Renji didn't run. He walked. Each step was a measured click of leather on asphalt that seemed to mute the surrounding city. The Vanguards—monstrous, armored things that had traveled dimensions to harvest this world—looked small in his shadow.
Three of them lunged. They were blurs of grey steel and humming obsidian. Renji didn't draw a blade. He flicked his fingers, a casual gesture, like snapping away a bit of lint.
The air didn't just vibrate; it shrapneled.
The three Vanguards detonated. There was no fire, just a sudden, violent expansion of pressure that turned ancient armor and alien bone into a fine, grey mist. Chunks of metal clattered against the surrounding shop windows. The remaining three Vanguards skidded to a halt, their boots carving deep gouges into the road.
"Why are you here?"
Renji's voice was low. It didn't carry the heat of his previous life. It was the cold, flat tone of a judge.
The Vanguards stood frozen. Their helms tilted, sensors struggling to process the entity before them. None spoke. The silence of the intersection was heavy, broken only by the hiss of a ruptured radiator in a nearby van.
Renji leveled his palm at them. The blue and yellow tracers on his skin began to glow with a rhythmic, pulsing intensity. "Who sent you? Why are you here?"
They didn't answer with words. They answered with a desperate, unified charge.
They moved with a speed that should have been terminal, their blades aimed at the gaps in Renji's tattered cloak. The strike should have landed. The steel should have tasted blood.
Instead, they hit nothing but the lingering scent of ozone.
Renji was standing ten paces behind them. His hands were folded behind his back. He didn't look at them; he looked up at the grey Kyoto sky, his throat moving as he exhaled a soft, sharp puff of air.
The temperature in the ward plummeted. Frost bloomed across the asphalt in a jagged circle. The Vanguards didn't fall. They simply stopped. A layer of rime ice encased their armor, locking their joints, freezing their alien breath in their throats. They became statues of frozen grey steel, eyes fixed on a man they couldn't touch.
The citizens had stopped. They stared at the figure with the fire-red hair. There was no recognition. To them, the Mortal King was a corpse in a grave. This man was a god, a stranger, a terrifying anomaly.
Shinjo pulled himself up against the side of the truck. He stared at Renji's back. For a second, a flicker of something familiar—the way the man stood, the tilt of his head—made Shinjo's heart hammer against his ribs. Renji?
But the power was too much. It was too alien. The Renji he knew was a man who bled, who struggled, who screamed. This being was a mountain of cold light. Shinjo exhaled a long, shaky breath, the hope dying in his chest. It wasn't him. It couldn't be.
"Come on," Shinjo whispered, his voice cracking. He reached for Hikari's hand. Her fingers were cold. She was staring at the man with the red hair, her eyes wide and wet, a strange grief pulling at her features even though she didn't know why.
They turned away. They walked into the haze of the city, two small figures dwarfed by the ruins.
Renji stood still. A single tear tracked through the dust on his cheek, steaming slightly against the heat of his skin. He didn't call out. He didn't say their names. The contract was written in the Null, and the debt was due.
He watched them until they disappeared behind the bend of a broken building.
He clenched his fist. Green flames erupted from his knuckles, licking at the air. With a sharp, cracking sound, the frozen Vanguards shattered into a million diamond-sharp shards. The ice didn't melt; it evaporated.
"I have a punishment to serve," Renji murmured. The words were meant for no one. "I promise. I will return. Five hundred years."
He bent his knees. The asphalt beneath his boots disintegrated into a crater. He launched.
The shockwave blew the remaining windows out of the street. He didn't just fly; he tore a hole through the atmosphere, a streak of red and green light that vanished into the clouds.
Below, the crowd finally breathed.
"Who was that?" someone asked, their voice trembling.
"He was stronger than the King," an old man muttered, leaning on a cane made of scrap wood. "Stronger than anything I've ever seen."
The city was a wreck of twisted steel and red sand. The reconstruction would start again, the same as it always did. The portal vanished, the heat dying out, leaving only the biting December wind. The civilians went back to their lives because they had no other choice. Shinjo went back to his silence. Hikari went back to her books, holding onto a promise made by a dead man.
Renji stood on the spire of the Kyoto Tower, the highest point in the skyline. He scanned the city one last time. He saw the tiny lights of the cars, the smoke from the heaters, the life he was leaving behind.
"I have to go."
He closed his eyes. The sorrow was a physical weight, a stone in his gut. He pushed off, accelerating until the friction turned the air around him into a roar of plasma. He punched through the stratosphere, the blue marble of the Earth shrinking into a marble, then a speck, then nothing. He crossed the threshold of the dimension, slipping through the cracks of reality into the black void beyond.
He arrived in a place where there was no up or down. Just an ink-black floor that reflected the stars of a billion dead universes.
An old man sat in the center of the nothingness. He was translucent, glowing with a soft blue light, sitting in a wooden chair and sipping from a porcelain cup.
The smell of coffee was the only thing that felt human in this place.
Renji landed. He didn't boast. He didn't stand tall. He approached the Abyss Lord and dropped to one knee, his head bowed.
"I am ready, my lord."
He felt the weight of the forbidden arts he had used to save his world. He had cheated the System. He had stolen power from the Void. Now, the Void wanted its pound of flesh.
"I am ready to start my life afresh," Renji said. "In the universe you spoke of."
The Abyss Lord stroked his long, silver beard. He didn't look up from his cup, but his fingers twitched. Beneath them, the ink-black floor rippled. A portal opened—not red, but a perfect, swirling circle of black and white.
"To be a King of Mortals is one thing," the Lord said. His voice was the sound of a closing door. "To be a King of the Universe is another. You lack the perspective. You lack the weight."
He signaled toward the portal.
"You will be reincarnated. You will grow. You will not return until you have fulfilled the requirements of a true sovereign. Five hundred years of your time. Grow strong, boy."
Renji nodded. He stood up, looking into the swirling black and white light. He thought of Hikari. He thought of Shinjo. Five hundred years was an eternity for a man, but for a King, it was a blink.
"Five hundred years," Renji repeated.
He stepped into the light.
The portal snapped shut. The Abyss Lord took another sip of his coffee and looked out into the void, waiting for the next cycle to begin.