The Black Bulls' headquarters was having a seizure.
One moment, it was its usual chaotic self—a hulking, misshapen beast of a building that periodically rearranged its own rooms. The next, a tremor ran through its stone bones, and the walls of the common room began to flicker. The stone turned into wireframe grids, the wooden floors went transparent, and the crooked portrait of the Wizard King temporarily dissolved into a shower of error messages.
"Hey! I was in the middle of a nap!" Magna Swing yelled, leaping off a couch that was now a semi-solid geometric shape. "What's the big idea?!"
Luck Voltia was already a blur of lightning, zipping around the room with a manic grin. "Is this a new kind of trap magic? It's so exciting!"
In the center of the room, where the main hearth should have been, hovered the source of the problem. It was a being of pure architecture, a humanoid figure made of shifting blueprints and ethereal scaffolding. It held a T-square that glowed with a cold, blue light, and its head was a gyroscope of interlocking rings that whirred with unnerving precision. An Architect.
It surveyed the gloriously messy, nonsensical layout of the base with an air of profound offense. Colorless text appeared beside it, formatted like a building inspector's report.
[Structural Anomaly Detected. Classification: Escher-Class Spatial Contradiction.]
[The existence of this structure is a violation of Euclidean geometry, architectural integrity, and common sense.]
[Action: Decompiling and archiving faulty asset.]
The Architect raised its T-square and drew a clean, straight line through the air. The wall behind Gauche, who was admiring a portrait of his sister Marie, was neatly bisected. One half simply… vanished.
"My perfect shrine to my angel!" Gauche shrieked, unleashing a blast of mirror magic. "Real Reflector Brigade!"
A hundred beams of light shot toward the Architect. But just before they struck, the creature tapped the floor. A blueprint unspooled from its feet, and the section of the room it occupied instantly reconfigured itself, moving ten feet to the left. The beams blasted into the empty space.
Vanessa, a wine bottle already in hand, watched with a lazy, calculating eye. "Rouge," she murmured.
The Red Thread of Fate shimmered into existence, and the little mana-thread cat purred, batting at the threads of causality. The Architect drew another line, this one aimed at the central support column. Vanessa's magic intervened. The line veered off course, erasing a suit of armor instead.
The Architect paused. Its gyroscopic head spun faster.
[Fate-altering magic detected. A chaotic variable.]
[Isolating variable.]
It pointed the T-square at Vanessa. But before it could act, Charmy Pappitson, her form shifting into her larger, more imposing self, sent her giant, fluffy sheep ramming toward it. "Stop trying to destroy our kitchen, you meanie!"
The sheep, an unstoppable force of cotton and mana, was met not with an object, but a rule. The Architect wrote [Intangible] in the air before it. The sheep passed right through, crashing into the far wall with a comical poof.
From deep within the groaning structure, a weak voice coughed. "Everyone… your mana… it's going wild… so… tasty…"
Henry, from his bed in the core of the base, was absorbing the chaotic spray of magic his squadmates were throwing around. The base, which was an extension of his own Recombination Magic, shuddered in agony as the Architect continued its deconstruction.
Then, the back door was kicked open.
"Alright, that's enough of that," Yami grunted, stepping inside. He took one look at the glitching walls and the floating blueprint monster. "So you're the punk wrecking my house."
The Architect turned, classifying this new, immense source of Dark Magic. [Prime-level threat. Recommending immediate structural reset.]
"Reset this," Yami said, drawing his katana.
But as he moved, the Architect's plan unfolded. Its whole body began to glow.
[FINAL COMMAND: REVERT_TO_BLUEPRINT().]
Every part of the Black Bulls' base began to dissolve. The stone turned back into raw earth, the wood into un-hewn logs, the metal into ore. Their home was being unwritten, reverted to the raw materials it was made from. This wasn't an attack on them. It was an attack on the idea of them having a home at all.
"It's coming apart!" Finral yelped, trying to open a portal to escape. His spatial magic sputtered, unable to find a stable exit point in the collapsing geometry.
Henry felt the connection to his home—to his own body—severing. But in that moment, he also felt a surge of power, a feast of mana from his friends' desperate, failed attacks. He would not let his home die.
"No…" he rasped, focusing all his will. "This… is our… place!"
The base fought back. Rooms began to spin and shift, not dissolving but actively reassembling in a chaotic dance, countering the Architect's orderly deconstruction. A wall would start to crumble, and Henry would instantly turn it into a flying staircase that slammed into the enemy. It was a battle of architectural wills.
But it was a losing one. The Architect's root command was too fundamental.
"Asta!" Yami's voice cut through the chaos. "Forget the monster! Cut the spell!"
Asta, who had been trying and failing to get a physical bead on the flickering creature, finally understood. His eyes locked onto the glowing command text hanging in the air. [REVERT_TO_BLUEPRINT()]. That was the enemy.
He planted his feet. Anti-magic, blacker than Yami's darkness, began to pour from his body, his Demon-Slayer Sword drinking the ambient dread.
The Architect raised a final, shimmering wall of pure code to protect its command.
"Not a chance," Yami growled. "Dark Magic: Black Hole."
A sphere of absolute gravity appeared, sucking in light, dust, and the Architect's defensive code. It held the creature pinned for a single, crucial second.
"RAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!"
Asta shot forward like a cannonball, propelled by Noelle's Sea Dragon's Roar. He wasn't aiming for a body. He was aiming for a sentence.
The massive black sword swung down.
The flat of the blade connected with the command line.
The anti-magic did what it always did. It said no.
There was no explosion. Just a sound like a record scratching, followed by an all-consuming silence. The glowing text shattered. The deconstruction of the base instantly reversed, stone and wood snapping back into their proper, crooked places.
The Architect, its core command having been not just broken but fundamentally negated, let out a silent scream of static. Its blueprint form unraveled, the lines of code dissolving into harmless motes of blue light. It was gone.
The Black Bulls' headquarters was saved.
In the center of the room, where the Architect had floated, a shimmer remained. It wasn't a monster. It was a tear in space, a stable, six-foot-tall oval of swirling, star-filled void. It was quiet. Permanent.
It was a Gate.
Finral Roulacase, his spatial magic buzzing with curiosity, cautiously approached it. He could feel it. It was like one of his own portals, but a million times more complex, leading somewhere… else. He reached out a hesitant hand.
"Finral, don't you—!" Yami started, but it was too late.
Finral's fingers brushed the surface of the Gate. His eyes went wide. His spatial magic automatically mapped the destination. A new location appeared in his mental catalogue of places he could open a portal to, right alongside 'Royal Capital' and 'The toilet, while Captain Yami is using it.'
The new entry was simple, but it made no sense.
[Designation: Shield Hero's Village, Sector 18-SH.]