Time froze. The entire world narrowed to Reiden Kagetori's clenched fist and Kaito Fujisaki's widened pupils.
"Authority of the Thunder Dragon," Reiden uttered, and his voice was not a shout, but a rolling echo born in the depths of his soul.
He did not hurl the blow. He released it.
From his fist, no beam erupted, no clump of energy flew. The space before his fist simply ceased to exist. It did not explode—it evaporated. Air, light, dust, debris—everything within a cone five meters wide and fifty meters long dissolved in a blinding white flash that gave neither heat nor sound. Only the absolute silence of annihilation.
Kaito Fujisaki did not try to parry. His "Eye of Dissection," which could find a weak point in any technique, choked upon seeing not a structure, but a void. There was no Scar to dissect—only the negation of all existence. His instincts, honed by hundreds of battles, screamed one thing: GET AWAY.
He got away. His body, propelled by the superhuman strength of his pact, lunged sideways with such speed it left not a trail but a momentary vacuum wake in the air. He flew thirty meters, slammed into a pile of debris just as the white void touched the spot where he had stood a second before.
Where the "Thunder Dragon" passed, nothing remained. Only a perfectly smooth, black glass-trenched groove, stretching into the crimson gloom of the Colony. No dust, no steam. Absolute nothingness.
Kaito extricated himself from under the stones. His vest was covered in dust, blood oozed from a cut on his cheek beneath the Scar from flying gravel. He breathed heavily, and for the first time, something sharp, almost animalistic, flared in his tired eyes. Respect mixed with cold fury. He couldn't take this force head-on. But he, Kaito Fujisaki, wasn't so easy to kill with one blow, even one like that.
Reiden stood in the same spot, but now he resembled an empty shell. Unleashing the "Authority of the Thunder Dragon" had burned out the last of his seething energy. He stood swaying, the golden patterns under his skin dimmed, and blood from the wound on his chest gushed with renewed force. He was a living beacon that had sent its last, desperate signal—and was now fading.
Kaito straightened up. His movements became even more economical, devoid of even a hint of wasted effort. He understood. The opponent had entered a "self-destruction" mode. All that was left was to wait.
He didn't approach. Instead, he stepped to the side, and from the folds of his clothing, as if at a wave of his hand, a weapon slipped out. Not a katana. A chain. Long, of dark metal, its links covered in dullly glowing runes—the Scar "Ravenous Severance." A chain that devoured Kokurō energy, tearing internal bonds.
Kaito swung his arm. The chain, like a living serpent, shot towards Reiden. He tried to bat it away with a strike, but his movement was slow, delayed. The chain wrapped around his forearm not to bind, but to latch on. The runes flared crimson.
Reiden gasped. This wasn't physical pain. It was a sensation of internal draining. The chain was sucking out the remnants of his energy, the very energy keeping him on his feet, making his heart beat through the pain. His golden glow faded completely.
Kaito tugged the chain. Reiden collapsed to his knees.
The mercenary switched weapons. A short blade appeared in his hand, its edge the color of tarnished steel—the Scar "Stagnation and Rot." He threw it. The blade embedded itself in Reiden's thigh, not deep, but enough. Immediately, the wound around the blade turned white, stopped bleeding, and the tissue around it began slowly but surely losing vitality, as if dying on living flesh.
This was no longer a duel. It was a cold-blooded execution. Kaito methodically, without malice, almost with clinical interest, inflicted wounds that didn't kill instantly but drained strength, hope, the ability to resist. A blade slowing regeneration. A dart disrupting nerve impulses. Thorns poisoning the spirit.
Reiden tried to rise. His body, accustomed to invincibility, refused to obey. Each wound was a precise strike against his system. He no longer saw clarity. He only saw the approaching shadow with tired eyes and another weapon in hand. Pain became the background, white noise of cosmic fatigue.
Finally, he collapsed onto his back, unable to even raise an arm. He lay staring at the cracking crimson sky, feeling life slowly seep from dozens of neat, lethal wounds. His golden eyes went dim. There wasn't even despair in them. Only emptiness. The same emptiness he'd felt after meeting Magoro, but now filled not with philosophical torment, but with simple, physical end.
Kaito Fujisaki approached and stopped over him. He looked at the fallen "strongest" without triumph. He looked as a master looks at complex but completed work. In his hand appeared the final tool. A dagger. Tiny, with a blade of black, lightless obsidian. On its surface pulsed a single Scar—a complex, multi-layered pattern resembling a wilting flower. The "Scar of Soul's Fading."
"The strongest Majutsushi of the modern era," Kaito uttered, his voice quiet, almost thoughtful. "A walking force of nature. And in the end..." he leaned slightly lower, "...just meat. Worth more than the rest. Irony."
Reiden didn't answer. He wasn't even looking at him. He was looking at the sky, and perhaps in this last moment, he saw not the cracks in reality, but a distant, clear sky above their cherry tree, and Sorato's laughing face as it was before everything went to ruin.
"Farewell, phenomenon," Kaito concluded.
And plunged the dagger.
Not into the heart. Into the throat. A precise, professional strike, severing the carotid artery and windpipe but leaving the brain and spine untouched. A quick, guaranteed death for any mortal.
Warm blood gushed onto the mercenary's hand and the dusty ground. Reiden's body jerked in a final convulsion, then went limp. The eyes, still looking at the sky a second ago, rolled back, losing their last gleam.
Kaito pulled out the dagger, wiped it on the edge of his hakama. He didn't sever the head. First, it was unaesthetic. Second, the Scar on the dagger guaranteed that even if the body somehow began to regenerate, the soul was already doomed to dissipation. The dagger itself, with the residual energy of the victim, would serve as proof of death.
He turned his back on the body, sheathed the dagger at his belt. His gaze, businesslike and cold, swept over the destroyed landscape, then fixed in the direction where, by his calculations, the second target should have been moving.
"Second target. Mushiro," he muttered under his breath and stepped forward, dissolving into the chaotic twilight of the dying Colony, leaving behind only silence, a glassy trench, and the body of one who, just an hour ago, was considered invincible.
The "Stable Point"
The "stable point" turned out to be a ghostly memory of grandeur.
It was a destroyed pavilion, once likely part of a luxurious game hall. All that remained were marble columns, half a dome, and a sparkling but rapidly fading floor paved with blue crystals that pulsed weakly with light. The air here was calm, distortions of reality almost imperceptible—like the eye of a hurricane. But this calm was deceptive. The crystals themselves on the floor were cracking, losing their glow. The protection was melting before their eyes.
"We might have an hour," Shiori said, kneeling and touching a palm to the cold crystal. "Maybe less. The source is fading. It's like... a breathing artifact taking its last breath."
Akira sat in the center of the pavilion; his "Zone" was no longer needed. He breathed heavily, his face covered in sweat. His hand instinctively reached for his chest, where a gut feeling hinted at approaching disaster he could neither see nor explain.
Ryūnosuke, gritting his teeth, tried to stabilize his wounds somehow using the remnants of his "Iron Oath," but the metallic veins on his skin flickered unevenly, malfunctioning.
"An hour... We won't think of anything in that time. We need direction. Real direction."
Kaede stood at the edge of the pavilion, watching as the crimson shroud outside slowly but surely advanced, consuming the last remnants of stability.
"There's only one direction—out. But where is 'out' in a place where space itself is going mad?"
All eyes involuntarily turned to Jintarō.
He sat on a broken column piece, twirling a pair of dice he'd procured from somewhere. His face had lost its hysterical glee. Now he looked simply tired and irritated.
"Looking at me like a savior? Cute. My luck isn't GPS. It's a feeling. A pull. Right now, it pulls..." he threw the dice. They landed "snake eyes"—two and three. Jintarō snorted. "See? No clarity. It says 'go,' but doesn't say 'where.' Maybe into an abyss. Maybe to an exit. Wanna play dice? We roll—even, we go left; odd, right. At least it'll be fun."
"This is madness!" Ryūnosuke flared up. "We're relying on the gambles of a lunatic?"
"Got anything better, thick-skulled heir?" Jintarō retorted, and his old, familiar causticity returned to his voice. "Your broken toys? Her logical paradoxes that'll blow your brains out in this chaos? His void that's about to run dry? Or her archives that say we'll all die in an hour? Go on, enlighten us!"
"Enough!" Kaede said authoritatively, but tension was audible in her voice. "We can't waste energy on squabbles. We need to..."
Her words were cut off.
Not by a sound. Not by a flash.
By a presence.
At the edge of the fading stable zone, where the crystals had already gone dark, stood he. Tall, in light hakama and dark shirt, with a face etched in eternal weariness and a thin scar on his cheek. Kaito Fujisaki had entered their sanctuary as silently as a shadow and now looked at them with his lifeless, appraising gaze.
His eyes slid over each of them, finally settling on Akira. They held neither hatred nor excitement. Only work.
"Kiriyama Akira," he pronounced, confirming the identification. "Mushiro. Second target."
In his right hand, hanging loosely at his side, he already held a cleaver with a wide blade shimmering with the Scar of unnatural heaviness. In his left—a chain with hooks emitting a quiet hiss.
He didn't even assume a fighting stance. He simply took a step forward, into the pavilion, and his entire demeanor said one thing: this would not be a battle. This would be a slaughter.
And in that moment, as Ryūnosuke and Kaede instinctively lunged forward to cover Akira, and Jintarō cursed and threw his dice, Shiori suddenly screamed, clutching her head not from fear, but from a sudden, deafening breakthrough in her perception of Scars.
Her eyes, wide open, stared not at the mercenary, but somewhere into the space behind Kaito, towards the battlefield he had left.
"No... it's... impossible..." she whispered, and her voice held not horror, but shocked, almost religious amazement. "He... he's alive. The signature... it's changing... a new Scar is being born... Primordial..."
But her words were drowned in Ryūnosuke's roar, in the whistle of Kaito's chain, and in the soul-chilling understanding that their respite was over, and now they would have to fight not a system, not a game, but the living embodiment of lethal professionalism, who had already killed the one they thought invincible.