The moment Raven pulled the Aether stone from her pocket, the same kind Fiona had used to draw the unknown aura from Yuuta’s sleeping body, the chamber changed.

This stone was not white like Fiona’s.

It was black.

Black as the void between stars. Black as the space where light went to die. Its surface was smooth, polished, but cracks ran through it like veins, and from those cracks radiated an aura that made the air itself tremble.

The laughter of the demons died instantly.

The sound cut off as if someone had closed a door on a screaming room.

One moment, the chamber had been filled with mockery and triumph.

The next, there was nothing. No sound. No breath. No movement.

A strange silence spread through the chamber, not the silence of peace, but the silence of prey holding still, hoping the predator would not see them.

The salesman demon’s smile vanished. His black pupils contracted to pinpricks, shrinking away from the light of the stone. His lips pressed together. His hands, which had been raised in triumph, lowered slowly to his sides.

High demons had the ability to sense danger. It was not a skill they learned, it was something they were born with, a gift from the darkness that had created them.

And when the salesman demon looked at the black stone in Raven’s hand, when he felt the aura radiating from its cracked surface, he felt something he had not felt in centuries.

Fear of death.

Not fear of pain. Not fear of defeat.

The cold, absolute terror of a creature that knew it was about to cease existing.

His mind raced back to a conversation he had dismissed as exaggeration. The Demon General’s words echoed in his skull, clear and terrible:

Remember. If you see any Agency member holding a black stone, you retreat. You do not fight. You do not hesitate. You run.

Retreat? he had asked, confused. From a stone?

You do not understand, the General had said, his voice low, almost a whisper. There is a power above us. Above the Demon King. Above everything we know. And that stone, that black stone, is connected to it. It is death. Pure death. Not even the Demon King is equal to it.

At the time, the salesman demon had laughed. He had dismissed the warning as fear-mongering, as exaggeration, as the ramblings of an old demon who had grown soft and cautious.

Now, standing in the chamber with the black stone pulsing in Raven’s hand, he understood.

The exaggeration was not the stone’s power.

The exaggeration was his own safety.

Raven did not look at the demons. Her eyes were fixed on the stone, her face pale, her jaw tight. She knew what she was holding. She knew what it would do. And she knew that using it would cost her something she could not get back.

She held the stone aloft, its dark aura pulsing like a heartbeat, like a countdown, like the final seconds before the end of the world.

Her voice was steady when she spoke, cutting through the silence that had swallowed the chamber.

"Remaining Crow unit," she said. "Grab the children. Leave this place. Now."

The Shadow Crow soldiers moved without hesitation. They had seen the stone before, not in person, but in training, in briefings, in the whispered warnings that passed between senior agents. They knew what it could do. They knew what it would do.

They broke the children’s chains with specialized tools, the metal snapping like brittle twigs. They gathered the small bodies, still unconscious, still peaceful, still unaware of the horror unfolding around them, and carried them into the shadows. Within seconds, they had vanished, disappearing into the darkness outside the warehouse, far from the reach of the stone’s aura.

The remaining demons, the ones who could not sense danger, the ones who had not been warned, the ones who still believed they were the hunters, laughed.

"Look at them run," one said, its red eyes gleaming with contempt. "The infamous Shadow Crow, fleeing with their tails between their legs."

"Cowards," another spat. "They talked so boldly, and now they scatter like insects."

"We will hunt them later," a third said, licking its claws. "One by one. In the forest. It will be a game." 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

They did not stop Raven’s unit. They did not need to. The children would not escape. The soldiers would not escape. No one escaped the demonic hunt.

But the salesman demon was not laughing.

His eyes were fixed on the stone. His body was trembling, not from cold, not from fear, but from something deeper. Something primal. His instincts were screaming at him, louder than they had ever screamed before.

Run, they said. Run. Run. Run.

He could not move.

Something was wrong.

Raven raised her hand. The black stone gleamed in the green light, its cracks pulsing like a heartbeat. She looked at the salesman demon, at his pale face, his contracted pupils, his trembling hands, and felt no pity.

"Repent your sins in hell, demon," she said.

The salesman demon’s eyes widened. He knew, in that moment, that he had made a terrible mistake. He had walked into a trap, not the one he had set for her, but one she had set for him. The children had been the bait. The unit had been the bait. But the real trap, the one that would end him, was in her hand.

"Retreat," he whispered. His voice was barely audible, cracked, broken. "Retreat. Retreat!"

His demons did not understand. They looked at him with confusion, with amusement, with the condescension of creatures who had never seen their leader afraid.

"What is wrong, Boss?" one asked.

"Scared of a little stone?" another mocked.

The salesman demon did not answer. He could not. His voice had abandoned him, fled with his courage, left him alone with his terror.

Raven smashed the stone against the ground.

SMASHHHHH!!!

The sound was equal to a gunshot, sharp and final, echoing through the chamber like a death knell. Raven vanished, not fading, not running, simply gone, swallowed by the shadows she had commanded for so long.

The demons laughed.

"How cowardly," one said. "She ran."

"We thought it was her trump card," said another, shaking his head. "And she ran."

The salesman demon forced himself to breathe. His heart was pounding. His hands were shaking. But nothing had happened. The stone had shattered. Raven had fled. He was alive.

"Truly," he murmured, a smile creeping back across his face, "I was scared to death for nothing."

Then the aura rose.

It rose from the shattered fragments of the stone, thick and black and red, the color of old blood, the color of dying stars, the color of wounds that would never heal. It spread across the floor, climbed the walls, filled the chamber like water filling a sinking ship. The green light of the fungus was extinguished. The shadows deepened. The air grew heavy, thick, impossible to breathe.

The demons felt it before they understood it.

The shackles on the walls vibrated. The chains rattled. The dust on the floor rose into the air, suspended by nothing, held aloft by a force that had no name.

The aura was suffocating. It pressed against their chests, their lungs, their hearts. It crushed them with the weight of mountains, with the weight of centuries, with the weight of something that had existed before time began and would exist after time ended.

The salesman demon fell to his knees.

His legs gave out without warning, without resistance, as if the authority to stand had been stripped from him by a higher power. His hands pressed against the floor, his fingers clawing at the stone, his nails breaking, his knuckles bleeding.

Around him, his demons collapsed. Some lay on the ground, unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to do anything except stare at the darkness spreading across the ceiling. Others curled into balls, their bodies shaking, their minds retreating to places where the aura could not reach.

One demon, the one who had mocked Raven’s retreat, began to scream.

"Red eyes," it shrieked, clawing at its face. "Red eyes in the darkness. Watching me. Judging me. They know what I did. They know everything."

Another demon, the one who had spoken of hunting children, began to weep.

"Screaming children," it sobbed, rocking back and forth. "They are screaming. They will not stop screaming. I can hear them. I can always hear them."

A third demon, the youngest, the weakest, the one who had believed himself invincible, simply stared at the ceiling, his eyes empty, his mouth open, his soul already gone.

The salesman demon lifted his head.

His ears were bleeding. Dark fluid dripped from his ear canals, ran down his neck, stained his collar. His veins bulged against his skin, visible through his pale flesh, black and swollen.

He saw her.

A woman standing in the darkness. Not Raven. Not any of the Shadow Crow. Someone else. Someone ancient. Someone terrible. She watched him with eyes that held no hatred, no anger, no judgment. Only pity.

Her tears fell, bright as stars, bright as dying suns, and each tear that struck the ground sent ripples through the aura, waves of power that made the demons scream and the walls tremble and the very fabric of reality shudder.

The salesman demon understood, in that final moment, what the Demon General had meant.

There is a power above us.

A power that even the Demon King cannot match.

It is death itself, imprisoned in crystal.

He had thought those words were exaggeration. He had thought the General was old, afraid, weak.

He had been wrong.

The darkness rose around him, swallowing his vision, his thoughts, his consciousness. The woman’s tears fell. The children’s screams echoed. The red eyes watched.

And the salesman demon fell into the depths of darkness, where there was no light, no hope, no return.

________

Raven and her unit waited five kilometers from the warehouse, hidden in the thick press of ancient trees. The forest was dark around them, darker than it should have been, the moonlight struggling to penetrate the canopy, the shadows pooling beneath the branches like spilled ink.

They had been watching for an hour, waiting for the stone’s aura to subside, waiting for the screaming to stop, waiting for the darkness to release its grip on the warehouse.

The children lay in a clearing behind them, arranged in neat rows on blankets that had been pulled from emergency packs.

Their faces were peaceful, eyes closed, lips slightly parted, chests rising and falling with the slow rhythm of forced sleep.

The purple smoke had done its work, carrying them away from the horror, burying their memories beneath layers of unconsciousness.

But the memories would not stay buried forever.

Raven watched as her unit moved among the children, their hands glowing with soft light, their faces tight with concentration. They were erasing what the children had seen, the blood, the screams, the headless body kneeling in the mud. It was delicate work, the kind that required precision and care, the kind that left scars on the agents who performed it.

Some monsters loved to torment pure souls. They fed on fear, on despair, on the sound of children crying for a God who did not answer. They did not care about the aftermath. They did not care about the lives they shattered. They only cared about the feast.

Raven’s gaze drifted back to the warehouse.

"What a terrifying presence," Raven murmured, her breath fogging in the cold air. Her eyes remained fixed on the warehouse, its silhouette barely visible against the darker sky.

Even from this distance, she could feel the lingering echoes of the Black Stone’s aura, faint whispers of power that made her skin crawl and her teeth ache.

She wondered, not for the first time, what creature Chief Sara had extracted that aura from. What being existed in this world, or beyond it, that could produce such concentrated malice? The stone was only a fragment, a shard of something larger, and yet it had brought demons to their knees.

The screams from the warehouse had been going on for hours. They had started as cries of agony, then faded to whimpers, then to silence. Raven could not see what was happening inside, but she could imagine, the demons clawing at their own faces, tearing at their own flesh, desperate to escape the visions the stone had forced upon them.

She did not envy them.

To be continued...