The sky over Kyoto did not fade; it snapped.
One second, the city was a hum of cooling asphalt and distant convenience store chimes. The next, the hum was replaced by a silence so heavy it felt physical. Every light—from the neon kanji of the arcades to the tiny LEDs on parked dashboards—went out. The darkness was not empty. It was thick, tasting of iron and static.
Then the gas arrived. A bruised, heavy miasma of violet and indigo that didn't drift so much as drown the clouds. Thunder followed, not as a crack, but as a low, continuous vibration that made teeth ache.
Six shapes tore through the haze.
They did not fall. They settled into the air like stones dropped into oil. The Great Sages. To the thousands on the ground, they were silhouettes of impossible geometry, draped in robes that didn't flutter despite the rising wind.
Panic is a cold thing before it is loud.
A man dropped his groceries, the sound of breaking glass sharp in the quiet. He didn't look down at the leaking milk. He fell to his knees, palms flat against the dirty street.
"Judgment," he rasped. "It's the end. It's finally the end."
Behind him, a woman screamed, a high, thin sound that broke the dam. The street erupted. People didn't run for cover; they ran for forgiveness. They wailed secrets into the dark, confessing to thefts and betrayals as if the asphalt could hear them. They mistook the executioners for gods.
The Sages did not look down. Their eyes, pits of steady, white radiance, ignored the ants.
"Where. Is. The. Mortal. King?"
The voice didn't come from a throat. It was a pressure wave. It hit the buildings, rattling the frames of every window in the ward.
"ENOUGH!"
The second command was a hammer. Glass rain showered the streets as windows shattered inward.
Renji stood in the center of a sidewalk, a grey hoodie pulled low. He didn't look up at first. He looked at his hands. They were steady. Beside him, Shinjo's grip on Hikari's arm was white-knuckled. The younger brother's jaw was set, a muscle jumping in his cheek, but his eyes were wide, tracking the six gods above.
Renji reached up. He pulled the hood back. The movement was slow, deliberate.
"Shinjo," Renji said. The name was small, but it cut through the screaming crowd.
"I'm not leaving," Shinjo snapped.
"Take Hikari. Get behind the perimeter. Now."
"Renji—"
"I said go!"
The authority in the voice wasn't human. It was the weight of the Abyss, a cold, absolute gravity that left no room for blood-ties or sentiment. Shinjo flinched as if struck. He didn't argue again. He grabbed Hikari, who was staring at Renji with a hollow, terrified silence, and vanished into the throng of retreating civilians.
Renji didn't watch them go. He exhaled, a plume of white in the unnatural cold, and stepped off the ground.
He rose. Not with the grace of the Sages, but with the violent intent of a spear. He stopped a hundred feet up, level with the white-eyed circle.
"You six looking for me?"
His tone was flat. He wasn't a hero delivering a speech; he was a man checking the edge of his blade.
The Elder Sage drifted forward. His skin looked like parchment stretched over old bone. "The boy the prophecy fears. A flicker of shadow in a world of light."
"I don't care about your poetry," Renji said. "Why are you here?"
The Sages didn't answer with words. They drifted apart, a synchronized expansion that turned the sky into a hexagonal cage.
"The balance is tilted," the Elder whispered. "You are a stain on the tapestry of Aetheria. We have come to burn it clean."
Renji didn't smile, but his eyes sparked with a sudden, violent purple. "Then come and try."
His aura didn't just glow; it detonated. A pillar of black and emerald light tore through the purple gas, shoving the clouds back.
The Sages moved. Hands extended, they threw a coordinated pulse of blue light. It wasn't magic; it was the raw incineration of the atmosphere. The oxygen between them vanished.
Renji was a blur. He didn't fly; he sprinted on the air, the friction of his movement leaving scorched trails in his wake. He closed the gap to the nearest Sage and drove a fist into the glowing barrier.
CRACK.
The shockwave sent a ripple through the city below, flipping cars like discarded toys. But the Sage didn't move. The barrier held, a crystalline wall of absolute order.
Renji didn't stop. He became a storm of kinetic energy, striking at six points in three seconds. He was faster, but they were denser. They were Supreme Beings, anchoring themselves to the laws of the universe.
"Mortal King? You are a mistake of flesh," one Sage spat, firing a bolt of condensed gravity.
Renji twisted mid-air, the bolt grazing his ribs and tearing the fabric of his hoodie. He ignored the sting. He caught another Sage's wrist, pivoted, and drove his knee into the entity's chest. The barrier shattered this time. The Sage plummeted, a streak of white robes crashing into a parking garage three hundred feet below.
Then another. And a third.
Renji stood in the center of the strobing chaos, his knuckles bleeding purple light.
The Sages stopped.
They didn't look hurt. They looked annoyed. They pulled back, maintaining a wide, precise circle. They began to chant—a low, discordant drone that sounded like the earth itself was groaning.
"By the roots of Aetheria, we bind the shadow..."
Renji felt the air turn to lead. He lunged at the Elder, his fist cocked back, but he hit a wall. It wasn't stone or light; it was a conceptual boundary. He was inside an Ancient Array.
"The Hex of the 30-Minute Cage," the Elder intoned. "A place where even time is a prisoner."
Renji didn't waste breath. He hammered the wall with necrotic blasts. The emerald flames splashed against the invisible barrier and died.
Then the sky groaned.
From the eye of the violet tornado above, the Legendary Chains descended. They were purple links the size of shipping containers, cold and ancient. They didn't hit him; they phased through the barrier and clamped onto his reality.
His left leg. His right. His torso.
The weight was tectonic. Renji roared, the veins in his neck bulging as he fought to rip the metal apart. The Abyss Monarch power surged, the ground beneath the city cracking under the sympathetic pressure, but the chains didn't even vibrate.
"These Sages..." Renji spat, blood beginning to leak from his nose. "They're using the world itself as a lock."
The Sages watched. Their expressions were neutral, the cold indifference of a gardener pulling a weed.
"We have him," the Elder barked.
Below, the confessional cries of the people turned to a hollow, collective gasp. Their king was pinned, a sacrifice held aloft by purple iron.
A final chain descended. It didn't coil. It snapped tight around Renji's throat.
The metal rattled as he thrashed. His eyes weren't fearful; they were a furnace of defiant, violet hatred.
"You may have... captured me," Renji choked out, the links crushing his windpipe. "But as long as I breathe..."
"A problem easily solved," the Elder replied.
He raised a hand. From the ether above the cage, a Giant Sword materialized. It wasn't made of steel; it was a solidified sentence of death, humming with the frequency of an executioner's bell.
The top of the barrier dissolved.
The sword didn't fall. It was released.
It dropped like a guillotine through the clouds.
BAM.
The sound of the impact was not the sound of a sword hitting flesh. It was the sound of a mountain being struck by a meteor.
A cloud of white dust and purple sparks exploded from the center of the array, obscuring everything. The Sages watched, waiting for the soul to dissipate into the void.
But the dust didn't settle. It was pushed.
A hand, wreathed in black flame, had caught the flat of the giant blade.
Renji was still in the chains, his throat bruised and bleeding, but his eyes were no longer purple. They were two voids of absolute, bottomless black.
"Thirty minutes," Renji rasped, the sound like grinding stones. "That's how long you think I'll last?"
He didn't break the chains. He began to pull them.
The Sages flinched. The clouds above began to swirl in the opposite direction.
"You didn't bring enough iron," Renji said.