didn't even have time to curse before the heat spiked.
The explosion was not sound but force—a detonation of wrath made flesh. His palm shattered, flesh and bone vaporized as his entire forearm disintegrated. His face followed, a bloom of blood and flame tearing him backward through the air. He crashed, rolled, and reformed in spasms of regenerating meat and smoke.
By the time he stood again, face half-formed and dripping magma from his eye sockets, he was laughing—loud, wild, even proud.
"Hahahaha! That's it!" he roared, voice gnarled but joyous. "That's the Rudra I remember! That's the monster Master feared would outgrow even her!"
He staggered forward, still healing, his tone turning almost celebratory, like a commentator praising a fighter mid-match.
"Even if I was holding back you destroyed someone like me, huh? —oh, Rudra, you bastard!" His laughter deepened, ragged but admiring. "You know what this is like? It's like Dana White trying to describe Jon Jones—he can't even hide the bias! That's how much you scare me!"
He spread his arms, regeneration complete now, flames and frost swirling in perfect equilibrium around his body. His grin widened, manic and adoring.
"Come on, The Phantom Flame" he said. "Show me what you've been hiding from even yourself."