The forest smelled of rain and old leaves, though no cloud bothered the sky. Arata walked without aim, hands in the pockets of a coat that belonged as much to the body he wore as it did to the life he had left. He let the sunlight stutter through branches and listened to his own heartbeat, that steady metronome that had nothing to do with the Kurogane name and everything to do with the person behind it.
He liked being small. He liked being the blank space in a painting where nobody looked. But smallness bored him if it meant stagnation. Boredom, he had long since decided, was the enemy of interesting things.
What can I do to have more fun and still look weak to everyone else? he wondered, idly.
A smile ghosted his mouth. There was a delicious cruelty to the idea: perform as a shadow by day, and by night—by choice—be someone else. Someone who could do anything. Someone whose existence did not tarnish Arata Kurogane's careful invisibility because no one would ever link the two.
He stopped under an oak and leaned his back to the trunk. The bark was rough and real beneath his palm. Thought by thought, he built the outline of a plan in the quiet.
Create a next me. Not a second body. Not a clone. A character. A personality. A mask.
He said it aloud, to hear how it sounded. The name came to him like a thrown coin that clicked into place.
John Merciless.
The name felt right—harsh consonants, no softness. John who did not hesitate, who took what he wanted and burned everything else. He loved the theatricality of it. He loved how easy it would be for polite society to dismiss a masked villain as an aberration, a rumor, a thing to be crushed by their knights while Arata watched from the wings.
He sketched the role in his head as if composing a play. John Merciless would lead an organization—not some petty band of cutthroats, but a structured shadow: cells that whispered in ports, agents who trafficked in rumor and fear, a banner seen only by those who needed to obey. An organization gave him reach while keeping his true self a tidy distance behind a curtain.
But to create a persona in a world of Circuits, theatrics were not enough. If John was to be feared, he needed an appearance and an opening move that would make the world remember the face and never connect it to the pale, ignored boy of the Kurogane estate.
A white mask. No ornate filigree—clean lines, blank and brutal. Black markings, like scars painted in ink, reminding the eye of old wounds that healed wrong. The mask would hide his voice. It would hide his mannerisms. It would be a flat, impossible smile that taught people to mistrust everything they saw. He pictured it in detail: the way light would run across its surface, the hollow void of the eye-holes that suggested depth where there was none.
But a mask alone is a trick. A mask can be torn. He smirked. We need a suit.
Arata's mind pivoted to materials. He imagined fabrics taught in stories—woven dragonhide, rune-threaded silk—but those were too predictable. He wanted something smarter: thin, unassuming clothes that could become armor when necessary and mend themselves when torn. He pictured the suit as a lattice of microthreads, each thread seeded with a "regenerative knot"—a small fragment of the whole that, if left in place, would allow the rest to reconstitute. Tear five inches out of the sleeve and it would stitch itself over, hairline seams knitting like a visible wound closing. If the seed piece were taken away entirely, the suit would not be lost—only slower to repair, buying him strategic vulnerability he could exploit for spectacle.
The suit would be magic-resistant, too—not invulnerable, but layered with anti-mana sigils. He mapped in his head how sigils scattered across the weaves turned incoming spells into harmless static, or at least threw them off the true target by a fraction of a second. An enchantment like that made a fight with mages messy, terrifying, and strangely theatrical—precisely the theater John would thrive in.
He considered voice modulation; he imagined a throat-guard that warped sound in a whispery, unreachable frequency, so that the timbre of John's speech sounded mechanical and unmoored. The mask's mouth would not move like a face; it would be a carved rictus, forever unreadable.
Arata took a step deeper into the trees and his mind stretched into engineering: where to procure materials, which of the clan's servants could be subtly bribed with rumors of brilliance, what caravans carried the right bolts of cloth. He mapped the supply chain like a strategist mapping enemy supply lines. Every operative, every shipment, every rumor could be a node. John Merciless would be an assembly of moving pieces, all of them perfectly ordinary in isolation.
And the ultimate attack, he thought, fingers curling at the idea like an appetitive hand. An opening gambit that leaves a signature so distinct the world will either hate John forever or never speak his name for fear of temp doom.
He remembered a book from his old life—the one he'd read nights instead of studying—pages of astrophysics bookmarked with grocery receipts and marginal ink. He remembered the word that had fascinated him then: nova. A star flaring bright, then fading; a death that stung the sky. It was a violent, precise word.
A memory was not a formula, but imagination could be cruelly inventive. He let that memory fold into the present.
What if I call it Nova? he whispered.
In his head he built the mechanics of the thing—not as an engineer of the real world, but as a mind that understood systems and logic. A nova in space happened because of a runaway reaction—fuel, compression, ignition. On this world there were no nuclear reactors as men on Earth understood them, but there were Circuits, and there was the Great Circuit, and there were the rules Arata now bent to thought. He would not create a star; he would coerce the local fabric of reality into releasing energy the way a ruptured dam spilled a river.
He pictured the Nova as a "cascade rupture": a focused, cascading unwinding of the very meridians that held matter together within a localized radius. Imagine a thread in a tapestry being pulled so violent that neighboring threads followed, tearing a perfect circle out of reality. The outward flash would be blinding, the heat all-consuming. The center—the point where his intent and the Circuit's pressure met—would hollow out, leaving a scar: a hole in the world where physics hesitated to walk.
He enumerated outcomes in cold delight. Small uses—an intimidation, the death of a coastal guard tower—would leave a neat crater no larger than a man's fist, scorched earth and a hole of maybe five inches across. Bigger uses, like confronting a town: a gaping wound twenty meters wide and, depending on how much Circuit pressure he put in, a thousand feet deep, or a mound of ragged rubble where a market used to be. The more he poured in, the more the world would obey the slash of his will. Each Nova would have a signature: the white flash like a cold sun, and the black ringed wound.
He considered the cost. You did not rip at reality without pay. His soul-circuit could manifest things because it bent belief into existence, but belief without economy left one exhausted, fragmented, possibly—worse—noticed. He would need anchors. He would need ritual components, catalysts to focus the surge: a shard of stone ritually charged, a line of runes drawn in blood—tactile things people could trade and thieves could fence. Cannons of rumor. The seed of the suit. The left eye could be the trigger, a focusing lens to set the initial pattern.
Why would it be possible for John Merciless to do it? he mused aloud, because the question needed answering in his own logic. Because the soul-circuit is a fragment of the Great Circuit. Because the left eye is a direct meridian. Because reality here answers to patterns. That last—reality answering to patterns—was his most important thought. If you could sketch a truth strongly enough in the weave, the weave would obey. He had only to be precise.
He crouched and drew a circle in the muddy earth with a stick, then filled it with a smear of crushed leaf and crushed stone. He imagined the circle as his lab. Within it, John Merciless would practice. The first Nova would be small—perhaps no more than the size of a crate—but it would be visible. It would get attention. It would give the organization a calling card.
And once the world knows the name 'John Merciless,' they will speak it with fear. They will send knights and clerics, and their attention will be on that name. They will not guess at the boy who sits beneath the cherry trees smiling.
His chest warmed with the neat cruelty of it. He was, he knew, being monstrous in the best way—creative, elaborate, theatrical. He enjoyed the taste of strategy. He enjoyed thinking three steps ahead of arrogance.
He rose, dusted the dirt from his knees, and tucked the stick back into his pocket as though it were nothing at all. The forest resumed its indifferent song. Arata Kurogane walked back toward the estate like a man who had only trimmed his nails and decided to take a quiet walk in the afternoon.
Inside him, a second life took shape: a mask, a suit, sigils, seeds, a banner sewn in whispered contracts. John Merciless existed now—an idea stitched by a man who had learned the most dangerous lesson of both his worlds: the world obeyed those who believed strongly enough.
We will make you real, he promised the name, and the thought of it tasted like thunder.