"So we'll do the R4K? Like in the old days?" asked one of the captains.
In the distance, Afro watched the preparations and spoke to his group:
"See that smoker's glowing eye? It allows him to see frequencies."
"That means he's going to activate a Resonance, right?" added Kael.
"Exactly," confirmed Afro.
Tara looked at Captain Draezen intently.
"So that's how he caught you in the square."
Afro opened his hands and began to walk calmly toward the captains.
"Captain, you know that doesn't work on me anymore, right?"
Ganken, confused, asked Draezen, "What do you mean, it doesn't work on him?"
The captain explained the mechanics: "His ability to detach souls from the body allows him to escape Resonances. They're not clones; it's him materialized in multiple places at once. He can choose which soul to incarnate in at the last second. In addition, he can overload a soul with energy cores and attack. Last time, he used ten cores at once."
Afro stopped a few meters away, assuming a fighting stance. Sparks of pure energy jumped from his body to the ground, and his eyes glowed bright red.
"Are you scared already? I'm alone this time," he taunted.
"Ten cores?!" exclaimed Ganken. "That's absurd. It's the equivalent of a human wearing ten Oni masks simultaneously."
"We're talking about a Sun Flower, I'm not surprised," said Kimyo, keeping his cool. "Yue, you'll be first, Yue. Your Resonance is infinite. If he leaves a soul outside the domain, when trying to enter or leave the Resonance, that soul will have to travel an infinite path out. It will be lost."
Yue added, "But there is a flaw. If he has already left a soul far away from here and is about to die within the domain, he can simply incarnate into that external soul to escape."
Draezen interrupted, focusing on the goal: "Remember: our main goal is to remove this calamity from our village. I have already written to the Empire; let them deal with this later. Our village comes first. Yue, prepare your induction."
As he took his position, Ganken thought, "Captain Draezen is really amazing... he's the only one who doesn't even need induction to activate his own Resonance."
"Resonance!" said Draezen.
Immediately, Kimyo and Ganken fired at Afro. The demon laughed beneath his mask, in a state of pure euphoria. Ganken advanced at absurd speed, but Afro tilted his body with millimeter precision, letting the giant pass. Immediately afterwards, he performed a sequence of backward somersaults, avoiding Kimyo's blades that fell from the sky like guillotines.
As he regained his balance, Afro realized that the world had changed. He was inside Draezen's Resonance: an absolute void of black smoke where visibility was zero. He couldn't see his partners or his enemies, only the dense gray that suffocated his senses.
In the distance, a female voice began a rhythmic recitation. It was Yue:
"Petal floating in the void of time,
Where the end is the beginning and the step is torment.
Path without margin, horizon that deceives,
Traps instinct in the net that profanes the mind.
What you see is everything, what you feel is nothing,
In the Infinite Garden, the soul is doomed!"
"I have to be careful," thought Afro, feeling the pressure. "Here I can't regenerate like I can outside. But fuck it... now I'm a Superior Lord! Hahaha!"
Through the smoke, Afro sensed a sword attack. Using his bodily synesthesia, the muscle memory of a martial artist who had trained to exhaustion, he flowed with the attacker's movement. He pinned his opponent's arm between his torso and armpit and, with his other hand open, prepared a devastating slap to the enemy's face.
However, Yue's recitation ended abruptly.
"Resonance: Infinite Garden!" she shouted.
Draezen's smoke dimension collapsed and was instantly replaced by Yue's. Afro's palm struck empty air.
In the blink of an eye, the scene transformed into a beautiful and serene prairie. The garden stretched as far as Afro's eyes could see, a field of flowers that seemed to have no end. Tara and Kael had disappeared. In front of Afro, isolated in that immensity, stood only Captain Draezen, standing still, watching him in absolute silence.
"You understand the strategy, you son of a bitch," said Draezen, advancing on Afro with cutting coldness. "Breath Cut!" He moved as if the air offered no resistance to his advance.
Meanwhile, in another layer of reality, Tara and Kael found themselves isolated from the other three captains: Ganken, Kimyo, and Yue. The setting was the same garden, but the distance between them and Afro was now a mathematical impossibility.
"I understand everything," Tara murmured, clutching the grimoire as her eyes turned black. "They're underestimating us. They want to eliminate the 'weak' first so they can focus on the master without interference. They were smart, but kind of dumb."
Kael straightened his back, and the sound of his scales rubbing against each other sounded like metal against metal.
"Indeed. In this infinite domain, their master and Captain may be at a point that is physically unreachable for us, even though they appear to be close."
Kael's scales glowed with a bluish light. "But they forget one detail... I am also a Lord. And we still have Takamura somewhere in this chaos."
Kael slammed his sword into the ground with violence, causing the grass in the garden to wither around the blade.
"This Resonance disgusts me."
Tara didn't wait for further words. She lunged forward, releasing the restraint on her power.
"Let the black flames make hell!"
BOOM!
An explosion of thick black fire engulfed the prairie, turning the perfect garden into a sprawling field of ashes. The secondary battle had begun.