COLD OPEN
The rain never fell on Yazukura Island anymore.
Hazuki pressed his forehead against the shattered window of the Rusted Cathedral's bell tower, watching his reflection overlap with the ruins below. Fifteen years old. Survivor of six years in hell. The kid who learned to kill shadows before he learned to read properly.
He felt nothing.
The glass was cold. He wished it were colder. Behind him, the eternal storm hummed with the white noise of a reality dying slowly—purple lightning that never struck, thunder that never stopped, the crackle of Zero Point energy eating away at the fabric of existence itself. The island remembered everything and forgot nothing.
Had it been six years? Or sixty?
Time was funny like that in Reality 8089. For someone who lived through the same ruined landscape every single day, Hazuki had lost track of what progression even meant. Survival didn't count days. It counted breaths. Each one a small victory against a world that wanted him dead.
"There used to be light here."
His voice was a ghost of itself. Exhausted. Detached. Almost dead.
He didn't turn around. There was no one to turn around for. The Cathedral had been empty for three years—since the last scavenger group tried to claim it as their territory and Hazuki had taught them, efficiently and without mercy, why that was a mistake.
"I don't remember its warmth anymore," he continued, speaking to the ruins, to the storm, to the ghost of who he used to be. "I've tried. Late at night, when the Kurofuries retreat to their nesting grounds and the storm-winds die down to whispers, I close my eyes and try to recall what sunlight felt like on skin."
A flicker of memory—golden light streaming over green fields, children laughing, his mother's hand warm in his. Gone before he could hold it.
"But I can't. I only remember its loss."
He pulled back from the window. His reflection stared back at him—dark hair deliberately unkempt, eyes that had seen too much and felt too little, a face that looked older than fifteen because survival aged you in ways that had nothing to do with years.
The exact moment the light died. The way the sky inverted like someone had pulled the world inside-out and left them trapped in the negative space where hope used to live.
Behind him, something moved in the ruins below.
Hazuki's hand went to his side instinctively, fingers already tingling with the sensation of Zero energy gathering. Not yet. Wait. Watch. Learn if it's worth the stamina.
Three shapes emerged from the shadows of collapsed buildings. Not human. Never human anymore. Kurofuries.
Stormborn Shadows—creatures formed when Zero Point energy crystallized into sentient darkness during moments of extreme violence. They looked like wolves made of static and broken light, their forms constantly glitching between states of matter, teeth crackling with purple electricity.
And they'd found prey.
A child. Maybe twelve years old. Hiding behind an overturned vehicle, blood running from a gash on her arm, breathing in panicked gasps that would draw every predator within a kilometer.
Hazuki watched. He didn't move.
This wasn't mercy. This was calculation. Kurofuries always hunted in packs. Revealing himself now would draw more from the nesting grounds. He needed them concentrated. Distracted. Their full attention focused on prey they believed was helpless.
Only then could he strike with the surgical precision that six years of survival demanded.
The kid whimpered as one of the creatures lunged forward in a testing strike. She pressed herself smaller, trying to become invisible through sheer desperation.
It never worked. Hazuki had tried that himself once, years ago, back when he still believed fear was something you could hide from.
The second Kurofurie circled to her blind spot. The third moved to cut off her only escape route. Professional. Efficient. These things weren't mindless monsters—they were evolved predators adapted to hunt the only prey that mattered anymore.
The child screamed as the first one lunged for real this time—Hazuki's eyes flashed lime-yellow.
The air around his right hand distorted, rippling like heat waves rising from pavement that hadn't felt sun in six years. Reality bent around his fingers, responding to something deeper than thought or will—responding to the fundamental despair that had soaked into his bones so thoroughly it had become a source of power.
Fragments of light spiraled toward his palm like moths to flame. They coalesced. Constructed. Compiled themselves into form.
In exactly two seconds, he held a gun.
Not metal. Not any solid matter that existed in standard physics. A flowing, neon-yellow construct that pulsed with unstable energy, its form constantly shifting—sometimes a handgun with clean lines, sometimes a rifle with a barrel too long to be practical, sometimes something alien that hurt to look at directly.
Infinite ammo. Limited only by his stamina. His will to continue existing. His despair, refined and weaponized into something that could kill creatures born from the death of hope itself.
"Three shots," he said to no one. He jumped.
ACT ONE: THE HUNTER
The transformation was immediate and total. One moment Hazuki was a statue on a rooftop. The next he was a falling blade, gravity weaponized into momentum, every movement economical and precise because wasted motion meant wasted energy and wasted energy meant death.
The first Kurofurie didn't see him until the Zero-construct barrel was already pressed against the back of its skull. Hazuki fired. The sound wasn't like a normal gunshot—it was reality tearing, a sharp crack followed by feedback static. The creature's head exploded into dissipating energy, its form losing coherence as the Zero power that held it together unraveled.
It didn't die so much as cease to be. Erased from existence like a file deleted from a hard drive.
The second Kurofurie reacted with predator speed, abandoning the girl to lunge at this new threat. Hazuki was already pivoting mid-air, his body twisting with the fluid grace of someone who had done this hundreds of times before.
He fired twice—gut, throat—each shot placed with surgical precision. The creature's momentum carried it forward even as its structural integrity failed, and it collapsed into glitching static that flickered between solid and transparent before fading completely.
The third one was faster. Smarter. Or perhaps just luckier.
It caught Hazuki's ankle mid-pivot, claws sinking through cloth and flesh with the sensation of ice and electricity combined, and slammed him into the ground with enough force to crater concrete. The impact shattered stone. Hazuki's body bounced once, twice, rolled—his Zero-construct gun flickering as his concentration broke.
Blood filled his mouth. He could taste copper and something else, something chemical and wrong that came from channeling corrupted Zero energy through a human body not designed for such abuse.
The Kurofurie pounced, going for the throat in a classic kill-strike, its jaws opening wide enough to engulf Hazuki's entire head—Hazuki's arm snapped up. The gun materialized again, solidifying from yellow mist directly into his grip.
He fired point-blank into the creature's open maw.
Yellow light erupted from within the Kurofurie's body, transforming it into a grotesque lantern for one frozen moment before it detonated outward. Static. Sparks. Silence.
Hazuki lay in the crater for three seconds, his stomach heaving. Blood ran from his nose in twin streams—a side effect of Zero-Flux Enmity, the power eating at his physical integrity from within.
The gun in his hand dissolved, energy scattering like dying fireflies. Each mote of light represented a fraction of life force he'd never get back.
Slowly, with movements that looked painful even though his face showed nothing, Hazuki pushed himself upright. His vision swam. His muscles screamed. Every use of his power drained him—not just physical energy, but something deeper. Emotional energy. The will to continue existing.
Each shot from his Zero-construct weapons was fueled by his own despair. And there were limits to how much despair a human body could weaponize before it started consuming itself.
He had maybe three more shots left in him today. Four if he pushed into dangerous territory. Five would probably kill him.
The kid was still there, pressed against the transport vehicle. Her eyes were wide with an emotion Hazuki recognized but couldn't remember the name of anymore.
Terror. That was it. She was terrified. Not of the dead Kurofuries. Of him. "You're..." Her voice trembled. "You're a Zero Looper..."
The words hung in the air between them. Zero Looper. A title given to the rare individuals—perhaps a dozen across all of Yazukura Island—who could interface directly with the corrupted Zero Point energy and survive. Most people who tried died instantly, their bodies unable to contain forces that operated outside standard physics.
The few who succeeded became something between human and weapon.
Hazuki stared at her. His expression didn't change. His eyes, still faintly glowing with residual yellow energy, might have been looking at a person or at an empty street for all the emotion they conveyed.
"Run." "Th-thank you, I thought I was going to—" "I didn't do it for you." His voice was cold. Clinical. Explaining a simple fact. "Their corpses will draw more Kurofuries within the next thirty seconds. Scavenger packs. Smaller but more numerous, and I don't have the stamina left to handle a swarm. If you're still here when they arrive, you'll die slowly instead of quickly. Run. Now."
The hope drained from her face like water from a broken vessel. She ran, stumbling over debris, disappearing into the ruins that covered Yazukura like diseased skin over rotting bone. Hazuki watched her go. He felt nothing. Not satisfaction at saving a life. Not guilt at his coldness. Not pride at his efficiency.
Nothing.
The capacity for those emotions had been scraped out of him one thin layer at a time until only the shape of them remained, like fossils pressed into rock—the impression of feeling without the feeling itself.
He turned and walked toward the Cathedral's interior, his movements already smooth again, the pain filed away into the same mental compartment where he kept hunger and exhaustion and the memory of what hope felt like.
ACT TWO: MEMORIES THAT BLEED
Inside the Rusted Cathedral, the silence was different. Heavier. The kind of quiet that accumulated in places where prayers went unanswered for so long that even gods had stopped listening.
Hazuki's living space occupied a corner of what had been the nave. Salvaged supplies stacked with military precision—canned food stolen from raided convoys, water purification tablets worth more than gold, weapons taken from corpses and maintained obsessively because a jammed gun meant death.
On the wall, scratched into stone with what looked like a knife point: tally marks. Two thousand, one hundred and eighty-seven. Days survived. Six years of choosing to wake up in a world that offered nothing but more days exactly like this one.
Should I keep counting? The thought arrived like an unwanted guest. Hazuki shoved it aside and sat against the cold wall, his back to stone that somehow felt colder than the air.
He'd learned not to sleep deeply. True sleep meant vulnerability, and vulnerability meant death. But he could rest his eyes. Could let his body process the damage from channeling Zero energy. Could drift in the space between waking and sleeping where memories waited like predators.
The memory surfaced unbidden. His father's face. His mother's smile. A house that didn't exist anymore, in a world that had been erased so thoroughly it might as well have been fiction.
He was seven. Maybe eight. Running through fields of real grass under a real sky, his arms spread wide like he was trying to embrace the whole world. Unaware that the world would soon try to kill him and everyone he loved.
"Hazuki, honey, don't wander too far from the house." His mother's voice. Warm. Distant. Impossibly gentle. "Your father and I need to be able to see you, okay?"
"Let him explore, love." His father's laugh—a sound like music from a broken instrument. "He's got your spirit. Your curiosity. He's going to do amazing things someday."
Young Hazuki chasing something. A butterfly maybe. Or just the wind. Not knowing that someday was a lie. That amazing things required a world where amazing was still possible. The memory glitched.
Digital artifacts corrupted the image like a video file degrading in real-time. The sky inverted—blue to purple, light to dark. The grass turned to ash beneath small feet. The laughter cut off mid-note, replaced by screaming. The Sixth Storm War. A war created by people who wanted to show their own ideals to the island and caused chaos throughout the lands.
The name made it sound organized. Like a battle with sides and objectives. It was chaos. Explosions blooming like poisonous flowers. Buildings collapsing. People running in every direction and no direction.
Young Hazuki's parents grabbing him, their faces transformed by terror into masks he barely recognized. Pushing him toward a shelter built into the basement.
"Stay inside!" His mother's voice breaking. "Don't open the door until we come back! No matter what you hear! Promise me, Hazuki! Promise me you'll stay inside!"
"Mama, I'm scared!" Nine years old. Crying. Not understanding. "Don't leave me! Don't—" His father sealed the door from outside. Hazuki heard locks engaging, bolts sliding home. Then footsteps running away.
Then explosions, closer now, close enough to feel through the walls. Then screaming. Then the building above him groaning, metal tearing, concrete pulverizing.
Then the worst sound of all: nothing.
Complete silence, except for a nine-year-old child pounding on metal that wouldn't open. Screaming until his voice broke. Begging for parents who would never answer. Crying until dehydration made his throat close and his eyes burn and he understood, that he was completely and permanently alone now.
Hazuki's eyes opened. No transition. No gradual waking. One moment the memory, the next the present, like flipping a switch.
"Crying dried my throat faster than starvation," he said to the empty Cathedral. His voice was mechanical. Reciting a lesson learned. "I learned that day. I pounded on that door for six hours before I stopped. I screamed for three before my voice gave out. I cried until I couldn't produce tears anymore, until my eyes felt like they were full of sand."
He stood, movements mechanical, and walked to the window that overlooked Yazukura's central district.
"And when I finally stopped, when I finally accepted they weren't coming back, I was so dehydrated I couldn't stand. I had to crawl to find water. Had to drink from a broken pipe that tasted like rust and chemicals. Had to learn that survival meant prioritizing function over feeling."
The purple storm churned overhead in its endless cycle. Lightning that never struck. Thunder that never stopped.
"They taught me something else too, Mom. Dad." His hand clenched into a fist. "They taught me that love makes you weak. That caring about people means caring about things you can't protect. Memory makes you human, but being human in this world is a death sentence."
He leaned his forehead against the cold glass.
"So I stopped being human. I stopped remembering what your faces looked like except in dreams I can't control. I stopped hoping for rescue or change or anything except the next meal and the day after this one. I became something that survives, because survival is all I have left."
His voice dropped to barely above a whisper.
"And you know what the worst part is? It worked. I'm still here. I'm still alive. And I hate myself for it." The air pressure changed. Hazuki's ears popped. A sound like reality tearing filled the air—a frequency that existed somewhere between sound and sensation. Purple lightning arced across the sky in patterns that were decidedly unnatural, geometric rather than organic, like circuitry drawn in electricity.
His exhaustion forgotten, his body shifted instantly into combat readiness. A rift.
Through the window, Hazuki watched a massive tear in reality forming above the island's center. It looked like someone had taken a knife to the fabric of spacetime and carved an opening into somewhere else. Energy poured out—raw, chaotic, beautiful in the way that nuclear explosions were beautiful.
Power so intense it distorted vision and made the air taste like copper and ozone. Then he saw movement on the horizon. Not Kurofuries. Not scavengers.
Something worse.
Figures in black armor, their plates inscribed with glowing red symbols that pulsed in time with heartbeats. Weapons that hummed with energy even from this distance. Moving in perfect formation, disciplined and deadly.
Dozens of them. Maybe more behind the first wave. "The Black Crescent," Hazuki whispered. The name tasted like ash.
Jinsora Kurogetsu's army. Loop-born soldiers who had died and been resurrected by the same broken physics that created everything else wrong with Reality 8089.
They were coming. They were coming in force. And they were coming for him.
ACT THREE: THE ZERO LOOPER
Hazuki descended from the Cathedral like a ghost given flesh. His movements were silent in the way that only came from six years of learning to be invisible in a world that hunted anything that moved.
He reached the ground level as the first soldiers entered the plaza—a wide open space that had once been a market but was now just another graveyard decorated with empty stalls and broken dreams.
Twenty soldiers. Thirty. More pouring in behind them like water through a broken dam. A voice echoed across the ruins, amplified by technology that somehow still worked in a world where most electronics had failed years ago. Deep. Charismatic. The kind of voice that could inspire loyalty or terror with equal ease.
"Kanaguri Hazuki." The name rolled off his tongue like a verdict. "The kid who kills shadows. The child who learned to play with Zero energy. The orphan who survived six years alone in hell and came out sharper instead of broken."
A figure emerged from the battalion's center.
Tall—perhaps six and a half feet, towering over his soldiers. Scarred—his face a roadmap of violence survived, each mark a story of death narrowly avoided. His eyes were like molten steel, liquid metal that somehow held shape.
Jinsora Kurogetsu.
The Black Crescent's warlord. A leader who had died in the First Storm War and been resurrected by Loop physics as something more and less than human.
He radiated danger the way fire radiated heat—not as a choice or an affect, but as a fundamental property of his existence.
"I've heard stories about you." Jinsora's smile was a terrible thing. "A kid who appeared three years ago, killing Kurofuries that veteran soldiers ran from. Who raided our supply convoys and disappeared like smoke. Who learned to weaponize despair itself and turned it into power."
He spread his arms.
"I want to see if the stories are true. I want to see if you're really as dangerous as they say. So come on then, Zero Looper. Show me what six years of hell have taught you."
Hazuki didn't respond immediately.
He was calculating. Thirty-seven soldiers, all armed with weapons that still functioned despite six years of entropy. Jinsora himself was an unknown variable—Loop-born meant he had abilities beyond normal human limits.
The plaza had three escape routes, but two were blocked now, and the third...
No. No escape. This was a kill box, and he was in it. Sometimes survival meant accepting bad odds and figuring out how to beat them anyway. He raised his hand.
Zero energy gathered around his fingers, faster this time, more controlled. Three years of practice had refined his technique, turned instinct into art into weapon. The lime-yellow construct formed—but different from before. Longer barrel. Larger frame. A rifle optimized for multiple targets rather than single kills.
"Leave." Jinsora laughed, genuinely delighted. "Or what? You'll kill us all? You're fifteen years old and you can barely stand after fighting three Kurofuries. You think you can take on the Black Crescent Battalion?" "Eighteen."
Jinsora's smile faded slightly. "What?" Hazuki raised the rifle, sights along the barrel with movements that were purely mechanical. "I'll kill eighteen of you before my stamina runs out completely. Maybe twenty if I'm efficient and get lucky with critical hits."
He paused.
"The question isn't whether I can win. I can't. You know it. I know it. The question is which eighteen want to die first. Which eighteen of your soldiers do you value so little that you're willing to sacrifice them just to capture one exhausted child?"
The plaza fell silent.
The soldiers shifted uncomfortably, exchanging glances. They had signed up to fight scavengers and monsters, not to die proving a point to a kid who might as well be a grenade with the pin already pulled.
"Because that's what this is, isn't it?" Hazuki continued, his voice still flat but the words cutting deep. "A test. You don't need me. You don't even really want me. You're just curious. Curious enough to spend eighteen lives finding out if the rumors are true."
He adjusted his grip on the rifle.
"So I'll make it simple. They're true. I am that dangerous. And if you don't leave right now, I'll prove it by painting this plaza with your soldiers' blood until my body gives out."
Jinsora's smile returned, wider than before.
"I like you, son. You've got steel where most people have hope. You understand cost-benefit analysis in a way that most adults don't. You'd make a fine weapon once we break you down and rebuild you properly."
He raised his hand.
"Take him alive. Acceptable casualties: twenty." The soldiers charged.
And Hazuki, fifteen years old and so tired he could barely remember what rest felt like, decided that if he was going to die today, he'd at least die proving he was worth more than twenty lives.
The first shot took a soldier in the gut. The warrior's armor cracked. Light burst from the impact point. He flew backward, crashed into two others. The rifle shifted forms. Longer range. Hazuki fired again. Again. Each shot precise. Each kill mechanical. Five soldiers down.
His nose was bleeding now. His vision blurred at the edges. The rifle flickered, destabilizing.
Ten soldiers down. A blade came from his blind spot. He twisted, barely avoided it, fired point-blank. The soldier's face disappeared in yellow light. Fifteen down. He was slowing. Breathing hard. Blood running from his eyes now—tears of energy, not emotion. The rifle dissolved and reformed as dual pistols, smaller, requiring less power to maintain. Eighteen down.
His legs gave out.
Hazuki collapsed to one knee, both pistols aimed at the remaining soldiers who had frozen in a semicircle around him, suddenly very aware that nineteen of their comrades were already dead or dying.
Jinsora stood at the edge of the plaza, still smiling, still watching. "Impressive," he said. "Truly. You weren't lying. But you're done now, aren't you? I can see it. You're running on fumes and spite." Hazuki's arms shook. The pistols flickered. He had maybe one shot left. Two if he was willing to die immediately after.
A bolt of blue lightning struck the ground between him and the soldiers.
Everyone jumped back. The air crackled with electricity. And through the dissipating energy, a figure landed. A kid. White hair. Blue-cracked irises that leaked light like fractures in porcelain. Electricity crackling around her body in patterns that looked almost organic.
"Back off," she said. Her voice was defiant. Terrified. Determined. Yozuki Raimei. The Stormborn Kid. Jinsora's eyes widened with recognition and delight. "Two anomalies for the price of one! My luck keeps getting better."
Yozuki glanced back at Hazuki. Their eyes met. "Can you stand?" "Why?" The word came out strained. "Because if you can't, we're both dead." Hazuki's hand clenched. Energy gathered one more time—weaker, unstable, pulling from reserves that didn't exist anymore. The construct formed. Not pistols. Not a rifle.
Dual handguns, smaller than before, barely cohesive, but enough. He stood. His legs shook. Blood ran down his face like war paint.
"I lied," he said to Jinsora. "What?" Hazuki raised both guns, his arms trembling with the effort. "I can kill twenty." They fired simultaneously—Hazuki's Zero constructs and Yozuki's lightning. The plaza erupted in light and sound and the smell of ozone and burning. When the smoke cleared, the Black Crescent soldiers were in retreat. Bodies littered the ground. Survivors dragging wounded. Jinsora stood alone, his coat singed, still grinning like this was the most entertainment he'd had in years.
"We'll meet again, Zero Looper." He turned, walking casually toward a purple rift that opened behind him. "And next time, you won't have help." He vanished. Hazuki's guns dissolved.
His legs gave out. Yozuki caught him, barely. "Hey! Stay awake!" "Why..." His voice was fading. "Why did you help me?" "Because—" She hesitated. "Because I've been watching you. Because I think... I think we're the same. Both of us living in this broken world. Both of us weapons pretending to be human."
Hazuki's eyes were already closing. "Nothing is the same in this world..." Consciousness faded like smoke.
EPILOGUE
The camera rose above them. Above the ruined plaza littered with bodies. Above the Rusted Cathedral. Above Yazukura Island with its purple storm and eternal twilight.
The massive rift in the sky pulsed once—bright, ominous, growing larger. And somewhere beyond it, in another reality, another Fortnite island existed. Bright. Alive. Full of light that Hazuki had forgotten how to remember.
The door between worlds was opening. His voice whispered through the darkness like a prayer to gods that had stopped listening. "There used to be light here. I don't remember its warmth. But maybe... maybe I will again."
The screen faded to black. In the silence that followed, only the storm remained. Eternal. Unending. Waiting.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT EPISODE: "The Gun That Burns the Soul"]