The War in Solarii (ソラーリの戦争 / Sorāri no Sensō)

The lower ring of Solarii appeared to have been dropped into a furnace.

Hajime stood at the head of the Celestine formation, sweat already rolling down his neck from the heat. Fire climbed the sides of the glass-front towers, turning them into pillars of orange and gold. Smoke choked the sky bridges. Somewhere ahead, a child screamed until the sound broke.

Behind him, hundreds of soldiers waited with shields raised and Seiki simmering under their skin. Armor that had once gleamed with polished silver now looked dull and gray in the smoke.

Hayate had done his part. The army was assembled.

Now it was on Hajime and Izumi to move them.

Izumi stepped up beside him. Her vines coiled along her arms in tight spirals, thorns tucked in for now. Red petals pulsed faintly with each breath she took.

She looked over the line of soldiers, then at the hell in front of them.

“Rei’s orders were simple,” she said quietly. “Hold the line. Protect the civilians. Push them back toward the breach.”

Hajime flexed his hands, gold-silver Seiki flickering along his knuckles. “What are we waiting for? Let's go!”

He nodded to the Celestine captain at his right.

The captain swallowed, then raised his sword. “You heard him. Advance!”

The Celestine line moved forward.

The first wave of the enemy army arrived without warning, only to be revealed by the movement within the smoke.

Corrupted soldiers charged out from behind a collapsed gatehouse. Their armor was twisted into jagged shapes, once-ornate breastplates dug into the flesh beneath. Their skin was stretched tight, black Seiki pulsing under veins like worms beneath glass.

“Shields!” Hajime barked.

The front line locked together. Seiki flared in a solid wall. The corrupted slammed into it hard enough to crack tiles under their feet.

Hajime jumped the last few steps to meet them. A corrupted knight swung a rusted blade at his head. Hajime ducked under it, stepped in, and drove a fist into the man’s gut. There was a crunch, a wet pop, then the knight folded in half and crumpled.

Another came from his left. Hajime took the hit on his shoulder, pain snapping through the joint. He grabbed the attacker’s wrist, pulled him in, and introduced his face to his forehead. Bone shattered. Blood sprayed.

Behind him, the Celestine line stabbed outward in coordinated thrusts. Spears pierced armor and blackened flesh. Some corrupted soldiers kept charging even with weapons sticking from their bodies, Seiki forcing them forward a few more steps before they finally collapsed.

Izumi slipped along the flank, where the formation bent around a ruined fountain.

A group of civilians was pinned under a collapsed balcony ahead. Two corrupted beasts, wolf-bodied nightmares with too many eyes, stalked toward them.

Izumi slammed her hand into the ground.

Forbidden Fruit Art – Thorn Garden

Vines tore through the cracked pavement, erupting in a spiraling wall between the beasts and the trapped family. Thorns thickened along the outer surface, angling toward the wolves.

The first beast leapt and hit the barrier. Thorns pierced its chest and skull. It writhed, shrieked, then went limp. The second tried to circle, snarling. Izumi snapped a vine out like a whip. It wrapped around the creature’s throat and yanked, crushing its windpipe with a single jerk.

“Get behind the soldiers!” she shouted at the family.

A woman clutched her child and ran, stumbling as she tried to keep her footing on the shaking ground.

Izumi’s vines spread lower around her boots, anchoring her in place as the street shuddered again.

A corrupted giant stepped around the corner ahead like a moving cliff.

It was easily thirty feet tall. Its flesh hung in thick, sagging coils. Both arms had been fused with metal beams and chunks of stone, creating irregular clubs of twisted steel. Chains embedded in its shoulders rattled with each step. Its eyes glowed with a deep, sick red.

Hajime glared up at it. “You take the legs.”

“Knock that giant on his ass,” Izumi replied.

The giant raised one arm and brought it down like a falling tower.

Hajime planted his feet, clenched his right fist, and forced his Seiki inward. It fought him, heavy and dragging, as if the air was thick iron pulling his arm back.

He drove his fist into the ground in front of him.

Genesis Pulse erupted.

The stone exploded outward in a ring. The shockwave crashed into the giant’s arm as it struck. The force did not stop the blow, but it twisted it just enough that the club missed the Celestine line and smashed into the empty street instead, pulverizing the tiles.

The impact sent Hajime skidding backward. His own knees buckled. Pain flared through his hand and wrist.

A familiar presence stirred at the edge of his mind, deep and old.

You can hit harder than that, Adam’s voice rumbled. Or is this all the first man amounts to in this age?

“Working on it,” Hajime muttered under his breath, already running forward again.

Izumi sprinted toward the giant’s leading leg. Vines lashed out and anchored into the stone, pulling her into a sharp leap. She rose to the giant's knee level in an instant.

Forbidden Fruit Art – Verdant Tempest

A spiral of cutting foliage spun around her in a tight column. The leaves shredded tendons and muscles as she passed. By the time she hit the ground and rolled, the giant’s leg had become a mangled mess of meat and broken bone.

It tried to take another step and collapsed onto one knee, shaking the entire street when it fell.

The Celestine line paused, some soldiers trembling, others regaining their footing just in time to catch the next wave of corrupted soldiers that poured around the giant’s legs.

Hajime saw a young knight in the front row freeze as a screaming, molten-eyed brute charged him.

“Move!” Hajime roared.

He slammed into the brute from the side, tackling it. They hit the ground in a tangle of limbs. The brute slashed at his face with clawed hands. Hajime caught one wrist, then the other, and squeezed until he felt bones snap.

He rammed his forehead into the creature’s nose twice, three times, until the face caved in.

He shoved the corpse aside and rolled to his feet, chest heaving.

The Celestine knight he had saved stared at him wide-eyed. “I… I am sorry. I hesitated.”

“Get back in formation,” Hajime said. “Next time, stab first and apologize later.”

He turned away before the man could respond.

Another shriek of stone tore through the air. The giant, still half-kneeling, swung its second arm down in a sweeping horizontal arc toward the Celestine formation.

Izumi reacted first.

Forbidden Fruit Art – Bloom Sanctuary

Petals burst from her arms and spun together into a translucent dome over the nearest squad. The giant’s arm slammed into the barrier. The sound was like a tree splitting in a storm. The impact drove Izumi to one knee. Blood trickled from her nose.

The barrier cracked but held.

The arm slid off, smashing into the ground just beyond.

Inside Izumi’s skull, Eve’s Will whispered like wind through branches.

You're not a wall, Izumi. There's a time to protect, and a time to be on the offensive.

Izumi let the sanctuary dissolve, redirecting the remaining vines to wrap around the giant’s arm instead. They coiled tight and pulled, unbalancing the creature further.

Hajime charged under the falling limb, teeth bared.

He focused everything he had into his right hand again. Seiki fought him harder this time, weighing down his bones. His vision blurred, but he kept running.

He jumped as high as he could, planting one foot on the giant’s arm like a springboard and launching himself toward its face.

Genesis Pulse exploded from his fist the moment it slammed into the creature’s jaw.

Bone and corrupted flesh detonated in a shower of black and red. The giant’s head snapped backward. Its body toppled slowly and heavily, smashing into an already burning building and taking half of it down.

Hajime hit the ground hard, rolled twice, and lay on his back for a second, blinking against the smoke.

Adam was quiet for once.

Izumi’s vines pulled two injured soldiers out of the giant’s fall zone a moment before it hit. She released them and looked up, chest rising and falling rapidly, her eyes stinging from the heat and ash.

“All units!” the Celestine captain shouted. “Forward! Do not let them regroup!”

The line pushed past the giant’s corpse and deeper into the mid-ring.

The further they advanced, the worse it became.

Streets had collapsed into sinkholes, and mangled bodies lay rampant throughout. Some buildings stood unburned but hollow, their windows smashed, doors hanging open. Hajime saw eyes watch from the dark as they passed, people too scared to move.

“Get the survivors out,” he ordered.

A small squad broke off to gather them. Some civilians walked. Some had to be carried. Others refused to leave until someone dragged them.

Izumi’s vines bridged gaps where bridges had fallen, making narrow, living walkways so civilians could cross to safer streets. Each new bridge drained a little more from her reserves. Her hands trembled when she pulled them back.

They turned a corner and almost ran straight into a nightmare.

A corrupted beast larger than the previous giant blocked the avenue ahead. It had once been a siege golem, one of the city’s own defense constructs, now twisted by demonic Will. Its stone plates had melted and reformed into jagged, uneven armor. Red veins crawled through the cracks. Its head was a mass of carved faces, all screaming.

It dragged broken chains behind it like tails.

When it saw the approaching soldiers, its mouths opened in unison.

The roar rattled in Hajime’s bones.

“Pull back!” the captain shouted instinctively.

Hajime did not move.

Neither did Izumi.

He glanced at her. “Hey, gorgeous, what's the plan?”

“I will distract it,” she said. “You beat the shit out of it.”

The golem’s arm crashed down toward the main formation.

Izumi’s voice was hoarse now. “Forbidden Fruit Art – Nature-Drowned Avatar.”

Roots shot out from beneath her feet like spears, wrapping around her body, lifting her off the ground. Bark, thorns, and vines twisted into a giant wooden form that towered almost to the golem’s chest.

The Avatar charged, ramming its shoulder into the monstrosity’s torso.

The golem slid backward, carving trenches in the street.

It swung at Izumi. She blocked with the Avatar’s arm. Stone and wood collided with a crack like thunder. Splinters flew. The Avatar’s forearm shattered.

Izumi grunted in pain inside the core as the feedback ran through her nerves.

You can't outmuscle it, Eve murmured. But you can outsmart it.

Izumi slammed the Avatar’s other arm down, forcing roots into the cracks in the golem’s stone plates. Vines wormed their way inside, branching out, pushing the plates away from each other.

Hajime used the opening.

He sprinted around the Avatar’s legs and charged straight at the golem’s exposed core. Seiki burned along his legs, shoving him faster.

He ducked under a wild swing, rolled between the golem’s feet, and punched upward.

Genesis Pulse detonated inside the thing’s chest cavity.

The explosion blew out its back in a spray of stone and black sludge. The golem staggered, took two more trembling steps, then collapsed forward like a felled tree.

The Avatar caught its fall enough to keep it from crushing the line behind them, then crumpled as Izumi’s strength finally dipped.

She dropped out of the dissolving wood, hit the pavement on one knee, and stayed there for a breath with her head bowed.

Hajime jogged over, panting hard, hands aching.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I will be,” she said, pushing herself up. Her legs shook, but she held. Vines wrapped tighter around her ankles and calves, bracing her.

The Celestine captain approached, face smeared with ash. “The breach is two streets ahead. Reports say they are still pouring in through the broken gate.”

Hajime wiped blood from his eyebrow. “Good, the warm-up is finally over.”

He looked at the soldiers behind them. Armor cracked, Seiki faltering. Some had bandages already where limbs used to be. Some moved with limps and stubborn eyes.

“Anyone who can't stand, stay here and defend civilians,” Hajime said. “Everyone else, let's keep moving.”

He turned and found Izumi already facing the next rising column of smoke.

She did not look at him as she spoke. “We can't let them reach the inner city!”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

They moved again.

The next street was narrower, boxed in by tall buildings close enough together that the fire had leapt from one to the other and never let go. The heat here felt alive. It pressed against their faces and crawled into armor seams.

Corrupted soldiers fought in clusters, hacking at Celestine knights who were trying to evacuate a cluster of civilians trapped at a dead end.

Hajime did not bother with orders.

He went straight at the nearest corrupted, tackling him into the wall, and drove three quick punches into his face until the helmet caved. Another came from the side. Hajime caught his wrist, twisted, and broke his elbow backward.

A third tried to stab him in the back.

Seiki flared behind him as a Celestine knight intercepted, his shield catching the blow.

“Hajime,” the knight shouted. “We thought the line had already fallen.”

“Not yet,” Hajime said. “Get these people out. Now.”

Izumi’s vines cut down two corrupted, trying to flank them. She moved like her bones hurt, but her control was still sharp. She used smaller techniques now, quick lashes and shallow roots, conserving enough power to keep going.

They fought like that for what felt like hours.

Street after street. Collapse after collapse. Each block they retook cost them something. Men and women fell. Some screamed. Others went down without a sound. There was no time to stop and count.

By the time they reached a plaza only one street away from the main breach, Hajime’s fists were split and bleeding. His Seiki guttered with each use of Genesis Pulse, like a fire starting to burn into wet wood.

Izumi’s hair clung to her face in sweaty strands. Petals along her vines had browned at the edges. Every deep technique had left a mark under her eyes.

The plaza ahead opened wide, then dropped sharply where the street had collapsed into a crater. In the distance, through the smoke, they could see the shattered remains of the main gate of Solarii.

Corrupted giants, soldiers, and beasts moved beyond it like silhouettes. More demon spawn flooded through the ragged hole in the city’s defenses.

The Celestine captain swore under his breath. “There are too many. We can't do this alone.”

“Who said we're alone?” Hajime asked.

He did not know if he believed it or if he was lying to keep everyone moving.

The ground shook beneath their feet. A fresh wave of corrupted Seiki rolled across the city like a hot wind.

Izumi turned her head toward the distant gate, eyes narrowed.

“Do you feel that?” she asked.

“Hard to miss,” Hajime said.

Somewhere ahead, beyond the crater, something massive collided with something just as strong. The air quivered with the shock.

Soldiers shifted nervously.

Hajime took a breath and stepped to the front of the formation again.

“Listen up!” he shouted. His voice came out rough, but it carried. “I don't care what is coming through that gate. I don't care what it looks like or how loud it screams. We are the line between them and everyone hiding behind these walls. We push until our legs break or they stop moving. Those are the only two options.”

He turned his head just enough to see Izumi out of the corner of his eye.

She nodded once, a tight, weary smile. “I'm with you,” she said. “And if you fall, I will drag you by the collar until we are done.”

A few tired laughs rippled through the line. Not many. But enough.

Hajime sucked in the hot, ash-thick air and pointed forward, toward the broken heart of Solarii.

“Advance!”

They marched toward the crater, toward the breach, and toward whatever had just hit the city hard enough to make even the fires hesitate.

Heat rolled at them like a living thing.

By the time they reached the edge of the collapsed plaza, the stone had warped under so many impacts that it looked like the city had been kneaded by a giant hand. Cracks webbed out from the center of the crater. Buildings around the rim leaned inward, foundations exposed and crumbling.

The plaza itself had sunk in on one side. What used to be a clean, open square was now a blackened bowl filled with bodies, broken wagons, fallen banners, and scattered weapons. Celestine white and Chainbound black lay mixed.

Beyond that, through a shroud of smoke and flickering embers, the main gate of Solarii lay open.

Or what was left of it.

The crystal inlet and steel supports that had once formed the proud outer gate now hung in twisted chunks. Part of the wall had collapsed entirely, leaving a jagged wound where molten earth still glowed. Corrupted giants moved in the gap, like the teeth of something chewing through the city.

Hajime exhaled, the air burning his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “That looks about right.”

Izumi stepped up beside him, gaze sweeping the battlefield. “If they reinforce that breach, this becomes a slaughter.”

The Celestine captain looked from the crater to the shattered gate. “We cannot hold open ground like that. Not with this many wounded. Not without more support.”

“Fuck it,” Hajime said. “We punch a corridor. We grab whoever we can. We keep the breach from widening, and we get everyone still alive away from that gate.”

Izumi’s vines stirred along her arms again, thorns regrowing where they had snapped or burned away. She pulled in a sharp breath, steadying her shaking hands.

“If we stay down there too long, we'll die,” she stated.

“Then we keep moving around,” Hajime answered. “Stick and move.”

The army stood with their mouths wide open. "That's your plan!"

"Hehe, yep," he chuckled.

Hajime jumped and slid down the broken slope and dropped into the crater.

The smell hit him first. Burned hair and blood. A metallic, rotting flavor that stuck to the back of his tongue.

Bodies were piled in the corners of the wreckage. He stepped over a fallen Celestine knight and tried not to look at the hole where the man’s chest had been.

“Anyone still alive!” Hajime shouted.

A weak voice came from under a shattered wagon. “Here... I'm over here!”

Izumi’s vines snapped forward, lifting the wagon just enough for two soldiers to drag the trapped man free.

“Form search teams,” the captain barked. “Anyone you find who can still fight, rearm them. Everyone else, stabilize and get them up to the upper district!”

The army scattered across the crater, reorganizing in the middle of a graveyard.

Hajime kept moving toward the center, toward the line where surviving Celestine troops still held a shaky formation against the advancing tide from the gate.

The nearer they got, the worse the corruption presence felt. It pressed against his skin like a bad fever, thickening the air until each breath came with resistance. His Seiki answered to it, not in submission, but with a low rumble, as if something older inside him was waking up in response.

Not a fan of this feeling, Adam’s voice murmured.

“Tell me about it,” Hajime said under his breath.

A corrupted knight barreled out of the smoke with a rusted halberd raised high. Hajime sidestepped, caught the knight’s arm mid swing, and broke the man’s elbow with a twist. He yanked the halberd free and swung it into another attacker’s neck, severing his spine.

He threw the weapon away and clenched his fists.

It was always easier to trust his own hands.

Izumi advanced more slowly now, saving her energy for when it mattered. She used smaller versions of Thorn Garden to intercept charging beasts, quick bursts of Verdant Tempest to shred clusters that got too close to civilian pockets. Her focus had narrowed to a sharp, almost painful point.

A boy no older than twelve clung to the body of his father near a broken arch, sobbing and refusing to move.

Izumi flicked her wrist, and a vine wrapped gently around the boy’s waist, lifting him just enough that a Celestine soldier could pull him away.

“Let me go!” the boy screamed, kicking. “He's not dead! He's not—”

Izumi’s vine tightened just enough to keep him from clawing at the corpse. She met the soldier’s eyes.

“Get him out of here,” she said. Her voice did not shake.

The soldier nodded and carried the boy up the slope, his cries fading into the noise of battle.

They reached the front edge of what remained of the Celestine defensive line.

Only two shield walls were still intact, forming a shallow V that pointed toward the ruined gate. Demons and corrupted soldiers pressed against it, throwing themselves at the shields with suicidal intensity. The line bent with every impact, shields creaking, boots sliding.

A lieutenant stood behind the formation, shouting hoarse commands. His armor was split open at the side, hastily bandaged. His Seiki flickered like a candle in a storm.

“Fall back ten paces!” he yelled. “Reset the formation! Do not let them surround—”

One shield finally broke.

The corrupted surged through the gap.

Hajime closed the distance.

He jumped into the breach and hit the first intruder with a short hook to the jaw. Teeth flew. He planted his foot and drove his elbow into another’s throat. A horned brute tried to bring a blade down on his head. Hajime stepped into it and used his shoulder to jam the man’s arm upward, then punched him so hard in the ribs that the bones crushed his own vital organs.

“Close that line!” Hajime shouted.

The soldiers hesitated for a heartbeat when they saw him.

Then something like shame or refusal lit in their eyes. They braced, pulled their shields back into place, and locked the formation again around him.

Izumi took the flank, her vines extending between gaps in the shields, striking at legs and throats whenever she saw an opening.

Some soldiers sagged with relief. Others straightened, reinvigorated.

Hajime closed his eyes for half a second and sent a short, childish thought into the back of his skull.

About damn time.

He opened them again and, over the roar of distant clashes, heard a familiar voice shout orders in the upper district, somewhere above and behind them.

Rei.

He didn't have time to look for him. The battlefield between their position and the breach had become a storm of clashing Wills.

Brilliant gold Seiki slammed into dark green corruption as Hayate met the first towering figure in the smoke. Blasts of pressure shook entire segments of the wall. A spike of void blackness cut through the air as another enemy Will answered Kazuki’s healing glow.

Hajime could not see them clearly from here, only flashes of power. But the pattern was obvious enough.

The real monsters had found each other.

“Hold your formation!” the Celestine captain yelled, snapping the troops back to attention. “Do not let anything slip past you. The lords will handle what is ahead.”

The lords.

Hajime did not know all their names yet. He only knew the weight of their presence. It made the battlefield feel smaller and larger at the same time.

Izumi’s shoulders dropped a fraction, just enough to show how close to empty she was. Her vines tightened around her wrists, hiding the tremor in her fingers.

Eve whispered again, barely audible under the din.

You have done enough for this battle. Take a moment to heal.

Izumi exhaled slowly and nodded once to no one, then refocused on the immediate front, where smaller demons were still testing the line.

They would not break it here, not while she was still upright.

Hajime stepped into the gap beside her.

“Keep the enemies off the lords,” he said. “That's our job now.”

“Thank God,” she replied, “that sounds simple.”

They fought there, at the edge of the crater, while gods in human bodies tore the world open nearer the gate.

It was impossible to see all of it at once. A wave of sun-bright light rolled across the breach and incinerated a cluster of giants. A beam of void split a falling tower in half, both pieces hanging for a moment before crashing down into the inner district. Serpentine shadows writhed through the smoke, hissing.

The sound alone was enough to make some of the younger soldiers flinch.

But the line held.

Somewhere in the midst of that chaos, Rei moved alone.

He cut a path not toward the breach itself but along the side of the battlefield, slipping between collapsed structures and empty alleys, ignoring lesser demons in favor of something he had felt from the moment the breach opened.

Lilith’s Will was here.

He followed it like a scent.

The further he moved from the organized lines and into the ruined mid-ring, the thinner the Celestine presence became. Dead soldiers lay where they had fallen, some with weapons still clenched in their fists. A cart of supplies burned silently, the wheels melted into puddles of metal.

He stepped over a chain-marked corpse and kept going.

Uriel’s presence burned steadily in his chest, a coiled heat waiting to be released.

She's ahead, the angel said, voice sharp. Don't forget what she is.

Rei’s jaw tightened.

He turned into a wide avenue that cut directly toward a secondary plaza, one of the places where the early resistance in his younger years had been strongest.

It was mostly ruins now.

Two glass spires on either side had shattered from the top down, their upper halves resting in angled piles across the road. Fire had carved the bark-like decorations from the buildings until they looked skeletal. A fountain at the center of the plaza still sputtered water that turned to steam as soon as it hit the air.

And there, at the far end of the plaza, standing on the rim of the fountain as if it were a stage built for her, was Akane Yatogi.

She stood barefoot on scorched stone, one hip cocked, hair falling in wild waves down her back. Chains looped from her neck to her waist, their links glowing faintly with red-black Seiki. The scraps of cloth she wore could be called an outfit only by generous people.

Demon spawn prowled around the plaza below her like guard dogs, but none dared to step too close. They shifted restlessly as Rei approached, instinct pulling them back from the heat of his Seiki.

Akane watched him come with bright, greedy eyes.

“Well,” she said, voice light and amused, cutting through the low roar of distant battle. “If it isn't my favorite handsome man.”

Rei stopped far enough away that he could still see the whole plaza, but close enough that he could see the detail in her smile.

“Akane,” he said.

Her Seiki brushed across his skin, hot and sly, like fingers under a collar.

“I'm hurt,” she said. “No, it's been a while?’ No ‘why are you burning my city?’ No, ‘I'm sorry about attacking Zebulum. ’ You are getting colder, commander.”

His grip on his sword tightened.

Behind his ribs, Uriel flared hotter.

Cut her down, the Will said, voice like a drawn blade. End her now.

Rei ignored him.

Akane hopped lightly off the fountain rim and landed without a sound.

She walked toward him through the steam and ash, chains at her waist chiming softly.

Red and black Seiki trailed behind her like curtains.

“Come on, big man,” she said, smiling in that way women do to arouse. “You came all this way. Play with me a little.”

Rei raised his sword, the flames along the edge responding to his anger.

Around them, the city of Solarii burned and screamed.