Standing a thousand feet close to the ground was like staring into a ball shot into the sky.
Carriages looked like tiny ink blots on the grounds of the courtyard before they were crushed by falling pillars and arches.
The world crumbled around him, and this was the first time this was happening physically to Ran.
He paid attention to the battle that ensued beyond, and above a city driven to ruin—drowned in blood, gore, and fire.
Horrors came out of the shadows to play—armies not of men, but of their sorrows, despair, glories, terrors made form, crawled upon every surface to reach its summit from which they jumped, soaring in the air and landing upon the Lagarakei.
Some jumped and clung to the beast's tendrils, and clung to them like ants clinging to a line of sweetness they sought to devour.
The world was rent with screams and sounds that bent imaginations and spat on belief.
The war went on while Kaito Ran continued to fall.
He fell lighter than a feather, he fell like a dream on strings—he fell, and fell, and the world burned around him.
The duchess added her voiced wails of ruin to the bellicose cacophony.
Sound surged like tides out of her blackened lips and enshrouded the beasts and its multitude of heads.
Ichor and flesh of mushy iron rained down, hotter than the sun, evaporating everything in their paths as they fell like meteors upon the city.
The war raged, and hell raged with it.
Demons committed involuntary Hara-kiri upon the tentacles of the Lagarakei. They were pierced from head down and pinned to the ground.
Then shaken off like blood on a knife. Corpses flew about as tendrils rid themselves of them.
Still armies of Demons, Lilims, and echoes of damned souls dogpiled the creature of nightmare.
A force, a thousand strong, sacrificed their might and life in destroying just five of the creatures one hundred tentacles.
The city was starting to look like a sandcastle crumbled by the crushing waves of the sea.
And then they came.
They looked like they had literally crawled out of the comic books. They were the highest of the hierarchy.
These were the Lords of Hell.
Mukoku and her Dukes and Duchesses rode upon winged Wraithwagons as they soared in a charge across a direct path to the Lagarakei.
Ran fell, Ran despaired, yet Ran watched.
The forces of city continued to clash with the aerial leviathan in a battle that could be called anything but glorious.
There was no glory, but there was plenty of other things galore: there was ash, there was rain of plasma, there was a frequent roar of sounds and abominations, there was terror, fear, calamity—
There was chaos.
"March to your doom," A demon general commanded his troops with the voice of a resounding boom.
"For severance," the armies of Lilims chanted—marching as one.
"For hell and damnation," the armies of Demons proclaimed in crackling sounds.
"For Severance, Hell and damnation," they roared all together as more forces joined the battle, pouring out of the broken city.
The chant continued with the pace of the battle— "For Severance, Hell and damnation!"
Chaos had been birthed, assumed form—now it crawled over the landscape like gravity driving a landslide.
Downhill everything went as well.
Demons perished in their thousands, Lilims died upon the tendrils of void borne leviathan.
They perished in their numbers, and yet—in unity—they chanted: "For Severance, Hell and damnation!!"
Ran drifted ever closer to the ground. Now he was about five hundred feet closer.
"If I fall," he whispered and paused. "What would happen?"
Would he fall with the force of he was meant to, or fall as light as a feather? Either was likely—hell had no rules, much less rules regarding gravity and a normal reality.
"By kin, may the celestial realms protect me," he prayed. "May the fortune of karma reward me."
He prayed, the battle raged—Naraku all around aged.
And then his voice was stolen from him like air from a vacuum.
For a moment there had been chaos, there had been sounds from a thousand different events happening at the same time.
Voices, weapons, heartbeats, roars, footfalls, destruction, sorrows and pains projected had all sang the same song—the song of war.
But then—
"For Severance, Hell and da…"
—all voices went silent.
With all that chaos being a present constant, filling up the moment like a thunder in a storm, this emergent noiselessness pervaded like a freezing wind.
The world held its breath as an event of history announced itself.
All voices stopped and all eyes turned to watch the approach of the Queen of Severance and her Lords of Hell.
They rode with the attention of the universe itself upon them, the Wraithwagons upon which they rode becoming the center of the universe.
As everyone looked—and Kaito Ran fell—the great demonic powers and entities approached the Lagarakei.
Mukoku, in all her armored glory, rode at the vanguard.
As they watched, everyone tensed or coiled in suspense, she rose to her feet within the Wraithwagon.
Billions of eyes beheld her might as she lifted herself, soaring high into the sky—surrounding herself in a fog of shadows.
In the next minute, Ran—staring with his mouth wide open—came to know why the Lilim sister of his ally was known as the Queen of Severance.
"By kin, she's powerful," he spoke in a voice that did not escape the confines of his head, unable to breach the silence.
She was like a living knife making a clean and searing cut through a world made of butter.
Space and time seperared across her path—tendrils that attempted to strike her vanished like chalk cleaned off a board.
Naraku shook as the power of Severance was manifested with the realm of hell.
Her lords continued forward beneath her as she rose higher and higher.
They launched pulses of plasma, acidic shadows, spears of solidified rage—weapons of apocalypse sent against the Lagarakei as the arsenal of hell unleashed in their mightiness.
Each one great enough to vaporize a continent in Kurana, yet they merely scored gashes—albeit gashes of great depth—upon the beast's flesh.
The silence continued as Mukoku reached a point in the sky over the Lagarakei.
Like a black star in a blurry horizon, she hovered over the humongous creature, her hands held apart like a statue of justice bearing the scale of judgment.
Her lords fired more attacks borne of ancient kin and demonic essence at the floating leviathan.
The silent war progressed, Ran's descent had almost reached its end.
The city brought down to its knees grew larger as though in preparation for a welcome to his fall.
Above, in contrast, the Queen of Severance levitated like an essence of the sky—as though she was a Titan soon to fall.
Demons, Lilims, knaves, and denizens of all kinds watched as one.
Ran, the ground approaching, watched—his heartbeats faster than his fall.
Then sound returned, broken, staggering, and infrequent.
It was like an audible vibration of missteps. Like a record broken into scattered timelines.
Everyone gazed up at the Queen of Severance as her sheer aura shook sound itself into a severed mess.
Her hands came together, as though in prayer.
All took a deep breath as one.
And destruction transformed from a mere concept into an encompassing reality.
Mukoku unleashed the force of her mightiness as Ran crashed into courtyard in stillness.