Story:

The Vampire Lord stood exactly where he had stood.

Not a slight scratch on him. Not a scorch on his collar. He had received the shrine's ultimate weapon—four bolts of holy lightning—standing still, hands loosely folded, and the dust of it had not even settled on his shoulders.

"Oh," said Bel, genuinely, pleasantly surprised, glancing at the scorched flagstones around him with a connoisseur's approval. "That stung faintly. I see. That must have been your last measure. I'm honored."

He smirked, and rose up both pale hands. "Now, my turn."

His blood shot upward from his opened palms—not a lance this time, but a torrent, crimson and uncoiling in mid-air, dividing, multiplying, a hydra of blood that surged toward the great red Torii itself.

The blood smashed through the gate's multiple layers of protection wards—one, two, five, ten, each layer flaring and shattering like beaten glass—and struck the Torii dead center.

The backlash tore through the ward-lines.

Chitose and the surrounding mikos screamed as one—their wards, their will, their life-threads woven into the great gate's protection all annihilated at once—blood spilling from their mouths, knees buckling, the defense line breaking like a wave against a cliff of black stone.

And through her blood-blurred, desperate eyes, Chitose saw it happen.

The Torii—flinched. The great vermilion gate, the boundary of the holy and the defiled, the shrine's hundreds-year heartbeat—began to change.

The sacred red darkened, deepened, corrupted—red bleeding into wet, gleaming, dark bloody black, the color spreading across its timbers like veins across a dying face.

The huge gate groaned—a sound like a mountain in its death throes.

And then it shattered.