In the midst of the fight, Trizha stood frozen at the precipice of the rooftop, her fingers cramping around the rusted iron pipe.
The wind howled, whipping her hair across her face, but she barely felt the cold.
Her eyes were wide, dilated with a terror that refused to subside as she watched the figure of Nomoro—or Narasao, or whatever monster-hero he had become—being dismantled.
It was supposed to be his big moment.
The transformation, the horn, the violet flames; in every movie she had ever seen, that was the signal that the tide had turned.
But Zackier was making a mockery of the tropes.
He moved with a speed that felt like a glitch in reality, his form blurring and reappearing like a ghost in a machine.
He wasn't just fighting Nomoro; he was redirecting him, using the boy's own demonic momentum against him with a bored, clinical grace.
"I thought... I thought the demon thing would mean we'd win!" Trizha's thoughts screamed in her head, nearly loud enough to drown out the clashing of steel. "Zack is a monster. He's a freak. How can anyone move that fast? How can he predict every swing before Nomoro even thinks it? I can't read him. I can't see an opening. Gosh, what do I do?!"
Her eyes darted frantically across the rooftop, searching for an edge, a strategy, a pattern.
She had spent years watching films, but she wasn't a tactician.
She wasn't some shonen protagonist who could take notes on a villain's 'quirks' and find the one flaw in their armor.
She was just Trizha—a girl whose life had been a series of mistakes and redirections.
Suddenly, a spark of hope ignited behind her eyes.
"Wait… My phone! I have my phone!"
She plunged her hand into the hidden pocket of her dress—now a tattered, dirty white ruin of its former elegance—and pulled out the sleek device.
She didn't plan to film the fight; she wasn't that delusional.
She needed to call for help, to scream into the receiver until the world heard her.
But the screen was a spiderweb of shattered glass.
It was dark, cold, and unresponsive.
"What?! No! Since when did this break?!"
She tapped the power button frantically, her breath hitching.
It could have shattered when she was dragged through the halls, or perhaps Zackier had calculated its destruction with a stray burst of energy earlier.
He was the type to sever every lifeline before he began the harvest.
In a fit of useless rage, she hurled the phone away.
It skittered across the concrete, a piece of high-tech garbage.
Only after it left her hand did she remember the encrypted files, the hidden information she'd kept stored in its memory—secrets that could ruin lives if found.
It was too late now.
The phone was gone, and so was her link to the outside world.
She turned her attention back to the center of the roof.
Nomoro was engaging Zackier in a brutal hand-to-hand exchange.
He was throwing all-out, demonic swings, his fists trailing purple fire, but Zackier simply danced through the flames.
The red-haired man delivered slashes that were almost too fast to see, opening deep red grooves in Nomoro's armor.
Nomoro would heal though, the flesh knitting back together in a grotesque display of regeneration, only for Zackier to open the wound again a second later.
"Nope," Trizha whispered to herself, the iron pipe feeling heavier by the second. "There's no way. I can't join that. I'd be dead before I even swung."
She felt a wave of crushing disappointment wash over her.
She wasn't battle-smart.
She couldn't figure out the environmental cues to trigger a trap.
There were no flare guns, no emergency torches, no conveniently placed barrels of gasoline.
She was just a high school girl caught in a clash of titans.
"Think, Trizha! Use your brain for once!" she scolded herself, gritting her teeth. "Help Nomoro... o-or help Narasao! Do something besides trembling like a leaf!"
She watched for another second, her eyes straining to follow the flashes of red and purple.
Nothing.
No ideas.
No plans.
Just a void where her courage should be.
She lowered the iron pipe, the tip clinking softly against the concrete.
The sound was small, barely audible over the roar of the fight, but it resonated in her ears.
She looked down at the rusted metal, then back at the boy who was bleeding for her.
She had made a promise.
She had told herself she wouldn't run.
And here she was, standing at the edge of the world, letting him fight alone.
She didn't have superpowers.
She didn't have logic that defied the universe.
"It's hopeless... I can't help," she muttered.
The pipe touched the ground again. Clink.
A strange, quiet determination began to settle over her.
She didn't have strength, but she had presence.
She didn't have an idea, but she had a physical weight she could throw into the gears.
"That's right," she said, her voice growing firmer as she stepped forward. "I have nothing except this pipe. It's all I can offer. It's a stupid, rusted piece of metal, but it's mine."
She took another step.
Then another.
The fear was still there, a cold lump in her throat, but she pushed past it.
She began to run.
"HAAAAAAA!"
She screamed at the top of her lungs, a raw, desperate sound intended to draw Zackier's attention, to give Nomoro even a millisecond of breathing room.
Nomoro heard the scream.
He was currently in the middle of a demonic lunge, his fist missing Zackier by a fraction of an inch as the man blurred behind him.
Nomoro immediately shifted his transformation, pulling the demonic armor from his right side and forcing it to emerge from his left to cover his exposed flank.
"Keep it moving! Don't let him settle!" Nomoro's mind was a chaotic storm of instinct. "Shift the parts, change the flow! Make yourself unpredictable!"
He swung his demonic arms in wide, sweeping arcs, trying to catch Zackier in the crossfire.
But he was losing.
He knew it.
Every exchange left him more exhausted, while Zackier seemed to be warming up.
The man fought with a logic that was suffocating—he used the obvious to defeat the complex.
"This guy is too fast! Why isn't he struggling?!" Nomoro's internal monologue was a frantic prayer. "How do I hit something I can't even see?"
Zackier was grinning.
He wasn't even breathing hard.
He was playing with his food.
Then, the scream reached them.
Nomoro's heart stopped as he saw Trizha charging toward the epicenter of the violence, her face a mask of reckless bravery.
Zackier paused, his gaze shifting toward her with an unbothered, almost bored curiosity.
"Trizha, no! Stop!" Nomoro roared, his voice cracking with panic. "Get away from here! Don't come any closer!"
Trizha skidded to a halt, her eyes widening as she looked at Nomoro's desperate expression. "Wh-what? What is it?"
Before she could react, the air around her began to shimmer.
Small, pulsing spheres of pink energy—dozens of them—appeared out of thin air, surrounding her like a crown of thorns.
Nomoro lunged toward her, his hand outstretched in a frantic bid to reach her before the light turned into fire.
"You know what I hate most?"
Zackier's voice was a cold, melodic whisper that cut through the chaos.
"It is the intervention of my very own fate. This is why I hate desperate audiences. They always try to ruin the ending."
Zackier didn't even look at them as he muttered the command.
「Reverse Causality... Second Variable.」
The air turned heavy, as if the concept of time itself were thickening.
In the realm of Alterlity, the Second Variable was a terrifying manipulation of cause and effect.
Normally, Emoplotion was the culmination of ten emotions being struck into existence.
But Zackier had reversed the flow.
He had planted the seeds of the strike before the fight even began, weaving invisible Emoplotions into the very air of the rooftop.
"On my way here," Zackier continued, his tone conversational and flat, "I exchanged the emotions of seventeen soldiers, sixty-two of Yuri's men, one hundred and twenty-four students... and then, finally, the two of you. That leaves me with a total of two hundred and three emotions and twenty uses of Emoplotion. I used one earlier, and nine more for this specific variable. I'm down to ten."
He looked at Trizha, who was trapped in a cage of glowing death, and then at Nomoro, who was just inches away from her.
Zackier's grin returned—a wide, jagged thing that held no mercy.
"I say again... what does this make you? Is this finally your twenty-third death?"
Zackier snapped his fingers.
BOOM.
The invisible spheres detonated in a synchronized sequence of blinding pink light.
The force of the blast was staggering, a roar of pure energy that erased the space where Trizha had been standing.
Nomoro was thrown backward by the sheer atmospheric pressure, his armored body skidding across the concrete as he watched the flames of the explosion bloom like a hellish flower.
Trizha was gone.
One moment she was there, a girl with an iron pipe and a foolish dream, and the next, she was nothing but cinders and dust, lost to the purgatory of Zackier's power.
Nomoro hit the ground hard, the air driven from his lungs.
He stared at the spot where she had been, his mind fracturing.
He had been so close.
Just a few more steps.
If he hadn't been so weak, if he hadn't been so slow—
"'Oh, don't worry, you'll be joining her shortly,'" Zackier said, his voice mocking the tone of a clichéd villain. "That's what they always say in the stories, isn't it? Right after the hero watches their love interest burn. It's such a stupid, unlucky line. I won't say it."
Zackier began to walk toward the kneeling, devastated demon.
His smirk was sharp, his eyes devoid of anything resembling humanity.
"Instead, I'll just say this: why do you care so much? You've only known her for a few days. Men like you truly are despicable when it comes to shallow attachments. You let your heart break for a girl who barely knew your name."
Zackier stopped in front of Nomoro, looking down at the grieving figure.
The demonic armor was starting to crack, the violet flames flickering as Nomoro's stability collapsed.
"You don't happen to be that Major Threat named 'Kat' from three hundred years ago, do you?" Zackier asked, rubbing the back of his head with a sudden, genuine flicker of nervousness. "You two have abilities that are... uncomfortably similar. Just looking at you makes me sick. It makes me feel like I should just end this now, before you become something I can't handle."
Nomoro didn't look up. But his demonic hand suddenly blurred.
CRACK.
A demonic punch caught Zackier square in the solar plexus before the man could even register the movement.
The force was astronomical.
Zackier was sent hurtling backward across the rooftop, his heels digging into the concrete until he managed to stagger to a halt.
Zackier touched his nose, his fingers coming away stained with his own crimson blood.
He stared at it, his grin twitching with a mix of excitement and rising dread.
"Gosh... I might have waited too long, haven't I?" Zackier whispered. "You've already tapped into that thing. What was the name the prophecies gave it?"
He lifted his gaze to Nomoro.
The boy was standing now, but he was no longer human.
His eyes were void of irises, turned into blank, glowing pits of violet light.
His body was trembling, his emotional core having been completely incinerated by the sight of Trizha's death.
The demon wasn't just a part of him anymore—it was the only thing left.
It was the only thing left. To fight for Nomoro… as he stands in a void of consciousness.
「...Prophecy Auto-Defense Mode.」
That was what it was called.
It is a Prophelity passive that only occurs when the user of the ability is in a state of despair that they pass out and the Prophelity decides to take control instead.
Out of instinct, Nomoro threw his head back and roared.
It wasn't a human sound; it was the primal, earth-shaking bellow of an apex predator from a forgotten era.
The sound echoed off the walls of the Prom Tower like a thunderclap.
"The best of your strength, amplified by pure, concentrated hatred," Zackier muttered, his grip tightening on his knife. "A single punch could level an island if you caught the right frequency. This is why I can't let you walk away."
Zackier licked the blood from his lip, his eyes narrowing. "I'm going all out. Try to stay in one piece, little demon of nine years ago."
Nomoro didn't wait.
He vanished into a blur of violet fire, charging at Zackier with the singular, mindless intent to kill.
As he reached his target, he pulled back his armored fist.
The air around it began to glow white-hot with the potassium-amplifier effect of his rage.
He swung with everything he was, everything he had lost—
And then, the world shifted.
The roar of the explosion faded into the soft, rhythmic sound of plastic clicking together.
The violet fire became the warm, golden glow of afternoon sunlight.
A small, young boy sat on a plush carpet, his short hair gleaming like a mountain horizon.
He had a soft, happy smile on his face as he reached out with a tiny hand, grabbing a toy warrior and making it punch a toy zombie.
"Boom!" the boy whispered, giggling to himself as the zombie toy fell over.
He was at peace.
The room smelled of lavender and home.
He mumbled unintelligible words to his plastic friends, lost in the simple, beautiful world of a child's imagination.
"Narasao, honey, let's go take a shower," a soft, melodic voice called out.
The boy stopped playing and looked up.
His mother stood in the doorway, her silhouette framed by the sun, a warm and loving smile on her face.
"You'll be late for school if we don't hurry!"
The boy—Narasao Tarosono—giggled and scrambled to his feet, running toward her with his arms wide for a hug.
He was loved.
He was safe.
He was Narasao.