Damien’s goggles let out a sharp, piercing beep — three short pulses that meant only one thing.
Calculation complete.
Every line of data he’d been building, every angle, every fractional weakness in the demon’s regenerating flesh, snapped into place at once.
His body moved before conscious thought caught up.
”Now.”
He closed the distance in a single stride, cleaver already swinging low to high, aimed to catch the creature across the exact seam where its regenerated arm met its shoulder — the one point that hadn’t fully knitted back together yet.
The demon’s eyes went wide.
It felt the calculation land a half-second before the blade did, and its face twisted, teeth grinding audibly against each other in raw frustration.
Then it opened its mouth and screamed a word that didn’t belong to any human language.
”Point Dome!”
The air itself buckled.
A translucent, dome-shaped barrier exploded outward from the demon’s body, swallowing Damien, Akira, and the unconscious Saki all in one violent pulse.
Inside the dome, the demon’s wounds began sealing shut at an accelerated rate — faster than before, the torn arm reforming in seconds instead of minutes.
Its muscles bulged, veins darkening as raw power flooded through it.
Damien’s cleaver, already mid-swing, missed its window entirely.
His eyes widened behind the blackened goggles.
That’s not possible.
The demon didn’t waste the opening.
It surged forward, blade-hands blurring, and unleashed a storm of cuts in every conceivable direction — high, low, diagonal, behind, all at once, like the air itself had turned into a thousand razors.
Damien didn’t try to dodge all of it.
He couldn’t.
Instead he planted his feet and let his body do what years of brutal conditioning had built it for.
The cuts landed — dozens of them, a blur of black steel — but instead of flesh parting, it was his coat that gave way.
Fabric shredded into ribbons, peeling off him in strips, his goggles’ strap nearly severed, his sleeves reduced to tatters.
Beneath it all, his skin remained mostly untouched, just a few shallow red lines where the demon’s speed had barely nicked through his defenses.
The demon skidded back, breathing hard, staring at Damien’s half-naked, torn form with something between disbelief and fury.
Damien exhaled slowly, cigaretteless now, smoke ghosting from his lips out of habit alone.
His mind raced even as his expression stayed flat. Find the original chapter at g.com.
A Point Dome.
A regeneration and buff domain, activated on command.
That’s a named technique.
Layered spiritual architecture.
This thing shouldn’t have that.
Grade A demons don’t get to have domains.
He ground his teeth, calculations spinning behind his blackened lenses.
Unless he’s lucky.
Some godforsaken stroke of luck pulled a technique like that out of nowhere.
No structure to it, no refinement — just raw, borrowed power he doesn’t fully understand how to use.
Damien’s grip on his cleaver tightened.
”Lucky,” he muttered under his breath, “doesn’t mean safe.”
Behind him, Akira held Saki tighter, watching the dome’s walls pulse like a heartbeat, and felt something ancient stir low in his chest.