The mountain did not just crumble; it screamed. Stone turned to dust under a wave of pure, malevolent will that washed over the landscape. It was not a force of chaos, but of absolute, chilling order—the order of the grave. Jokedone did not merely look astonished; he looked as if he had seen a ghost he'd spent a lifetime burying. The air grew cold, and the very light seemed to dim, not from shadow, but from a profound, draining emptiness.
"What was that?" Sarah breathed, her voice small against the echoing, silent roar. Her System was flashing crimson alerts she didn't need to read to understand. [CATASTROPHIC COSMIC-LEVEL THREAT DETECTED.]
Kenta's hand was already on the hilts of his swords, his knuckles white. The dark blade, Yami no Hikari, throbbed in its sheath, not with its usual hungry rage, but with a strange, resonant dread. "That… felt like my dark blade," he whispered, his voice tight. "But a thousand times older, colder. It's not anger. It's… conclusion."
Jokedone's face was a mask of grim recognition. When he spoke, his voice was low, scraped raw by memory. "The Shadow of Buddha," he said, the name a curse and a lament. "An echo of enlightenment twisted into pure nihilism. A part of our master's own boundless compassion that, in seeking to understand all suffering, became consumed by it. It chose to see the pain of the world not as a problem to solve, but as the only fundamental truth. Its mercy is annihilation."
He turned to Kaguya, and in that look passed a history of shared battles and shared scars. "Kaguya. Guard them with your life. This is a poison I must cauterize alone. It is a wound in the world that bears my master's name. The duty to close it is mine."
Kaguya's usual slyness was gone, replaced by a solemn, unshakeable resolve. She placed herself between the students and the emanating darkness, a silent, living fortress. "No harm will come to them," she vowed, her voice absolute.
As Jokedone walked towards the source of the decay, each step was heavy with the weight of a duty he had hoped was finished, a failure he had long sought to atone for.
---
The Evil Shadow of Buddha, the entity once known as Xi'an, sat amidst the ruins not like a conqueror, but like a monk having achieved the final, terrible satori. The destruction around him was not a conquest; it was a statement. A logical endpoint. The silence he cultivated was not peaceful; it was the silence after the last scream has faded.
"Xi'an," Jokedone said, his voice echoing in the suffocating quiet.
The entity turned, its eyes not filled with rage, but with a profound, chilling emptiness, like the void between stars. "Jokedone. You still carry his light like a torch in a hurricane. You still believe in saving a world whose only consistent language is suffering."
"Our master taught us to end suffering, not to worship it," Jokedone countered, his stance firm, his spirit a bastion against the encroaching void.
"He taught us to see the truth," Xi'an corrected, his voice a soft, insidious whisper that eroded hope. "I have simply looked deeper than you dared. If life is suffering, then the only true peace, the only authentic compassion, is in its cessation. I am not causing chaos, Jokedone. I am offering a final, merciful silence. A release from the cycle."
With a gesture, a Demon Dagger materialized in his hand. It did not gleam with evil; it was worse. It absorbed the light, the sound, the very possibility around it, a sliver of absolute, logical void.
"You have taken a tool of protection, a concept meant to guard the fragile, and turned it into a weapon of annihilation," Jokedone said, his anger a quiet, burning thing in the face of this coldness. "You violate the very compassion you claim to have understood."
"Compassion is a delay of the inevitable," Xi'an sighed, as if explaining something simple to a stubborn child. And then, he moved.
He did not attack with an army of clones, but with 10,000 reflections of his own nihilism. They were not mindless drones; each moved with the chilling grace of a perfect, despairing logic, their purpose not to kill, but to convince Jokedone of the utter futility of his fight, to mathematically prove the elegance of surrender.
Jokedone's response was not mere brute force. He did not meet chaos with chaos. He sank his will into the mountain itself, becoming an anchor of reality. The veins on his arms glowed not with rage, but with focused, benevolent power as he invoked the "Fist of Subjugation." The mountain didn't just shake; it agreed with him. The ground, the stone, the very essence of the world rejected the clones, not through violence, but through a fundamental reassertion of order and existence, swallowing them back into the unyielding earth from which they came.
He moved through the dissolving army, not as a brawler, but as a purifying force, a man walking through a bad dream and waking the world around him, until he stood once more before Xi'an.
"Your strength is impressive," Xi'an admitted, and for the first time, there was a flicker of something beyond emptiness in his eyes—annoyance. A flaw in his perfect logic. "But can your body, your mortal shell, resist the ultimate truth?"
The Demon Dagger moved faster than thought. It did not simply pierce Jokedone's flesh; it injected a metaphysical poison—the cold, irrefutable certainty of despair. Jokedone gasped, not from physical pain, but from the sudden, overwhelming vision of a universe without hope, a future where all struggles, all loves, all joys were inevitably ground into meaningless dust. It was the most seductive argument he had ever faced.
He fell to one knee, the poison whispering that surrender was the only logical, the only compassionate choice.
"I… will not," Jokedone gritted out, blood that looked too bright, too gold, trickling from his lip. He was not just fighting Xi'an; he was fighting the seductive, beautiful logic of the void. "I made a promise… to a friend in a temple of ashes. My end… is not for you to give."
"Sentiment," Xi'an sneered, but the sneer was a thin mask for his growing frustration. "The final, most illogical chain that binds you to suffering."
It was then that Jokedone truly stood. His simple trousers tore away, not for spectacle, but because the energy radiating from him—the energy of a vow upheld against all reason—could no longer be contained by mundane cloth. This was not an escalation of power; it was a transformation of purpose. He was no longer just a disciple; he was the embodiment of a promise.
"You speak of truth," Jokedone's voice boomed, now layered with a divine resonance that challenged the silence. "But you see only one half. You see the sunset and call it the death of light. I see it and remember the dawn that will inevitably follow. You see a dying star and call it an end. I see the elements it scatters to form new worlds."
A golden, intricately complex Mandala of Unwavering Vow ignited in the air behind him, its patterns mapping not destruction, but the sacred, interconnected web of all life, all vows, all love. Another circle, the Wheel of Karmic Justice, spun into existence on his back, its power not fueling his muscles, but affirming his sacred right and duty to defend the beautiful, fragile cycle of life itself against this unnatural cessation.
His kick that shattered Xi'an's leg was not an act of violence, but of severance—a breaking of the path this dark reflection walked, a refusal to let the illness spread further.
Xi'an laughed, but it was a hollow, broken sound now. "A temporary setback! The truth remains!"
"No," Jokedone said, his voice filled with a terrible, final compassion that was far more powerful than any hatred. "This is an intervention."
He gathered not just his energy, but his entire being—every prayer ever sent his way, every hope he had fostered, every memory of light and laughter he had ever cherished. He became a living conduit for a single, defiant principle: that life, in all its suffering and its sublime beauty, is worth protecting.
"Buddha Art: Final Benediction."
The resulting blow was not a "Smash." It was a silent, expanding sphere of golden light that made no sound because it was not breaking anything that was meant to be. It did not destroy the forest; it unmade the darkness that had infected it. Trees were not shattered; they were restored, their leaves bursting into vibrant, impossible green as the light passed over them. It was not an explosion, but a restoration.
Xi'an did not explode. He fragmented, his form dissolving into motes of fading shadow, his cold, empty eyes widening in a final, fleeting moment of shock—not at the raw power, but at the sheer, illogical, unwavering love that powered it. It was the one variable his perfect, despairing logic could not compute.
The light faded.
Jokedone stood alone in a suddenly peaceful, rejuvenated grove, the air sweet with the scent of new growth. Then, the cost of channeling such a fundamental, world-affirming power took its toll. The Mandalas flickered and died. The divine resonance left his voice. He collapsed, vomiting blood that was too bright, too gold, his body a shattered vessel, having contained a divine fire meant to burn away a cosmic despair.
He had won. He had proven that love was stronger than logic. But as the darkness took him, the victory felt like dying.