A hundred years captive to time—not a span for true fury. It merely ages, like cursed wine, growing stronger and denser.
The first was flame in a human shell. Hikaru Kaname. Tall as a young cryptomeria, with a blacksmith's physique forged in the crucibles of countless battles. His long hair the color of smoldering coals was tied in a messy bun, strands escaping to frame a face with sharp, fire-chiseled features. In his eyes, the color of molten copper, lived an unquenchable conflagration. His Kokurō, "Flame of the Eternal Forge," wasn't mere pyrotechnics. It was authority over the very essence of combustion—expansion, purification, insatiable hunger. He didn't create fire. He commanded matter to remember it was merely a temporary form before the face of all-consuming heat.
The second was his shadowy genius, reflection in smoke. Ayami Iroha. Of average height, fragile-looking, in a simple gray-blue kimono that seemed to constantly tremble, losing clear boundaries. His features were blurred, unmemorable, like a face seen through rippling air over heated stones. Only his eyes, gray and bottomless as an ashen sky, betrayed focused acuity of mind. His Kokurō, "Fabric of Scattered Echo," granted him power over subtle matters: over sound, refraction of light, surface tension of air, the very illusion of form. He could make air hard as steel, force light to lie, sound to cut. His strength wasn't in crude impact, but in perfect, intangible distortion of reality.
A hundred years ago, they and Tatsumi Ryūsei, master of whirlwinds, were the "Triad of Raging Elements"—a thunderstorm that swept across the battlefields of the era of turmoil. The chaos of the Game had awakened them. And when Narikawari's list pierced their consciousness, their gazes, fiery and ashen, met in silent agreement. Ryūsei. Only one key. He was weak, vulnerable. They had to find him, unite. With the "Triad," they could challenge anyone. Even those monsters atop the rankings.
They moved through the distorted landscapes of the Colony, swift and purposeful. And then...
The air died.
Not metaphorically. It ceased to vibrate, transmit sound, fill lungs. It became heavy, viscous, and utterly lifeless. Aural pressure descended upon them not as a wave, but as the entire ocean floor, nailing them in place. Every muscle in Hikaru's body screamed under unbearable weight. Dark spots swam before Ayami's eyes—his delicate perception of matter was crushed by a monstrous, monolithic presence. Cold, sticky sweat broke out on Kaname's brow and streamed down Iroha's temples. They couldn't leap away. Couldn't even twitch a finger. They could only stand, feeling their own power, their century-old fury, turn into the pitiful trembling of a mouse before a boa constrictor.
And then, from behind them, from the very emptiness, a voice sounded. Calm, even, devoid of all theatricality. A voice that sounded like a sentence read out of bored duty.
"Excuse me for interrupting... But is it him you're looking for?"
Something heavy and wet slapped onto the cracked earth between them and rolled. Stopped. Stared at them with empty sockets.
The head of Tatsumi Ryūsei. His familiar face, now forever frozen in a mask of final horror. The cut on the neck was perfectly smooth, as if the throat simply... ceased to exist in a certain plane.
"Can it be... the 'Cursed Sovereign'?!" a hoarse whisper escaped Hikaru's parched throat. It wasn't a question. It was an acknowledgment of the end.
Quiet, measured footsteps sounded from behind. Akatsuki Magoro walked around them, unhurriedly, as a master inspecting his domain. His ashen kimono didn't rustle. His heavy, all-seeing gaze slid over Ayami, lingered on Hikaru.
He stopped directly before Kaname. Due to his height, the flame mage physically looked down upon the Emperor-Demon. That detail, that tiny, illusory advantage, in an instant gained monstrous, unbearable weight.
Magoro slowly raised his head. His eyes met Hikaru's. They held no anger, no challenge. Only cold, analytical curiosity mixed with slight... discomfort.
"You seem a bit tall," Magoro uttered, each syllable falling like a stone into a bottomless well of silence. "Wouldn't you like to be a little shorter?"
Survival instinct, ancient and blind, jerked Hikaru's body backward. His will, squeezed in the vise of terror, burst forth in the most primitive, most powerful impulse. He didn't even shout the technique's name. He simply wanted the space between him and this creature to turn into pure, all-cleansing flame.
From his outstretched palm, with the roar of tearing vacuum, erupted the Pillar of the Eternal Forge's Flame. It wasn't a beam, but a catastrophe compressed into a cylinder. A white-blue core at ten thousand degrees, surrounded by a spiral of solar fire melting not only flesh but Scars, the very memory of matter. The air howled, stone under the beam instantly vaporized, leaving behind a trench of molten glass.
Akatsuki Magoro didn't even sway.
He raised a hand. Not to block. Not to counterattack. He simply drew the edge of his palm through the air before him, as if wiping dust from an invisible surface.
Space folded.
The fire pillar, this apex of Hikaru's power, met not force, but law. The law of revised reality. It wasn't extinguished. It was sliced. Dissected along its entire monstrous length into two perfect halves, which howled apart to the sides, incinerating cliffs at the edges, but not touching Magoro.
And the line of that cut, pure, absolute, and inexorable, continued its path.
It passed through the head of Hikaru Kaname.
Not through the throat. Through the forehead, exactly in the middle. A perfect geometric cut, dividing precisely 50% of the brain. No more, no less. The left half of his face momentarily retained a grimace of wild fury and incomprehension. The right—was already an empty, dead mask. No blood sprayed from the cut. The tissues simply... parted, revealing a cross-section of bone and brain, which immediately whitened and crumbled to dust.
The body of the "Flame of the Eternal Forge," deprived of will and half its consciousness, collapsed to the ground with a dull, lifeless thud. Centuries of fury, dreams, power—all turned to nothing with one indifferent wave of a hand.
Akatsuki Magoro slowly turned to Ayami Iroha.
He still stood, paralyzed by horror, which had been replaced by icy, piercing clarity of despair. His mind, accustomed to calculating thousands of variables, battered against a wall of absolute zero. Run? Pointless. Attack? He saw what happened to Hikaru. His Kokurō, "Fabric of Scattered Echo," was a subtle, intellectual force. Against brute force—it was useless. But... perhaps against this... reality-rewriting will...
With a quiet, almost inaudible exhale, Ayami surrendered. Not his life. Strategy. He released the attempt to resist directly. Instead, he concentrated all his will, all his skill, on one thing: Distortion.
"Kokurō: Fabric of Scattered Echo," he whispered, his voice thin as a spider's thread. "Full Reflection of Akamagara."
He didn't attack Magoro. He attacked the reality around himself and around Magoro. The air trembled and fractured into millions of microscopic prisms. Light bent, creating countless mirrored copies of Ayami, each standing in a slightly different pose, breathing at a different rhythm, emitting a distorted energy signature. Sound multiplied, turning into a deafening hum drowning all directions. The very space between them became viscous, non-linear, breaking any direct attack. This wasn't a shield. It was an illusion of such complexity it bordered on creating a pocket reality—a labyrinth for perception where there was no up, no down, no true target.
Ayami stood at the center of this madness, his mind burning from unbearable strain. Blood trickled thinly from his nose and ears. He knew he'd last seconds. But perhaps that was enough to... to what? See a weakness? Catch a glimpse of possibility?
Akatsuki Magoro looked upon this riot of distorted lights and sounds. For the first time in this encounter, a spark flickered in his eyes... not of interest, but of light, almost contemptuous boredom, replaced by a decision.
"Rather cute," he uttered. His voice sounded clearly, without distortion, directly in Ayami's consciousness, over the chaos he'd created. "A desperate gesture of an insect trying to hide by changing the pattern on its shell. But you see... why bother solving a puzzle when you can simply erase the board?"
Magoro closed his eyes for a moment, as if listening to something within himself. His thought, cold and clear, raced through the silence of his mind: "In principle, I've recovered about thirty percent of my strength. In this form, I should already be capable of using... it. Even if just for an instant. Let this be an epitaph for one who understood the futility of illusions."
On his face, usually concealed by the scarf, a smile appeared. Not kind, not evil in the usual sense. It was the smirk of an architect taking up a forgotten, beloved tool for the first time in centuries. The smirk of a god remembering what it's like to create.
Slowly, with almost ceremonial grace, he folded the fingers of both hands into a strange, inconceivable sign. Not like a mudra, but like the roots of an ancient, poisonous tree breaking stone. The air around him screeched at an inaudible frequency, and the very fabric of the Colony trembled, sensing the birth of something surpassing its own distorted laws.
"Kokurō," his voice sounded not from his throat. It came from the earth, the sky, the cracks in reality. "Graveyard of Hell."
And the Ignition began. Not a cry, but a measured, inexorable reading of the sentence:
"Epoch..."
Time didn't just stop. It collapsed. Clocks, heartbeats, falling dust—all froze in one infinitely stretched second. Only Ayami's consciousness, trapped in this point of non-time, continued to work, perceiving the nightmare unfolding beyond all laws of physics.
"Descent..."
The space beneath Ayami's feet and around him gave way. Not into emptiness. It yielded to something else. The earth turned into a polished black surface, cold as cosmic ice and reflecting the distorted horror in his eyes.
"Great Dissection."
And from the center of this black surface, with the quiet, guttural grind of breaking geology, She began to grow.
The Golden Stoepa.
Colossal. Forty meters from base to tip. But it wasn't an architectural structure. It was a sculpture of eternal suffering. Each of its tiers, each facet, each ornament was molded, smelted, compressed from countless faces. Faces of sinners, warriors, Majutsushi, ordinary people—all whose souls had ever been torn, distorted, or consumed by Magoro's will. They weren't screaming. They existed in eternal agony of a silent scream, their features fluid and shifting, merging into a continuous stream of gilded despair. The Stoepa slowly, with deathly grace, rotated counter-clockwise, against the very flow of time and karma.
Around its base raged not water, but thick, ink-black fog. It smelled not of dampness, but of incense mixed with the reek of burnt flesh and the sweetish stench of decay. This fog coiled around the steps, streamed between the faces, like smoke from the deepest infernal censers.
And from the black surface of the earth around, within a hundred-meter radius, hands began to sprout. Thousands, tens of thousands of hands. Not skeletons, but bodhisattvas—perfect, with elegant, genderless fingers and smooth, jade-like skin. All were folded in refined, sacred prayer gestures—Anjali, Dhyana, Varada... But instead of palms, in the place where divine mercy or wisdom should reside, blades protruded. Sharply honed, curved ritual kukri knives, shining with cold, unearthly light. A forest of pious hands crowned with instruments of sacrifice, praying for eternal slaughter.
And above it all, in the cracked sky of the Colony, unfolded a giant, phantasmal Wheel of Samsara. It was transparent as glass and just as fragile. It slowly, creakingly rotated, and with each revolution, huge chunks broke off from it. They fell downward, scattering into a rain of golden dust. This dust glittered with a soft, deceptively beautiful light. But, touching the earth, the fog, the hands, it emitted a quiet, hissing sound. Each speck was a microscopic, incredibly sharp blade, cutting on a molecular level everything it touched. It was blessing and curse in one—dazzling, sacred dust carrying absolute, silent dissection.
Ayami Iroha stood amid this divine nightmare. His illusions crumbled like a house of cards before a true monstrosity. His Kokurō, "Fabric of Scattered Echo," met its absolute opposite—not brute force, but a finished, perfected reality created by the will of a single being. He saw the faces on the Stoepa, recognized fleeting features of ancient enemies and forgotten friends. He felt the cold of the blades protruding from prayerful hands. He saw the golden dust slowly, inexorably descending upon him, already beginning to hiss, touching the edge of his kimono, leaving invisible, perfectly clean cuts.
He couldn't move. Not from fear. From understanding. He wasn't an opponent. He was a spectator. A spectator of his own execution in a theater where the director, set designer, executioner, and the very concept of death were one and the same.
Akatsuki Magoro, standing at the foot of his creation against the backdrop of the rotating Stoepa of faces, looked at Ayami one last time. His eyes held neither hatred nor triumph. Only cold satisfaction of an artist finishing a sketch.
"Sleep well," he uttered, and these words were quieter than the rustle of golden dust. "Your illusion is over. Welcome to my reality."
And the golden dust, glittering and deadly, enveloped Ayami Iroha from head to toe, like a shroud. No explosion, no scream. Only a quiet, continuous hissing sound, like frying on a hot skillet, lasting several moments.
When the dust dispersed, carried away by a non-existent wind, nothing remained on the black surface of the earth. No body, no ashes. Only a perfectly clean, polished area reflecting the lower tiers of the Golden Stoepa and the silent, frozen prayerful hands with blades.
Akatsuki Magoro lowered his hands. The complex sign disintegrated. The Golden Stoepa, the hands, the Wheel of Samsara, the black surface—all began to melt like a mirage under the morning sun. They didn't vanish with a crash. They simply ceased to be, yielding to the usual, distorted landscapes of the Colony. Within seconds, not a trace remained of the Graveyard of Hell.
Only two dead forms on the ground—one beheaded, the other bisected—bore silent witness to what had transpired here.
Magoro turned and slowly walked away, his silhouette dissolving into the crimson twilight of the collapsing world. He didn't even glance at the keys that should have dropped from Hikaru. They didn't interest him. Points in someone else's game no longer occupied him.
He had simply conducted an inventory. And was satisfied with the state of the tools.
He didn't look back. His steps were measured, purposeful. He wasn't leaving something. He was moving towards something.
In the air before him, as if responding to his silent will, light began to condense. Not a flash, but slow crystallization. Particles of the Colony's crimson energy, fragments of the scattered Scars of the recently slain Majutsushi, the very memory of their power—all of it drew together into a single point. In his open palm, with a quiet, crystalline ringing sound, a Key materialized.
It was unlike the crude crystals of other players. It was a complex, multi-layered geometric figure resembling a lotus flower carved from black obsidian. In its depths pulsed a dull, distant light—an echo of Hikaru's flame and Ayami's illusions, forever locked in perfect form. The Game's mechanics obeyed him as naturally as air obeys breath. He didn't take the key. He allowed it to condense from chaos, as a master allows shavings to fall at his feet after work.
Magoro brought the Key to his eyes, turned it in his fingers. His gaze held no greed, no satisfaction from the prize. Only the cold, analytical interest of a scientist examining a new, curious, but ultimately primitive specimen.
"Not a bad Game," he uttered aloud. His voice was quiet, but the words seemed to momentarily subdue the howling chaos of the Colony around him.
He closed his fist. The obsidian lotus-key didn't break. It dissolved, absorbed into the skin of his palm, leaving behind only a faint, quickly fading pattern resembling a tattoo, and the number "1," which flashed for a moment in his mental perception of the ranking. He didn't accumulate Narikawari's power. He merely registered a fact.
Lowering his hand, he looked into the distance, as if through the walls of reality, directly at the pulsing mark with the number "3" in another sector of the dying world.
"I think Homura will be the next target," he concluded, and for the first time, notes of something distantly resembling anticipation sounded in his voice.
Not a hunter's excitement. The anticipation of a researcher approaching the most interesting experiment.
With these words, he took a step forward.