The battlefield did not wait.
Breaker surged forward like a hurricane given flesh, the earth trembling beneath his sheer mass. His target, the man in jade—the smug, scheming specter of a man—stood still, unfazed. But as Breaker's fists, each large enough to crush bone with ease, swung down to end him, the man simply... vanished.
Gone. Not even a flicker of an afterimage remained.
Breaker skidded to a stop, grinding his teeth. "Coward."
The wind howled through the digital trees, rustling the metallic tendrils coiled around ancient trunks. Above, neon constellations glitched in and out of existence, as if the system itself mocked him. The ruins around them pulsed with the energy of long-forgotten machines, their circuits still flickering, illuminating the open field in eerie intervals.
And then, movement.
The men in black—still here, still waiting. Encircling him like scavengers around a wounded beast. Among them, one stood out. A player, obviously unlike the rest.
Chez.
His green cursor flickered above his head as he raised a single hand, fingers snapping together with an exaggerated flourish. "Formation, my dudes. You know what to do."
The men in black snapped into movement, their formation shifting like a living organism, fluid yet controlled. Breaker's crimson gaze burned into them.
"Where did your boss run off to?" he snarled, rolling his shoulders, the motion alone sending tremors through the ground.
Chez grinned, tilting his head. "Oh, who knows? Maybe he's watching us from the shadows. Maybe he's sipping virtual piña coladas on some distant server. Maybe he's—" Chez gasped dramatically, hands clasping his cheeks. "—already inside your mind."
The men in black murmured in agreement, nodding sagely as if Chez had uttered divine truth.
Breaker exhaled sharply through his nose, his patience burning to embers. "You have no chance. One against a hundred, a thousand—it wouldn't matter. Walk away, tell me where he went, and I might spare you."
Chez wagged a finger. "Tsk, tsk. You really don't get it, do you, big guy? We're not here to win. We're here to entertain."
Breaker's lip curled. "Fine. I'll break you first."
A spark of madness lit up Chez's eyes as he raised his hands. His Leere activated.
Reality twisted, glitching in patches around him, and then—
A weapon materialised in his grasp. A giant, ornate wedge of cheese, its surface glowing with arcane sigils, pulsing with an unnatural, greasy energy. The scent—rich, pungent—seemed to cling to the air, almost tangible.
"Behold! The Grand Fromager!" Chez declared, twirling the colossal cheese weapon like a seasoned performer. "With this, I shall drown my enemies in aged dairy!"
The men in black let out cheers, though one among them muttered, "Big bro, I think you mean suffocate, not drown."
Chez ignored him.
They charged.
Breaker braced himself, muscles tensed, ready for impact—but then they veered, moving in perfect synchronicity, shifting around him like a tide retreating before the storm.
Something was wrong.
A metallic hiss. A pulse of corrupted light. Then—
Debuffs. A dozen at once.
His body stiffened, his movements slowed, his strength—diminished. Poison coursed through his veins like liquid malware. Anti-heal effects wrapped around him like invisible chains. Paralysis crept up his limbs, gnawing at his control.
And then came the cheese.
Thick, molten strands of Chez's conjured dairy shot forth, slamming into Breaker's legs, his arms, wrapping around his chest like eldritch tendrils. It clung to him, hardened, burned. His flesh sizzled beneath its bizarre properties, his health bar dipping dangerously toward the yellow zone.
Breaker growled, his teeth grinding. The men in black had stopped moving, their weapons lowered, their breathing steady. They had him. And they knew it.
Chez sauntered forward, smugness oozing from every step. He examined Breaker like a critic inspecting a flawed painting, his eyes twinkling with mischief.
"Man, you're supposed to be legendary—an Envoyer of Dusk, the Sin of Wrath, the big bad rage monster. But you're kinda... not? I expected more. Maybe a flaming aura. Or, like, screaming. You know, anime stuff."
One of the men in black coughed. "Big bro, our report said he destroyed three buildings last week just by sneezing."
Chez waved him off. "Details. Anyway, what I meant to say is—well. This was kinda easy."
"be careful bro," one of the men murmured.
Chez scoffed. "Nah. He's done. Arms, legs—everything's locked up. He ain't moving."
Breaker's health bar pulsed in warning. The cheese melted deeper, scalding, burning, but his eyes—his eyes never wavered. No fear. No doubt. Only that endless, simmering wrath.
Then, movement.
A snap of muscle, a twitch in his neck.
Then—
His teeth sank deep into flesh.
A sickening crack filled the air.
Silence fell over the battlefield.
Chez's health bar plummeted to zero.
The men in black stood frozen in horror. It wasn't just the attack—it was how it happened. No warning. No buildup. Just a maw closing over Chez's head, crushing bone and code alike.
Then, he chewed.
One of the men let out a strangled noise. "Oh my god, big bro—"
Breaker exhaled sharply through his nose, his expression unreadable, then spat.
A tiny fragment of Chez's shattered skull shot from his mouth, whistling through the air like a bullet—And struck another man in black square in the forehead.
His head exploded instantly.
A wave of sheer, paralysing dread rippled through the remaining men in black. No one moved. No one breathed.
Breaker finally spoke, voice low, guttural.
"I warned you."
His eyes swept the living, the dying, the ones pretending not to shake. "Doesn't look like the traitor's in this herd," he rasped. "You're all far too weak."
And then, with a single, monstrous flex of his muscles, the cheese restraints shattered like brittle glass as his health bar shot instantly back to full.
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It was a graveyard in the making.
The air crackled with the aftershock of Breaker's wrath, static bleeding through the digital sky like the very world had recoiled in fear. The ground beneath him was no longer an open field but a canvas of carnage—limbs strewn, bodies shattered, data flickering like dying embers. The scent of simulated death lingered, coppery and artificial, a mere imitation of the real thing.
And yet, the destruction was real.
Breaker stood at the center of it all, the eye of his own storm, shoulders rising and falling with slow, deliberate breaths. His hands dripped with digital blood, the system struggling to process what had just unfolded. Around him, the last remnants of the men in black twitched, some still clinging to the illusion of life, their health bars blinking red, desperate for reprieve.
But there would be none.
A severed arm still clutched at his leg. Without looking, Breaker stepped down, crushing it into nothingness.
'Wrath was not rage,' he thought, it was precision guided by fire. It was the moment before the dam break, when silence was already death.
"You're just like a dog on a leash, you know that?" One of them had said to him, moments before he'd crushed their skull with a single squeeze. "Chained to your master, frothing at the mouth, waiting for a command."
A dog.
Breaker had heard those words before. Not here. Not in this world. Before.
They had mocked him for his size when he was a child. Freak. Beast. Monster. The words had dug into his skin, deeper than any wound, until they had become part of him. He had carried them like chains, heavy, suffocating. And his mother—his mother had never once looked at him, never once acknowledged the weight he bore.
Why did she never look at me the way she looked at them? The strangers. The ones who came and went through the door he wasn't allowed to knock on.
She had never spoken his name with love. Only frustration. Only indifference.
Breaker drove his fist through the chest of another man in black, ripping through digital flesh, bone, and code like they were made of paper. The man choked, eyes wide in horror, trying to scream but finding nothing left in his lungs. Breaker wrenched his hand free, the force of it tearing the man in half.
Another charged him. Foolish. Breaker caught him mid-step, gripping his throat in a single massive hand. The man flailed, boots scraping against the bloodied ground, fingers clawing at the vice that encased his neck.
"You never had a chance," Breaker growled, his voice a low rumble.
He squeezed. A sickening crunch. The man's body convulsed before collapsing into a pile of fragmented data, dissolving into the digital wind.
In the past, his anger had been mindless. It had lashed out wildly, uncontrollably. He had wanted to burn the world, to tear it apart, to make everyone feel the suffering that had festered inside him since birth.
But the professor had taught him differently.
"Your anger is not a weakness, you have every rights to feel this way." The professor had once told him, standing amidst the ruins of a battle much like this one. "It is your foundation. But it is a tool, not your master. Now tell me, child—what do you want to break?"
'Everything.'
Breaker tore another man apart, gripping both his legs and pulling until the body snapped in two, his health bar vanishing before he even had time to process his death. The scent of burning flesh—fake, fabricated, yet visceral—clung to the air. The Angel Orchid pinned to Breaker's collar was stained red, its delicate petals untouched by the carnage.
A man tried to run.
Breaker let him.
For a moment, he simply watched, the coward scrambling over the ruined terrain, tripping over fallen bodies, desperation oozing from his every movement. A part of Breaker almost found it amusing. But another part of him—the part that had once been a child, weak and small and forgotten—hated it.
'Don't look back,' he thought. 'Don't make me remember.'
Hated the weakness. Hated the fear. Hated the way it reminded him of himself.
He lifted a nearby piece of rubble—no, not rubble. A remnant of Chez's skull mid-disintegrating, its edge shedding polygonal, holographic flecks. He rolled it once between his fingers, then flicked it forward with inhuman force.
The jagged shard whistled through the air like a bullet.
When it struck, the fleeing man's head exploded in a burst of red and static.
'You ran like I used to,' Breaker thought coldly, scanning the dark edges of the field where more figures stirred. 'But you won't get the second chance I did.'
One more.
High above the battlefield, nestled within the skeletal branches of a derelict tree adorned with rusted gears and frayed wires, Grave laid prone.
Through the scope, he observed the carnage below.
The sniper's finger hovered near the trigger, not with intent to fire, but as a gesture of readiness. He studied Breaker's movements, noting the precision, the calculated fury. This was no berserker; this was a predator.
Suddenly, Breaker's head tilted upward, his gaze locking onto the sniper's position. The old man breath's caught. In that moment, he felt as though the scope was a conduit, connecting their eyes across the expanse.
A slow smile crept across the sniper's weathered face.
He whispered, "The rest is up to you, young mistress." The words were carried away by the wind, a final message to the only saint person left in that family of monsters.
Then, everything went dark.
A sudden force strucked, severing a sphere shapped figure cleanly from his body. Breaker stood behind him, his hand extended, fingers together like a spear. Blood sprayed in an arc, painting the mechanical branches crimson. The sniper's body remained momentarily upright before collapsing, lifeless.
Breaker retracted his hand, the blood evaporating into digital mist.
Wrath was not an emotion.
It was a promise.
And there was still more to break.
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An illusion… or a dream?
The dreamer couldn't tell. He floated, weightless, in a void that whispered nothing and echoed less. The air was thick with silence, yet there was no air. Beneath him, the ground was neither hard nor soft—just there, like memory too old to forget and too faint to grasp.
A petal fell. Pale at first, then stained, veins darkening as if ink bled through silk; it turned, resisting the last inch, reluctant to meet a world. It came to rest on a hilt.
A sword stood upright before him, wedged deep into the unseen earth. The dreamer stepped; with each small motion the dark behind him pulled back, coiling itself around the blade as if choosing a roost, and the rest of the void brightened into a breath-white that answered in pulses. Only the blade kept its night.
Closer, and the petal became part of the thing—glass, the blade, a lake held vertical. Within its edges something moved.
A line. A crack.
At first, no more than a thread of black. But then it bled—slowly, steadily—as if oil were seeping through ice. Darkness trickled through the blade's heart, curling into veins, branching like roots or sins. It was beautiful, and it was wrong.
The dreamer stepped again. The blade pulsed. It fractured.
And then—
The world bent.
Colours twisted, peeled back like theatre curtains. The floor beneath his feet became painted wood. Lanterns swung above, casting long shadows across a paper stage. A puppet dangled at its centre—delicate, elegant, with joints too fluid to be real. A single word echoed in his mind like a forgotten lullaby:
Ukiyo.
The floating world. A life that dances, then fades.
Water swept across the stage. Stones replaced planks. He blinked.
Now he lay on wet stone, cold pressing into his back. Before him stood the puppet—not a marionette of strings, but a girl stitched together by something that calls itself fate when no one argues.
Her eyes were glassy blue, wide and unreadable. Her dress, a swirl of pastel white and faded sky, swayed gently as if caught in the tide. Threads glimmered faintly at her joints, trailing upward into a space that did not exist.
She did not speak, but somehow, he understood that she too had been dreaming.
A tremor of light behind her—no moon, no flame. Tiny lamps rising, the way wishes forgot to fall. They drifted upward like embers in reverse, pale greens and blues, each pulse as soft as a breath, as if every flicker remembered a name and would not say it out loud.
'This place only floats because nothing anchors it, a truth arrived, then went.' He said nothing.
His body, heavy with questions, lifted slowly from the wet stone. The chill of it clung to his back. Water lapped gently at his boots, the river beside him drawing in a tide that hadn't been there before. The tunnel narrowed ahead, its walls slick with time.
Ukiyo didn't move. Her eyes stayed on him, glassy and ocean-deep.
Her voice, when it came, was like silk torn and rethreaded too many times—holding, barely.
"The world calls it salvation… but they only want someone to blame."
She blinked—not in innocence, but like someone who hadn't slept in years. Not truly.
Kazami's throat tensed. There was too much behind her words. Too much he couldn't hold.
His gaze dropped, chasing the curve of the water beside them as it curled around moss-laced stone. He tried to speak, but the words scattered like ash in his mouth—burnt before they reached air.
She didn't wait.
Her hands dropped to her sides, thin threads of light tugging faintly at her wrists like marionette strings without a master. Her dress, pale blue and worn like memory, swayed with the rising tide.
"Even if I could save them…" she began, softer now. A tremble nearly hidden beneath her breath. "…would you let me?"
The silence between them grew long. Not empty, but weightless—as though time itself had decided to pause and listen.
Her lips parted again to speak.
But then—
She froze.
Eyes widening—just slightly—as her head tilted toward the far bend of the tunnel.
The light trembled.
And from the deepest curve of the water's flow, something emerged.
A figure, silver-haired and still, framed by the hush of moving shadows. The ripples at his feet curled unnaturally—like fingers brushing against skin not meant to be touched. His form seemed to breathe without lungs, his presence more felt than seen.
The air around him shimmered.
As if the tunnel had inhaled something it shouldn't.
His eyes held no shine. His feet never broke the surface. And yet, the water stirred.
Something about him reminded her of an old story—one told in hushes, not words. Of spirits caught in a place where winds never stopped—not gales, but whispers. Breaths of longing that circled forever, looking for bodies to wear.
Her breath caught in her throat.
He didn't move. He didn't need to.
Desire has shapes—it casts long shadows.
Kazami didn't notice. Not yet. But Ukiyo's fingers curled slowly, her threads tightening. The light in her eyes dimmed, not from fear—
—but from recognition.
The tide rose. He vanished.
And only the river knew what she had seen.