Lava crackled beneath jagged stone, and the once-pristine chamber had become a scarred ruin from the csh of darkness and fury. Rourke, the abomination, howled, smming his cwed arms into the earth and creating violent shockwaves that shredded the terrain.

  Kurai didn’t flinch.

  A smirk danced across her lips as the wind of chaos whipped through her silver hair. She raised her war fan—now folded—and vanished in a rush of shadow.

  Kurai reappeared like a phantom from the darkness—sliding across summoned shadow ptforms mid-air, her war fan drawn and whirling like a bde in a hurricane. She struck first with the serrated edge, not aiming to pierce, but to pressure.

  A single ssh became ten. Ten became twenty.

  Kurai’s movements were unreadable—erratic but calcuted. She didn’t simply swing her fan; she wrote violent poetry with every motion. One ssh bent around Rourke’s guard. The next carved a crescent of darkness beneath his chin. A third hit him squarely in the shoulder, the serrated edge biting in before she vanished in a plume of bck mist.

  She reappeared above him with a spin, conjuring multiple shadow clones using Eclipse Mirage, each mimicking her attack patterns from different angles. Rourke swiped at two illusions, missing completely. The real Kurai nded behind him, spinning her war fan into a burst of slicing dark winds with Umbral Aeroga—the pressure ripping cracks across his corrupted armor.

  Rourke roared and backhanded the clones with a bst of shadow, but Kurai had already pivoted again. She dipped low, avoided a sweeping cw, and unched Shadow Firaga into his abdomen. It exploded, sending burning bck tendrils wrapping around him. He stumbled—but only briefly.

  Without pausing, she flipped backward into Abyssal Severance, her fan spinning into a buzzsaw of condensed dark energy. She angled the ssh upward at his underarm, where the pting was thinner. The attack forced Rourke to stagger—but as he turned, she was already gone.

  From above, she dropped into Death Waltz, slicing in an elegant series of arcs from three different directions in rapid succession using afterimage feints. Her fan seemed to appear and disappear, sshing diagonally across his arms and colr with surgical accuracy.

  Rourke snarled and retaliated with a backhand—but Kurai sidestepped mid-air, using Umbral Step, a subtle darkness-step burst from the fan’s core.

  “Too slow,” she muttered.

  She vanished again, but this time, she didn’t reappear in the open. Instead, Umbral Step brought her within the shadows of Rourke’s own body. She leapt from behind him with a feint ssh—but as his cws moved to intercept, she dissolved again, reappearing beneath him and jamming her war fan upward with an Abyssal Severance strike. Darkness cleaved through his midsection, splitting a gash that leaked molten corruption.

  Rourke groaned, but no pain registered in his movements. Instead, with disturbing ease, his torn body began to reform. Muscles twisted. Shadows crawled. Flesh regenerated.

  “You’ve got an amazing regenerative power,” Kurai muttered, twisting away from a retaliatory sm.

  Not wasting time, she unched a high-speed volley of chained spells: Nightmare Blizzaga to freeze his joints, Twilight Thundaga to shock the nerves, and a volley of Drain spells to siphon energy to heal her wounds. The area darkened as her spells cut through the molten haze.

  Still, Rourke endured.

  Kurai dropped to a crouch and smmed her war fan into the stone. Bck Hole Chain burst from the ground, shadowy tendrils wrapping around Rourke’s limbs, locking him momentarily in pce. She dashed toward him, her movements now like a storm unchained. Each swing of her war fan shifted angle and pressure, each spell detonated mid-combo with perfect rhythm.

  But Rourke refused to fall. His body cracked, twisted, reformed. His head snapped backward, then forward, absorbing her relentless barrage.

  Then Kurai threw the fan.

  It split into five separate spinning fragments, orbiting like homing bdes around Rourke in a technique she called Ebon Cyclone. Each piece sliced him from odd angles as she controlled their flight paths with subtle gestures of her off-hand.

  Rourke roared, smming his body into the ground and sending a spike of darkness upward—but Kurai had anticipated it. She dropped back down just behind his knee and swept her fan upward in a wide arc, using Hollow Bloom—a technique that deyed the cut’s pain until several seconds ter.

  Rourke twisted, trying to catch her.

  Kurai let go of her fan.

  It floated, suspended momentarily, before folding into its bde mode again as she summoned Reaper’s Grasp, shadow tendrils from the earth that seized Rourke’s arm.

  She caught her weapon mid-flip, using its shifting momentum to leap high.

  Kurai growled under her breath. This wasn’t working. As she nded, her shadow began to expand.

  She pivoted into Void Dominion, cloaking the area in suffocating shadow, giving herself speed, concealment, and control. From every angle, she attacked with illusions and reality, feints, false steps, and precision aggression. But Rourke’s regeneration adapted. He didn’t need to see her clearly. He just withstood everything she threw at him.

  Kurai’s fan hit his arm with enough force to splinter stone. The fan’s edge bent slightly from the strain.

  And still, Rourke stood. Eyes glowing with infernal malice. Rourke gathered the red energy in his body into his hand, lighting it up, allowing him to see Kurai. Able to see her, he attacked Kurai. Kurai gathered darkness into her war fan and used Dusk’s Crescendo, channeling an immense darkness into a devastating single ssh that sends shockwaves of shadow.

  Both attacks struck each other, bsting both back far.

  Smoke erupted.

  Kurai nded smoothly and rolled her shoulder and dusting the dirt off her clothes.

  “You’re ugly, strong, and dumb. Two out of three isn’t bad,” she said casually in a mocking tone.

  The smoke parted.

  Rourke emerged again—regenerating, slower this time, but relentless. His cracked skin sealed, and the molten veins glowed brighter.

  Kurai jumped back, breathing heavier now. Not from exhaustion—but from calcution.

  She raised a hand. “I need one minute,” she called out to no one in particur. “Just sixty seconds to gather everything. Then I’ll end this.”

  Rourke roared and charged.

  Then—

  A beam of pure light split the sky.

  A white spear bathed in sacred white fme descended from above like divine retribution.

  BOOM.

  The spear smmed into Rourke’s back, detonating in a pulse of holy fire. Rourke howled—screamed—in agony. The regeneration stalled. Steam poured from his scorched armor. He writhed.

  Kurai's eyes looked up coldly.

  From the smoke, a silhouette dropped.

  Helios.

  He nded atop Rourke and yanked the spear—Bríon na Lú—free. Fmes coiled around him as he leapt and nded beside Kurai, the weapon held casually in one hand.

  “Miss me?” he asked, spinning the radiant spear once.

  Kurai exhaled, smirking. “No I didn’t. You took long enough.”

  “Couldn’t let you hog the spotlight forever.”

  Rourke rose—burning, furious, wounded.

  Kurai lifted her keybde again.

  Helios raised Bríon na Lú beside her.

  “You’ve got your minute.”