'At least hold back a bit,' Azel thought as he looked at the aftermath of the explosion.

The forest or rather, what used to be a forest was completely gone.

As far as his eyes could see, there was nothing left but a blackened wasteland.

Trees had been reduced to ash, the ground was cracked and glowing red from the residual heat.

If he looked far enough, he could even see the soldiers who had been stationed near the meadow.

They stood frozen in shock, staring at the destruction from afar.

'Damn.'

He looked down at himself.

His shirt had been completely burned away and smoke still rose from his body, and there were scorch marks on his skin.

His trousers were barely holding together… they looked much more like shorts now and were smelling like burnt fabric.

"Are you okay?" Luke called from above, hovering easily in the air.

Azel resisted the urge to glare up at him.

The man had told him to brace himself, not to defend against a small apocalypse. Where was the sense of fairness in that?

"I think—where's the—"

He didn't get to finish.

A flicker of motion caught his eye and he trusted his instincts...

He twisted his head to the left just as a knife sliced through the air where his face had been a second ago.

"Ah, fuck no."

Azel jumped back, creating distance between himself and the attacker.

The smoke shifted, clearing just enough for him to see what had attacked him throguh the smoke.

The Skinbutcher.

It was standing tall in the center of the scorched clearing and was completely unscathed… The explosion hadn't even singed its grotesque patchwork costume.

'It didn't affect it?' Azel thought, completely stunned… Was this what it meant to absorb or be a fragment of the sky?

Luke's spell had been strong enough to erase the whole forest, to the point that even the air itself had burned but this monster hadn't taken a single scratch.

To test a theory, Azel lifted a hand. Holy light gathered in his palm and blasted forward in a beam.

The beam hit the Butcher's chest and bounced off like water splashing against glass.

'Holy shit. Magic doesn't work on it?'

The Skinbutcher tilted its head, Azel couldn't tell if it was deliberate but it was damn weird. Then it threw another knife.

Azel dodged again, but this time the knife curved mid-air, twisting unnaturally before shooting back toward him.

He swung his arm, parrying it away with the dagger coated in aura.

When he looked up, the Butcher was already in front of him.

It moved so fast it blurred, closing the gap in a blink.

The two knives in it's hand were glowing and in seconds, they had turned into silver blurs heading straight for his chest.

'I can probably defend against these stabs so I can be a bit reckless,' Azel thought, he couldn't see anything special about them.

He hardened the bones in his arms, feeling his aura flare through his body.

He risked a glance upward.

Luke was still in the air with his hands… It was clear he was gathering magic for a spell.

'Doesn't he learn?' Azel grimaced. This monster was practically invulnerable to physical attacks…

The Skinbutcher lunged and Azel crossed his daggers in front of him, channeling energy through his grip.

"Star Strike."

The world flashed white.

He swung both blades in an X, pure starlight bursting outward.

The attack was filled with the light of the stars, the radiant glow cutting through the smoke and flame like a blade of heaven itself.

It was strong enough to cut through steel, magic, and monsters alike and it should have cut through the Skinbutcher too.

…But it didn't.

Azel's blades hit and bounced back.

"What the—"

He barely had time to react. The Butcher's knife came for his chest so in that split second, he focused on strengthening that part to the maximum.

The knife was just a few centimeters away from his chest when a burst of wind slammed into the monster, throwing it backward through the air.

The wind crackled, leaving arcs of blue in its wake.

"Sybil?" Azel looked up.

She hovered in the sky with her hair whipping in the wind. "So you're that fucker…"

Below her, the Skinbutcher dug its feet into the dirt and stopped sliding. Its head turned slowly toward her and it growled as it inverted the knives.

The wind around Sybil's hand condensed, spinning faster and faster until it formed a visible sphere… a vortex of slicing air.

"You picked the wrong place to show your face, freak! Especially in my fucking meadow."

The Skinbutcher lifted its knife.

But before it could move, golden light blazed above.

Luke had finished his spell.

"Chain of Judgment!" he shouted.

Dozens of golden chains burst from the air itself, snaking through the clearing. They wrapped around the Skinbutcher, binding its arms, legs, and torso in an instant.

Each chain glowed with dense magic before tightening, pulling the monster up into the air.

It thrashed, but the bindings held.

Azel noticed something odd as the light pulsed around it. There wasn't just magic flowing through the chains… there was aura.

'Luke can use aura too?' he thought, blinking. He didn't mean to brag but he was the only one that was meant to be able to do it… maybe Reinhardt but he hadn't seen the progress of the Protagonist for a while now so he wouldn't be able to know.

It seemed like they would finally be able to capture the monster but…

The air changed.

A dark energy seeped out from the Skinbutcher's body.

It spread like ink, rippling through the chains. The golden light dimmed as if suffocated.

"What—"

The darkness spread faster than either of them could react, crawling along the chains and devouring the magic.

In seconds, the bindings snapped apart. The wave of black mana continued outward, swallowing Sybil's wind attack whole.

"Dispel?" Luke muttered in disbelief. "No, that's—"

The monster's body began to crumble, its skin shedding like ash. But before it completely disintegrated, its head turned toward Azel.

Its teeth… those too-white teeth shone through the gaps of its masked face.

Then the voice came.

"…Skin..."

[The Fragment of the Sky has promised to skin you alive.]

A blue system window flashed across his vision for a split second before everything exploded in black light.

The blast was instant.

The ground split open, shockwaves flattening what little was left of the forest.

Luke threw up a barrier around himself and Sybil, while Azel's body was launched backward, tumbling through the air.

'I fucking hate this,' he thought as he crashed through a pile of charred roots and rolled across the dirt.

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