The skeletons surge forward in a clattering wave, but Akos is already in motion. He pivots his entire body, the Katana Totsugeki Field whistling through the air as it claims their heads in a single, fluid
He blurs through the horde, a ghost in a red jacket, leaving a trail of severed limbs and decapitated torsos. A massive devil lunges, trying to crush him with its heavy legs, but Akos performs a perfect backflip over the beast. Mid-air, he drives his blade deep into the creature's skull.
The Devil lets out a harrowing shriek of agony, thrashing blindly; its massive horns accidentally impale several other nearby monsters before it finally topples over, plunging into the sea of blood with a heavy splash.
Akos leaps clear just in time, landing among a swarm of zombies and spiders. As they close in, he steadies his breath and channels his energy into the blade.
"SLASH OF THE ABSOLUTE VOID!"
A devastating wave of energy erupts from his sword, a vertical line of destruction that shears through the horde.
The force is so great that even the air seems to split. However, a devil directly in front of him—despite being cut clean in half—performs a grotesque feat of regeneration. Its flesh knits back together with a sickening squelch, and it lunges at him with renewed fury.
"Eh? You just won't stay dead, will you?" Akos mutters. He doesn't give it a second chance, plunging his katana directly through its forehead.
The devil reels back, its claws scratching desperately at the steel embedded in its brain. Seizing the moment, Akos draws the Dragon Slave Shotgun. The cavern echoes with the thunderous roar of the weapon as he begins to systematically execute the surrounding threats.
He moves with lethal efficiency: a blast to the leg of one, a point-blank shot to the skull of another. One by one, the devils fall in a spray of ichor. A giant-handed monster tries to swat him out of the air, but Akos jumps, aiming mid-flight and blowing the creature's eye apart.
Suddenly, a devil with spike-like limbs strikes at his hands with blinding speed. The force of the impact knocks the shotgun clean out of Akos's grip, sending it spinning into the air.
The spiked devil lunges again, aiming to impale him while he's unarmed.
Akos doesn't retreat. He springs upward, reaching for the falling weapon. In one lightning-fast motion, he catches the shotgun mid-air, levels the barrel, and pulls the trigger, vaporizing the spiked monster before he even touches the ground.
Akos lands softly, his chest rising and falling as he catches his breath. A thin, dangerous smile plays on his lips. "Okay... that was actually a little bit of fun."
But the fun is short-lived. The ground beneath him begins to vibrate, and a shadow looms over his position. He looks up to find a gargantuan worm, its mouth a circular maw of thousands of teeth, staring him down.
The giant worm screeches, launching a swarm of explosive, bird-like parasites from its maw. They streak toward Akos like living missiles, detonating in fiery bursts upon impact.
Akos blurs through the smoke, narrowly dodging the chain reaction. Seeing the worm's massive body exposed, he sprints directly toward the towering threat.
As the worm lunges, Akos drops into a low slide, skidding across the slick, black stone. He passes directly beneath the creature's massive, gaping head.
Looking up, his eyes lock onto the monster's underbelly—a cluster of pulsing, vulnerable sensory organs. Akos grins, winks at the beast, and presses the barrel of the Dragon Slave Shotgun against its soft tissue.
BOOM.
The worm's head vanishes in a geyser of black ichor and shredded flesh, spraying the cavern walls. Another devil lunges from the side, but Akos doesn't even break his stride.
He blasts the creature's legs out from under it and hammers a reinforced fist into its gut. He finishes it with a point-blank shot to the stomach, leaving it motionless on the floor.
Akos turns his head, spotting the regenerating devil that still has his katana embedded in its skull. It's still twitching, its fingers clawing at the ground as it tries to crawl.
With a sudden burst of speed, Akos leaps onto the creature's back. He levels the shotgun at its neck and fires, severing the head completely.
As the head flies off into the darkness, Akos grips the hilt of his katana and rips it free. Even then, the headless stump tries to knit itself back together with sickening squelches.
Akos scoffs at the persistence of the curse and delivers one final blast to the center of the torso. This time, the monster finally goes silent for good.
Suddenly, the ground erupts with a violent force. The colossal Octopus finally joins the fray, its massive, blood-red tentacles slamming into the floor like giant spikes.
Akos spins, his katana moving in a silver blur as he severs one tentacle after another. But every time a limb is cut, it regenerates instantly, thicker and more aggressive than before.
Akos moves with blinding speed, dancing between the lethal strikes. However, the Octopus has one trick left; one of its tentacles strikes a specialized sac on its body, releasing a thick, supernatural gas.
The mist is dense and acidic, stinging Akos's eyes and robbing him of his sight. He stumbles back, plunging his katana into the stone floor to steady himself in the haze.
He blinks rapidly, trying to clear the burn, but he is functionally blind. Sensing his weakness, the octopus brings a massive tentacle crashing down to crush him.
Akos moves by pure instinct. He rolls to the side a split second before the impact, the force of the blow causing a massive explosion of stone and dust.
Smoke now fills the entire chamber, hiding the hunter from the hunted. The octopus looms over the cloud, its giant eye scanning the wreckage for a mangled corpse.
Instead, the smoke parts slowly. Akos stands there, calm and unshaken, his presence feeling heavier than before.
He reaches into his jacket and slides his signature glasses onto his face. The blue glow of his "Infinite" eyes hums behind the lenses, cutting through the supernatural mist as if it weren't even there.
Akos: "Nice try, octopus
The octopus loses its remaining patience and lashes out with all its limbs at once. The impact is so violent that the reinforced vines binding the prisoners snap, and the very foundation of the cavern begins to crumble.
Akos dodges the massive tentacles, his mind racing. If he keeps swinging wildly like this, he'll crush the survivors, he thinks. I have to get them out now.
He blurs through the air, his blade moving so fast it creates a vacuum. He severs the octopus's limbs repeatedly, forcing its regeneration to work overtime, hoping to drain its energy. The beast counters by flooding the chamber with more toxic gas, but Akos just adjusts his glasses—the "Infinite" sight keeping his vision crystal clear through the haze.
Enraged, the octopus slams all its tentacles into the floor simultaneously. The shockwave is so immense that the ground buckles, launching Akos fifty feet into the air. For a fleeting second, he is eye-to-eye with the monster, only inches away from its massive, staring pupil.
He falls back toward the uneven ground, but the octopus doesn't give him a chance to land safely. It strikes again and again, its heavy limbs boring the hole even deeper into the earth. Akos twists his body mid-air, narrowly avoiding a strike that shatters the stone where his head was a second before.
"I've got it," Akos mutters, landing in a crouch. "I know exactly how to end this."
With a sudden, blinding dash, Akos sends a precision slash toward the remaining vines. The seven survivors, along with the woman from before, fall free from the walls. Eight people in total are now loose on the crumbling floor.
Akos doesn't stop. He sprints up the vertical wall toward the Cursed Scripts. He levels the Dragon Slave Shotgun and fires a double blast. The concentrated energy doesn't just shred the parchment; it ignites them in a holy, white-hot fire.
"Didn't know this thing packed that much heat," Akos says, glancing at the smoking barrel. "Good to know."
The destruction of the scripts sends the octopus into a primal frenzy. It prepares its ultimate move, raising every single tentacle to crush everything in the pit once and for all.
Akos grins. "That's exactly what I wanted."
The octopus brings its full weight down. The impact is so tectonic that the entire floor tilts at a sharp angle, sliding Akos, the survivors, and the debris into the Sea of Blood.
As they plunge into the crimson depths, Akos remains calm. He has already driven the Katana Totsugeki Field deep into one of the octopus's main limbs. The monster was so focused on the attack it didn't even realize it was now tethered to its own doom.
The octopus dives its tentacles into the blood-lake to finish Akos off. "Now!" Akos shouts.
As the limbs close in, Akos activates the FIELD of his katana. The sudden expansion of energy within the liquid creates a massive pressure vacuum. The Sea of Blood reacts like a volcano—the pressure from the deep hits, and the Katana's field causes the entire lake to erupt.
A gargantuan tsunami of blood screams upward, surging through the hollowed-out hotel like a geyser.
Outside the building, a lonely police officer patrolling the perimeter looks up and freezes in terror. A pillar of crimson liquid, hundreds of feet high, explodes out of the roof of the Grand Imperial Hotel, shattering the remaining structure and lighting up the night.
Akos finds himself catapulted 50 meters into the air, riding the crest of the blood wave. For a moment, time slows down. He looks out over the vast, shimmering lights of Tokyo, the city glowing like a sea of stars.
Tossed into the sky around him are the eight survivors, the mangled remains of the octopus, and dozens of lesser devils, all suspended in the air above the ruins of the hotel.
In a fraction of a second, the minor Devils caught in the blast began to disintegrate. Without the Cursed Scripts to anchor them,
the Tokyo protective barrier burned through them like acid, turning their bodies into smoldering black and red ash.
But the Octopus was different. It was a titan of spite, and it was still alive as it plummeted toward the street. Below, the lone police officer watched with a paralyzed, open-mouthed stare as thirty meters of monstrous flesh and tentacles fell from the sky directly toward him.
Akos, perched high atop the falling beast, felt the wind howling past.
He tightened his fist. Deep inside his body, his blood began to boil—not from heat, but from pure, raw power. His cells surged, channeling every ounce of vitality toward his right hand. A violent, crimson aura ignited around him, vibrating with the frequency of Nature Energy.
His palm glowed with a blinding red light. As they reached the lower atmosphere, Akos plummeted toward the Octopus's massive central eye.
"LIGHTER FLASH!"
The punch landed with the force of a falling star. The energy didn't just strike the surface; it detonated inside the creature's biology. In a split second, the Octopus's body buckled and collapsed under the internal pressure. Its blood reached a boiling point instantly, causing the massive creature to explode.
A rain of corrosive, steaming blood sprayed across the district. It hit the parked cars below, melting through metal and glass like hot wax.
Akos crashed into the rising tide of crimson liquid as the "sea" he had unleashed from the hotel flooded the streets, carrying cars and debris away in a violent, gory wave.
Eventually, the crimson tide settled, leaving the area around the ruins of the hotel submerged in a shallow, steaming lake of blood. Akos climbed out of the wreckage, dripping wet, his breath coming in heavy, ragged gasps.
He looked at his fist, still tingling from the Lighter Flash. "What the hell was that...?" he muttered, shaking his head. He reached down, retrieved his katana, and sheathed it across his back.
Nearby, the wave had deposited the eight survivors onto a relatively dry patch of pavement. They were still unconscious, but alive.
Akos turned his attention to the pulsating grey vines clinging to a shattered pillar. He reached out and snapped off a piece of the material Vanessa had requested. Up close, it didn't look like a plant; it shimmered with a jagged, crystalline structure.
The distant wail of police sirens and fire trucks began to close in. Tokyo's emergency services were responding to the "explosion" at the Grand Imperial.
As Akos turned to vanish into the shadows, something caught his eye floating in the blood-slicked debris: a White Cowboy Hat, remarkably clean. He picked it up, dusted it off, and placed it firmly on his head, adjusting his glasses beneath the brim.
He froze. To his right, standing behind a pile of rubble, a little girl stared at him with wide, terrified eyes. She had seen everything—the monster, the light, and the boy who fell from the sky.
Akos slowly raised a finger to his lips. "Shhhhh," he whispered.
Grimacing from the sharp pain in his side, he turned and limped away just as the first police cruisers screeched onto the scene.
Firefighters and paramedics rushed past him, focused on the carnage behind him.
Akos didn't look back. He unwrapped a lollipop, popped it into his mouth, and disappeared into the neon-lit alleys of Tokyo, a silent shadow in a white hat.