The light appeared once again in another place. It was only a brief flash before disappearing, leaving behind a confused Kaito.
[You are in the cemetery] Before he could ask, the system hurriedly explained.
"The ceme..."
[It is a space disconnected from everything]
The system, clearly in a hurry, interrupted him and began explaining.
[Listen, this is a space that has existed since the beginning, and no one knows its origin. What they do know is that it is completely disconnected from everything. Teleportation, senses, messages, anything, it is impossible for it to leave this place. It is a space completely isolated from the space and time of anywhere else]
"How do I get out of here?"
[I don't know.
The Gaia System has recorded countless worlds and thousands of simulations for each one. It was obvious that not all of them would turn out well. Every now and then a simulation fails, completely deviating from the story it was supposed to follow. Destroying that simulation would mean destroying part of the people's souls, which would have serious consequences, so they decided to send those "errors" here.
But despite having sent hundreds of thousands of them, no one has ever escaped.]
"So there's no way out?" Kaito frowned.
[There has to be one, and you have to find it. Listen, I don't have much time. The link between us has also been severed. I'm talking to you through the space that opened when they brought you here, but it's already repairing itself.
I disconnected the console from you and then linked myself to it so I wouldn't disappear or be anchored back to the central system. I'll explain everything that happened to everyone.
As for the beings in the cemetery, I don't know how powerful they are. As I said, they're errors. An error can range from someone falling in love with another person to an NPC destroying the world. Most likely there aren't many left because the psychopaths killed each other.
I don't know how you'll escape, but you have to find a way. I'll wait for...]
[...]
"...It got cut off" Kaito muttered with a sigh, his expression barely changing.
"System, lower the... I can't believe I forgot so quickly. I'll have to do it myself."
Kaito sat down on the ground in a meditation position and focused inward with a purpose. His senses, normally capable of perceiving everything for kilometers around him, turned inward as though searching for lost information.
Although Kaito possessed many abilities, there were also many he never used personally, instead leaving them for the system to manage.
But without the system, this time Kaito was forced to do it himself.
In the end, they were still his abilities, and no matter how rarely he used them, their control remained engraved into his very being. After only a few seconds, Kaito already knew how to do what he had previously left to the system.
When Kaito opened his eyes again, his expression was no longer the same neutral one as before.
Dilated pupils, bloodshot eyes, narrowed brows, clenched teeth, bulging veins. His entire body displayed an anger he hadn't felt in a very long time.
With his Impenetrable Mind reduced by half, Kaito stood up and took a small step forward.
Without controlling himself, his foot cracked the ground beneath him, sounding like shattering glass.
Paying attention to his surroundings for the first time since arriving, Kaito noticed how strange the place was.
It was a kind of forest where the trees, and the vegetation in general, were anything but ordinary.
The trees, the ground, the bushes, the flowers, even the nearby sky, everything was made of tiny gray dots that seemed to move.
The environment itself looked like a television filled with static and glitches everywhere.
Crrrsh!
Every now and then, accompanied by a static noise, things changed shape before returning to normal as if they were glitches in a video game.
Whatever that forest contained, Kaito could sense it was some kind of corruption, one that was also trying to corrupt him. It was only prevented by his immunity to every kind of debuff.
But Kaito didn't care about that at the moment. What caught his attention was how everything looked as fragile as glass.
Looking down, he observed the crack he had created simply by standing there. Like a spider stretching its legs, the fractures spread outward from where his foot rested.
Seeing this, Kaito lifted his leg and then slammed it down with all his strength.
CRASHHH!
Using his true strength, the ground shattered with ease, leaving behind an enormous nonphysical crack.
There were not only chunks of earth floating in the air without obeying the laws of physics, but some of the pieces that had been launched earlier were now suspended around him in complete weightlessness.
Kaito took another step and did the same with his other foot, creating an even larger crater this time, one that merged with the previous one.
Then he grabbed one of the floating chunks of earth and threw it toward the nearby trees like a baseball. It tore through several hundred meters with ease before finally meeting resistance and slowing down.
Immediately afterward, he approached one of the nearest oaks and grabbed it, tightening his grip until it shattered into digital crystals scattered throughout the area.
"This will be fun" he muttered as he looked at what he had done.
After that he didn't speak again. In the blink of an eye he was standing before another tree, which was destroyed with a single punch.
The impact spread far beyond, destroying several hundred meters of terrain as Kaito changed targets and repeated the action again and again.
When there were no trees left around him, leaving only a plain one kilometer in radius, Kaito began destroying the ground itself, either by stomping on it or simply crouching down and smashing it with his fists.
And once the entire area had been completely destroyed, Kaito moved on to the next one.
...
In this place there was no time. If you looked up at the sky, you would see nothing more than a strange blend of day and night, with tiny suns scattered across a starry sky that didn't match the light those suns should have produced. As if someone had tried to fix it afterward, there were also small clouds with shapes far too perfect to be real, separated by identical distances.
Unable to tell how much time had passed since Kaito arrived, the landscape now consisted of nothing but kilometers upon kilometers of destruction, with enormous cracks everywhere, similar to craters left behind by meteorite impacts.
BOOM!
The sound echoed throughout the area as chunks of earth were launched across the sky and crashed into the other floating fragments already there.
Nearby, something resembling a meteor had slammed into the ground with tremendous force.
The complete absence of dust or displaced air from the impact made recognizing Kaito easy for anyone.
Once he stood up, he leaped out of the crater in a single jump, landing heavily on the surface and creating even more cracks before moving straight ahead in search of untouched ground to continue smashing.
But halfway there, he stopped.
Within barely a millisecond, he had already turned around, and before he could even think, he was already punching the entity standing there.
With his speed and strength, combined with the creature's fragility, the being was destroyed instantly, exploding into thousands of tiny fragments.
Only for a black slime-like substance to spread from those countless pieces the next second, pulling them all back together and reforming the creature.
Kaito observed it. With everything around him being little more than static, the figure stood out easily. It was a small figure, perhaps no taller than a meter, though its hunched posture made its height difficult to judge.
One of its arms remained bent stiffly in front of it as though it were broken and incapable of movement, while its other hand clutched its own face as though its very existence caused it pain.
It wore what looked like some kind of red clown suit, or something similar, complete with two jester ears. Once again, half of its body had been consumed by static, making its original appearance difficult to determine.
Bzzzzzzztt!
Just like the environment around it, the small creature glitched. And as though echoing it, everything around them followed suit.
The next instant, the creature began moving toward him. It moved erratically, with no strategy whatsoever, as though driven by pure instinct.
Halfway between them, Kaito vanished, reappearing directly in front of it with one leg raised horizontally before delivering a kick that destroyed it once again.
But the black slime spread once more and reformed it almost instantly.
This time, however, it seemed to be missing a tiny fragment, so small that most people would never notice.
Kaito clenched his fist until nothing remained inside it, then opened his hand, showing it to the monster.
"I just have to do that another 7,689 times and you'll die" he said with a smile that made no sense, even to himself.
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+15 chapters in advance on Patreon.
p-atreon.com/IAMME26
(just delete the hyphen)
80 power stones = 1 extra chapter (cumulative)