The Box: Fate
Chapter 63 — The Silence of Aethelgard
The absolute stillness of the Grand Astral City was more terrifying than any storm Azureus could summon.
When Zanaki, Axel Hatanaki, and Sharky Bee breached the outer perimeter of Aethelgard, there were no guards to greet them. The massive, towering white marble walls that had looked so majestic from a distance now stood completely abandoned. There were no merchants, no bards, and no civilian chatter. The thousands of people who had lined the streets just hours ago to witness the arrival of the Sovereign Vanguards had vanished.
"This doesn't make sense," Sharky Bee whispered, his body automatically slipping into a **Phantom Veil**. He knelt, touching the cobblestones of the main thoroughfare. "There are no signs of a struggle. No blood, no scuff marks from an evacuation. It's like an entire city just... paused."
Axel closed his eyes, his golden-tinted armor humming as he channeled his sensory aura. "The ambient mana is dead, Zanaki. There's no heat, no wind. Even the shadows feel like they're glued to the ground."
Zanaki stood in the center of the empty square, his sapphire eyes narrowing as a cold sweat broke out on his neck. His hand crept to his chest, where the burning core of the Storm Dragon was suddenly pulsing with an erratic, warning rhythm.
*'The matrix of this sector is freezing, boy,'* Azureus's voice echoed sharply inside his mind, stripped of its usual arrogant calm. *'This is not an evacuation. The localized reality is being suppressed by a higher administrative command. Your silver-eyed leader has triggered a firewall.'*
"We need to get to the palace. Now," Zanaki said, his voice dropping all playful pretense.
The three teenagers sprinted through the ghost city, their heavy footsteps the only sound echoing off the sterile white buildings. But as they neared the grand golden gates of the royal court, the scenery began to tear.
Literally.
Zanaki watched in horror as a section of the marble archway to his left glitched, the stone texture flickering rapidly before dissolving into a flat, wireframe grid of glowing amber light. A high-pitched, metallic hum—the same sound Zanaki remembered from the day his phone vibrated inside his brain—vibrated through the air.
"The world is breaking apart," Axel muttered, his fists tightening as his solar aura flared defensively.
***
Inside the sealed containment unit of the throne room, the crushing gravity field continued to press down on Kataki's team.
King Sharon stood motionless at the base of the dais, his face fractured into jagged porcelain lines that leaked a blinding, featureless white light. He didn't look at the struggling players with malice; he looked at them with the cold neutrality of a machine processing a deletion queue.
"You waste your remaining processing cycles, Void Reaper," the Sharon-terminal spoke, its voice layered with the synthesized audio of the outside world. "The extraction of the soul-bound cards is a hard-coded event. Ren-sama's sequence cannot be bypassed by native-tier artifacts."
Kataki, his knees dug deep into the cracking hard-light floor, forced his head up. The void-black aura from **The Twin Fangs of the Eclipse** was aggressively eating away at the golden constraints around his wrists, but the gravity was adapting, multiplying its density with every passing second.
"Ren..." Kataki choked out, his silver eyes flashing brilliantly as he forced his vision to pierce the golden grid of the firewall. "The nineteen-year-old boy in the hoodie... the one pulling your strings. Why us? Why the Akatsuki group?"
The Sharon-terminal's head tilted at an unnatural, ninety-degree angle. "The Akatsuki group was the cleanest data pool. Sixteen unique behavioral profiles with zero systemic overlap. Perfect variables for the Zenith seed. Ren-sama did not choose you by accident. He built the link to match your exact neural frequencies. You were written to be the vanguards of the harvest."
Behind Kataki, Vahn let out a guttural, roaring scream. The obsidian flames of his Star-Rank aura flared violently, his old memories violently colliding with the terminal's words.
*The Zero Zone... the static... Rin's screaming face.*
"It wasn't a punishment zone," Vahn roared, blood leaking from his nose as he fought the gravity field to take a single step forward. "Ten years ago... you didn't trap my squad because we failed! You trapped us because the harvest wasn't finished! The 'Zero Zone' is just a recycling bin for broken code!"
"A logical deduction, Unit Vahn," the terminal stated flatly. "But outdated. The recycling bin is full. Crash is the manual override. When the Sovereign of Nullification fully manifests, this entire server will be wiped to prepare for the Next Generation patch. You are all scheduled for deletion. There is no home to return to."
Murasaki gripped her catalyst staff, her knuckles white. "He's lying... he has to be lying!"
"He isn't," Kataki whispered, his silver sight finally locking onto the hidden core of the room.
Through his eyes, the throne room was no longer a palace. It was a massive, cylindrical cage of running scripts. And at the center of King Sharon's porcelain chest, a glowing amber node was routing the entire gravity command directly from the Tokyo hub.
"He's an interface terminal," Kataki said, his voice turning ice-cold as the void aura on his daggers suddenly stopped fighting the constraints and completely condensed into the steel. "And a terminal can be smashed."
"Extraction commencing in three seconds," the Sharon-terminal announced, its chest plate sliding open to reveal a localized tractor beam of pure data light aimed at Monk Fish and Hina.
"Not today," Kataki muttered.
With an explosion of pure willpower, Kataki didn't activate a system skill—he used his silver eyes to forcibly overwrite the gravity code in his immediate space for a fraction of a millisecond.
*Snap!*
The constraints shattered. Kataki vanished from the floor, leaving a trail of silver afterimages behind him.
*CLANG!*
The first attack of the war struck. Kataki appeared directly in front of King Sharon, his left dagger slamming violently against an instantaneous amber barrier that materialized an inch from the terminal's face. The shockwave of the collision blasted the golden grid lines across the entire room, tearing the illusion of the throne room wide open.
"Zanaki! Axel!" Kataki roared through the comms channel as the barrier cracked. "The palace is a trap! Break the outer core from the outside!"
At that exact moment, outside the palace doors, Zanaki drew his fist back, his sapphire eyes igniting as he heard Kataki's voice cut through the static of his mind. The real fight hadn't just started; the boundary between the game and the reality was finally collapsing