Miuson towered over the writhing Oni, every muscle coiled like a drawn bow. The spear felt impossibly heavy, yet so impossibly right in his hands—an extension of the furious heat in his chest.

He tasted iron and snow in both air and mouth. The villagers' scattered cries seemed distant, muffled by the gale. For a thin, sharp second the world narrowed to the Oni and the narrow channel his spear would make.

He gave a raw, guttural cry—part challenge, part prayer—and drove the blade down.

The tip kissed the air above the Oni's skull and then—an ear-splitting, crystalline shriek ripped across the square. It was a sound that lived inside the teeth, a note so high it made the blood in Miuson's ears rush cold and loud, making the spear halt.

Something bright slammed past: an icicle, wicked and needle-thin, launched like a thrown dagger.

Miuson's arm flashed white-hot pain where the shard sheared across skin and tendon. He felt the wet sting, the warm splash of blood on his sleeve, and then his balance betrayed him—the world tipped and he fell hard, snow spitting up onto his face.

Domitius' shout and Okun's thundered name collided in the wind as both men lunged forward, but their eyes had already leapt skyward toward the roofline, where the icicle had come from.

They saw movement: a small, quick shape crouched on the warped shingles of a half-broken house, barely larger than a child and hardly imposing at first glance. For one breath everyone thought it was only a wisp of shadow, a trick of the blizzard.

Then the figure launched itself off the roof and dropped like a darker leaf, landing with a predatory gaze. In the instant between roof and ground, the thing resolved into a face and body: a smaller Oni, its features a miniature reflection of the towering monster on the ground.

Time stuttered. Miuson's heart hammered, breath bright white in the air as he pushed himself up on one elbow. The cut along his arm burned and ached, but the shock of the new presence cut sharper. He swallowed and reached blindly for the spear that had skittered away.

Domitius' voice snapped, confusion and disbelief braided into one. "What—there's another—!?"

Mumu's stitched face registered something else—like the memory of a smell that suddenly returned. His little fabric ears pricked up. The plush bear's gaze locked on the child Oni, and recognition fluttered over him like a page turned too quickly. From the way the air had stung their faces and the small, bitter thing in the road on that cliff—Mumu remembered.

The child Oni they were facing now was the same shadowy figure they'd encountered on the way to Briarstone.

The child Oni skidded across the snow and threw itself against its parent's side. Its whimpering sounded oddly human—thin, urgent noises that made the hairs on any parent's arm rise. It pressed its forehead to the larger creature's shoulder and clung, face contorted with an almost unbearable worry.

The parent Oni made a low, ragged groan, the sound hitching between agony and some animal confusion. Blood pooled beneath it in the red bloom of the snow. It reached a shaking hand toward the child and uttered noises that might have been words, a sound like a guttural lullaby.

The child's tears tracked clean lines through the frost clinging to its cheeks, and for a second there was something painfully human in that little face—grief so immediate it looked like it could split the world.

As the child pressed itself closer, its eyes fluttered and the moment opened into memory. In a jagged montage, it saw the same prostrate shape of its mother from back then, before the wounds and the falling blood—the memory superimposed over the present until past and present bled together.

Behind that vision rose a darker frame: men in black cloaks, shoulders squared, silhouettes that swallowed the light. Where the child's father should have been, there was a monster moved by strings, a puppet now an empty echo of a person.

Standing in front of that wreckage, bureaucratic and terrible, was a figure with a black jewel on a chain around his throat, the gem catching the sparse light like a crow.

The child Oni's breath came in trembling bursts, its throat tight with sobs that barely escaped into the wind. Its tiny hands gripped at the fallen Oni's arm, unwilling to let go. The snow seemed to dim around them, the air itself hesitating, as if sharing the child's heartbreak.

But then—its pupils dilated. Something old and dark, a wound left behind by memory, stirred awake.

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The child turned its head, slowly, instinctively—just like before. Its small frame stiffened when its tear-blurred eyes found Miuson, Domitius, Okun, Koul, and Mumu standing in the haze.

A sound like broken glass echoed in its mind. The familiar shapes of Miuson and the others flickered, replaced by the black-cloaked figures of memory—those who had turned its father into a puppet, destroyed its childhood, hurt its mother, forced them to flee to a place like this.

It wasn't fair.

And that was all it took.

The next instant, something snapped.

The child's eyes widened, glowing with an intense, glacial blue light that pulsed like a heartbeat beneath its skin. Its grief twisted—warped—into pure, unrestrained anger. The once-soft wind became a violent scream as snow spiraled upward, answering the child's fury.

It screamed at them—high, sharp, and filled with something primal.

The blizzard obeyed.

The wind howled and tore through the village, kicking up chunks of ice and snow as though the world itself was breaking apart. Everyone present felt it: a terrifying force pulling them upward, trying to lift them off their feet, to toss them about like ragdolls caught in a storm.

Mumu threw himself over Koul, shielding Dama's godfather with his body.

Domitius gritted his teeth, wrapping his arms around Chief Okun and forcing his boots deeper into the snow. His muscles screamed against the wind's pull.

Miuson, staggering to his feet, slammed the butt of his spear into the ground, clutching it like an anchor against the storm's wrath. His teeth chattered, and his breath came out in bursts of frost, but he held his ground.

The air crackled with power. Frost crept up the spear, over their boots, over the frozen ground itself. All throughout, the child Oni's screams howled and echoed in the storm.

Then, suddenly, the screaming stopped.

The silence that followed was eerie—like being inside the eye of a storm. The only sound was the faint whistle of the wind through the ruined village.

The child Oni stood in the middle of the snow, trembling, its fists clenched tight before its chest. Its breath came in rapid, misty bursts. Then, with a sharp cry of exertion, it thrust its fists outward in a violent cross, as though tearing something invisible apart.

SHHHHHK—!

The snow around them erupted.

Hundreds of icicles burst from the ground and the surrounding air, forming a perfect circle around Miuson and the others. The shards hung there, glinting with a deadly blue sheen—each one sharpened to a lethal point, all of them aimed straight at the group.

It was a ring of death, suspended in the storm.

The child Oni stood in the center of it all—small, shaking, and crying—but its eyes burned brighter than ever. Finally, it slammed its fists together with a war cry of anger. The motion caused the icicles to shake, pull back a bit, then after a moment, launched themselves inward.

Death was imminent now.

Miuson's knuckles went white around the spear as the circle of death tightened. For a hair-thin second the world narrowed to the hiss of wind and the glint of bladed ice.

He closed his eyes, the faces of his mother, Miron, the village children, and most importantly Kaede, flashed before him."If he died right now, what's stopping the Onis from killing everyone else?"

The thought made his soulura begin to flare deep inside. Then, a fire sparked to life in his eyes, a small ember that began moving in a circle, quickly picking up to the rhythm of his own heartbeat until it became a glowing halo, his hair beginning to rise.

Before the icicles could proceed an inch closer, Miuson gave a war cry of his own as he raised his spear, turned it upside down, and slammed the metal tip into the ground with so much force, it actually broke the earth a bit.

The sound challenged the storm—a grinding crack that split the hush like lightning through still air. Snow and grit burst upward in a ragged spray. For one suspended heartbeat, nothing happened, and then the spear's point shuddered as if it had struck some hidden furnace.

A glow answered it: a thin ring of orange, at first no bigger than the tip of a fingernail, flaring with hungry light. However, almost in an instant, the ring crawled outward along the ground in a living pulse, widening with a sound like distant bells. Heat breathed up from the stone and snow. It wasn't the blast of a torch, but a slow and thorough warmth that filled lungs and eased muscles.

The expanding ring licked the snow and the snow screamed—not with language but with steam. Wherever the orange reached, ice hissed and melted, vapor twisting into ribbons that rose and dissolved into the wind.

The first wave of icicles struck the ring's edge and, as if encountering an invisible sun, unmade themselves in an instant: a flash of watery light and then a scatter of droplets. Others that streaked inward passed over the halo's horizon and hissed into mist; they did not pierce bottoms or bone. They simply became water and fell.

Domitius felt the change in his bones before he registered it with his mind—a relief like a blanket setting over a wound. He drew a long breath and the warmth settled into his shoulders, unknotting muscles that a moment before had been ready to snap.

Okun's chest rose and fell more easily; the deep and cold pressure in his lungs relented slightly as if some counterforce had eased it.

Mumu let out a low, incredulous whine and hugged the air around Koul harder, feeling the comforting heat seep through his stitched fur. Koul wiped at his face with a numb hand, staring as gray stone—dry, solid and ordinary—showed through where snow had once been piled.

The child Oni staggered back, the hatred in its young face flickering as shock and confusion broke through. The Oni parent below had a look of incredulous fury warping its features as the deliberate weapon of winter dissolved into ordinary water and sunk harmlessly into the earth.

Miuson's fire did not end with triumph uncosted. The halo's light dimmed quickly to embers, and he sagged against his spear as if the heat had been taken from him. His breath came ragged and hot; his hair, which had lifted in a halo of its own, began to fall back into place.

But for those few seconds—for the crack of flame that turned ice to steam and death to harmless rain—the village had been given a sliver of of a chance.

-

Next: (Chapter 101) The Oni's Child Cometh: Part 2

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