Story:

The whole Torii burst apart into rubble and stones—sacred timber and blessed stone blasted outward, raining down, breaking at last into a pile of broken stone that collapsed down onto the faces of the very mikos it had served and protected for a hundreds years.

The shrine's final gate. The final boundary between the holy mountain and everything that hungered for it.

Gone.

The same moment the Torii fell, the earth itself answered its death.

A huge earthquake erupted from the very center of where the gate had stood—the ground bucking and rolling in waves that threw mikos from their feet, split flagstones, cracked the temple steps—the whole mountain seeming to shudder in anguish at the violation of its heart.

And above, the night sky changed: darkness flooding upward and outward from the broken gate-point, the stars drowning, the heavens turning dark red and otherworldly.

No one could stand. Everyone could only shake on the broken ground, clinging to the rubble, to each other.

And through the rolling quake, through the raining dust and the crimson light, one figure rose.

Bel floated serenely upward off the broken earth, rising above the ruin of the Torii, above the pile of stone that had been the shrine's soul, unhurried, untouched—his robes still settling in the earthshaken wind.

And the Vampire Lord laughed.

Not a polite chuckle. A full, head-thrown, ancient roar of laughter—overjoyed, total, mad—echoing off the mountain.

The Yamato Shrine straddles the throat of the leyline running through Yamato's main island, like a wedge hammered into a dragon's vein.

It commands the leyline's flow, and because of it, the Lord of Hell cannot tear open a shadow rift here vast enough to march an army through.

Ten years ago, Bel dispatched an elite demon force and Miu to destroy the shrine—Later he sent Black Rose, but her advance was stalled again and again by the resisting daimyo of the eastern provinces, and never bore fruit.

But tonight, the Vampire Lord could finally call Mt Fuji home.