The gold barrier shimmered like a heat haze, vibrating with a frequency that silenced the roar of the crowd. Inside the ring, the air felt thick, heavy with the scent of ozone and the metallic tang of blood that had begun to pool on the cracked concrete. The man in the charcoal suit—the "Shadow" of the Zenin—didn't move. He stood with the relaxed, predatory posture of a man waiting for a bus, his wooden staff held loosely in his right hand.
I was dying. I could feel it in the way my vision flickered, in the way my lungs wheezed like a broken bellows.
[WARNING: SYSTEM ANALYSIS FAILED]
[OPPONENT LEVEL: ABOVE THRESHOLD]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION: RUN]
"Run?" I whispered, a wet, bitter laugh escaping my parched throat. A glob of dark blood hit the floor. "Where am I supposed to go? He owns the air in this room."
"A logical assessment," the Shadow said. His voice was like dry leaves skittering over a tombstone. "The Zenin do not leave exits for their prey."
He moved.
He didn't run. He unfolded. One moment he was ten paces away; the next, the world had disappeared behind the blur of his wooden staff. It buried itself in my solar plexus with a sound like a sledgehammer hitting a sack of grain. I didn't even have time to activate a [Gravity Well]. The [Cloak of the Fallen King] was dark, its energy drained.
I hit the gold barrier with a sickening thud. The impact didn't just hurt; it rattled my soul. My vision turned white, then a bruised, sickly purple.
[HP: 12/100]
[INTERNAL BLEEDING DETECTED]
[SYSTEM CRITICAL: SHUTDOWN IMMINENT]
"Ren!" Nobara's voice was a muffled scream against the outside of the barrier. Through the shimmering gold threads, I saw her silhouette. She was throwing her entire weight against the barrier, slamming her hammer until her knuckles bled, but the Zenin technique didn't even ripple. Her face was a mask of raw, unfiltered agony—the kind of terror you only feel when you are forced to watch your world end from behind a window.
"Stop looking at the girl," the Shadow murmured, standing over me. The tip of his staff hummed with a concentrated white light. "It's a mercy, really. She won't have to watch what I do to your corpse."
"He's right, you know," Valthazar's voice was no longer a whisper. It was a resonant, tectonic boom that seemed to originate from the very center of my DNA. "You are holding onto your humanity like a child holding a broken toy, Ren. You think it will save you. But a toy only breaks. If you want to survive, you must become the thing that breaks the toy."
'I won't... I won't lose myself,' I gasped, my fingers clawing at the concrete, leaving streaks of red. 'If I lose... if I become you... what happens to her?'
"She lives," the demon purred, his golden eyes manifesting in the darkness of my fading vision, twin suns in an endless night. "That is the trade. Give me the reins, boy. Just for a minute. Let me show this shadow what it means to stand before the Sun at high noon."
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
[EMERGENCY OVERRIDE INITIATED]
[SYNC RATE: 15%... 30%... 65%...]
I felt it then. The "Snap."
It wasn't a physical sensation. It was the feeling of a glass wall shattering inside my mind. The pain in my ribs vanished—not because it was healed, but because it no longer mattered. My heartbeat slowed until it was a rhythmic, metallic thud that vibrated the floor of the arena.
The blood on my face didn't drip anymore. It began to float. Tiny red droplets rose from my skin, swirling around my head in a tiny, perfect gravitational orbit.
"What... what is this?" the Shadow hissed. For the first time, his calm demeanor shattered. The frost on the ground began to retreat. He lunged again, the staff glowing with a concentrated, soul-piercing light, aimed directly at my heart.
I didn't dodge. I didn't even flinch. I reached out and caught the staff with my bare hand.
The wood didn't break. It ceased. The atoms were crushed together with such violence that the staff turned into a fine, gray dust that was instantly sucked into the palm of my hand. The Shadow tried to pull away, but his hand was fused to the space I occupied. My grip was no longer a grip; it was an event horizon.
[SYNC RATE: 85%]
[WARNING: PHYSICAL FORM UNDER EXTREME STRESS]
[UNLOCKED: THE SINGULARITY]
I looked up. My eyes were no longer brown. They were twin pools of spinning, golden galaxies, and the vertical slit on my forehead had torn fully open, weeping a thick, violet ichor that smelled of ozone and ancient earth.
"You speak of shadows," I said. My voice wasn't human. It was the sound of a thousand stars dying simultaneously. "But a shadow cannot exist where there is no light to block. And I... I am the mouth of the dark that eats the light."
The Collapse of Roppongi
I didn't use a technique. I didn't call out a name. I simply released the pressure I was holding back.
The gold barrier didn't just break; it imploded. The thousands of silver and gold threads were sucked toward my body, fueling the void. The crowd on the balconies screamed as the air was sucked out of the room, their lungs burning as the oxygen was dragged toward the center of the ring.
The Shadow screamed—a high, thin sound of absolute biological terror—as his charcoal suit was shredded into atoms. His skin began to stretch, his bones elongating and snapping as the gravity pulled at his very DNA. He was being folded into himself.
"Please!" he shrieked. "The Zenin... they promised—"
"The Zenin are dust," I whispered.
I closed my fist.
The space where the Shadow stood simply... vanished. There was no explosion. There was no blood. There was just a perfectly smooth, circular hole in the floor of the reservoir that descended into an infinite, silent darkness. The man, the staff, and the threat were gone as if they had never been written into reality.
The silence that followed was deafening. Thousands of bounty hunters and killers stood frozen on the balconies, their weapons lowered, their eyes wide with a fear that transcended greed. They weren't looking at a student. They weren't looking at a bounty.
They were looking at a God.
The Aftermath of the God
The sync rate began to plummet, and with it came the agony. The cold void was replaced by a crushing, white-hot heat that felt like my blood was boiling. Every nerve ending in my body screamed in protest. I collapsed to my knees, the violet light fading, the third eye closing with a painful, wet sound that made me retch.
[SYNC RATE: 12.5% (STABILIZING)]
[TOTAL EXHAUSTION DETECTED]
[REWARD: 5,000 OP]
Nobara was the first to move. She leaped into the cratered ring, her hammer discarded. She didn't care about the hole in the floor or the silent, terrified crowd. She threw her arms around me, her body trembling so hard I could hear her teeth chattering against her lip.
"Don't you ever do that again," she sobbed, her tears hot against my cold skin. "Don't you dare go where I can't follow, Ren! You hear me? You stay here! You stay with me!"
I tried to hug her back, but my arms felt like lead weights. I looked down at my hands—they were covered in strange, black geometric patterns that pulsed with a faint, dying violet light. The mark of the void.
"I'm here," I managed to whisper, the darkness finally rushing in to claim me. "I'm... still... here."
As I slipped into unconsciousness, a final, glowing blue screen appeared before my eyes.
> [VOLUME 2: THE CULLING OF FATE - HALFWAY POINT REACHED]
> [NEW TITLE: THE KING OF THE PIT]
> [ALERT: GOJO SATORU HAS DECLARED YOU 'OFFICIALLY DEAD' TO PROTECT YOU.]
> [THE REAL WAR BEGINS NOW.]
>