Third-person POV

His hot breath pierced the cold air like a thousand daggers. The only sound in the god-forsaken chamber was his feet patting against the cold floor, followed by the sound of his legs' broken chain. With the approaching daybreak, the visibility in front of him grew, allowing the eight-year-old boy to see a small girl's tangled black hair as her body lay sprawled on the cement floor, blood pooling all around her.

"R-Rit-Ritsura...?" He breathed out his little sister's name with his eyes wide open before collapsing to his knees next to her.

He extended a small hand as he approached the unconscious girl. Infuriated at the state of her clothes from the abuse she had endured, he screamed out in horror. However, it was the blood smeared across her eyes that drew him in the most. When he realized what it meant, he was overcome with a sense of terror.

"Ritsura! Open your eyes! Onii-chan is here to get us out! Ritsura!!"

The coldness of her body slowly drained the warmth from his fingertips, and he was more frantic than he'd ever been in his life as he begged her to look at him and stay with him.

Time had lost its meaning; the seconds could have been hours, or the hours could have been seconds. Riei, on the other hand, was caught in the eye of his own storm in that frozen moment.

'Daddy, I'm scared!' At this rate, Ritsura will die!'

'What kind of big brother am I if I let my younger sister die?'

'It's all because of me!' If I hadn't brought you along—no! If only I hadn't believed that liar! We wouldn't be in this situation!'

He was all over the place one moment and completely empty the next. Then, that fleeting emptiness gradually changed into something entirely different. There was something rising in Riei's chest, and he had no idea what it was. As if his soul was troubled by something that wasn't quite human, twisted and deformed as it was, but nonetheless real. The voice in the back of his head echoed in his mind.

'It's the humans... they did this, and they're going to pay for it.'

At that moment Riei's blood began to boil and a burning desire to destroy swept through his veins and up his spine like a fire.

Riei's short black hair grew longer and flowed down the side of his head before turning a different shade of blue. His eyes lightened to a frosty shade of sapphire as his demonic energy jagged into a violent black flame-like look, the temperature around him plunged to absolute zero.

"Those humans... I'll kill them all!"