AKAME ASSASINATION (44)
Fragment voids were creatures born from pure, unbound fragments. According to Vatican research—studies Akame had skimmed in another life—they were little more than hunger given form. Beings with no capacity for thought, only an endless, screaming need to fill the hollow where a soul should be. They fed on life energy—chi—because fragments alone were inert, powerless. They needed the spark of living things to burn.
But consumption brought no satisfaction. It was a theory, one scribbled in the margins of a report Blake had once left open. They consume, yet remain empty. A perfect, eternal hunger.
Now, however, the theory was cracking.
Akame stood still, the dry grass whispering against his ankles. The voids surrounding him weren't mindlessly surging forward. They were circling. Watching. Their hollow eye sockets seemed to track his slightest shift in weight, the tension in his shoulders.
When their gazes locked onto him, what he felt radiating from them wasn't just hunger.
It was fear.
'A response to threat. To the possibility of annihilation.' The realization was cold, clinical in his mind. 'They've evolved. Developed a survival instinct.' It wasn't unheard of—fragments could give shape to a lingering soul, as with Catherine. But this was different. There were no souls here. Just raw, adaptive hunger learning to preserve itself. 'If they can learn fear, they can learn tactics. Counters. This changes everything.'
"I don't know why you're hesitating," Akame said, his voice cutting the tense silence. He slicked his white hair back, a casual gesture that made several voids flinch backward. "I have no fragment energy. To you, I should look like nothing. Just… meat."
He took one deliberate step forward.
The circle widened. They retreated in unison.
Akame's green eyes dropped to his left hand, to the obsidian band of Lynn wrapped around his finger. 'Is it you? Do they sense the echo of the corridor? The space between spaces?'
Using Lynn to unhinge the train car had drained him more than he'd let on—it had plunged him into a dead sleep for hours. The ring felt heavy now, dormant. A tool temporarily locked away. He was, in every practical sense, handicapped. He couldn't rely on fragment techniques, couldn't summon the shadowed stairs. Not without risking collapse.
Crushing their skulls would be temporary. They'd reform, their fragment-mass swirling back together. He needed eradication, not violence.
But Akame was not defined by what he lacked.
He was a calamity remembered in Vatican archives for a reason. His body was his legacy—a relic honed beyond human limits, forged in a crucible none of these creatures could comprehend. Where fragments failed, pure physicality ascended.
Speed that blurred perception.
Strength that could shatter stone.
Durability that mocked mortal wounds.
He didn't need energy thrumming in his veins. His veins were the weapon.
"Come on," he murmured, rolling his shoulders. The air stilled. "Let's not waste the daylight."
One of the voids lunged, a blackened claw slicing toward his throat.
Akame didn't dodge.
His hand shot out, not with the flourish of a technique, but with the brutal, simple economy of a predator. He caught the claw mid-air—and crushed it.
The sound was not of breaking bone, but of compacting stone, of fragment-mass collapsing in on itself. The void shrieked, a soundless撕裂 of energy, and dissolved into swirling motes of fading light.
Akame stood amidst the dissipating haze, his expression unchanged. He cracked his neck, a soft pop in the quiet.
"Filthy creatures," he said, not with disgust, but with a weary finality. "You learned fear. Now learn extinction."
The remaining voids recoiled, their predatory certainty shattered. For the first time, the hunger in their hollow eyes was eclipsed by something far more human:
Dread.
The creatures did something unheard of—they broke ranks and fled. Their shrieks were no longer guttural hunger but high, wavering cries that imitated human terror. They understood threat. They valued survival. This wasn't mindless hunger anymore; this was something with the beginnings of consciousness.
Akame watched them scatter, his skepticism hardening into cold curiosity. What are you, really? Where do fragments end and… identity begin? These were questions for Blake—Blake with his probabilities and archives and cryptic half-answers. But Blake wasn't here. Only the rain-slicked plains and the hollow howls of retreating voids.
For now, eradication was enough.
His gaze shifted. Through the curtain of rain, something glowed in the distance—a pulsing, brilliant core of fragment energy so dense it warped the falling drops around it.
'Good,' he thought. A beacon. A target.
Further out, he saw her—Catherine, running behind the Maasai girl, Nala. Nala moved with a hunter's economy, her spear not just a weapon but an extension of her will. She didn't fight the voids; she disassembled them, striking before their adaptive hunger could decipher her patterns. She was smart—she understood that evolution was their weapon, and she denied them the time to use it.
A fresh wave of voids surged toward them, black against the gray-green grass. Nala stopped, planted her feet, and breathed out. The spear floating before her trembled, then changed. Fragment energy swirled around it, compressing, amplifying. It grew longer, thicker, its tip blurring into a vicious spiral—a drill made of pure intent.
She pulled her arm back, muscles coiled, and with a sound like tearing canvas, released.
The spear blasted forward, a screaming helix of energy. It didn't pierce—it unmade. Voids in its path dissolved into dissipating mist, their forms shredded before they could even scream.
As the last mote of fragment-light faded, Nala's strength left her. She dropped to her knees, chest heaving, the rain plastering her hair to her skin. The spear clattered to the ground beside her, inert once more.
"At least you took care of them."
The voice came from directly behind her. She hadn't sensed a thing—no approach, no displacement of air. One moment, emptiness. The next, him.
"Yoo, what's up?" Akame said, hands still buried in his pockets, as if he'd been standing there all along.
"Akame!" Catherine whirled, her earlier fatigue forgotten in a burst of theatrical relief. "Can you believe it? They were torturing me!"
"Really?"
"Yes! They have no respect for an eloquent lady such as myself."
"Where do you even get this vocabulary from?"
"But I took them all out," she declared, puffing out her chest, "using my wits and abilities as the leader, of course." She neatly sidestepped his question.
"I wonder how much of that was true," Akame mused, his eyes not on Catherine, but on Nala. He studied her face—the strong jaw, the defiant set of her eyes, the traditional beads now heavy with rain. "She must be his daughter… The resemblance is uncanny."
Then, a new presence brushed against his awareness—darker, heavier. Not the hollow hunger of voids, but something layered, deliberate, and cold.
Everyone turned.
In the middle distance, a figure in a white cloak sprinted toward them, movements frantic with urgency. And behind him, looming like a storm within a storm, was something for which words ceased to exist. It wasn't a shape; it was an absence that hurt to look at—a moving tear in the world, swallowing the light, the rain, and the very fragments in the air.
TO BE CONTINUED!