The world didn't end with a bang; it ended with the suffocating sound of my own heartbeat. Yuna was gone. The golden embers of her soul had drifted into the void, leaving behind nothing but a hollow silence that screamed louder than any explosion. I, Kaito, stood paralyzed in the center of a graveyard that used to be my life. Around me lay the broken bodies of my friends—Kenji, Daiki, and everyone from Momos Lane. Their eyes, wide and glassy, seemed to follow me, accusing me. "Why are we the ones rotting, Kaito, while you still breathe?"
I looked up at the sky. It was no longer a vast blue expanse; it looked like a shattered liquid crystal display. Digital artifacts glitched through the clouds, and the very fabric of the multiverse was tearing apart, raining down like shards of obsidian.
Kaito (Inner Monologue): "Pain? No, this isn't just pain. This is the erasure of my existence. Yuna gave me her heart, but what is a heartbeat in a world that has been deleted? Every breath I take feels like I'm inhaling the ashes of my own memories."
I clenched my fists until my knuckles turned white and my nails bit into my palms. Blood—thick and crimson—dripped onto the cracked earth, but I felt nothing. The physical world was becoming a suggestion. I reached deep into my core, touching the jagged edge of my Dark Power and the lingering, warm resonance of Yuna's light. As I forced them to merge, a violent surge of energy erupted from my body. Golden and black lightning arced across the wasteland, atomizing the ground beneath my feet until I was floating in a crater of nothingness.
"I will fix this... I will drag them back from the dark!" I roared into the vacuum. I released Yuna's power, and thousands of golden threads shot out from my chest, seeking the drifting souls of the fallen. I tried to anchor them, to weave them back into reality, but they slipped through my fingers like sand. I turned toward the Barrier—the source of this nightmare. I lunged at it, pouring every ounce of my hate into a strike, but my hand passed through it as if it were a ghost. The Barrier wasn't a wall; it was a fundamental law of the universe that I was no longer allowed to touch.
Suddenly, the light died. The world didn't just go dark; it ceased to exist. I stood in a sensory deprivation tank of absolute shadow. "Show yourself!" I snarled, my voice echoing back at me from a distance that felt like light-years.
Then, reality snapped back. But it was a cruel imitation. I was standing on a bustling city street. People were walking to work, children were laughing, and the sun was shining with a sickening, artificial warmth. I tried to grab a passerby, but my hand phased through his chest. I was a phantom in a play that had already been cast.
"Humans are such fascinating, pathetic creatures... aren't they, Kaito?"
A voice, cold as an arctic wind and devoid of any shred of empathy, whispered into my ear. I spun around to find Chronos standing there. His face was a masterpiece of marble-cold indifference, and his eyes held the weight of a thousand dead timelines.
"Look at you, Kaito," Chronos said, his voice echoing with a melodic cruelty. "So much power, so much potential... and yet, you are utterly useless. You play the same discordant tune of despair over and over. You think you're a hero? You're just another selfish human. When your Goddess deleted entire worlds, you stayed silent. But now that your little circle of friends is gone, you want to lecture the heavens? Let me show you what you're actually protecting."
Chronos snapped his fingers. A thunderous crack rent the air as the skyscraper beside us buckled and collapsed. Thousands were crushed instantly. Screams of agony filled the air, but then, something even more horrific happened. The survivors didn't run to help. They pulled out their phones. They started recording. The flashes of their cameras flickered like vultures' eyes in the dust. They weren't mourning; they were hunting for views.See?" Chronos hissed, his breath smelling of ozone and ancient dust. "They only care for themselves. They film the death of their own kind for a moment of digital relevance. This is the humanity you want to save? They are parasites, Kaito. So why are you bleeding for them?"
Chronos pulled a silver handgun from his coat and casually executed an elderly woman kneeling in prayer. "Stop it! You monster!" I screamed, but my voice was a whisper in the wind.
"Monster?" Chronos laughed, a sound like glass breaking. "Kaito, you are the one who triggered the 'Glitch.' Every drop of blood spilled today is written in your ink."
In a blur of motion, Chronos shifted his form. He now looked exactly like me. My face, my eyes, my clothes. He began a systematic massacre, moving through the crowd like a reaper. Heads rolled onto the pavement, and the street turned into a river of gore. People began to cling to my legs, begging for mercy from a version of me that was killing them. The city turned from a paradise into a slaughterhouse in seconds. Fire rained from the sky as meteors struck the outskirts, and the earth groaned, splitting open to swallow the screaming masses.
I regained my physical form through sheer willpower and lunged at Chronos. My fist traveled toward his jaw with enough force to shatter a mountain, but he caught it with one hand. His touch was so cold it froze the blood in my veins instantly.
"I thought you had grown, Kaito," Chronos said with a sigh of disappointment. "I thought you would want to discuss the mechanics of the end... but you're just another emotional, small-minded, pathetic insect."
He gripped my throat and lifted me off the ground. My lungs burned as the air was cut off. "Do you want to know a secret?" Chronos smiled, showing teeth that looked like shards of bone. "Your war isn't against us. Your war is against yourself. Everyone wants to possess you, Kaito. But why? Why does the universe crave such a useless maggot? To me, you are something I can crush and forget in the same breath."
"I'll... kill... you..." I wheezed, my vision blurring.
"You need to be taught your place," Chronos said, his eyes erupting into blue flames. Suddenly, the flow of time around us didn't just speed up—it became a blade. He accelerated the temporal pressure to a point where physics collapsed.
It happened in less than a millisecond.
The word 'pain' is an insult to what I felt. The sheer force of the temporal shear didn't just cut me; it dismantled me. My body was ripped into millions of micro-plastic-sized shards. I didn't die. My consciousness was forcibly kept alive, tethered to every single microscopic fragment of my being. I was no longer a man; I was a cloud of sentient dust floating in the air.
My heart, my hands, my memories—all reduced to micro-shards of translucent matter, hovering around Chronos like a mist of broken glass. Every single shard felt the freezing cold of the void. I could see Chronos looking at the cloud of my remains, a look of pure disgust on his face.
"Miserable insect... learn to rot in your own insignificance. You are but a footnote in a story I am deleting. The next time we meet, I expect you to be nothing more than dirt."
Chronos turned and walked into a rift in time, leaving my fragmented soul to drift in the ruins of a burning world. Kaito was gone, scattered into a million pieces of agony, waiting for a miracle that would never come.