Kaito Fujisaki wasted no time on warnings or theatrical gestures. He was here to work. His "Eye of Dissection" instantly analyzed the threats: the girl in crimson with dangerous intellect in her eyes; the large samurai with metallic "scars"; the archivist connected to the past; the jester with an aura of distorted probability; and in the center—the boy who was nothing. Emptiness.
He started with the most dangerous one—with logic.
Against Kaede, he threw a chain with hooks, but not at her, at the space in front of her, the very moment she, anticipating an attack, had already begun folding her fingers for the "Crimson Loop." The chain links flared with the Scar "Severance of Consequence"—a technique breaking cause-and-effect links on a fundamental level. The web of logical conclusions Kaede was weaving didn't unravel—it never arose at all. Her mind, accustomed to neat equations, hit a blind spot, an error of division by zero. She gasped, clutching her temples, blood sprayed from her nose, and she collapsed to her knees, her consciousness plunged into chaos of an unsolvable paradox.
Against Ryūnosuke, already flying at him with a roar and sword raised, Kaito didn't thrust a blade forward, but a short, massive hammer with a pommel of dull bronze. It shone with the Scar "Mirror Induction." The hammer didn't block the strike. It accepted it. At the moment of contact, the Scar activated, creating instant feedback. All the power of Ryūnosuke's "Iron Oath," all his intent to destroy, turned inward into his own body. The metallic veins on his skin flared white-hot. He cried out, not from pain but shock, feeling his own technique searing his nerves and muscles. He collapsed, smoking, seized by a convulsion.
Against Shiori, who, shaking off the shock, was already pulling out a scroll and whispering an incantation, Kaito threw a light throwing dagger. Its blade was of matte silver with the Scar "Silence of Echo." The dagger didn't hit her. It stuck in the ground at her feet. But that was enough. A spreading wave of silent vibration touched the forming ghostly images of the past around her. And they didn't scatter. They evaporated, like a dream upon waking, leaving not even a memory. Shiori felt her connection to the archives, to history itself, snap for a moment. She was gripped by claustrophobia of absolute loneliness in the present. She hugged herself, silently weeping.
Against Jintarō, who with a wild grin threw a handful of glowing dice at him, shouting, "Critical failure, bastard!" Kaito simply took up a halberd. Its long shaft was covered in a pattern resembling a compressed spring of fate—the Scar "Inevitable Outcome." He didn't slash at the flying dice. He thrust the halberd into the air before him. And Jintarō's luck stumbled. The dice, which should have created an explosion of chaos around Kaito or a pit in the floor, just fell to the ground as dead weight. Jintarō himself, reliant on the flow of probability, suddenly felt the world become utterly predictable, rigid, and hopeless. His grin slid off his face, replaced by panicked confusion. He froze, not knowing what to do in a world where his only superpower didn't work.
All of this took less than ten seconds.
And now he was face to face with Akira.
The boy stood, fists clenched, his face pale but resolute. He activated his "Zone"—a small bubble of negation around himself.
Kaito Fujisaki, for the first time in this short fight, stopped. His "Eye of Dissection" slid over Akira, seeking... and not finding. No Scars. No weak points for magic. Nothing for his lethal logic to latch onto. This wasn't a shield. This was a hole in the very fabric of reality, where the rules of his profession didn't apply.
No irritation or malice appeared on the mercenary's face. There was cold, professional respect. He nodded, like a master acknowledging a unique, difficult material.
Then he did something unexpected. He raised his halberd, the one with the Scar of inevitable fate, and, gripping the shaft and head, broke it in half over his knee with a snap. The sound of cracking wood and metal sounded absurd in the pavilion's silence.
In his hand remained a sharp, jagged piece of shaft, about a meter long. No Scar. No magic. Just a piece of wood with a torn edge.
He moved.
Akira, relying on magic being powerless against him, was stunned for a second. That second was enough. Kaito didn't use fencing techniques. He used a spearman's thrust—sharp, direct, with the concentrated force of his whole body. The splinter, driven by superhuman pact strength, pierced the trembling bubble of the "Zone." There was resistance—but it was the resistance of air, not magic. The tip, though wooden, entered Akira's chest slightly left of center with a dull, wet sound.
Akira gasped, his eyes wide with incomprehension and shock. He looked at the splinter protruding from his chest, then at the mercenary's impassive face. Then his knees buckled, and he collapsed, gulping for air. A crimson puddle quickly spread across the blue crystal floor.
Kaito pulled out the splinter and tossed it aside. He surveyed the pavilion. Kaede writhed in a silent fit, Ryūnosuke lay motionless, Shiori sobbed with her face in her knees, Jintarō stood staring into emptiness, and Akira bled out. All alive. But incapacitated.
He wiped his palm on his hakama.
"Contract says kill," he uttered aloud, more to himself than to them. "But the spider didn't specify exactly how. Does this count?.. Perhaps this dying world will finish you off itself. Economical."
He turned and left the pavilion with the same unhurried, silent step, heading back to where he'd left his main proof. He needed that dagger with the "soul-fading Scar." With it, he would get his thirty percent.
Meanwhile, Where the Dead Body Should Have Been
Meanwhile, where a dead body should have lain, something not covered by any contracts or Scars was happening.
Reiden Kagetori's brain, a unique magical organ without equal in the world, under threat of complete annihilation, did what no one else could. It didn't resist the "soul-fading Scar." It ignored it. For its neural structure, devoid of the polarity "possible/impossible," "alive/dead," this Scar was just another set of data, noise in the system.
Threatened by annihilation, instinctually, bypassing consciousness, a forbidden, deep protocol activated. Not a Kokurō technique, but something more ancient, fundamental. The "Scar of Primordial Vitality."
This wasn't immortality. It was short-term hyper-regeneration demanding a monstrous price. It began in emergency mode, burning his internal reserves of Scars—all the energy accumulated over a lifetime, all imprints of techniques, all his magical inheritance. It inflicted irreparable damage to his very connection to Kokurō, threatening to leave him an empty shell.
But his brain, unique among others, was already working. In unclear, inscrutable ways, it began to mitigate the damage. It wasn't restoring the burned Scars—it was rewriting the system itself. What for another would be the end of a magical career was becoming transmutation for him. He wasn't losing his connection to Kokurō. He was changing its nature. For him, the polarity "strong/weak," "whole/broken" didn't exist. Only efficient/inefficient. And now, the survival program demanded efficiency at any cost.
His body began to visibly mend. Not just heal over with flesh. Restructure. The golden patterns under his skin didn't fade but changed their design, becoming more complex, deeper.
Kaito Fujisaki returned to the battlefield. And stopped.
There was no body. In its place lay only a puddle of thick, golden liquid slowly evaporating, rising into the air as golden pollen. The air itself rang with residual, alien energy. Of the "soul-fading Scar," not a trace remained—it had been absorbed, digested, like everything else.
The mercenary's tired face expressed, for the first time in many years, not surprise, but cold, professional admiration. He whistled, quietly, almost inaudibly.
"So, that's how it is..." he whispered. "Not just a phenomenon. A phenomenon with a will to live. And with... resources. Interesting. Very."
That's when he felt it—the weight hanging over him. Not physical. Existential. The pressure of reality suddenly focused into a single point.
He slowly turned.
Twenty meters above the ground, in the center of a whirlwind of golden dust and warping light, Reiden Kagetori levitated. His clothes were in tatters, revealing a body covered in new, pulsating golden patterns glowing from within. His hair, usually black with gold strands, now seemed completely bleached platinum-white and floated weightlessly like a halo. But the most terrifying were his eyes. They were stars of molten gold, without pupils, without whites—just spheres of liquid, furious light.
He wasn't looking at Kaito. He was looking through him, into the very essence of the universe, and what he saw there, obviously, disappointed him.
"I have seen specks of dust that think themselves mountains," Reiden spoke, and his voice was not his own. It was a choir of echoes sounding from every air molecule, a low hum with the hiss of lightning and the rumble of distant stars. "I have seen mountains that fancy themselves eternal. I have seen eternity trembling before the face of the Void." He slowly lowered his hand, pointing a finger down at Kaito, at the ground, at everything. "In all that encompasses heaven and earth, in all this fleeting play of shadows... I alone remain the true vessel. The sole constant. The true greatness that needs no pacts, no Scars, no... mercenaries."
Kaito didn't answer. He already knew words were useless here. He knew he was about to die. But in his tired eyes, there was no fear. There was the excitement of a gambler plunging into the last, most insane bet against the casino itself. He dropped into a low stance, his body tensed to the limit, ready to challenge a force of nature one last time.
Reiden simply looked at him. Not with hatred. With pity.
"Raikyōshiki: Shiden," he uttered, and this was not the name of a technique. It was the proclamation of a law.
He snapped his fingers.
There was no flash. No sound.
Between him and Kaito, a purple spark appeared. Tiny, no bigger than a pea. It didn't move. It simply was.
And Kaito Fujisaki moved. The air in the pavilion didn't just shatter—it detonated. Without much effort, Kaito could break the speed barrier for short bursts, achieving velocities of up to 80 Mach. The world slowed to a viscous crawl. In that infinitesimal moment between the spark's appearance and its manifestation in his future path, the Hunter was already gone.
He wasn't just dodging. He was painting the landscape with his fury. His form became a blur of devastating motion. He drew his blade—not one of his tactical artifacts, but the "Shattered Blade of the Weeping Heavens." A katana with a blade that looked chewed, broken into savage, jagged teeth. It held no active Scar for this fight, but its very substance was a monument to annihilated power.
As he moved at hypersonic speeds, he didn't aim at Reiden. He aimed at the space between them. And he cut.
Each swing, fueled by pact-enhanced strength and unimaginable velocity, wasn't a sword stroke but a localized apocalypse. The crystal floor didn't crack—it vanished in wide, smooth trenches thirty meters long, as if scooped out by the hand of a giant. The pavilion's pillars, those that weren't instantly eviscerated, were sheared off cleanly halfway up, their upper halves hovering for a nanosecond before collapsing in a thunderous rain of debris. The very air pressure from his passage carved canyons in the ground and ripped what remained of the structure's walls to shreds. He left a crisscrossing web of total destruction around the levitating Reiden, a testament to the fact that even without a Scar for this specific enemy, Kaito Fujisaki was a force of pure, kinetic obliteration.
Yet, the purple spark persisted. It didn't chase him. It anticipated him. As Kaito finished a devastating arc that leveled a small hillock to the north, the spark winked into existence directly in the path of his next micro-corrected leap. It waited for him where physics and momentum dictated he would be.
His "Eye of Dissection" saw it—a flaw in reality itself, a solution with no variable to alter. There was no time for another burst. He couldn't stop. He saw the inevitable intersection.
A grim, almost relieved smile touched Kaito's lips in that final fraction of a second. Not a smile of triumph, but of a gambler who has pushed his luck to the absolute limit and finally sees the house's unbeatable hand. He didn't try to block with the Shattered Blade. He simply accepted it.
The spark touched his chest.
And everything happened.
The Purple Spark was not a strike or a beam. It was a pinpoint collapse of reality. A microscopic singularity where the laws of physics ceased to function for an instant. It didn't burn flesh. It erased it. Molecular bonds, atoms, elementary particles—everything that constituted Kaito Fujisaki at the point of contact simply ceased to matter. It annihilated, turning into pure energy that immediately flowed into... nowhere.
The spark passed through him. Cleanly, without resistance. It pierced his chest, exited his back, and continued its path down into the earth. And didn't stop. It went deeper, into the mantle, the planet's core, leaving behind a perfectly smooth, microscopic channel of absolute non-existence, and exited the other side, into space. It became a segment with a beginning but no end, and would fly through the void for eternity, fueled by nothing and unstoppable by anything, a monument to a power that should not exist. Only ancient, slumbering barriers laid upon the planet by unfathomable entities in its youth shuddered and bore the monstrous load, preventing the world from unraveling from such a collapse.
Kaito Fujisaki knelt. In his chest gaped a perfectly round hole the diameter of a coin. Through it, the ground behind was visible. No blood. No charred edges. Just... emptiness. His "Eye of Dissection" still worked, and he saw the Scars of his pact, his weapons, his own enhanced body fading like candles without a wick. Life was leaving not through pain, but through a sensation of rapid, irreversible loss.
He swayed forward but didn't fall. He braced his hands on the ground, coughed. From his lips, not blood, but a clot of mist with golden sparks gushed out—the remnants of his soul.
"Hey... Kagetori..." his voice was hoarse but surprisingly calm. He raised his head, looking at the levitating figure slowly descending to earth. "Hey, man... I've got... a kid back there..."
Reiden, now standing before him, looked at him with his star-like eyes. They held no anger, no triumph. They held something else. Understanding.
"Seiya," Kaito forced out with difficulty. "In a Tokyo orphanage... 'Dawn'." He took another horrible, gurgling breath. "Those bastards... from the Tokyo Academy of Magical Arts... they scan orphans... for the magical organ..." He tried to raise his hand, grab Reiden's sleeve, but his fingers slid helplessly over the fabric. "If they find it... they'll rot in labs... or become cannon fodder... like me..."
He gathered his last strength. His gaze, losing focus, became incredibly sharp, piercing.
"You... you're not like them..." he whispered. "Make him... a man. Not a weapon... Okay?.. That's... my last... order..."
His hand fell. His head bowed. But he didn't fall. He froze as if fallen asleep on his knees, forehead resting on the cold earth. A moment later, his body began slowly crumbling into golden ash, carried away by the wind of the dying Colony. All that remained was a small pile of dust and several objects: broken weapons and, fallen from the inner pocket of his vest, a worn photograph.
Reiden Kagetori stood over this. He felt no triumph. He felt weight. The weight of a new responsibility, strange and absurd, placed upon him by a dying enemy. The weight of a promise given not with words, but with silent agreement.
He bent down, picked up the photograph. It showed a boy about eight years old, with serious eyes and dark hair already promising to be as straight as his father's. The boy was smiling, but the smile held more wariness than joy.
Reiden looked at the photo, then at the pile of ash, then at the crimson, collapsing vault of the Colony, which was finally crumbling, freeing itself from the artificial structure.
He tucked the photograph into the inner pocket of his torn jacket. Then sighed. Deeply. And said to himself, perhaps for the first time in a very long time, truly sincerely, without pathos, without posing, simply stating the fact of a new, absurd duty:
"Okay."
And turned his back to the place where the "Game" ended, and took the first step towards where the living waited—wounded, broken, but alive. And where somewhere in Tokyo, in the "Dawn" orphanage, a boy named Seiya waited, unaware that his fate had just been bought and paid for with the highest possible price.
The Price of a Thousand Victories
At the moment his body turned to golden dust, it would be worth remembering who Kaito Fujisaki had been.
Not just a mercenary. Not just strong. At twenty-seven, his record showed exactly one thousand two hundred and three entries—each signifying a defeated Majutsushi whose Scar he studied, whose technique he dissected with his "Eye of Dissection" before delivering the final point. He wasn't a maniac. He was a tact. An iron logic in a world of chaotic magic. His strength wasn't innate.
At seventeen, the son of a simple carpenter and already understanding that the world of Majutsushi was a world of masters and slaves, he voluntarily entered a dilapidated shrine on the brink of ruin. He didn't pray there. He offered a deal, a Sacred Pact, to an ancient, almost forgotten spirit of the Weapon-Shaper, longing for times when blades decided the fates of empires. It was signed not with ink, but with drops of his own blood, into which he imprinted his desire: "Never to be a toy in the hands of others. To become the hand that holds the blade."
The Pact didn't give him magic.
It gave him tools: a body forged as a perfect weapon; perception that saw flaws in everything; and the right to summon an arsenal that grew with each victory. By thirty, the artifacts in his inscrutable inner arsenal were not treasures to him, but calibrated keys. Each blade, chain, or hammer was chosen for a specific type of Scar, for the weakness of a particular school of Kokurō.
A katana-obsessed illusion master fell to the sword "Quiet Dispersion." An invincible armored titan of the Morohashi clan was immobilized by the hammer "Mirror Induction."
Kaito didn't fight warriors—he solved equations where their powers were the variables, and their death was the answer. He became a legend and a nightmare for minor clans. His name, "Hunter of Majutsushi," was spoken in whispers. He wasn't hired for wars—wars were too crude and politicized for his precise approach. He was hired for surgical removal. Of a specific person. A specific threat. For a specific, astronomical price. He lived twenty-seven years. One thousand two hundred and three entries. Thirty artifacts. One Sacred Pact. And one son who would never learn what his father did.
Sorry, Seiya Fujisaki. Dad turned out to be not such a flawless instrument after all.