The sky above Tempest was boiling.
Thousands of angels, armored in gold and platinum, descended like a storm of absolute light. There were no war cries, only a deafening holy hymn carrying a single intent: to erase the "Void Anomaly" from existence.
From the highest peak of the tower, Akira looked out at this white ocean.
Thirty-five days ago, the mere thought of facing a goblin made him tremble. Now, with his left eye burning with a faint blue glow, he didn't see an invincible army before him; he saw "paths." He saw lines of energy, the flow of mana, and the weaknesses represented by the spiritual cores of every angel.
"Diablo, just watch," Akira said, his calm voice carrying the coldness of the void.
Akira leaned forward slightly, then fell from the edge of the tower.
He didn't jump. He didn't thrust. He let gravity pull him toward the ground.
And in mid-freefall... the air frozen around him.
[Activation: Void Raiment (Ultimate Grade).]
Akira vanished.
It wasn't ordinary magical stealth that could be detected by radar or mana sensing. He was "erased" from the fabric of reality. Air resistance ceased, his body heat vanished, and the sound of his breath faded. He had literally become... nothing.
Swoosh!
When his feet struck the ground, they made no sound. He launched like a muffled shot through the first ranks of angels that had just landed.
A two-winged angel raised its holy spear toward a blind spot, but before it realized what was happening, Akira's black dagger had passed through its neck as if passing through butter. There was no resistance, because Akira hadn't cut physical flesh; he had used Void Perception to cut the "spiritual link" directly.
The first angel evaporated, turning into particles of light.
Then the second. The third. The tenth.
Akira's dance of death was silent and terrifying. He moved with Hakuro's fluidity, but with a brutality forged by the pain of gravity in the Labyrinth. If an angel tried to stab him, Akira swayed his body by a few millimeters—a skill learned with great difficulty under the influence of 10x gravity—dodging the blade, only to counter with a killing blow to the spiritual center.
"Where is he?! Mana sensing isn't working!" screamed one of the angel leaders as he watched his soldiers evaporate one after another without seeing the attacker. "Use wide-range bombardment! Purify them all!"
Hundreds of angels gathered in the sky, charging their spears with searing white light, then unleashed them like a volley of destructive meteors toward the entire battlefield.
[Warning! Comprehensive area bombardment.] [Activation: Survival Pulse.]
Akira finally appeared, raising his head toward the holy rain. He didn't try to run.
He clenched his left fist and did something he had never tried before. Instead of erasing his existence, he concentrated the "Void Raiment" into a single point directly above him, creating a small shield out of nothingness.
When the spears of light collided with Akira's shield, there was no explosion. There was no sound of impact.
The spears were simply... swallowed. The void devoured the holy magic as if it had never existed.
"Impossible..." whispered the angel leader in the sky, his eyes widening in horror. "He is swallowing the light!"
At that moment, the rank of angels in the sky parted, and a platinum meteor descended at terrifying speed. It crashed into the ground directly in front of Akira, creating a massive crater.
From the midst of the dust, a being with six golden wings rose. It was a Seraph.
"You abomination!" roared the Seraph, his voice carrying the echo of a thousand storms. He drew a colossal sword burning with a white fire capable of melting mountains. "I am Zariel, Sword of Justice! I shall erase your sin from this existence!"
Akira did not give him a chance to finish his speech.
Akira dashed at full speed, utilizing all the muscular strength he had gained in the Labyrinth. Zariel raised his sword to block the attack, confident that a human's strength would not break his holy defense.
But Akira didn't attack the sword.
At the last moment, Akira threw his black dagger into the air, slid under Zariel's raised arm, and placed his bare left palm directly onto the Seraph's platinum armor.
"Goodbye."
[Discharging absorbed Void Energy.] [Soul Shard consumption: 100%.]
An invisible shockwave exploded from Akira's palm. It wasn't a thermal explosion, but a "collapse" of reality at that specific point. The legendary armor cracked, and Zariel screamed a cry that tore the sky, before his body flew backward like a broken doll, his six wings falling like dead autumn leaves.
Absolute silence reigned over the battlefield.
The entire Heavenly Host froze as they watched their leader defeated in a single strike by a human.
Akira stood up slowly, caught his dagger while panting slightly, and looked at the angels with a cold eye. He had won. He had proven he was not prey.
But...
In that moment when the ecstasy of victory should have been complete, something happened that paralyzed Akira entirely.
The threat did not come from the angels. It came from inside his head.
The blue screen of his familiar System shook violently, beginning to distort like an old television screen. Then... it turned blood red.
[CRITICAL WARNING! SYSTEM ERROR!] [External breach of host's core code detected.] [Attempting to isolate... FAILED.] [Attempting firewall activation... BYPASSED.]
"What?" Akira took a step back, clutching his head, which began to burn with a pain he hadn't experienced even in the Labyrinth.
Suddenly, Zariel's broken corpse on the ground began to flicker with a strange light... like the "pixels" of a glitching computer screen.
Instead of evaporating, the Seraph's body began to reshape, but not as an angel. The light and gold broke apart to form a human shape.
Standing before Akira was a young man.
A young man wearing a modern Japanese school uniform, white earbuds hanging around his neck, smiling coldly. But worst of all... floating above his head was a System screen similar to Akira's, but it glowed with a brilliant, golden light.
The System's voice screamed in Akira's mind one last time before partially shutting down:
[Entity identified: Hostile Human Host.] [Hostile System definition: "Absolute Fate System".] [Seal status of Void Throne: 99.9%... Risk of collapse.]
The Japanese youth put his hands in his pockets and looked at Akira as if looking at an annoying bug.
"My god, it took me a long time to find you amidst all this fantasy garbage," the youth said in modern Japanese, then tilted his head and smiled. "Hello, Akira. Administration sent me to correct the 'program error' you've caused in this story."