Ra'Khan did not struggle against the invisible force binding him.
Instead, the burnt child's body remained frozen in place while the glowing yellow eyes changed slowly toward Henry, calm and disturbingly amused.
The stillness itself felt unnatural. As if the creature had already planned around this moment long before Henry had even spoken the spell.
"There is no problem," Ra'Khan said in that deep, layered voice,
"Movement is unnecessary… when the battlefield itself answers to me."
Henry narrowed his eyes but did not lower his blade.
Then Ra'Khan spoke again,
"And besides… one of your companions is already trapped."
Henry's gaze turned into seriousness slightly, though his face did not show it.
"In this forest, I do not exist in a single location. I am distributed… layered… present in multiple places at once. While you fight me here… another part of me harvests flesh elsewhere."
Henry's grip around the katana hardened.
"Free them." he said flatly.
Ra'Khan's glowing eyes brightened faintly.
"No."
Without warning, the ground around Henry trembled.
At first, it looked harmless. Just scattered gray leaves shifting slightly across the soil. But then they began to move faster, sliding across the surface like living insects.
Dozens turned into hundreds, crawling over each other with unnatural coordination.
Henry swung his blade in a wide arc.
Thin wind slashes burst forward. It cut through clusters of leaves and scattering them briefly.
But the moment they fell, they began to move again.
"Wind cannot destroy what obeys command."
The leaves surged upward.
They climbed Henry's boots first, crawling along his ankles like cold fingers. Then higher. Wrapping around his legs, tightening around his waist. Each leaf pressed against his skin with unnatural strength, sticking as if coated in invisible resin.
Henry gritted his teeth. He understood,
This... It is trying to do parasitism in my body and consciousness!
If they covered his face, they would burrow inward. He had seconds left.
The binding circle of King's Counterseal still held Ra'Khan's physical body in place, but the environment itself remained under the entity's influence. That meant attacking Ra'Khan directly wouldn't solve this.
The leaves weren't individual threats. They were a network. Henry changed his stance.
His carefully gripped his Astra, body coiled with controlled tension.
"If wind doesn't destroy, in his logic...then I will create my own."
Energy surged through the blade.
The air around Henry trembled as currents began gathered toward the katana's edge. The sound deepened. A rising hum that felt less like wind and more like a force building before a storm.
Ra'Khan's eyes narrowed slightly. Henry raised the blade slowly.
As his final resort, he chanted,
"Thousand Sword Style."
The swing did not look fast at first.
But the result was overwhelming.
From a single motion of swing, thousands of compressed wind slashes erupted outward at once, spreading in all directions like a violent storm tearing through reality itself.
The trees and trunks around the area began to dance and fall violently by the sheer force.
The gray leaves lost cohesion instantly.
They were ripped away from Henry's body in a violent outward burst, torn free before they could fully seal around his face. Thousands of them scattered across the battlefield, hurled into the mist like fragments caught in a hurricane.
The force alone cleared the space around him.
Then the slashes reached Ra'Khan.
Even without movement, the entity could not fully avoid the storm of attacks. The wind blades carved across his burnt flesh again and again, slicing deep into already bruised vessel. Blackened layers tore apart, exposing deeper wounds beneath.
Cracks spread across his body. Smoke burst outward in jagged streams.
For the first time, Ra'Khan's posture faltered visibly.
Henry stood at the center of the cleared ground, chest rising heavily, katana lowered slightly as the last fragments of leaves drifted away from him like dying ash.
A crooked smirk tugged at the corner of his lips.
"You talk big for someone stitched together from a burnt corpse." Henry said quietly.
"Centuries of years old, calling yourself a god… yet you are still stuck babysitting a pile of ash and bones."
Ra'Khan's glowing yellow eyes narrowed.
"There is no use in bravado, child." he replied slowly.
"You do not understand the cage you stand within. This place… this domain… it is mine. Within it, mine physical body may recover, mine wounds may close, mine limbs may be reattached if severed… but my true self cannot escape unfortunately… I am not free to rebuild my form as I wish. The Crucifix of Undying binds my consciousness to this child's corpse. Even if this body rots… burns… shatters… my awareness remains chained here."
Henry lowered his blade slightly, studying the creature more closely now.
"So you call yourself a god… ruler of this place… master of life and death."
He took one more step forward, gaze locked directly into those glowing eyes.
And asked,
"If you are a God… why do you exist?"
The mist did not move, yet the forest felt as if it had inhaled and forgotten how to breathe.
Ash-gray leaves hung in the air without falling, frozen between motion and stillness, as Henry's question settled into the silence like a blade pressed gently against exposed flesh.
"If you are a God… why do you exist?""If you are a God… why do you exist?""If you are a God… why do you exist?""If you are a God… why do you exist?"
For the first time since awakening, Ra'Khan did not answer.
Inside the domain, his awareness surged outward automatically, sweeping through the forest like an invisible tide. He sensed every branch bending under its own weight, every fleck of ash drifting between currents of heat, every tremor of magical residue still clinging to the air.
He knew, he knew the distance between Henry's heartbeat and the nearest tree root. He knew the direction of the wind before it formed.
He knew the movement of life, the structure of matter, the pathways of energy flowing beneath the soil like veins beneath skin. Inside the domain. His awareness surged outward automatically.
He sensed every branch bending under its own weight, every fleck of ash drifting between currents of heat, every tremor of magical residue still clinging to the air.
So he reached further into Henry. Into the mind that had just spoken those words.
Since, Henry was in his domain, Ra'Khan is able to sneak into minds if victims.
And when he peeked in... He saw...
Nothing arranged in the way thoughts should exist.
No chain of reasoning constructing the question before speech.
Ra'Khan went insane, what!? Why I can't read his mind!? He is saying and doing something like these not even thinking anything!?
Ra'Khan's awareness recoiled like a hand touching fire without warning.
How does he know this? He shouldn't.
The thought erupted inside him.
Again he forced his presence into Henry's mind, pressing deeper this time, searching for hidden layers, suppressed reasoning, unconscious motives—anything resembling a structure he could read.
Still... Henry's mind had no thoughts to be read...
Henry stood there calmly, breathing, alive, present… yet mentally ungraspable in the way a shadow cannot be held. The words he spoke came not from thought but from something more immediate.
It created a fracture inside Ra'Khan's certainty, a dissonance so subtle yet so violent that his awareness stuttered across the forest like a cracked mirror.
For the first time in centuries, he found doubt... in his own identity... If I see everything… why did I not see that question before it was spoken?
The forest itself seemed to lean inward, listening.
And then something even stranger happened. Something that did not feel like it belonged to the world at all.
For a brief, suffocating instant, it felt as though the silence extended beyond the forest… beyond the battlefield… beyond the very scene itself.
He felt like unseen observers, distant and unreachable, were witnessing this same fracture in Ra'Khan's certainty at the exact moment he felt it.
Ra'Khan's glowing eyes trembled faintly for the first time and somewhere deep inside his consciousness, a thought formed that terrified him more than Henry's blade ever could.
If I am truly omniscient here… why did that question feel like it came from outside my world?