The air over the boiling lake rang with residual energy. Jintarō Kobayashi stood on the opposite shore, his charred figure smoking, but his spiral eyes burned with fierce excitement. The number "2" above his head pulsed in time with his barely living heart. On his internal timer: 7 SECONDS.
Raiden Inazuma hovered on the rock, his body a clump of restrained fury. The blue discharges on his skin grew denser, more ominous. He was tired of this clowning.
"Enough," his voice rumbled like a landslide. "Thunderous Roar."
He didn't strike. He detonated.
His hands swept apart, and from him, in all directions, not as a shockwave but as a spherical distortion of reality, a sonic singularity spread. This wasn't just sound. It was quantum dissonance—a wave that forced air molecules, water, matter itself to vibrate at their resonant frequency of decay. Space sang with a piercing, mind-rending hum in which the moans of all he had ever killed could be discerned.
The lake water boiled and evaporated in an instant. The stone under Jintarō didn't crumble—it turned into fine-dispersed mist. Jintarō's body jerked in convulsions, his own bones and insides threatening to turn inside out from this vibrational hell. "Credit Immortality" feverishly patched flesh being torn apart atom by atom, burning the last seconds. 3... 2...
Inazuma was already preparing the final blow—a clump of plasma capable of erasing from the face of reality not only the body but the very probability of resurrection.
In the last, decisive instant, when the counter was about to zero out, Jintarō did something insane. He didn't defend himself.
He opened his fist. The worn coin fell into the hovering dust. He raised both hands like a conductor before an apocalyptic orchestra, and his spiral eyes flashed with blinding white light.
"ALL IN!" his hoarse cry overpowered the hum. "CASINO OF HEAVEN'S RETRIBUTION! FINAL BET!"
He threw into Narikawari's distorted system not energy, but a concept. All his remaining luck, all the "probability of winning" accumulated over a lifetime, all the debts and credits of immortality—into one single, impossible goal:
"CREATE A STABLE COMMUNICATION CHANNEL BETWEEN POINT A (ME) AND POINT B (HIM)."
The world shuddered. Not from force, but from paradox. The Game system froze for a moment, its algorithms choking, trying to process a request that wasn't an attack, defense, or escape. It was a change of rules within the rules.
Instead of a plasma explosion from Inazuma, the space between them stabilized. The chaotic energies of the Colony receded as if cut off by glass. A quiet, perfectly white bubble ten meters in diameter appeared. Inside, there were no sounds of the raging hell outside, no distortions. Only tomb-like silence and two opponents separated by the boiling wound of the world.
The system hung. The numbers of keys above their heads froze, then began to flash with an error.
Jintarō collapsed to one knee. From his mouth gushed not blood, but a stream of glowing, golden substance—the very flesh of his luck. His "Credit Immortality" had ended. He was mortal, exposed, and holding on only by willpower and the remnants of an absurd win. But the grin didn't leave his scorched face.
"Heh..." he wiped his lips with the back of his hand. "Played myself. Alright, ancient one... I propose a deal."
Inazuma, whose hand was still raised for the strike, slowly lowered it. The thunderous roar subsided. In his blue eyes, full of lightning, something besides fury flickered—cold, predatory interest. A look he hadn't given anyone in this Game.
"Speak quickly," his voice was low, like distant thunder, "before your thread snaps completely."
"You didn't wake up just to mindlessly crush everyone, right?" Jintarō straightened, his voice becoming firmer, strategic. "You're waiting for... the King of Majutsushi. Aren't you?"
Inazuma didn't answer. But his silence was more eloquent than any nod.
"He's stronger than you. For now," Jintarō continued, his eyes darting, calculating odds even now. "But I've seen how he works. He's not a god. He has logic. A pattern. He rewrites reality by his own rules. And anything that has logic... can be hacked. Outplayed. Put on the line."
He took a step forward, inside his fragile bubble.
"We have a team. Those with the guts to challenge heaven itself have gathered. An anomaly that can't be seen. A force of nature that just updated its firmware, and some other folks. The Crossroads Alliance. For the biggest bet in history. And you..." Jintarō looked straight into Inazuma's eyes, "...you'll be our guarantor. The one who makes the game truly high-stakes. So he comes out to fight not a bunch of ants, but an opponent worth turning his full... ancient might upon."
The silence in the bubble grew even deeper. Inazuma looked at this charred, spirit-leaking madman. The past of his four-hundred-year sleep surfaced: Narikawari's promise. The battle with Magoro. The only worthy challenge.
"A squad..." Inazuma finally uttered, and his lips slowly stretched into a smirk devoid of former arrogance. It held understanding, calculation, and awakened thirst for a real spectacle. "To prepare a worthy opponent for me? To make Magoro step onto the arena not as a runt, but at full strength?"
His smirk suddenly stilled. His gaze became sharp as a honed blade, piercing through.
"Alright, pup..." Raiden Inazuma hissed. "I'm in."
The white bubble trembled and burst, washed away by the renewed chaos of the Colony. Inazuma now stood directly before Jintarō, not as a killer, but as... a necessary ally. He gave his mutilated body an appraising look.
"You know..." he said unexpectedly, and something distantly resembling respect sounded in his voice. "I haven't given such a compliment to any pathetic worm in this Game. But your audacity... your absolutely idiotic, suicidal bet..." he shook his head, and a spark of that ancient, wild mirth he'd almost forgotten flickered in his eyes. "That was... even fun. You provided stimulating combat. A rarity in this boring era."
Jintarō, clutching his side, laughed hoarsely.
"Old-timer, if that's a compliment... I accept. But let's agree, our next duel happens after we set off a bigger fireworks show."
Inazuma merely grunted in response, turning away. His gaze was already searching the chaos for traces of other marks. The game had just changed its rules. And he, the Lightning God, was once again at its very epicenter.
Meanwhile, on the perfect plain sterilized by mutual annihilation, Akatsuki Magoro finished his analysis.
Homura En'en, drained of strength and will, performed a final act of despair. Her hands, folded in a final mudra, released not a white or black flash, but something Gray.
"Kokurō: Zero Sphere," she whispered, and her voice was an echo from oblivion.
This wasn't a mixture. It was a negation of mixture itself. If White Flame simplified an object to primordial matter, and Black devoured its history and connections, then Gray was their absolute synthesis—an imaginary mass, a point of no return. Its principle of action was elegant and terrible: it didn't attack an object in stages. It overwrote its context of existence to "NULL." An object struck by Gray Flame wasn't destroyed or forgotten. It was annihilated at the information level, losing the right to occupy a place in the current frame of reality. It was erased from the present as completely as a digit is erased from a slate, leaving not even a memory of its inscription.
The Gray sphere, silent and emitting nothing but a sensation of deaf, bottomless emptiness, drifted towards Magoro.
He observed it with the same cold interest. Enough data gathered. Experiment concluded.
"Edge Rupture," he uttered, and his voice was the final chord.
He didn't dodge. He drew his index finger through the air before him. The movement was light, as if cutting invisible silk.
Space before him tore along a seam.
This wasn't a crack in the usual sense. It was a linear rupture in the fabric of being. A perfectly straight, black (not in color, but in absence of everything) line traced the air, the ground, the drifting Gray Sphere, and, in the distance, Homura's very figure.
Everything that crossed this seam ceased to be whole. The principle was simple: the seam separated not matter, but connectivity itself. Time on either side of the tear flowed independently. Matter lost coherence, crumbling into unconnected elementary particles. Energy, even the energy of the Gray Sphere, lost vector and meaning, dissipating into nothingness.
The Gray Sphere, touching the seam, didn't explode. It disintegrated into unconnected quanta of information, which immediately drowned in the void. The rupture continued its path.
Homura En'en, seeing the approaching line of non-being, understood only one thing—the end would be clean, absolute, and devoid of even the illusion of resistance. The seam passed through her center.
Her body, her monastic robes, her white hair, her very cold flame—none of it was cut. It was disconnected. Parts of her being ceased to perceive each other, the connection between them severed by a fundamental law. For a moment her form wavered like a bad hologram, then crumbled into a quiet, silent rain of glowing dust that evaporated before reaching the ground.
Where she had stood remained only a clump—not ash, but concentrated, pure flame energy, devoid of will and form. A white-black tangle, quietly pulsating in the void.
Akatsuki Magoro approached it. From the folds of his ashen kimono, he produced an artifact. It was a single-bladed vajra—a ritual ancient Indian dagger carved from dark, lightless metal. Its form was simple and cruel: a straight blade with one sharpened edge, transitioning into a pommel shaped like a stylized diamond, symbol of indestructibility.
He brought the blade to the clump. The vajra drew the energy into itself like a sponge absorbing water. The blade momentarily flashed with a complex, interwoven pattern—white and black, rotating around the blade's axis, then went out, becoming even darker.
Magoro twirled the vajra in his hands, his thoughts flowing in a cold, analytical stream: "A primitive but effective weapon. Flame erasing context... Against that boy with his murky brain... Might come in handy. Will need refinement."
His gaze, heavy and all-seeing, slowly slid through the Colony's ruins, fixing on the direction from which he felt a strange, pulsating surge—first a monstrous discharge, then... stabilization. Lightning raged there, and an absurd luck spiral spun. And a bit further, in another dying reality's focus, a new, strange signature flickered—as if death itself had been reborn into a different quality.
On his internal Game map, the numbers updated. The tournament standings, available to all players, read:
Raiden Inazuma — 4 Keys. Killed: 74 Majutsushi.
Akatsuki Magoro — 4 Keys. Killed: 14 Majutsushi.
Jintarō Kobayashi — 2 Keys. Killed: 4 Majutsushi.
He skimmed the vanished names. Homura En'en erased from the lists. Only three holding keys remained. The core of a new, absurd reality stubbornly refusing to crumble completely.
"The Game is entering its final stage," he thought indifferently. "Soon Narikawari will be forced to make his next move. Or... he'll be forced to. I estimate about twenty players remain."
Hiding the vajra, Akatsuki Magoro turned. He didn't wait for the Colony's collapse. He simply stepped to the side, and space before him yawned open, accepting him into its dark, starless embrace between worlds, leaving behind only a perfectly empty plain, a shimmering clump of ash, and a silence louder than any roar.