Zagan sat like a queen in the corpse-shadows of Kyoto, draped in beauty, blood, and unbearable stillness.

The shrine that held her wasn't built. It grew – a tumour of bone-bark and sinew spiralling up from the forest floor, shaped by hands that had long since forgotten their names. Mask fragments bloomed from the roots like malignant petals, half-submerged in rotted soil. Some wept. Others screamed when touched by wind.

She reclined atop a living palaquin – a seething mass of transmuted yokai and human torsos twisted into furniture. The ones beneath her didn't cry. Their mouths had been sewn into blossoms.

Above, a parasol of bleached ribs kept the sun from her eyes. It wasn't needed. Light didn't dare reach her.

Seven snowy tails curled behind her like drifting banners of fog, each one sinuous and unnervingly aware. They moved not with the breeze, but with will – testing the air for threats, vibrations, souls. They licked at invisible boundaries, always hungrier than they looked.

Zagan herself sat perfectly poised, as if carved from moonlight. White hair spilled down her shoulders in perfect silken waves, veiling the soft twitch of her pointed fox ears. Her skin bore the softness of untouched snow. Her lips were the colour of crushed rose petals.

But it was her eyes that unsettled – wide, rimmed in red, and yawningly bored, as though every miracle offered to her had already grown stale. They scanned the battlefield in the distance with all the urgency of a painter regarding a half-finished sketch.

A dozen silent children encircled her shrine. Masked. Porcelain. Cracked. One of them sat cradling a human spine like a stuffed animal. Another tried endlessly to reassemble a dead bird – bones backward, feathers coated in slime. They didn't breathe. They didn't blink. But they adored her with the stillness of perfect worship.

Zagan barely acknowledged them. Her gaze remained fixed on the foothills far below – where the Sanctuary fought and bled to protect something it didn't yet understand.

The annoying exorcist – Hana. Victor. Chloe. Alyssa. Dan. Max.

Her tail-tip flicked once.

Max.

That one was… interesting.

She exhaled, long and delicate – a breath more like mist escaping a glacier than anything human. Her fingers rested atop the skull of a dead monk whose mouth still moved, whispering prayers into the silence.

Without looking, she reached down and plucked his tongue out between two fingers. It slid free like wet silk. The whispering stopped. She placed it delicately between her lips, chewed twice, then spat it onto the forest floor.

"Why do humans scream for so long when they break?"

"It's all just red inside."

The yokai beneath her trembled. Not from pain. But reverence.

Zagan tilted her head.

The Sanctuary's defences were crumbling. The barrier frayed at its seams. The twins were fatigued. The soldier with the rifle – he was cracking at the edges. The phaser girl, the healer, the ghost. All brittle.

Only Max remained unreadable. Even through her scouts. Even through blood.

And that intrigued her. Not enough to smile. But enough to stay.

Zagan's tails twitched. Her breath clouded the air, though it was not cold.

Max Jaeger. The man who burned wrong.

She studied souls the way some studied brushstrokes. Their imperfections revealed intent. Their fractures hinted at origin. Most souls – even strong ones – unfolded in layers. Regret. Hope. Fear. Love. A delicious structure.

But his was... different. Warped. Heat-glazed. Not raw, not refined – just changed, again and again, in ways she couldn't predict. It made her itch.

Change is truth, she thought. And he's wrapped in lies so old he thinks they're scars.

She didn't hate him. She didn't care enough to hate. But curiosity was a kind of gravity – and he pulled. The way dead stars pulled light.

Zagan's eyes lowered to the shrine beneath her. A blossom of bone began to curl open, unbidden.

"I wonder," she murmured, "how many times he's chosen to burn… and how many times someone else lit the match."

She shifted, and the shrine pulsed in response – the nerve-veined floor twitching beneath her feet like a muscle preparing to contract.

Still, she didn't rise.

There was no need. Not yet. This wasn't her battle.

This was art.

And art, she'd learned, always demanded patience. Even boredom.

And Zagan was very, very good at being bored.

…………………

Zagan rested her chin against the back of her hand, elbow on the bone-armrest, her tails coiled like ribbons of slow, white smoke. The battlefield whispered beneath her feet – distant cries, gunfire, the crunch of limbs too soft to resist. She barely listened.

Everything was unfolding exactly as she'd calculated.

The yokai were spreading like wet rot – testing the perimeter, lashing out in waves that weakened rather than killed. She'd designed them that way. Not mindless but measured. Alive with transmutation and memory, not instinct. Each carried a purpose stitched into its core.

Break the rhythm. Unmake the cohesion. Never strike too hard. Not yet.

She watched from the shrine's crest, bored enough to narrate.

"The girl with the ghost-touch will snap soon," she murmured. "The twins… already splintering." "And the soldier…?"

Her lips twitched. Not a smile. A tic.

"Already cracking."

The voice she spoke to – or at – gurgled wetly beside her. A shrine maiden, if the term still applied. Its limbs were too many and too small – child arms protruding from its ribs like sick flowers. Antlers jutted from a skull not its own. Its feet bled constantly, leaving little crescent puddles that smoked on contact with the shrine floor.

It didn't answer. It just writhed softly, trying to mimic a bow.

Zagan didn't look at it.

Her eyes wandered back to the distant edge of the forest – where Chloe and Alyssa now fought in tandem, leaping through yokai bodies with practiced desperation. Each movement became slower. More strained. Alyssa's punches left cracks instead of craters. Chloe's phasing stuttered under stress.

Zagan yawned. No sound escaped.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

This wasn't battle. This was erosion. Watching something built too fast collapse under its own weight.

"It's like sculpting with clay that's already cracked," she said. "No tension. No surprise."

Her boredom thickened.

Until Victor moved.

Zagan tilted her head.

The soldier flung aside his rifle, charging into the fray with the twins – but something shifted mid-run. Bones lengthened. Limbs thickened. His skin rippled with unnatural seams as the bestial mutation overtook him. Chimera muscle bulged under human skin. His roars became thunder.

He tore through three yokai in a single leap.

Interesting.

Zagan's tails lifted slightly, like petals catching light.

"Oh," she said, almost curious. "He can change too."

The shrine maiden gurgled again, an eager burble of worship.

Zagan's interest died as quickly as it bloomed.

"But not enough."

Victor's movements weren't clean. His body resisted itself – man and monster locked in constant disagreement. His power was borrowed, diluted. He was adapting to survive, not to create.

She had seen others like him – half-shifters. Incomplete myths wearing human skin like it still mattered.

Victor's change bore no intention. No artistry. It was panic disguised as evolution. She could smell the hesitation in his muscle fibres. He flinched from his own form.

Poor thing.

Even now, as his claws shredded through her lower servants, his spine was misaligned – not because it broke, but because it wouldn't choose. Man or monster. He hadn't decided.

Zagan's tails flicked with distaste.

He could be useful, yes. A vessel. A warning. A before-and-after. But never art.

"Perhaps we take that one next," Zagan murmured. "He might scream differently."

The shrine shuddered below her. One of the masked children dropped their plaything – a wet bird-heart – and turned their blank face toward the sky. As if something had shifted.

Zagan felt it too.

She turned slightly.

Far beyond the tree line, in the centre of the distant battlefield, a building had caught fire. But it wasn't orange or gold.

It was blue.

Blue hellfire.

Not the kind that burned flesh. The kind that burned souls.

Zagan's expression darkened.

She said nothing for a long while. Just watched. Her eyes narrowed – no longer bored. Just… still.

Then, softly – almost to herself:

"But him..."

"That one's trouble."

…………………

Zagan closed her eyes.

Not in reverence. In irritation.

The memory arrived like a splinter to the brain – uninvited, unignorable. A shape pressed into her soul, too sharp to forget. Not words. Not voice. Just presence.

Moloch.

He had appeared before the siege began, not in flesh – the boy-body was just theatre – but as raw, encoding will. A mindprint seared across her thoughts. His eyes had never opened. He had no mouth. But he'd spoken nonetheless.

DO NOT KILL MAX JAEGER.

BREAK HIM.

The command had pierced her, bypassing sound entirely. The forest around her had curdled at his touch – birds fell dead mid-flight. Trees twisted themselves inside out. Even her yokai had hissed in their sleep.

She had listened.

She always listened.

But not because she feared him.

Moloch didn't inspire fear. He inspired compliance – the way gravity did. The way inevitability did.

Even now, the instructions echoed behind her eyelids.

Shatter him, piece by piece.

Take from those around him. Fear. Despair. Soul fragments.

Kill his allies. Maim his faith.

Torture his family.

Make him watch

Make him responsible.

And most important of all…

IMPLANT THE SEED.

He must sacrifice.

Zagan's tails shifted behind her, one of them lashing softly against the shrine floor. Her fingers curled in her lap – graceful, pale, agitated.

There had been no elaboration. No offer of joy. Moloch never explained why. Never seduced. Just gave purpose like a scalpel.

She had accepted, as always. But never with loyalty. Not even with reverence. Just curiosity.

"Even flowers rot," she murmured aloud. "Perhaps this one will rot loud."

The shrine-maiden beside her twitched in excitement – but Zagan ignored it.

She wasn't here for revenge. She wasn't here for loyalty. She was here to observe the ruin of potential. To watch a soul unravel, screaming.

And perhaps, if the seed bloomed… to see what bloomed through it.

…………………

Zagan slid one elegant hand beneath her ribs.

Not metaphorically.

Her pale skin parted without resistance. Not torn – opened. Like silk unthreading at a thought.

Beneath her sternum, where most creatures kept a heart, she held a different kind of organ. A womb of crystal – jagged, transparent, and wet with light. Veins of gold filigree ran through it, pulsating slow as breath.

She reached inside.

Flesh shifted. Her body adjusted, unfazed. The shrine around her hummed, bones creaking in quiet reverence.

Her fingers closed on the vessel.

She pulled it free with care, lifting it into view. No larger than a plum. Smooth. Opaque glass shot through with cracks of red. Inside it, floating weightless, was the seed.

It didn't move. It quivered.

A black speck, pulsing with faint veins of infernal red – not bright, not hot, but hungry. Like a coal left buried under centuries of ash, waiting for breath.

Zagan turned it slowly in her hand, watching the way the shadows around it bent. Even her tails drew slightly inward.

"You shouldn't exist," she whispered to it.

But it did.

Moloch's creation – harvested from the final scream of Aamon, when the Demon Lord's essence was devoured. Bound to Max's unique soulprint. Forged in stolen truths.

Tempered with chaos.

Not biological. Not magical.

Conceptual.

A rewritten thought-fragment of Aamon's hellfire – no longer just destruction, but infection. A parasite that could only root itself in one thing:

True Hellfire.

And only if the host – Max – began to doubt himself. Only if he flinched. Only if his flame flickered.

Then – and only then – would the seed bloom.

"He thinks the first gate was death," Zagan said softly.

The seed pulsed once, as if hearing her.

"He's wrong."

Her lips curled – not in joy. In anticipation.

"The second is truth."

…………………

The shrine began to change.

Not all at once – but like breath held too long, something underneath the structure exhaled. The forest twisted with it. Trees bowed, their bark splitting open to reveal veins of meat and prayer scrolls. The mist thickened into ropes. The sky blinked.

Zagan rose.

Her body levitated with unnatural grace – legs dangling, arms falling slack at first… then lengthening. Fingers stretched too far. Joints bent backward. Her silhouette expanded into something half-divine, half-insectile, her beauty calcified into horror.

From her spine, threads began to erupt. They found the yokai.

Gold and sinew. Dozens. Hundreds. Arcing in every direction like nerves from a god's open wound. Each thread pierced into one of her yokai horde. They pierced the masked children. The crawling priests. The limping horrors. Each thread tethered to a soul – not draining, but shaping. Refining. They screamed as one. Her choir.

From within her open ribcage, nestled in crystal and nerve, she pulled the seed.

It was small. Black. Still pulsing faintly red – like an unlit ember refusing to die.

But it was no longer just an idea. No longer just Moloch's whisper. Zagan had given it form. Shape. Flesh.

She pressed it into a mask.

White porcelain formed first – smooth and featureless. Then cracks. Blood lines. Curling glyphs. She twisted the concept of the seed into something beautiful and wrong. An artefact. A weapon. A face for fire to wear.

It was not just a weapon. It was a translation. The seed had no shape of its own – only intent. Rage. Doubt. Echo.

The mask gave it syntax. A structure the soul could wear.

She traced one claw along the forehead of the porcelain. It hissed with heat, but she didn't flinch. Glyphs stitched themselves along the cheeks – names that had no vowels. Words that meant "fracture," "invitation," "mirror."

Zagan tilted her head.

Max would wear it. Or resist it. Either was acceptable. Because the moment the mask touched his skin, the seed would know. Would root. Would grow.

And the second gate... would open.

When it was done, seven tails curled protectively around it, as if even Zagan feared what she'd made.

Then she turned.

"Gremory."

The air trembled.

From the base of the shrine stepped a demon unlike the others. Lithe. Armoured in skin and shadow. A demon of fox-blood and violence. She moved like a blade unsheathed – long limbs, bare feet, no wasted motion. Her mask was broken, revealing half a face too perfect and too dead.

Zagan did not call Gremory often. The blade was too sharp to leave unsheathed.

Gremory had once been human – or close enough. A shrine attendant, perhaps. Or a murderer's daughter. It didn't matter. Zagan had taken her in during the first bloom of the Transmutation – when her art was still crude and her faith in the process untested.

Gremory became the proof. The masterpiece. The child who did not scream when her bones were rewritten. Who kept bowing even as her lungs turned to silk.

She no longer remembered her old name. That made Zagan proud.

Most of the masked ones obeyed from need. But Gremory obeyed from completion. There was no rebellion left in her. Only precision.

Zagan reached into her kimono and pressed her palm to her breastbone – feeling the slow echo of Gremory's soul-thread tethered to hers. Perfect tension. No slack.

My scalpel, Zagan thought. With legs.

Where the others obeyed in silence, Gremory knelt with purpose. One hand pressed to her chest. Her eyes – one human, one stitched from gold – never left her mistress.

Zagan lowered the new mask.

"For him."

Gremory took it with both hands, reverent but not afraid. She pressed it to her side, where it vanished beneath her black kimono.

"Fit it to his face," Zagan said. "Do not kill him. Not yet."

She hesitated, then added, softly:

"Make him feel it first."

Gremory nodded.

And then she moved.

She leapt from the shrine platform, exploding into motion. A comet of bone and velvet. She tore through the yokai ranks with impossible speed, every step a blur. She didn't run. She glided, faster than sight, faster than the scream.

Toward the sanctuary. Toward Max Jaeger.

Break him, Moloch had said. Feed the flame with memory. Let his own fire devour him.

She obeyed.

Threads tightened. The shrine shuddered. The air filled with a low, constant hum – like flesh dreaming of static.

And from Zagan's open mouth, a final phrase echoed across the soulfield: "Burn, little gatekeeper. And let what hides beneath your flame… bloom."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.