The cavern of the Outer Rings smelled of sulfur, dried blood, and old dust.
It is an oppressive, heavy dark, the kind that pressed against the ribs until breathing felt like swallowing sand.
Min-sun and Arashi crouchs behind a jagged shelf of obsidian, their knuckles white against the stone.
Ahead of them, the cavern widens into an amphitheater of jagged stone.
And there, standing entirely exposed, was Hong-kung.
He looked small.
Too small.
Hovering over him like monolithic statues of rotted flesh and bone were the huge demons.
Their forms shifts in the gloom—massive, horned silhouettes with eyes like burning coals and teeth like rusted iron bars.
The air ripples with their heat.
The largest of them, a towering behemoth with horns that scraped the cavern roof, took a booming step forward.
The ground trembled.
“What is a hairless ape doing in the nursery?” the lead demon sneers, his voice scraping like grinding tectonic plates.
“Speak, flesh-bag, before I paint the walls with your marrow.”
Hong-kung doesnt flinch.
He doesn’t even shift his weight.
He stood with his left hand buried deep inside his trouser pocket, his posture so casual he might have been waiting for a bus.
“I have some work to do,” Hong-kung says, his voice flat, clear, and entirely unimpressed.
The lead demon blinked, its massive, sulfurous nostrils flaring.
“Work?”
“Yeah. Work,” Hong-kung said, pointing a lazy finger toward a patch of pale, luminous flora blooming near the back of the chamber.
“I’m going to grab those flowers, and then I’m going to leave. So if you guys could just step aside, that’d save us all some time.”
A collective, low rumble vibrates through the demon horde.
It was a sound that could shake the teeth out of a human skull.
The lead demon threw its head back, a terrifying, wet laugh echoing off the stone.
“You? And what army, little meat?”
Hong-kung offered a small, terrifyingly calm smile.
“One man army.”
The horde erupted into hysterical laughter.
The sound was deafening, a chaotic chorus of screeching, howling, and mocking roars.
Even the shadows seemed to mock him.
Behind the rock, Min-sun’s heart hammered against her chest.
“Is he insane?” Min-sun whispered, her voice trembling.
“They’re going to tear him to pieces. Arashi, we have to do something!”
“Stay down,” Arashi hisses, grabbing her shoulder.
His eyes are wide, tracking Hong-kung’s complete lack of fear.
“Look at him. He isn’t stupid. He’s planning something.”
The lead demon stopped laughing, its burning gaze narrowing down onto the boy.
“A one-man army. Amusing. Let us make a deal, insect. If you can get the head of my main fighter down there within two minutes, you can take your little weeds and walk out of here alive. Fail, and I will eat your soul piece by piece.”
From the darkness behind the leader, a massive, armored fiend stepped forward, its fists wrapped in iron chains.
Khung-kung doesn’t hesitate.
“Deal.”
He turned his gaze directly to the champion.
His face blanked of all emotion.
When he spoke, his voice dropped an octave, delivering a crisp, icy phrase in fluent Japanese.
“Sono kubi morratta!”
The champion paused, utterly confused by the foreign tongue, and then began to roar in mockery.
It never finished the sound.
Hong-kung didn’t move his feet.
He didn’t lift his hand from his pocket.
He simply blinks.
A sound like a localized thunderclap cracks through the cavern.
A violent, unseen pressure ripped through the air.
Crimson spray painted the stone walls.
With a wet, heavy thud, its massive head tore clean from its shoulders, bouncing across the dirt until it settled directly at Hong-kung’s feet.
A cloud of choking dust and black blood surged outward.
“Get down!” Arashi yells, throwing his body over Min-sun to shield her from the flying debris and choking ash.
When the dust settled, Hong-kung was still standing in the exact same spot.
His left hand was still in his pocket.
He looks down at the severed head, then up at the paralyzed horde.
“That was less than two minutes,” Khung-kung noted dryly.
The lead demon’s face contorted from shock into pure, unadulterated fury.
The sheer pressure of its rage caused the stone ceiling to crack, dropping pebbles into the dark.
“You trickster worm! Kill him! Break the deal! Tear him apart!”
“Figures,” Hong-kung sighs, finally pulling his right hand out of his jacket.
He didn’t form a fist.
Instead, he extends his pinky finger, keeping his left hand firmly anchors inside his pocket.
“You guys really have no honor.”
The horde surged forward, a tidal wave of claws, teeth, and raw, demonic malice.
“Come,” Hong-kung mutters.
A gargantuan hound-demon leaped at him, jaws wide enough to swallow him whole.
Hong-kung simply flicked his pinky finger upward.
“Abyssal Tremor: First Fracture!” he announced.
An invisible blade of concentrated gravity erupts from his fingertip.
The charging hound-demon was cleanly cleaved in half mid-air, its two halves crashing heavily onto the stone on either side of him.
Three more demons lunged from his left, their spears aimed at his throat.
Hong-kung swiveled on his heel, his left hand remaining casually tucked away.
He swiped his pinky horizontally through the air.
“Void Cascade!”
A crescent wave of dark, shimmering energy tears through the cavern.
The spears shatters into dust, followed immediately by the demons wielding them.
The attack didn’t stop there; it slammed into the far cavern wall, carving a massive, glowing trench into the ancient stone.
“What kind of power is this?!” Min-sun gasps from behind the rock, her eyes wide with terror and awe.
“He isn’t even trying!”
“It’s demon-induced,” Arashi whispered, his eyes fixed on the strange, pulsing purple aura radiating from Hong-kung’s small finger.
“But the purity of it… it’s higher than the lords themselves. Intriguing. ”
The remaining demons hesitated, their primal instincts screaming at them to run.
But the lead demon pushed through them, its massive fists cloaked in hellfire.
“I will crush you myself!”
“You’re too loud,” Hong-kung said.
He pointed his pinky straight at the giant’s chest.
“Singularity Point.”
A microscopic black bead appeared on the lead demon’s chest.
For a fraction of a second, everything goes completely silent.
Then, an immense gravitational pull imploded inward.
The giant demon screamed as its massive mass was compressed, crushed, and folded into nothingness within the span of a single heartbeat.
The cavern fell dead silent.
The remaining lesser fiends turned and fled into the dark tunnels, wailing in terror.
Khung-kung stands alone among the carnage.
He let out a soft breath, blew on his pinky finger as if extinguishing a match, and slides his right hand back into his pocket.
He began walking calmly past the mangled bodies lying dead across the floor.
He stopped by the luminous patch of flora, bent down, and carefully plucks the glowing stems.
“Thank you very much,” he says to the empty, bloody room.
“I’ll be taking my flower now.”
As he turns to walk back, a wet, ragged cough echoed through the silence.
It looked up at Hong-kung with eyes full of absolute terror.
“What… what are you?” the dying demon wheezes, blood bubbling from its maw.
“Where did you get… that power?”
Hong-kung stopped and looked down at it.
He leans in slightly, dropping his voice to a low, conspiratorial whisper.
“It’s a secret.”
He gives a small wink.
The demon’s eyes went wide.
Before it could utter another syllable, its internal energy destabilized completely.
It exploded into a shower of black ash and sparks.
Hong-kung casually wipes a stray splatter of blood from his pale cheek.
He sighs, shaking his head.
“I knew he couldn’t handle it. Too fragile.”
He turned his attention toward the obsidian rock structure near the entrance.
“Hey. You two can come out now. Are you ready to help, or are you just going to keep sightseeing?”
Min-sun and Arashi slowly stands up from their hiding place.
“Look like you’ve got everything under control. No need for our help.” Arashi says scanning the laid down demons.Min-sun is trembling, her eyes darting from the bloody trenches in the stone back to the boy’s completely unbothered expression.
“How…” Min-sun stutters, her voice failing her.
“How did you know we were there?”
Hong-kung gave them a blank, ignorant look, shrugging his shoulders innocently.
“Know what? I just guessed. Lucky hunch, right?”
“A lucky hunch?” Arashi repeated, his voice laces with heavy skepticism.
He steps forward, putting himself slightly in front of Min-sun.
He tried to force a friendly, casual look onto his face, though his eyes remained sharp and calculating.
“That was quite a performance, Hong-kung. We’re glad you’re on our side. Truly amazing.”
Hong-kung doesn’t return the smile.
He stops walking and narrowed his eyes, leveling a cold, piercing glare directly at Arashi.
The temperature in the room seemed to drop.
Arashi instinctively takes a slow step backward, his look blank,raising his hands in a non-threatening gesture.
Min-sun looked between them, completely amazed by how easily Hong-kung could control the tension in the room just by changing his expression.
One moment he looked like a clueless schoolboy, and the next, he looked like the apex predator of the abyss.
“Let’s just get out of here,” Hong-kung says, his tone instantly shifting back to careless boredom as he turns toward the exit tunnel.
“Right,” Min-sun murmurs, quickly following behind him to keep her distance from the bodies.
“The faster we leave this place, the better.”
They walked in silence through the twisting, narrow exit of the cavern.
The oppressive air of the inner chamber began to lift, replaced by the cooler, damp breeze of the upper levels.
Min-sun let out a long breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.
But just as they reached the threshold of the outer cave, a faint, echoing voice drifted through the rocky tunnels.
It was distant, distorted by the stone, but incredibly familiar.
…Min-sun… help me…
Min-sun froze in her tracks.
Her skin went entirely pale.
“Primrose?”
“Min-sun San, keep moving,” Arashi urges, gently, but firmly reachingin for her hand.
“We don’t know what’s mimicking voices down here.”
“No, that was her! I know her voice!” Min-sun cries, spinning around to look back into the dark, intersecting tunnels behind them.
“Prim!”
Before she could run back, Arashi firmly grabbed her hand, pulling her toward the surface light.
“We have to get out right now. If there are more of them, we’re compromised.”
“Let go of me!” she protests, though her eyes filled with dread as the voice fades into the depths.
“He’s right,” Hong-kung says from the front, not even looking back as he steps into the light of the upper terrace.
“Arashi’s right for once. We’ve met with enough trouble for one day.”