Harem Cultivation System

Fire roared through the grey void, a pillar of white-gold flame tall enough to swallow a building whole. Kagen held the stance a full three seconds longer than necessary, savoring it, before he finally let the flow taper off.

Smoke curled upward from the scorched crater where a person used to be standing.

"That’s that, then," Kagen said, rolling his neck. "Dosk, let’s collect the others and get back to—"

"Get back to what, exactly?"

The voice came from directly behind him.

Kagen spun, flame already crawling back up his forearms — and found Haruki standing there. Not burned. Not smoking. Not even a singed thread on his sleeve. His hair wasn’t out of place. His expression was almost bored.

"...What."

"You know," Haruki said, cracking his neck slowly, "for a guy who talks a big game about fire eating everything, you really should’ve checked what you were actually cooking."

Dosk’s grip finally loosened — the one still closed around empty air where Haruki’s throat had been a heartbeat ago.

Copy: Rejuvenation. Copy: Butterfly Magick. Copy: Enchanter.

He hadn’t dodged. He hadn’t blocked. In the half-second between the spear of flame leaving Kagen’s palm and it reaching him, Haruki had layered every defensive trait he’d copied from Ariel into a single, compressed shell around his own body and simply let the fire wash over it like water over stone. It had cost him. His Dao reserves had cratered. But it had worked, and that was the only thing that mattered.

"Impossible," Kagen breathed. "Nothing survives direct contact with my Cinderheart Flame. Nothing."

"Add me to your list of firsts, then." Haruki’s crimson Dao surged back into his palm, forming the twin blades from before — except this time, they burned with a faint corona of gold at the edges, an afterimage of the very flame that had failed to kill him. "Copy works both ways, by the way. Thanks for the sample."

Kagen’s face twisted from confusion into fury. "You little—"

Dosk didn’t wait for the sentence to finish. He came in low, shoulder first, aiming to drive Haruki straight through the floor of the Hollow Between the way he’d flattened the ground earlier.

Haruki didn’t retreat this time.

He met the charge head-on, twin blades crossed in an X in front of his chest — and at the point of impact, the entire grey plain shuddered like a struck drum. A shockwave rippled outward in a perfect ring, kicking up mist in every direction.

Dosk’s fist had connected. Haruki hadn’t moved an inch.

"H-how—" Dosk’s voice, usually a flat rumble, cracked with something close to panic.

"Enhanced Vitality isn’t just a healing trait." Haruki’s blades ground against Dosk’s knuckles, sparks screaming off the contact point. "Turns out if you push enough Dao through it fast enough, it hardens everything it touches. Bones. Skin. Whatever’s underneath that overgrown muscle of yours."

He shoved forward. Dosk — for the first time since the fight began — staggered back a full step.

"Kagen, quit gawking and burn him already!" Dosk barked.

"Right — right!" Kagen thrust both palms forward. Twin lances of white-hot flame tore across the void, converging on Haruki from either side.

Haruki didn’t dodge. He didn’t shield.

He ran straight at Kagen.

The flames closed in around him mid-sprint, a corridor of fire with nowhere to escape — and for one triumphant instant, Kagen grinned, certain he’d won a second time.

Then Haruki burst out of the inferno at point-blank range, untouched, blade already swinging.

"Dao: Fluxen Hitches."

The world fractured into red and black. A web of slashes tore across Kagen’s chest in the space of a single breath — not deep enough to kill, but precise enough to sever the tendons in both his arms before he could raise them again.

Kagen’s flame guttered out. His knees hit the ground.

"You—you should be ash," he choked. "I hit you directly. I felt it connect—"

"You want to know a secret?" Haruki crouched down to his eye level, blade resting lightly against Kagen’s throat. "Ariel’s rejuvenation trait doesn’t just heal wounds. It undoes them. There’s a difference. Your fire didn’t fail to burn me. It burned me, and then it simply... stopped having happened."

Behind him, a second shockwave rattled through the void as Dosk charged again, roaring, fists raised for a finishing blow that would never land — Haruki’s free hand snapped out, catching the punch dead center in his open palm.

Bone cracked. Not Haruki’s.

Dosk’s arm buckled at an angle it was never meant to bend, and he dropped, howling, clutching the ruin of his own fist to his chest.

Silence settled over the grey plain, broken only by Kagen’s ragged breathing and Dosk’s whimpering.

"Two down," Haruki said, standing, letting his blades dissolve back into crimson dust. He didn’t have a scratch on him. Not one. "Nibel! You can pack these two up whenever you’re ready — I’m done here."

A tear split open in the mist a few feet away. Nibel’s head poked through, scythe balanced lazily over one shoulder, purple eyes sweeping across the scene: two grown men reduced to groaning wrecks, and Haruki standing over them without so much as a hair displaced.

"...Well." A slow, delighted smile curled across her lips. "I take back what I said about you not screaming main event material."

"Where are the others?" Haruki asked.

"Ariel finished hers off before I even sealed the rift shut. Rosalia’s been done for a while too — she’s just refusing to stop hitting hers out of spite." Nibel snapped her fingers, and the voids beneath Kagen and Dosk yawned open, dragging them both down into the dark. "Shall we?"

"Yeah." Haruki rolled his shoulders, the last traces of borrowed gold Dao fading from his blades. "Let’s go see how bad Rosalia wrecked the plane’s roof."

—

Back aboard the Fengril-built vessel, the remaining hostile forces lay scattered across the wing — porcelain woman frozen mid-scream inside a cocoon of crimson butterflies, the twitchy mismatched-eyed man buried up to his neck in solid pink stone, and the bald, ever-smiling attacker currently being used as a springboard by a thoroughly unbothered Rosalia.

Ariel spotted Haruki the instant he stepped back through the tear in reality and was across the wing in half a second, arms thrown around his neck.

"Haruki-sama! You’re not hurt?!" She patted down his chest, his arms, his face, as if she genuinely couldn’t believe it.

"Not a scratch." He allowed himself a small, tired grin. "Turns out being fireproof runs in the family, apparently."

"Show-off," Nibel muttered, though there was no real bite in it.

The Head Air Hostess, Deiee, peeked out from behind a bent section of the hull, eyes wide as saucers as she surveyed four unconscious hijackers, a fifth still shrieking beneath Rosalia’s boot, and not a single passenger casualty.

"...I believe," Deiee said faintly, "we’ll be issuing all four of you a lifetime first-class pass."

"Excellent," Ariel said immediately, not letting go of Haruki’s arm. "Add extra honey bean donuts to that and we’ve got a deal."

— End of Chapter —