Jason stood amid the residual heat and ash of the previous battle, the body of the fire-skinned demoness still cooling on the cracked volcanic stone. He had made a scene—loud, violent, and decisive—but something else tugged at the edge of his awareness. A faint, distant calling reached him from his own dimension, from the realm he had left behind. The sensation was subtle yet unmistakable. The Marrow was no longer solely his.
Fragments of it now resided elsewhere.
Both of the newborns carried a piece. No—all three of his children did. The older infant who had already displayed impossible protective magic, and the twin boy and girl who had just entered the world, each held a sliver of the same ancient authority. The realization settled over him because Jason could feel it despite not understanding how or why.
He pushed the thought aside for the moment. There would be time to examine what that meant later. Right now the immediate threat demanded his full attention.
Before he could fully refocus, one of the twelve stronger signatures he had sensed earlier arrived.
The being that stepped into the clearing was striking. Pale white skin, almost luminous against the dark volcanic backdrop, and two elegant horns curving back from his forehead were the only features that marked him as non-human. His face was beautiful in a way that felt almost divine and refined, free of the grotesque excesses common to many of the realm’s inhabitants.
He glanced once at the fallen demoness, his facial expression was indifferent, then fixed his gaze on Jason.
Jason did not waste time and began to immediately question him, the other realm he had been to welcomed him like a king.
"What do you want with my children?" he asked, voice flat.
The pale figure gave a small, almost elegant shrug. "We have no particular interest in the children themselves. Only the Marrow. If any of them were targeted, it was solely because of the fragments they carry."
Jason’s eyes narrowed. The answer confirmed what he had already begun to suspect. He found himself wondering, briefly, whether other sources of the Marrow still existed in the realm from which it had originally come. If so, this entire conflict might have been avoidable. He kept the question to himself as showing too much curiosity could reveal more than he intended.
He understood now with perfect clarity. These beings truly wanted the Marrow and nothing else.
Jason exhaled and rolled his shoulders. "You know what? Come take the Marrow. I don’t want this shit either."
The prince’s lips curved into a faint smile. "That is swell."
The moment the words left his mouth, Jason felt the change.
A barrier expanded outward in a perfect mile-wide radius, invisible yet absolute. The laws of the volcanic realm bent and rewrote themselves inside that boundary. Jason’s System flickered, then went dark. Every external ability, every borrowed trait, every form of supernatural interference that did not originate from this realm simply ceased to function. Adaptation, regeneration beyond the purely physical—everything foreign was suppressed.
Jason noticed it immediately.
Fortunately, he still possessed one card the barrier could not fully erase. The internal architecture of living flame he had assimilated from the demoness remained available, hidden and unannounced since it belonged to this realm.
He kept that knowledge tightly sealed, it would serve as his trump card when the moment required it.
The pale figure spoke again, voice calm and cultured.
"I am one of the Twelve Princes of Gehenna."
That explained the beauty. The higher ranks of this realm clearly favored refined forms over the monstrous.
Jason raised a brow. "Well, what would one call a person who kills a prince?"
The prince laughed, a soft, genuine sound. "You jest."
Without further ceremony he drove the fingers of one hand into his own chest, tore free his still-beating heart, and crushed it in front of Jason. Dark fluid spilled across the stone. Nothing happened to the prince. He remained standing, expression unchanged.
"You see," he said quietly, "my laws forbid me from dying."
Jason sighed. The ability was absurd. Complete rewriting of localized reality to the point that death itself became optional. Under normal circumstances his System would have begun dissecting and adapting to such a law, elevating his own capabilities by an enormous margin.
Now, trapped inside the prince’s domain, that path was closed.
"Now..." the prince murmured.
He appeared directly in front of Jason in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Jason did not flinch. The lack of killing intent was strange—almost polite—yet the pressure the prince radiated was unmistakable.
Jason attempted a strike. His fist passed through the prince’s form as though through smoke. The prince had not merely trained in multiple combat disciplines; he had refined them to a level that rendered conventional hand-to-hand exchanges meaningless. Jason was outmatched in pure technique and speed within this imposed law.
The prince’s hand reached forward and rested lightly against Jason’s chest.
Everything stopped.
Jason found himself frozen in place, body locked, consciousness pulled inward. He stood—or rather existed—inside the landscape of his own mind, the physical world reduced to a distant, muted backdrop. The prince stood before him in that inner space as well, gaze fixed on the dense, swirling mass of the Marrow that resided at Jason’s core.
"There you are," the prince said softly, staring directly at the ancient power.
The barrier continued to hold. The laws of Gehenna remained absolute within the mile radius. And for the first time since claiming the Marrow, Jason faced an opponent who could reach past every defense and look upon the source of his power with open, unhurried intent.
In that moment, Jason knew he stood no chance here, he had to escape and fast.
Jason knew the moment the prince’s presence settled fully inside his mind that the situation had turned critical. Everything was sliding south at terrifying speed. The imposed laws of the barrier still suppressed most of his external abilities. The prince stood before the core of the Marrow with open, unhurried intent, already reaching for what he had come to claim. Staying meant losing everything, including his life potentially.
He had to get out.
Jason focused the entirety of his will into a single, violent act of rejection. He did not try to overpower the prince in a contest of strength. He simply refused the intrusion with absolute finality, treating the foreign presence the same way his body once rejected everything.
The mental landscape shuddered. The prince’s form flickered, resistance flaring for an instant, then the connection snapped. The prince was forcibly expelled from Jason’s mindscape and driven back into the physical world.
The barrier’s laws still held, but one critical detail remained in Jason’s favor. Portal creation belonged to this realm’s native authority. It was not foreign magic. It was not something the prince’s decree could suppress either.
Jason’s body, operating on pure survival instinct while his mind finished reasserting control, reacted before conscious thought fully returned.
The flight response took over.
His limbs moved without waiting for permission. Mana and residual Marrow authority surged downward through his feet and outward in a raw, undirected command.
Reality tore open in front of him with a sound like the sky itself being ripped apart. The tear that formed was unlike any he had seen or encountered before.
It yawned wide and violent, edges unstable and crackling with excess energy. The aperture stretched higher and broader than any previous breach, large enough that the denser, more refined entities of Gehenna would have no difficulty passing through.
Jason’s body did not hesitate. It launched forward into the chaotic threshold even as his mind finished reclaiming full awareness. The prince’s voice, sharp with sudden realization, followed him for only a fraction of a second before the roar of the tear drowned everything else.
The crossing was violent and uncontrolled.
Instead of the familiar transition back to the settlement or any known location, Jason felt the path twist. The exit did not deposit him where he had entered or anywhere near the original battlefield. Space folded in on itself, redirected by the raw, panicked nature of the portal and the interference of the prince’s still-active barrier. When Jason finally slammed into solid ground again, the air, the gravity, and the ambient mana were all wrong.
He had been sent somewhere else entirely.
Behind him, the massive tear remained open—an uncontrolled wound in reality large enough for the stronger creatures of Gehenna to cross. Then the connection destabilized further. The location of the tear on the original side became impossible to track. Whatever anchor had briefly linked the two points collapsed under the strain of the forced, imperfect passage.
Jason pushed himself up from the unfamiliar ground, chest still aching from the earlier lance wound and the mental intrusion. The prince was no longer in front of him. The mile-wide barrier was gone. But the cost of the escape was clear.
He had left behind a tear large enough to matter, in a place no one on his side could immediately identify or close. And he himself had arrived in a location he did not recognize.
The situation had not been resolved.
It had only been postponed—and made larger because now the threats finally had a passage to this realm.
"Fuck!" Jason blurted to himself.