Kazuo staggered as the pocket dimension finally solidified. His sneakers skidded across warped asphalt, and his messenger bag dug painfully into his shoulder. He barely managed to steady the infernal tome against his chest, its pulsing warmth seeping through his soaked band tee.
On his cracked phone, Lilith's aura readings flickered across the screen—her form breaking apart like corrupted pixels in an old VHS. The overlay bled into diagrams from the tome, cross-referencing instructions written in infernal ink.
"L-Lilith-san!" Kazuo's voice cracked as he tripped over a mound of irradiated figurines. "Resonance triangulation requires three idol artifacts! Without them, your glamour will collapse for good!"
His trembling hands clawed through glowing trash heaps of the otaku landfill. Plastic keychains, melted CDs, and rusted gachapon capsules clattered around him. His fingers bled as he dug deeper. Then—
A cracked Love Live! microphone.
A sun-bleached Vocaloid concert poster.
And finally—half-buried beneath glowing sludge—a Miku glowstick. Its faint light pulsed in rhythm with Lilith's shallow, glitching breaths.
"Got it—!" Kazuo gasped.
But before he could catch his breath, Mephistopheles appeared atop a crumbling hologram stage. His immaculate suit glistened in the rainless void. He snapped his fingers.
The landfill blurred.
Neon streaked across Kazuo's vision. Weeks of scavenging collapsed into seconds. His nails cracked, his knuckles tore open, and his shirt grew heavy with idol residue and radiation-soaked sweat.
"Enough scavenging," Meph's velvet baritone cut through the distortion. His words weren't loud, but they bent reality around them. "Show me what Hell's newest contractor has learned."
A flick of his clove ember landed on Lilith's dissolving form. The ember caught, spreading along the outlines of her body like wildfire on paper. She screamed silently—fishnet shadows, idol hoodie, and flickering horns tearing apart into static.
"NO!" Kazuo lunged, clutching the glowstick like a relic.
Reality snapped back into place with a gut-punch lurch.
Kazuo scrambled, palms raw and bleeding, to arrange the artifacts into a triangle on the trash-slick ground: cracked mic, faded poster, pulsing glowstick.
"Resonance triangulation complete!" His voice trembled as he slammed his palm onto the glowing triangle. "Stabilization protocol—initiating!"
A pulse of raw obsession ripped through the field. Plastic wrappers, posters, and magazines shivered in the landfill. And with a deafening pop, Lilith's body reformed, collapsing to the ground like a wet hoodie dropped from a line.
Kazuo sagged with relief, sweat pouring down his face. His glasses fogged instantly in the rising infernal heat.
The library had manifested again around him.
Shelves twisted into impossible shapes, tomes whispered curses with every flutter of their pages. Ash drifted from the ceiling like dead snow.
Kazuo forced the tome open across his knees, smearing soot and blood across page 83: Taxonomy of Damnation.
His cracked phone flickered with overlay data, trying and failing to reconcile the tome's diagrams with his anime references. His voice broke as he muttered:
"S-strata? But Devil's Ledger classified them by elemental affinity!"
Meph emerged from a spiral of drifting book-smoke, moving with the calm precision of a lecturer about to demolish a student's essay. He flicked a glowing ember onto Kazuo's phone screen.
The ash rearranged itself into burning labels beneath the holographic demons swirling above them:
Class Five: Sedimentary (Lilith).Class Four: Igneous (Piano-Wire Void).Class Three: Metamorphic (Scream-Weaver).Class Zero: Primordial (Shadow-Devourer).
"Anime classifications are children's crayon scribbles," Meph's voice resonated like iron gates sealing shut. "These are tectonic plates grinding in Hell's mantle."
Kazuo's fingers smeared the labels as he tapped desperately, his screen glitching under his touch. The data contradicted every forum thread he had ever debated, every wiki page he had ever moderated.
"B-but… Abyssbound episode nine!" Kazuo stammered. "It showed Igneous-class demons vulnerable to sound frequencies! That's why Piano-Wire Void's tendons—"
He froze.
On his cracked phone, distorted frames from Devil's Ledger stuttered across the screen. Characters he knew by heart now moved differently. Attacks he remembered had been rewritten.
Kazuo's breath caught. His glasses fogged in the infernal heat.
"…you altered the anime too. Didn't you?"
Meph's shadow stretched like spilled oil across the floating tomes. His cufflink glinted crimson as Lilith—stabilized, for now—munched phantom onigiri in the corner.
"Clever boy." His smirk curled like smoke. "Demons evolve. Your anime?"
Another flick of his clove. Flames consumed the cracked phone, projecting corrupted anime frames across the ceiling. Heroes died in ways they hadn't before. Villains survived untouched. Weaknesses became invulnerabilities.
"Merely Hell's outdated manuals."
Kazuo's stomach dropped. Years of obsession, forum debates, entire nights spent overanalyzing filler episodes—it was all bait. All manipulated.
"Y-you censored the vulnerabilities?" His voice cracked.
Meph's answer was a leather-bound tome plucked from the air, its cover etched with screaming faces. He opened it to diagrams of strata that bled across one another like geological layers in flux.
"Class Five," he pointed with lazy precision. Lilith's hologram twitched, chewing ghostly Kit Kats. "Feeds on transient desire—idols, obsessions, the mania of convenience."
The page turned. A shadow writhed across it: Piano-Wire Void, its tendrils vibrating like violin strings stretched too tight.
"Class Four: Igneous. It consumes structure—mathematics, music, the bones of reality."
Meph's cufflink flared. Ash labels spun through the air.
"Its weakness isn't sound, little analyst… but silence."
Kazuo's blood ran cold. His trembling fingers scrambled across his phone, overlaying the strata diagrams with corrupted anime clips. Rain dripped from his hair onto the glowing pages.
"Silence… like the null zones in Abyssbound's filler arcs!" His voice sharpened, clarity cutting through fear. "Shinjuku's underground jazz clubs—they amplify acoustic voids during last call! Piano-Wire Void's hunting there tonight!"
Lilith twitched in agreement, her shadow stretching hungrily toward the city's neon glow.
Meph's smile widened. He snapped his fingers.
The library convulsed.
Shelves screamed, ash ignited, and reality warped until Kazuo found himself in Shinjuku's rain-slick alleys. Neon signs bled color into the puddles at his feet.
"Precisely," Meph intoned. Shadows licked around Kazuo's ankles like smoke. "And it is already rewriting Bach's fugues into fracture points."
A discordant piano chord sliced through the downpour, sharp enough to make Kazuo's teeth ache. His cracked phone lit up with pulsing void-signatures, all converging on a crumbling jazz cellar up ahead.
Kazuo's hands shook as he fumbled with his messenger bag, scattering crushed melon pan crumbs across the wet pavement. He ripped out Lilith's idol artifacts—the glowstick, the cracked mic, the faded poster—and threw them into a trembling triangle on the ground.
"S-silence anchors! Just like episode fourteen's null grenades!"
The cellar door rattled. Black tendrils seeped from the cracks, vibrating in time with broken piano notes.
Meph's shadow emerged from a warped neon reflection. He flicked a clove ember toward the cellar. It froze mid-air, suspended in unnatural stillness. The tendrils recoiled as though burned.
"Null grenades?" His baritone dripped with contempt. "Child's play. True silence requires surgical precision."
The idol artifacts ignited.
The Miku glowstick burned like a blade of frozen light.The Vocaloid poster curled, its singer opening her mouth in a scream—but no sound came.The cracked mic glowed red-hot, absorbing the storm's thunder until the rain itself fell soundless.
Every raindrop crystallized mid-air before shattering silently against the pavement.
Kazuo's breath caught. His glasses fogged again, the world now painted in silence-fields. His cracked phone buzzed violently as corrupted schematics overlaid the scene, mocking him with rewritten truths.
He rewrote it all. Even the rules I thought were mine.
His heartbeat thundered in his ears—louder than the storm.
And that was the problem.
The tendrils twisted sharply, drawn to the rhythm inside his chest. Each one thrummed toward him like strings tuned to his panic.
Kazuo stumbled backward. His artifacts flared desperately, but the silence was surgical, not protective. His body was the resonance point now.
The cellar door creaked open.
From within, a dissonant chord ripped the silence apart. Tendrils uncoiled, shimmering like piano wire soaked in voidlight.
And something vast stepped forward.