"They were all illusions."
The words hung between Haroku and me, leaving a bitter taste in my mouth.
Haroku spun around, his hands raised, ready to cast another seal. "Then where is the real one?"
A sharp crack echoed from directly above us.
I looked up just in time to see the space over our heads warp and fracture like broken glass. The real female spirit dropped from the distortion, her matted hair flying back, her hands glowing with concentrated, lethal kinetic energy. She was aiming straight for my neck.
I reached for another paper, but I was a fraction of a second too late.
Before her decaying fingers could even graze my skin, the space between us violently tore open.
It wasn't a dark portal. It was a jagged, burning rift, ripping from the inside out.
A pale hand shot out of the fiery tear and clamped down like a steel vise around the female spirit's throat.
The entity's forward momentum stopped instantly. She choked, her glowing eyes widening in pure shock as she was held suspended in mid-air.
From the burning rift, Makeno stepped out.
Her garments were slightly scorched, but her glowing eyes burned with absolute, unhinged fury. She hadn't been spat out by the abyss; she had physically torn her way back to our world.
"Did you really believe a dimensional rift could hold me?" Makeno's voice was deathly calm, but it vibrated with lethal intent.
The spirit thrashed, throwing a point-blank spatial distortion at Makeno's face. Makeno didn't flinch. She just tilted her head, letting the attack glance harmlessly off her aura.
Makeno tightened her grip, her fingers digging deep into the spirit's neck.
"I am bound to the Sekonami bloodline," Makeno stated, her voice projecting across the empty road. "As long as Symen breathes, and as long as his heart beats, there is no cage in existence that can keep me from his side."
With a brutal flick of her wrist, Makeno slammed the female spirit directly into the asphalt.
The impact cratered the road. The entity screamed as chunks of concrete flew into the air, her spatial loop stuttering from the sheer force of the blow.
Makeno didn't give her a single second to recover. She dropped down, planting her knee firmly on the spirit's chest, pinning her to the broken ground.
"I was not forged by a wandering soul," Makeno said, raising her bare fist. "I am the creation of Sekonami Shinji and the Eight Elite Spirit Hunters of the year 1026."
Makeno was a weapon of mass spiritual destruction.
Makeno brought her fist down, she's not even using her 1% powers and abilites in this battle.
It was a devastating, sickening impact. The spirit's head snapped back against the pavement.
The entity desperately threw up her hands, generating a layered spatial shield to deflect the next blow. Makeno didn't care. She didn't use a spell to counter it. She simply punched straight through the shield. The barrier shattered like brittle glass, and Makeno's fist connected with the spirit's face again.
And again.
It was entirely raw. Pure, unadulterated violence. Makeno carried no weapons, relying entirely on the overwhelming, concentrated spiritual density woven into her very being by the ancient elites.
"You rely on parlor tricks," Makeno said coldly, driving a backhand across the spirit's jaw. "Spatial folding. Illusions. Cowardice."
The spirit shrieked, her form glitching. She managed to slip through a micro-portal, teleporting ten feet away to escape the brutal beatdown.
She staggered to her feet, raising both hands to launch a massive wave of dark energy.
Makeno didn't dodge. She stepped directly into the blast. The dark energy washed over her, completely unable to penetrate her core defenses.
Makeno walked right through the attack, grabbed the spirit by her tattered clothes, and threw her over her shoulder. The entity crashed into the rusted mileage sign, bending the thick metal pole in half.
Before the spirit could slide to the ground, Makeno was already there. She grabbed the woman by the hair, yanking her head back, and delivered a devastating knee strike straight to her torso.
The spirit let out a hollow, agonizing gasp, her form flickering wildly as her energy reserves plummeted.
Makeno tossed her onto the road like a broken doll.
"Enough," Makeno commanded. She stood over the shattered entity, raising her hand to gather a lethal charge of silver energy for the final execution. "Your distortion ends here."
"Wait," I called out, taking a step forward.
Makeno paused, her hand still glowing, but she deferred to my command.
Haroku walked up beside me, breathing heavily as we looked down at the broken entity. The spatial loop was already collapsing. The unnatural shadows in the trees were retreating, and the road ahead finally looked clear.
The female spirit was lying on her side, trembling.
She didn't try to teleport away. She didn't try to cast another illusion. Her violent, mocking sneer was completely gone.
As her energy drained, the terrifying, monstrous facade began to slip. The matted hair fell away from her face, and the rotting, disjointed features softened into something deeply, painfully human.
She wasn't looking at us with hatred anymore.
She was looking at the asphalt, her hands clutching weakly at her chest.
And she was crying.
The tears weren't spectral energy or mist. They looked agonizingly real.
"I... I just wanted..." her voice broke, no longer a layered, terrifying echo, but the fragile, trembling voice of a normal woman.
She slowly curled in on herself, her shoulders shaking with a profound, crushing sorrow that completely stripped away the tension of the battlefield.
"I just wanted to find him," she whispered into the dirt, her voice cracking with centuries of grief. "Why did they take him from me?"
I lowered my hand, my legendary paper slipping back into my coat. Haroku's combat stance dropped completely.
We just stared at her. The monster we had been fighting for the last hour wasn't a mindless soldier of Jason.
She was a prisoner of her own tragedy.