The air in the Forest of Petrified Dreams didn't tremble. It groaned. As if space itself here, on the edge of the collapsing Colony, was tired of chaos and had frozen in a silent scream. Crystallized memories of past battles—ghostly figures of quartz and mist—stood motionless like tombstones to forgotten ambitions.
And into this dead silence, He entered.
Akatsuki Magoro didn't appear in a flash. He simply became a fact, like sunrise. His ashen kimono, black scarf, and heavy gaze were the only spots of color in this monochrome realm. He walked slowly, not looking around, and under his steps the crystallized ground didn't crunch but leveled out, obeying an unspoken command.
He was found quickly. Or rather, he walked out to meet him.
From behind a boulder of blue quartz resembling a frozen wave of sorrow, a figure rose. A man woven from rusty iron rods and dark oak wood, like a self-erected tombstone. In the hollow of his chest burned a dim, green fire—a remnant of a soul. This was Asato Kusunagi, once a legendary guardian of clan borders, master of Kokurō binding metal and living wood into impenetrable defense. Reincarnation hadn't taken his memory, only polished his pride to razor sharpness.
"Akatsuki," Kusunagi's voice was the creak of rusty branches in the wind. "A phantom. A shadow they couldn't bury. You walk upon the graves of our victories."
Magoro stopped. His eyes slid over the composite body of his opponent. Not with threat assessment. With the curiosity of an aesthete examining a peculiar pattern.
"Victory over what? Over a shadow?" his voice was even, deep as the rumble of a distant landslide. "You built your castles on the sand of my temporary absence. And call that victory. Amusing."
"My power withstood armies!" Kusunagi rasped, and the iron rods in his body tensed, the wood groaning, filling with ancient power. "My walls were taken by neither fire nor steel! You are just another storm. And storms pass."
"Distortion: Knot of Silence," Magoro uttered.
He didn't even move a finger.
Directly before Kusunagi's chest, a centimeter from his blazing heart, the air broke. Not flared, not tore—it broke, like a poorly folded map. An invisible spatial knot formed—a zone where the geometry of the world ceased obeying common sense.
Kusunagi, already beginning to move for an attack, suddenly froze. Not because he was bound. Because the space inside the knot compressed a million-fold, becoming harder than diamond, while around him it stretched into a kilometer of void.
His consciousness, his body, his spirit received mutually exclusive commands: "you are here" and "you are not here." He felt no pain. He felt absolute disorientation in his own existence. His iron didn't bend, his wood didn't break. They just... ceased to be a single whole.
"See?" Magoro's voice was calm. "You speak of walls. Of force that repels something. I speak of the foundation. What those walls stand on. And if the foundation decides the walls are no longer needed..."
He moved his index finger almost imperceptibly.
The invisible knot shifted. By a centimeter. It passed through Kusunagi's composite body like a knife through butter, meeting no resistance.
"...the iron ceased to be bonded to the wood. The wood forgot it was part of a body. The spiritual flame found no fuel."
Kusunagi didn't disintegrate. He... delaminated. Rusty rods fell in a crude heap on the ground with a dull clang. The dark wood crumbled into dust smelling of ancient mold. The green flame blinked once and went out, not even having time to flare with despair. No explosion, no struggle. An act of reality revision.
Magoro approached the metal pile. Bent down. Picked up one rod on which a faint Scar of an ancient defensive technique still smoldered.
"You were asking implicitly," he said just as quietly, addressing the one whose consciousness had already turned into an empty dead shadow. "They all ask. Where in me comes this attraction to the weak. To their trembling hope. To their inevitable agony when that hope dies."
He clenched the rod in his palm, and the metal couldn't withstand the touch—it crumbled into rusty dust, vanishing in a gust of wind that had no source here.
"But what is this, if not love? They exalt us for strength. And we answer them with what stands above any strength. We answer with love. Love for purity. For a world that will no longer writhe under the dirty hands of those who do not understand on what thin fabric they leave their bloody stains."
He opened his empty palm. The dust fell.
"A pity you couldn't understand that. Your era understood only walls. Mine understands the fabric."
Magoro straightened. His gaze fell on one of the crystallized ghosts—the figure of two young warriors standing back-to-back. The image was vague, but the silhouettes were discernible. Reiden and Sorato. In the bloom of their friendship.
Under the scarf, the Emperor-Demon's face was touched by a shadow of something distantly resembling melancholy.
"Two suns in one sky..." he whispered. "One must set so the night can appreciate the light of the remaining one. Or... so it itself becomes brighter from the pain of loss. We will find out soon."
He turned and walked away from the Forest of Petrified Dreams, leaving behind a zone of perfect, inscrutable order where even the memory of resistance was erased. He walked towards his sunset or his sunrise—and it seemed he didn't care what the world, which he intended to rewrite with the love and relentlessness of a river washing away sandcastles, would call it.