The forty-eight hours had passed like a slow countdown to a firing squad. The rain in New Delhi was not a gentle mist.
It was a torrential, gray downpour that turned the sky into a leaden ceiling. It washed the heat of the city into the gutters, leaving behind the smell of wet concrete and ozone.
Sakura Watanabe stood in the center of the vast courtyard leading to the Prime Minister's residence.
The red sandstone was slick with water. She was alone. She didn't have her team. She didn't have the DHC tactical units.
She just had the white suit that was already beginning to cling to her frame from the rain.
Ankit Mehta stood twenty paces ahead of her, blocking the entrance to the main building. He had discarded his formal jacket.
He wore a black tactical shirt that showed the corded muscle of his arms. He didn't look like a bodyguard anymore. He looked like a soldier at the end of a long war.
"The time is up, Sakura," Ankit said. His voice was steady, carrying over the rhythmic drumming of the rain. "The Prime Minister has made his choice. He will not nullify the contract. He believes his destiny is written in the stars, and he will not let a corporate ghost from Tokyo erase it."
"Then he has chosen to die," Sakura replied. Her voice was cold. It was the same tone she used to order a pizza or report a casualty. "Get away from the door, Ankit. I have no personal quarrel with you, but I will walk through you if I have to."
Ankit let out a short, dark laugh. He reached his right hand into the air. "You have a death wish, woman. You are in the heart of my country, standing on my ground. You think you can walk through an 8th Deviation?"
He closed his fist. A gout of crimson light erupted from his palm, vaporizing the rain as it touched the air.
The energy hissed and screamed, solidifying into a long, jagged blade that glowed with the intensity of a dying star.
It wasn't just a sword. It was an Astra, a weapon forged from pure demonic energy and historical weight. The heat from the blade turned the rain around Ankit into a halo of white steam.
Sakura didn't move. She didn't reach for a weapon. She simply closed her eyes.
"Void," she whispered. "Forest of Iron."
The courtyard didn't just change. It died.
In a twenty-meter radius around Sakura, the shadows on the ground began to boil. A second later, thousands of rusted iron chains tore through the red sandstone.
They didn't move like snakes. They moved like spears, fired from the earth with a sound like a mountain shattering.
They filled the air in a jagged, chaotic forest of metal, clinking and rattling with a deafening roar.
Ankit wasn't ready for the sheer volume of the attack. He had expected a few chains, a focused strike. He hadn't expected the world to turn into a cage of iron.
Seven chains surged toward him at once, coming from his blind spots. Ankit's eyes widened. He moved in a blur of motion, his red Astra whistling through the air.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
He managed to sever six of the chains in a heartbeat, the molten energy of his blade melting through the rusted links.
But the seventh chain was faster. It found a gap in his defense and punched through his stomach, the heavy iron links tearing through his tactical shirt and exiting out his back.
Ankit didn't scream. He didn't even flinch. He used his free hand to grab the chain, his skin sizzling as he touched the cold iron.
With a violent jerk, he snapped the chain with his raw strength and pulled the remaining segment out of his gut.
Blood poured from the hole in his abdomen, mixing with the rain, but he remained unfazed. His energy signature didn't even flicker.
Meanwhile, Sakura was still standing at the center of the forest. She wasn't unharmed. Because the Forest of Iron was a non-discriminatory void, the chains didn't care about their master.
Three of the heavy iron links had impaled Sakura's own body. One was through her left shoulder, one through her thigh, and one through her side.
She stood there, draped in her own blood and iron, looking like a broken doll. She didn't look like she was in pain. She looked like she was observing a chemical reaction.
With a snap of her fingers, the chains vanished. They dissolved back into the shadows, leaving the courtyard a mangled mess of broken stone and blood.
"I thought it would be much easier," Sakura said. She wiped a streak of blood from her lip. Her white suit was ruined, stained a deep, dark crimson.
Ankit spat a glob of blood onto the ground. His stomach wound was already beginning to close, though the edges were jagged and black. "You can't be more wrong than that, Sakura. You think because you survive the gutter-rats of Tokyo, you know what real power is? You're a child playing with scrap metal."
Ankit attacked.
He didn't run. He simply ceased to be in one spot and appeared in another. He was a blur of black and red, his speed so great that he bypassed the rain entirely.
He appeared in front of Sakura, the Astra raised high for a vertical cleave.
Clack.
Dozens of chains erupted from Sakura's back, weaving together into a dense, metallic shield. The red sword slammed into the iron with the force of a falling meteor.
The impact sent a shockwave through the courtyard, the ground beneath Sakura's feet collapsing into a small crater. The air around them turned into a vacuum of heat and pressure.
Ankit pulled back and swung again, his movements so fast they were nearly invisible. He hit the shield from the left, then the right, then from above. Every strike sounded like a thunderclap.
On the fourth strike, Ankit's blade cut through the center of the shield. He lunged forward, aimed for her throat, but his blade met nothing but empty air.
Sakura had disappeared.
Ankit looked back, his eyes darting across the courtyard. He looked up.
Sakura was hovering fifty feet in the air. She wasn't using wings or a flight technique. She was standing on a single, taut chain that stretched across the sky like a tightrope.
Her energy was pouring out of her, holding her aloft against the gravity of the planet.
Ankit grinned, his teeth stained red. "I am surprised you can use demonic energy for flight too. Most specialists are too focused on their gimmicks to learn the basics of gravity manipulation."
Ankit's own energy flared. A pillar of red light erupted from his feet, and he shot upward like a rocket. He didn't need a chain.
He moved through the air as if it were solid ground, his Astra trailing a wake of fire behind him.
"Void," Sakura said again. Her voice was a whisper in the wind. "Forest of Iron."
The chains didn't come from the ground this time. They came from the sky. They tore through the clouds, thousands of miles of iron falling like rain.
Ankit twisted in mid-air, his body spinning as he dodged the falling spears of metal. He was incredibly agile, his 8th Deviation instincts allowing him to predict the trajectory of every link.
But the sheer volume was too much.
Two chains caught him—one through his shoulder and one through his calf.
The weight of the chains dragged him down for a second, but he sliced through them and kept climbing.
Sakura took the brunt of it again. Four more chains impaled her, pinning her against the sky. She was a silhouette of white and red against the gray clouds, her body riddled with iron.
Blood sprayed from her wounds, falling down into the courtyard below like a second rainstorm.
"You are killing yourself!" Ankit yelled, his voice echoing through the sky. He was only ten feet away from her now. "Every time you use that technique, you shred your own flesh! You're going to bleed out before you even touch me!"
Sakura didn't reply. She didn't have to.
She reached out her hand and grabbed the air. Suddenly, the chains that were floating in the sky began to move. They didn't fall anymore.
They began to whip and coil, their speed surpassing the sound barrier.
The air was filled with a constant, deafening series of sonic booms as the chains lashed out at Ankit.
Ankit had to move. He flew around the sky, a red streak dodging a thousand black whips. The chains destroyed everything they hit.
They tore chunks out of the government buildings nearby, they shattered the stone pillars of the courtyard, and they carved deep furrows into the earth.
Ankit was barely dodging, his Astra moving in a frantic blur to parry the links that came too close.
But as he dodged, Ankit began to smile. He had seen the pattern. He had seen the limit of her control.
"You're fast, Sakura," Ankit said. He was suddenly perfectly calm. His red energy stopped flickering and turned into a smooth, steady glow. "But you're still bound by the mechanics of your chains. You have to move the metal. I just have to move myself."
He stopped in mid-air. He let the chains close in on him from all sides.
"Void," Ankit said. His voice was deep, resonant, like the tolling of a temple bell. "Yudh Kshetra."
The world turned white.
The rain, the sky, and the iron chains didn't disappear, but they became irrelevant. The courtyard was replaced by an infinite, sun-bleached battlefield of red sand and ancient spears.
Ankit became a blur. It wasn't the blur of a fast man. It was the blur of light itself.
He moved at sublight speed.
Sakura's chains were moving at the speed of sound, but to Ankit, they were standing still. He moved through the gaps in the iron forest as if he were walking through a garden.
He didn't even have to swing his sword to clear the path. He simply existed in the spaces where the chains weren't.
Sakura tried to react. She tried to pull the chains back, to form a shell, to do anything. But her nervous system wasn't fast enough.
Her brain couldn't even process the image of him moving.
Before Sakura could even realize the battle had shifted, the sensation of heat hit her chest.
She looked down.
The red Astra was buried deep in her chest. It had entered through her sternum and exited through her spine, the tip of the blade glowing with the heat of a furnace.
Ankit stood in front of her, his hand on the hilt of the blade. He wasn't smiling anymore. He looked at her with a grim, solemn respect.
The chains in the sky began to rust and crumble, turning into red dust that washed away in the rain.
The sword was through Sakura's heart.