Akaza's screams echoed across the deathly silent snowfield before dawn.
It was a roar mingled with agony, horror, and incomprehension.
He rolled through the snow like a madman, trying to extinguish the black fire on his arms with the freezing snow. Yet the snow turned to steam the instant it touched the black flames, while that ominous fire did not so much as flicker. It continued to burn quietly, relentlessly.
What the hell was this thing!
It had no temperature, yet it burned hotter than magma. It had no substance, yet it was sharper than a blade.
It was burning his flesh and blood, but more than that, it was gnawing at his soul.
The rapid regeneration Akaza took such pride in became a joke before Amaterasu. The moment new flesh appeared, the black flames devoured it, turning it into fuel for their burning. He could clearly feel that this fire was erasing his life force in a way that defied all reason.
"Aaaaaah!"
With his uninjured left hand, he struck his burning right arm viciously, trying to beat the fire out with brute force.
Instead, as though alive, the black flames split off a wisp that instantly coiled around his left hand.
Twice the agony, welling from the depths of his soul, made this battle-hardened Upper Rank Three completely lose his composure as a martial artist. His mind was being burned to ash, bit by bit, by these flames that would never go out.
And just as he sank into an abyss of endless pain, a faint light quietly appeared on the eastern horizon.
It was the pale light of dawn.
Daybreak.
The light of the sun, deadlier than any Blood Demon Art or any Breathing Style.
His instinctive fear of sunlight was like a bucket of ice water,