The cave led into a winding tunnel that sloped down almost immediately, the path quickly twisting into darkness as it descended deeper. Hung from the supports at regular intervals were little lanterns filled with wisps, casting their eerie light blue glow on the cave. Erina summoned a shining orb into her palm for better visibility as they headed further and further into the mountain itself.

  "Pipes," remarked Akira. Several sets of them appeared every so often, running along the walls and ceiling.

  The sharp smell told Erina what was coming up well before they got there—a small clearing with numerous vats of alcohol, their tops removed and the surface of the liquid exposed. Erina looked up and found countless sharp stalactites looking back.

  "You see those?" Akira nudged her, jerking her head towards the barrels. Erina stretched her arm as high as it could go while she squinted her eyes. The shadows shifted as she raised the glowing orb. Several objects had been left in the barrels near the back of the room, by the tunnel leading deeper into the cave.

  "Swords." Akira walked from one barrel to the next, sizing up the collection of weapons in each barrel. "Arrowheads. Spears, too. Looks like a pile of axe blades in this one."

  "Some of the men back there had weapons too," said Erina. "They didn't seem ordinary."

  "No way. A sword-bow that shoots light isn't ordinary?"

  "But why are they in wine?"

  Akira looked at the barrels. Steam rose from the ones with weapons in them. She hovered her hand over one. It'd likely cook her finger if she dipped it in.

  "…Tsuchinoko?" said Erina. Shining her light directly over the barrels, she could spot a lifeless fat little snake curled up at the bottom of each one.

  "Goukei's favorite snake wine," said Akira. "Fresh batch, looks like. Let's keep going."

  The path turned around at some point, going deeper no matter what. Erina put together a rough map in her head as they walked. The tunnel twisted and rose and curve in uneven ways, but the overall gist of their path seemed to be a rough spiral working its way down into the mountain.

  They passed through several more small rooms. Most were empty. A few still had racks of assorted weapons lined up against the walls. The air was getting stale. Erina felt as if the walls were closing in, even though she double- and triple-checked and confirmed they weren't.

  It really didn't help that the tunnel ended in one last room with nothing but a hole in it.

  The hole was a little under a dozen feet across. Erina couldn't see the bottom even when she shined her light straight down it. When she fired a laser, it took several seconds for her to see the flash of it dispersing on rock. This fall was at least several hundred meters deep.

  "No way but down," shrugged Akira.

  "Maybe there's a hidden path," mumbled Erina. "A button in the rocks, or—"

  "See you at the bottom."

  "Please wait!"

  Akira jumped. Erina ran to the edge just in time to see her vanish into the darkness. The agonizing seconds it took to hear the faint thump of Akira hitting the bottom felt like an eternity.

  "All clear!" Akira's tiny voice floated up from the hole.

  That only made Erina feel a little better about this. On the other hand…

  She looked around in the dark cave. She couldn't tell if the low distant moaning and the muffled whispering was just the wind or something else entirely. Now that it was just her, she suddenly felt like staying up here, in this black hollow cave, all alone, was absolutely terrible. Erina drew a spell circle into the middle of the hole and hopped onto it, letting her weight push it gradually down the hole at a reasonable, not-heart-stopping pace.

  The bottom of the hole led into one more short passage. After just a few bends and turns, Erina saw a harsh orange glow emitting from the end of the tunnel. Every step seemed to raise the temperature by a few degrees.

  They emerged into a huge natural cave. Giant pipes lined the walls around the entrance. The heat hit Erina in the face like she opened an oven. They were on a platform overlooking a lake of magma—excruciatingly hot molten rock, the air shimmering with heat haze around the spikes of sturdier rock periodically jutting up through the surface. Large dark machines sat near the edge of the platform. Massive cubes of iron, gold, and other metals Erina didn't recognize sat with them. Chunks and slices had been chopped off from the blocks for material. Magma flows oozed from a few select points in the wall, flowing down into carved trenches that passed between and into the machines before cascading into the molten ocean. This was the most intense blacksmith's forge Erina had ever seen—not that she'd seen many forges to begin with.

  And looming over the lake of magma, wrapped and suspended by countless black chains pulled taut, hung a great… mass. Erina couldn't think of how else to describe it.

  The thing was vaguely spherical and made of a patchwork mess of material. Darkened sinews and thick muscle fibers pulled taut over sharp-angled chunks of rusted metal. Some sort of meat, with a texture she could only think of as dried jerky. Disturbingly human-shaped bulges, arms digging their fingers into the rest of the mass around them.

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  "Yo! Akira! Erina-chan!" Seated on the anvil with a bottle in hand and one leg up was the man himself. He polished off the last of his whiskey before greeting them with a fanged grin. No doubt he drank the entire thing himself. "Took ya long enough to show up! Though gotta say, I'm surprised you're the ones to get here first."

  "Maybe if you and your pals weren't getting hammered every night, we wouldn't have," said Akira. "Naga Blood is like stamping your name on their livers, dumbass."

  "Aww, is someone jealous they got some and not you?" he cooed. "Can't go back to normal booze after a taste of mine?"

  "Stop talking like that. It's disgusting. Kill yourself."

  "Ahahaha!" He burst out laughing. "The barrels are back upstairs, y'know. Never too late to crack 'em open."

  "Just that, after making me come all the way out here to the middle of fuck-all nowhere?" Akira scoffed. "Nah. Instead, how about I take everything that isn't nailed down?"

  Goukei pointed a finger, grinning. "You and I both know you'd take everything that is nailed down, and the nails while yer at it!"

  Akira just shrugged and didn't deny it, an incriminating smirk on her face.

  "Patriarch Kirigami." Erina stepped forward. Her hands were balled into fists to try and stop them from shaking as she confronted this demon again. "What is your plan? What are you hoping to achieve by breaking the barrier?"

  "I'm fixin' for a good fight," he said. "Simple as that."

  Erina blinked.

  "I was hopin' one of the Three Equalizers would show up," mused Goukei, stroking his chin. "Been a while since I threw down with Darius or Julian, and I've been itchin' to tango with Saya-chan ever since she signed on… but y'know, it's not so easy as walkin' up to them and takin' a swing anymore. Can't be seen throwin' hands just 'cause I felt like it. That's 'street thug behavior' or some other bullshit like that." He raised his voice and called out, "This whole yakuza shtick's a real pain in the ass sometimes, ain't it, Akira?!"

  Akira made a non-committal noise, looking as if she honestly thought so but didn't really feel like being caught agreeing with Goukei at that particular moment.

  "A nice warm fuck off to you too." Goukei held his bottle over his good eye and shook it a few times. Totally dry. "One of 'em will roll up sooner or later, I'm thinkin', and not one of 'em can let somethin' this big slide. They show up? I get the fight I want. They don't show up? Magic runs wild once more."

  "And this is related to that object back there?" Erina looked at the half-flesh, half-metal mass over the magma lake.

  "Well, aren't you a precious little bean!" cackled Goukei. "That is called an egg! Ever heard of one?"

  "An egg?"

  "More like an incubator," said Akira. "A typical ritual calls for runes, the right reagents, maybe a sacrifice or two. When you need something really big, throw more stuff at it. Stabilize the material form with physical sustenance and the immaterial with curses… It's ugly as all hell, but I can't say I expected anything less."

  "Picture it!" Goukei's smile was far too wide as he spread his arms wide. "All the fun back then! Those were the days you could kill a man and everyone wrote it off as bad spirits or misfortune or whatever the hell superstition they felt like. Back before shit like 'science' and 'technology' ruined everything and left us holin' up in the Reverse. The times when the Association wasn't rippin' off everyone's balls 'cause they sneezed on a human. The good ol' days when you could wrestle with gods just by shoutin' your best insults at the sky!"

  "Are you drunk?" asked Akira. "Actually, don't answer that."

  He just shook his head with a grin. "You know those were good times too, Akira."

  "You just want to beat people up, bonehead. Never had a single other thought in that thick skull of yours."

  "Oi." His voice suddenly dropped to a deep snarl. "Watch that fuckin' tongue of yours, brat."

  Akira just met his menace with her smuggest, cockiest smile.

  "Regardless of the reason," said Erina to Goukei. "We'll stop you."

  "Really," he said flatly. He wasn't amused at all.

  Erina willed herself not to tremble.

  Goukei's polished shoes touched the rock floor. He straightened to his full towering height and slowly turned, presenting his back to them. One massive hand reached up to his shoulder, and in one fluid motion, he tore off his shirt all at once. Blood red flames flared, withering the strips of expensive fabric and silk to nothing before they could touch the ground.

  The tattoo didn't just cover his back. It extended down his arms almost to the wrists and stretched around to the edges of his massive chest. It better resembled a mural than a tattoo. The gates of Hell stood tall and proud as the centerpiece of the scene. The dead writhed beyond its open doors, arms outstretched from their burning torment in desperate search of relief that would never come. Demons with cruel, wild faces ruled the wastelands and spilled from the gates. The raging rapids of the Sanzu River roared at his waist, whipped into a white frothing frenzy by the serpentine dragons tangling around each other in its depths. They snatched stray humans from the banks, some gleefully tearing them apart with their jaws while others clamored for more.

  And larger than anything else, standing taller than even the gates themselves, were the fierce guardians of Hell, gnashing their teeth and brandishing colossal weapons that stretched down his arms. The guardian at his left shoulder had the head of a mad bull. The guardian at his right shoulder bore the likeness of a wild horse. Gozu held the gates of Hell open. Mezu seized the dead by the massive fistful and flung them through the doors to their eternal damnation.

  A fissure split open in the rock at Goukei's side. The staff of bone rose from its grave into his waiting hand.

  "They say, make a livin' off what you love," rumbled Goukei, balancing his staff over his shoulder. "But I never was a fan of my job. I ain't into killin' snot-nosed brats or escortin' old folks outta the retirement home. I was born to fight." He turned around, head held high as his one good eye glared down. "Me 'n Akira go way back. But you, Erina-chan… Is your name even worth being mentioned in the same breath as a legend?"

  Erina gulped. Sweat poured down her back. Goukei wasn't a crime lord, and he wasn't an oni either. He wasn't just one of the fiercest, most violent creatures in Japanese mythology. He was all of that and then worse still.

  She realized with ice-cold clarity. This wasn't going to go remotely like any fight she knew. Everything up until now—all of the terror and fear and struggle—it was all child's play compared to the monstrosity towering before her.

  "Steady now, Erina." Akira stepped up to her side. "I'm right here."

  Erina nodded feverishly. "Right."

  "You've made him bleed before," said Akira. "And what can bleed, can die. Matter of fact, you don't even need to go that far today." Akira flicked some of the dirt from her cheek and settled into a low stance, feet bouncing on the floor. "Just follow my lead! That'll be enough!"

  Erina snapped to attention, and she nodded. A set of spell circles glowed to life at her feet, green light tracing her arms as she readied for battle. "Yes, sir!"

  "Hehehehe…" Their little act got a rise out of Goukei. "How cute." The end of his staff shattered solid rock as he slammed it down before him, the deep cracks spreading all the way to the magma trenches and rapidly filling with a molten glow. "Come on then, and spit in the face of Death himself! Sorry if I break your new favorite toy, Akira!!"