The Plaza of Screams held its breath. Akuma stood at the epicentre of the storm he commanded, twin orbs of devouring darkness swirling above his gauntleted fists, poised to scour the battered defiance arrayed before him. Ryota Veyne, a crumbling monolith leaking life onto the hungry stone, leaned heavily on Starbreaker, its Polaris light guttering like a dying campfire. Haruto Isamu, a statue carved from glacial focus, dagger poised, veins standing out like frozen rivers on his temples. Shiro, unarmed, writhing on the floor, phantom ice daggers flaying the nerves in his fused wrists. Kuro, on his knees, head bowed, the sickly blue luminescence of corruption visibly pulsing beneath his vambrace, tendrils inching towards his heart, static a physical drill bit in his skull.

"Vermin," Akuma's void voice resonated, thick with cosmic contempt that vibrated their teeth. "Your borrowed time expires." The orbs pulsed, the gravitational pull intensifying, threatening to peel the flesh from their bones before the cold could finish the job.

Then, chaos erupted, not from Akuma, but from the broken circle.

Ryota moved. Not with his former tectonic power, but with the desperate lurch of a mortally wounded bear. Ignoring the white hot inferno in his gut, the blood slicking the axe haft, he roared, a sound ripped from a ruined chest, and swung Starbreaker in a wide, brutal arc. Not at Akuma, but at the yielding floor in front of the Void Knight. CRACKKKK! The impact wasn't clean; it was a messy, agonized slam that sent shockwaves through the organic stone, geysers of black ichor erupting. Akuma's stance shifted minutely, the void orbs flickering as his footing momentarily destabilized.

Simultaneously, Haruto was a blur of lethal geometry. He didn't charge; he flowed, exploiting the microsecond of distraction caused by Ryota's impact. His Polaris dagger, blazing with focused fury that visibly strained his control, a bead of frozen sweat traced his jawline, stabbed not for Akuma's heart, but for the vulnerable seam at the back of his knee, a flaw documented, anticipated. Akuma's void gauntlet snapped down with viper speed, intercepting the strike in a shower of frozen sparks and searing vapor. The force jarred Haruto back a step, a flash of absolute zero agony locking his elbow joint, but he disengaged instantly, already circling for the next opening. Precision under excruciating pressure.

Shiro, gasping through the agony in his wrists, saw Kuro stir. Their eyes met, Shiro's clouded with pain and desperation, Kuro's storm grey gaze a maelstrom of static and defiance. No words. Just understanding. Shiro, ignoring the grinding shriek threatening to shatter bone, rolled onto his side. His right hand, trembling violently, scrabbled for a shard of black ice. Not a weapon. A projectile. He hurled it, not at Akuma, but high, towards the pulsing, diseased rune on the ceiling above him. It shattered harmlessly, but the spray of frozen fragments rained down like hail.

Kuro acted in tandem. A guttural sound escaped him, part agony, part feral focus. He didn't rise. He shoved his corrupted arm forward, palm flat against the yielding floor. He didn't unleash the unstable power; he channelled the invasive, soul numbing cold radiating from it, the glacial fire chewing his marrow. He pushed it outwards in a focused wave, not an attack, but a psychic shiver of absolute zero, aimed directly at Akuma's void touched senses. A disruptive chill across his cosmic awareness.

Akuma snarled. Not a roar of anger, but a sharp, frustrated sound like glaciers shearing. The void orb in his left hand lashed out almost reflexively, vaporizing the ice shards. The psychic chill from Kuro was a gnat's buzz, easily dismissed, but it was another distraction, layered onto Haruto's relentless, precise harrying and the destabilizing tremors from Ryota's next, weaker floor slam. He parried Haruto's next thrust, a move of economical brutality, sending the Architect skidding back again, but the smooth flow of his void energy was disrupted. The orbs pulsed erratically.

"Persistent fucking gnats!" Akuma's voice lost some of its cosmic indifference, gaining an edge of sharp annoyance. He backhanded a chunk of ice Ryota had dislodged, shattering it mid air. "You sting. You buzz. You fucking accomplish NOTHING!" He aimed a concentrated lance of void energy at Kuro, the source of the psychic chill. Kuro braced, the corruption flaring blue white in anticipation of unmasking agony.

But Ryota was there. Not blocking. Interposing. He staggered into the path, swinging Starbreaker's massive head in a desperate parry. KRACKKKKKKK! Void energy met Polaris infused steel. The blast detonated, throwing Ryota backwards like a ragdoll. He hit the floor with a sickening thud, Starbreaker clattering from his grip, its light almost extinguished. Blood fountained from his side. But Kuro was spared the direct hit.

Akuma didn't press. He paused, staring at the crumpled form of the Old Star, then at Haruto repositioning, then at Shiro desperately scrambling for another piece of debris, Kuro gasping on his knees. His star pupils narrowed. The effortless dominance he'd displayed moments ago was fractured. Not by power, but by relentless, irritating, costly persistence. Each deflection, each dodge, each minor disruption chipped away not at his armour, but at his implacable certainty. The void orbs still swirled, but their formation was less focused, their light more agitated.

"How…" Akuma's voice rumbled, the distortion flickering, revealing a sliver of something beneath the cosmic malice, incredulity laced with a chilling thread of… unease? "How the fuck can I be losing ground to this?" The question hung, not just for his spectral audience, but seemingly for himself. "A dying relic, a disgraced lord, a broken gutter rat, and rotting princeling?" He gestured contemptuously at them. "Ryo…" The name was a whisper charged with dread. "Ryo will flay the skin from my bones if I fail. He'll feed my essence to the hunger piece by fucking piece for this embarrassment!" The fear was palpable, raw. It wasn't fear of them, but of the master he served, the consequences of delay.

He watched them regroup. Ryota, coughing blood, dragging himself towards his axe, movements leaden and agonizingly slow. Haruto, icy mask firmly in place, but breathing slightly harder, the strain of maintaining both lethal precision and Polaris intensity showing in the tightness around his eyes. Shiro, finally finding a jagged shard of black ice, clutching it in a hand trembling from wrist agony. Kuro, pushing himself up onto one knee, corrupted arm held close, static crackling visibly around him, his face a rictus of pain and determination. Their coordination was a disaster. Ryota's desperate, broad strokes clashed with Haruto's surgical strikes. Shiro's frantic throws were poorly timed. Kuro's disruptive chills sometimes interfered with Haruto's angles. They tripped over each other's efforts, their styles jarring, their communication reduced to pained gasps and shared glances.

Yet, they kept coming. Relentless. Irritating. Buying heartbeats with screams and blood. They were grains of sand in the gears of his execution. And the grinding was getting louder in his own mind.

Akuma deflected another precise thrust from Haruto, the void gauntlet ringing with the impact. He vaporized a chunk of ice Shiro hurled. He ignored another wave of psychic cold from Kuro, though it made his void energy sputter slightly. He watched Ryota, with a herculean effort fuelled by pure stubbornness, heave Starbreaker up again, its light a pathetic flicker. The Old Star met Akuma's gaze, and even through the pain and blood, there was no surrender. Only defiance.

That defiance… it wasn't emanating solely from Ryota anymore. Akuma's star pupils swept the ragged group. Ryota was the symbol, the broken banner. But he wasn't the engine. The relentless, cold, calculating pressure, the one forcing him to constantly adjust, defend, react… it came from the disgraced Lord. Haruto. The man moving with the lethal, unyielding precision of a glacier, directing the chaos, exploiting every micro opening, turning their disparate, desperate flailing into a constant, grinding harassment. He was the pivot. The anchor. The cold mind holding the crumbling line together through sheer, analytical will.

A revelation, cold and sharp as a void forged dagger, pierced Akuma's mounting frustration. He was the true leader of this stubborn resistance. Not the fallen Commander, but the erased Lord. Shatter him, and the fragile, grinding machine would fly apart. The sand would stop grinding. The execution could proceed.

A slow, predatory smile, devoid of humour and filled with chilling intent, spread across the void where Akuma's face might have been. The agitation in the void orbs settled, replaced by a renewed, focused malice. He stopped swatting at the gnats. His star pupils fixed, not on Ryota, not on the twins, but solely on Haruto Isamu, the architect of this infuriating delay. The void energy around his gauntlets coalesced, not into indiscriminate orbs, but into sharp, crackling lances of pure negation, humming with deadly purpose.

"Enough fucking distractions," Akuma stated, his voice regaining its chilling certainty, now layered with a terrifying focus. "Time to break the erased Lord." The lances of void energy snapped into alignment, aimed with lethal precision at Haruto's centre of mass. The cold, analytical eyes of the fallen Lord of House Isamu narrowed a fraction, recognizing the shift, the sudden, absolute threat now directed solely at him. The grinding wheel was about to meet its breaker.

The Plaza held its breath again, but this time, the silence crackled with a different kind of tension. Akuma's void lances, humming with focused negation, were a physical manifestation of his shifted intent, a predator locking onto the vital artery. Haruto felt the shift like a plummeting temperature gauge. The cold, analytical engine of his mind registered the absolute threat, lethal energy aimed solely at him, bypassing Ryota's defiance, Shiro's desperation, Kuro's corruption. Akuma wasn't just attacking; he was targeting the pivot point of their fragile resistance.

Before Haruto could adjust, before Ryota could bellow a warning, before Shiro could hurl another futile shard, Akuma spoke. Not a roar, not a taunt. A voice like frozen silk, dripping with cruel intimacy that cut through the Plaza's groan and the ragged breathing of the wounded.

"Remember the pyre, Isamu whelp?" Akuma's star pupils bored into Haruto's obsidian gaze. "The scent of charring flesh and ceremonial incense? The weight of the ceremonial blade in your hand? So young. Barely eighteen winters, playing Lord of a now gutted House."

The words struck Haruto like a physical blow. Not a memory recalled, but a trapdoor opening beneath his feet, plunging him into the frozen hell of two years past. The Plaza dissolved.

He stood on the windswept platform high in the Razorwind Peaks, the Frostguard's sacred cremation ground. The air was biting, scoured clean, smelling only of snow and the cloying sweetness of the oils soaking the pyre wood. Below, ranks of Frostguard stood silent, faces grim, some averted. On the pyre lay a shape swathed in white silk. Too small. Too still. Not the towering presence of Lord Takeru Isamu, Master Strategist, Commander of the Northern Reaches. Just… a bundle.

Haruto, eighteen years old, clad in the formal, stiff robes of House Isamu, robes too large, the mantle of leadership crushing his narrow shoulders, held the long, ceremonial Polaris igniter. His hands, trained for precision since he could hold a stylus, trembled violently. His face, usually a mask of impassive calculation, was pale as the snow, eyes red rimmed, raw. The cold wasn't just atmospheric; it was the absolute zero filling his chest cavity where his heart used to be. He'd identified the body. He'd seen what was left beneath the silk.

Not a warrior's end. A butcher's work.

"He didn't die on a battlefield, boy," Akuma's voice slithered back into the present, shattering the memory, yet amplifying its horror. The Void Knight took a slow step forward, the void lances tracking Haruto's slightest movement. "He died on his knees. In the dark. Begging." A pause, thick with sadistic relish. "Not for his life. Oh no. The great Takeru Isamu was too proud for that. He begged for mercy. For a quick end."

Haruto's breath hitched. A microscopic fracture in his icy composure. His knuckles whitened on the Polaris dagger's hilt. The blade flickered.

"Mercy," Akuma chuckled, the sound like dry bones rattling in a tomb. "A concept Ryo finds… quaint. Your father's defiance, his strategic mind, his loyalty to ideals Ryo deemed obsolete… it needed to be flayed from him. Layer by layer."

Haruto stood alone in the ice cold mortuary chamber hours before the pyre. The air reeked of antiseptic and something coppery, metallic. The sheet was pulled back. He'd insisted. He needed to know. Needed to see the face of the enemy who could do this.

It wasn't a face. It was a ruin. The skin was gone, stripped from the skull in ragged patches, revealing the stark white bone beneath, streaked with frozen blood and gristle. The eyes were missing, the sockets dark, gaping voids filled with crystallized fluid. The lips were peeled back from shattered teeth in a perpetual rictus of agony. The body… it was less a corpse and more a grotesque anatomy lesson. Muscle, tendon, bone, all exposed in a chaotic, brutal display. Deep, precise cuts scored the chest and limbs, not haphazard, but methodical. Deliberate. The hands… the hands that had sketched brilliant battle plans, that had ruffled Haruto's hair… were stumps of frozen meat, the fingers systematically broken, the nails ripped out. The symbol of House Isamu, a stylized mountain peak, had been carved backwards into the ravaged flesh of the chest, a final, blasphemous insult.

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Haruto didn't scream. He didn't vomit. He stood frozen, colder than the chamber itself. Then, slowly, deliberately, he leaned close to the monstrous wreckage that was once his father. His voice, when it came, was a whisper colder than the deepest void, carrying an absolute, unshakeable conviction that etched itself onto his soul: "I will find them, Father. Whoever did this. I will unmake them. Piece by piece. I swear it on the ashes of our House."

Akuma's voice yanked him back to the Plaza, the mortuary's horror superimposed on the Void Knight's looming form. "It took hours," Akuma continued, his tone conversational, almost bored, yet dripping with venomous detail. "He screamed, of course. A wet, bubbling sound once we reached the lungs. The frost helps, you see? Keeps them conscious longer. Nerves alight with exquisite clarity." He mimed a delicate cutting motion with one gauntleted finger. "First, the skin. Peeling it back from the muscle, starting at the collarbone. Like removing a glove. It comes away in sheets, especially when you warm the blade just enough to sear the capillaries… prevents too much bleeding, preserves the subject. Ryo appreciated the aesthetics. The contrast of red muscle on white bone, steaming in the cold air."

Haruto's entire body began to tremble. A fine, uncontrollable vibration. His breathing, usually measured and silent, came in short, sharp gasps that plumed violently in the cold air. The Polaris dagger in his hand flared erratically, spitting sparks, its light strobing between blinding white and sickly yellow. The Plaza's runes nearby frosted over completely.

"He tried to bargain," Akuma mused, taking another step. The void lances hummed louder. "Offered secrets. Troop movements. The Frostguard's weaknesses. Pathetic. Ryo already knew. We just wanted to hear him break. And break he did. When we started on the fingers. Snapping them one by one. Then the tendons in the wrists. The precision… it was almost artistic. He begged then. Not for himself. For you." Akuma's star pupils flared with malicious delight. "'Spare my son! He knows nothing!' Over and over. A broken record choked on his own blood."

Haruto stood before the pyre, the ceremonial igniter heavy as a mountain in his hand. The Frostguard Priest intoned the rites, words about honour and the eternal ice. Haruto heard nothing. He saw only the backwards carved sigil on the ravaged chest beneath the shroud. Heard only the phantom echo of his father's screams, his pleas. The weight of House Isamu, disgraced, its legacy ending in butchery, settled on his eighteen year old shoulders. He touched the igniter to the oil soaked wood. The flames roared up, hungry, consuming the shroud, the horror beneath, the last of his childhood. The heat did nothing to thaw the absolute zero within him. It forged it into something harder. Colder.

"I silenced him eventually," Akuma stated flatly. "Tore out his tongue. Crushed his larynx. Ryo's orders. Said the whimpering was ruining the ambiance." He tilted his head. "His eyes… they were the last to go. Still held that stubborn Isamu fire, even as the frost took them. I didn't pluck them out oh no I carved them just like Ryo did with Kaya's years ago. The sight was beautiful seeing the light diminish."

The final detail was the detonator.

Haruto Isamu's aristocratic composure didn't crack; it shattered. A raw, animalistic scream ripped from his throat, a sound of such profound agony and rage that it dwarfed Kuro's earlier cries, silenced the static in his mind, and even made Ryota flinch. It wasn't human. It was the sound of a glacier shearing, a soul tearing itself apart.

"YOU FUCKING VOID SPAWNED FUCKING ANIMAL!" Haruto roared, spittle flying, his voice raw and broken, stripped of all control, all precision, all icy calculation. The tremor became a violent convulsion. The Polaris dagger ERUPTED with unstable, incandescent fury, not a focused beam, but a supernova of raw stellar rage erupting around him. The light wasn't white; it was a chaotic, searing violet white, lashing out in jagged tendrils that scorched the fleshy floor and cracked the nearby weeping pillar.

He didn't attack with geometry. He launched himself at Akuma, a wounded beast driven mad by pain. All finesse vanished. He stabbed wildly, hacked, slashed, movements fuelled by pure, unadulterated hatred and the image of his father's mutilated corpse. The dagger flared and guttered violently with each strike, reflecting the storm within. He screamed profanities, a torrent of vitriol directed solely at Akuma, names and curses that would have shocked the austere halls of House Isamu.

"I'LL CARVE YOU APART! PIECE BY FUCKING PIECE! I'LL FEED YOUR EYES TO THE VOID BETWEEN STARS! I SWORE IT! I SWORE IT ON HIS ASHES!"

Akuma met the onslaught, not with concern, but with cold efficiency. He deflected the wild blows, void gauntlet meeting the erratic Polaris light in showers of sparks and negation. CLANGGGGG! He gave ground, not because he was overpowered, but because the sheer, unpredictable ferocity of Haruto's assault forced him to. A cruel smile played beneath the obsidian helm. The plan was working. Perfectly.

The chemistry of the team shattered like glass. Ryota stared, momentarily paralyzed by the raw horror of Haruto's breakdown and the revelation of Takeru's fate. His own grip on Starbreaker faltered. Shiro froze, the ice shard forgotten in his hand, his own agony momentarily eclipsed by the visceral tsunami of Haruto's grief and rage. Kuro, struggling against the corruption, gasped as Haruto's wild, flailing energy discharge sent a wave of disruptive Polaris static crashing into his own overloaded senses, making the invasive cold fire surge painfully.

Haruto was a vortex of uncontrolled fury. He drove Akuma back step by furious step, but it was blind rage, not tactics. He left his flanks exposed. He ignored openings for the twins or Ryota. He was a one man hurricane of pain, focused solely on tearing Akuma apart, heedless of the cost, heedless of the team, heedless of his own survival. The cold, analytical anchor was gone, replaced by a supernova burning itself out in a single, catastrophic burst. Akuma's star pupils gleamed. The grinding wheel wasn't just broken; it had become shrapnel flying back at its makers. The path to extinguishing the remaining sparks was clearing.

The Plaza of Screams became a crucible for Haruto Isamu's unravelling. His scream wasn't sound; it was the detonation of a glacial core, shattering his icy precision into a supernova of raw, untethered agony. Polaris light, once a scalpel, erupted from his dagger in chaotic violet white tendrils, lashing the fleshy floor, scarring weeping pillars, reflecting the fractured hellscape within him. He moved like a wounded beast, hacking, slashing, stabbing with berserk fury, each wild strike fuelled by the visceral horror of his father's mutilated corpse replaying behind his eyes, the flayed skin, the shattered teeth, the backwards carved Isamu sigil, the pop of frozen eyes. Profanities, vitriol reserved for the abyss itself, tore from his ravaged throat.

Then, the shadows shifted.

Not a dramatic entrance. Not a flare of power. It was a subtle deepening of the gloom near a colossal, weeping pillar, a sudden, profound stillness that seemed to suck the chaotic noise towards it. The Plaza's ambient groan, the hiss crackle of frost, the wet rasp of Kuro's breath, all seemed muted, dampened. A figure stood where only darkness had been moments before. Corvin.

He was a natural extension of the void between the pulsing, diseased runes. His hood was drawn deep, his face an enigma within its depths. No weapon was drawn. He simply stood, unnervingly still. Yet, his presence was a physical pressure, a sudden, localized intensification of the Plaza's hunger. The void stone ring on his finger pulsed once, a deep, resonant thoooom that vibrated in the marrow, not loud, but felt more than heard. It was the sound of a tomb sealing, of cosmic scales tipping.

Akuma's star pupils flickered minutely. A microsecond's hesitation in his fluid parry of Haruto's next wild lunge. The seamless flow of his void energy stuttered, just for a heartbeat. He'd sensed it, the silent observer stepping onto the stage, radiating not overt threat, but a chilling ambiguity that scraped against his cosmic certainty.

Corvin didn't engage Akuma. His unseen gaze fixed solely on the vortex of self destructive fury that was Haruto. His distorted voice, flat and devoid of inflection, cut through Haruto's raging scream like a blade of frozen air:

"Haruto. Your geometry is compromised."

Haruto didn't hear him. Lost in the red black haze of his father's torture chamber superimposed on the Plaza, he launched another desperate, off balance thrust. Akuma deflected it contemptuously, the void gauntlet sending a jarring shock up Haruto's numbed arm.

Corvin took a single, silent step forward, the yielding floor seeming to solidify beneath his tread. His ring pulsed again, a counterpoint to Akuma's swirling void aura.

"Focus," Corvin commanded, the distortion layering the word with hidden urgency. "The enemy exploits your fracture. THINK!."

Haruto snarled, a feral sound devoid of reason, and swung wildly at Akuma's head. Akuma swayed back, the blow whistling harmlessly past. He didn't press the opening Haruto left; his star pupils were fixed on Corvin now, a flicker of wary calculation replacing the predatory amusement.

"HARUTO!" Corvin's voice was sharper now, a whip crack in the psychic noise. "Your father's killer stands before you. Does he deserve your rage? Or your precision?"

The word 'precision' struck a dissonant chord in the cacophony of Haruto's mind. It echoed Haruto's own relentless mantra, the foundation of his being the foundation of House Isamu, before it was shattered. He faltered, his next slash faltering mid arc, the chaotic violet light sputtering. For a split second, the image of his father's ravaged face flickered, overlaid by the cold, analytical eyes Takeru Isamu had possessed, eyes Haruto had inherited.

Akuma seized the micro hesitation. A lance of void energy, sharp and fast, shot towards Haruto's exposed side. Ryota, jolted from his stupor by Corvin's intervention, bellowed a warning and threw himself, not to block, but to shove Starbreaker's haft into the blast's path. KRACKKKK! The impact flung Ryota back, blood spraying, but it deflected the worst. The glancing force still slammed Haruto sideways, knocking the breath from him, the chaotic Polaris light guttering out completely.

Haruto hit the fleshy floor, gasping, the dagger slipping from his numb fingers. The red haze receded slightly, replaced by the searing pain in his ribs and the crushing weight of failure. Akuma loomed, void energy coalescing anew, his focus now divided between the fallen Architect and the silent, unsettling presence of Corvin.

Corvin was at Haruto's side in two silent strides. He didn't offer a hand. He simply stood over him, a shadow against the Plaza's jaundiced gloom, his ring pulsing steadily.

"Breathe," Corvin stated, his distorted voice devoid of sympathy, only cold pragmatism. "The void feasts on broken tools. Are you a tool, Haruto? Or the hand that wields them?"

Haruto coughed, tasting blood and ozone. His father's mutilated face swam before him again. The carving. The begging. The silence. The rage surged, hot and desperate, threatening to drown him once more. He scrabbled for the dagger.

"LOOK HARUTO AROUND YOU," Corvin commanded, his voice cutting through the rising tide of panic. Not a suggestion. An order from the darkness itself. His hand, pale and long fingered, didn't point, but his hooded gaze shifted meaningfully away from Akuma, towards the periphery of the light.

Haruto's frantic gaze followed, driven by instinct more than thought.

He saw Shiro. Disarmed, wrists bound in void leather braces that visibly ground bone dust against fused joints, his face a mask of agony and despair. But beneath the pain, Haruto saw the echo of a deeper wound, the revelation in the throne room, delivered by Ryo's venomous tongue: Your mother, Yuki Aratani, burned alive on a Temple pyre. Contaminated. Her defect flowing in your veins.

He saw Kuro. On his knees, corrupted arm pulsing with sickly blue light, tendrils inching towards his heart, static visibly crackling around his head. Blood crusted his jaw from Akuma's earlier strike, his ribs shattered. But his storm grey eye, even clouded with pain and the invasive cold, burned with a hatred forged in an equally horrific revelation: Your mother, Kaya, torn apart by Ryo's hounds, her eyes carved out while she screamed, all because you, a child, stole a crown.

The images slammed into Haruto's fractured psyche, Shiro's mother burned, Kuro's mother defiled and devoured, his own father flayed and broken. Not just individual tragedies, but a pattern. Ryo's pattern. The systematic annihilation of light, of legacy, of mothers. The crushing weight of his personal loss didn't lessen, but it was suddenly… contextualized. Shared. He wasn't alone in the abyss of Ryo's cruelty. Shiro and Kuro weren't just burdens or tools; they were fellow survivors of the same monstrous design, bearing scars just as deep, just as horrific.

A tremor, different from the rage shakes, ran through Haruto. It was the tremor of ice reforming, not over emotion, but around it. The raw, screaming agony was still there, a white hot core, but it was no longer molten chaos. It was being contained, shaped, forced into a familiar, brutal geometry by the sheer, cold force of shared suffering and Corvin's relentless, pragmatic presence. He dragged in a shuddering breath, the Plaza's foul air scraping his lungs.

Akuma watched the shift. He saw the wild fury in Haruto's eyes bank, replaced by a chilling, familiar focus, the focus of the Architect assessing a battlefield, calculating vectors of pain and retribution. The Void Knight's star pupils narrowed. This unexpected variable, this shadow, had disrupted the beautiful unravelling. Annoyance flared into sharp unease. He raised his gauntlet, void energy swirling into a concentrated orb aimed at Haruto's head. Time to end this distraction.

Before the energy could lash out, a sound tore through the Plaza, silencing the groan of the mountain, the hiss of frost, the ragged breaths of the combatants.

It was a scream. Raw. Primal. Agonized beyond measure. It ripped from the shadowed upper reaches near the vaulted ceiling, echoing off the weeping pillars and diseased runes with soul shattering force. It wasn't a scream of physical pain, but of profound, universe breaking betrayal…

"I THOUGHT WE WERE FUCKING BROTHERS, TAKESHI!"

The name, Takeshi, hung in the sudden, absolute silence that followed, charged with cosmic anguish. Akuma froze, the void orb sputtering in his grasp, his star pupils snapping upwards towards the source of the cry. Ryota, dragging himself up from the floor, blood streaming from his side, stared upwards, a dawning horror replacing the pain on his face. Shiro flinched as if struck. Kuro's head jerked up, his storm grey eyes wide, the static momentarily silenced by the sheer, human devastation in that scream. Even Corvin's unnerving stillness seemed to deepen, his hooded head tilting fractionally.

The Plaza of Screams held its breath, the echoes of Juro's shattered faith ringing louder than any void blast, heavier than the mountain itself. The battle below was forgotten. The true fracture, deep and personal, had just been exposed high above, promising a storm far more devastating than any clash of light and void.

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