Chapter 180: Demolition Man

The building, having lost two of its beams, had only one way to react at first.

A loud groaning of steel and concrete.

But it held.

The sound rolled through the street like a warning bell. Kael felt it in his teeth. The building wasn’t giving up yet. It was stubborn, like it wanted to keep pretending it still belonged in a city that had already died.

“Fuck,” Kael cursed as he realized that he didn’t have many shots left.

His internal energy had dipped more than he liked. Not catastrophically, but enough that he felt it, the slight hollowness under his ribs, the drain in his limbs, the way [Presence] made every exertion cost extra.

Darkness wasn’t cheap, and he was using it while also paying to remain “not real” in the Ifrit’s perception.

The consumption brought him down one-third of his reserves. He needed to use the least of it from now on.

He steadied his breathing, forced the urge to rush. If he panicked and missed a beam, he’d waste a shot and lose the angle. If he ran out of energy with the Ifrit still mobile, he’d get turned into ash before he could even regret it.

He aimed at the third pillar and let the darkness consume it.

The beam vanished, and this time the building didn’t just creak. It shifted. A long, ugly shudder traveled through the upper floors. Dust poured like rain. Somewhere inside, glass finally gave up and shattered in a cascading hiss.

With half its supporting beams gone, the building began crumbling.

Slow at first, very slow, agonizingly slow, slow enough that the Ifrit began backing away.

Kael’s throat tightened. The Ifrit wasn’t stupid. It wasn’t flailing. It was reading the situation the way any predator read danger: something is wrong here, move.

This made Kael tense up, his plan of toppling the building entirely above the Ifrit would soon fail if it escaped the impact zone.

He needed it to stay under the falling mass. He needed it to commit to the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Fucker!” Kael said as he removed Presence.

The world snapped back into full color. Sound sharpened. Heat sharpened. His own existence slammed back into reality like a door being kicked open.

This caught the Ifrit’s attention immediately.

It turned, not slowly, not lazily. The stone head pivoted with purpose, and the fire that made up the rest of its body surged, flaring like a creature inhaling before it struck. Kael felt the air around him spike in temperature in an instant.

“Remember this?” he laughed as he held up his right arm.

The Fire Rune was there.

The same rune Kael stole a few days ago.

He didn’t even need to activate it. The sight was enough. The Ifrit recognized it the way an animal recognized the scent of stolen food. The moment the rune caught the light, the Ifrit’s posture changed, anger, focus, that ugly possessive rage that bosses had when you took what they considered “property.”

There was only one reaction a creature that was consumed with rage would do, and that was to charge at Kael admits the falling rubble, and try to kill him.

This wasn’t the case.

The creature didn’t chase; it wasn’t foolish, it actually continued backing away.

Kael’s grin faltered into something sharper.

“Shit…” Kael cursed and pointed his left arm, “I hate smart monsters,” he muttered as he let loose another shot of black matter.

He didn’t aim it at the Ifrit’s face. He didn’t gamble on whether Darkness would “kill” something made of fire and stone. He aimed to force movement, deny it space, deny it options, make the street itself become a trap.

A shot to destabilize, slow, and control. If it did anything more to the ifrit than it was a bonus, the worst case it would at least buy a second or two.

But it was a good enough attempt here to try.

The darkness ball shot forward, and the Ifrit wasn’t fast enough to dodge.

Instead It tried to hover above the ground and dodge it by flight.

And it worked.

For a moment that is.

Kael saw the movement happen, stone rising, flames tightening, the Ifrit trying to cheat gravity the way it always did. He felt the building above finally start to give, the whole structure trembling as if it was deciding whether to die now or in five seconds.

The darkness ball had touched right underneath its stone-made body, splattering into ’flames’ itself, instead of the stone-made construct.

Kael believed he missed; after all, the body of the Ifrit was the stone, not the fire.

Only to realize he was wrong.

The moment the ball of darkness made contact with the fire underneath the Ifrit.

The fire itself disappeared.

Not dimmed. Not blown away. Not smothered. It just… ceased. Like someone had removed a section of the Ifrit’s anatomy, and the world didn’t know how to fill the gap back in.

It couldn’t regenerate, nor could it be replaced. Flames surged down to try and keep the Ifrit in flight, but failed miserably, throttling around what looked like an invisible orb of nothingness.

The Ifrit’s “legs”, its support, its lift, its cheating, were gone. What remained was stone and gravity and a sudden lack of options.

The Ifrit’s body fell down to the street, and the building finally came down completely.

Burying the creature in steel, stone, and concrete.

The impact shook the block. Debris blasted outward in a dusty wave. Kael flinched, arms raised instinctively, and felt rubble pelt his armor like hail. The street vanished beneath a collapsing avalanche of ruin and dust, and the building folded in on itself with a long, grinding roar.

When the dust began to settle, the Ifrit was no longer hovering in the open.

It was under a new structure, one Kael had built in seconds out of desperation and spite.

And Kael stood there, chest rising and falling, internal energy bleeding down, staring at the pile like he was daring it to move.

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