A pulse. Deep within, something stirred.


    The Oni-Wraith had been waiting. Watching. Bound within Ash''s soul, its hunger had festered with every battle, every wound. It did not whisper—it roared, silent but unrelenting, a force that clawed at the edges of its prison. It had been promised release, not in words, but in blood. And now, the moment of desperation had arrived.


    The chains trembled. The first fracture formed.


    Ash''s fingers curled against the dirt. The agony that had wracked his body receded—not because it faded, but because something darker, something deeper, had begun to rise. His heart pounded, but it was not entirely his own. His vision sharpened. The air thickened, pulsing in time with the beast that lurked beneath his skin.


    The storm slowed.


    Raijin lunged—lightning incarnate, fury given form. His blade flashed, a streak of raw devastation tearing through the air.


    And Ash met him.


    Not as himself.


    But as something more.


    Shadows bled from his limbs, curling, slithering, warping through his body like living veins of night. They wove through him, around him, binding his movements to something far greater than flesh and will. His blade, once a mere instrument of his own strength, burned now with an obsidian flame, its hunger mirroring that of the thing stirring within.


    Steel met steel, and for the first time—


    Raijin staggered.


    A moment''s hesitation. A crack in the storm.


    Ash pressed forward, his strikes gaining momentum. His blade sang through the air, no longer burdened by exhaustion, no longer bound by mortal limits. Each clash sent tremors through the battlefield, the ground cracking beneath them. He was no longer just Ash. He was something terrible. Something transcendent.


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    But the Oni-Wraith was not patient. It did not seek balance. It sought dominance.


    A pulse of dark energy exploded outward. Raijin hesitated. Ash gasped. His vision split—two realities clashing within his skull. His fingers tingled, numb. His breath hitched as the shadows turned on him, surging through his veins like liquid night.


    Then the air itself howled.


    The Unleashing


    The chains shattered.


    The Oni-Wraith did not creep forth; it tore free. Shadows ruptured from Ash''s form like a dam breaking, flooding the battlefield in tides of unnatural darkness. His body convulsed as something vast, something wrong, slithered into existence. It was neither fully tangible nor entirely ethereal, a monstrous silhouette writhing and shifting, its outline forever in flux.


    Then the eyes opened.


    Burning, endless, fathomless pits of crimson fire.


    The fangs followed—jagged, wicked, carved from the void itself.


    The Oni-Wraith had awakened.


    The sky recoiled.


    The storm faltered, its fury unraveling at the seams. Raijin''s stance shifted, his aura crackling with renewed vigilance. The storm roared around him in warning, as if it, too, had sensed the shift. The imbalance. The corruption that had slithered into the fray.


    A force beyond gods and men had stepped onto the battlefield.


    Ash barely held on.


    He could feel it writhing beneath his skin, its hunger boundless, its fury absolute. It did not serve. It did not obey. It had only ever been restrained, and now, for the first time in centuries, it was free.


    The Oni-Wraith craved battle. It reveled in the clash of steel, the scent of blood, the rhythm of destruction. Every strike, every wound, was ecstasy. It did not merely fight—it indulged. It exulted. It thrived in the chaos, drinking deep of the violence that surrounded it.


    The storm howled in defiance.


    And now, there would be reckoning.


    Wraith-Bound Fury


    The battlefield had become something else entirely.


    Lightning clashed with shadow, storm with abyss. But the storm no longer reigned alone.


    The Oni-Wraith did not simply stand beside Ash—it loomed, towering, shifting, flickering between existence and nothingness. A being of endless malice, wrapped in the remnants of spectral armor, its form a grotesque fusion of nightmare and triumph. Tendrils of black fire coiled around its jagged edges, wreathing it in a haze of undying wrath.


    Raijin halted.


    For the first time, the god of thunder did not strike.


    Even through the winds, through the crackling electricity, through the chaos that had engulfed the sky, there was something unspoken between them. Not the understanding of warriors, but of something far older. Two titans of calamity, locked in a gaze that held the weight of destruction itself.


    The Oni-Wraith tilted its head, a grotesque, jagged grin carving across its demonic visage. Malicious. Exultant. Starved.


    It wanted more.


    Then the battle resumed.