The Council Hall descended into chaos, but it was a silent, swift chaos, like the dream of a mind.
The Void that Akira had pointed to didn't just stir. It yawned open. Emerging from the shadow behind Kurokawa, it broke free, no longer restrained by the rituals of control. Its form, devoid of anything that could be called matter, devoured light, sound, and smell. The air congealed, becoming viscous and heavy.
«...GIVE BACK... MINE... WHOLENESS...»
The mental screech hit like a wave. Decorative vases with ikebana along the walls turned into fine white dust—the Scars of their form were erased. Silk banners with clan crests decayed in an instant, stripped of the Scars of fabric.
"Defend yourselves!" Masato Takatori bellowed, leaping from his dais.
His body flared with a coppery aura. He didn't read a scroll or make complex gestures. He was a warrior. His Kokuro was simple and terrible: "Scar of the Unbreakable Mountain." He absorbed the Scar of a millennia-old cliff, becoming a part of it for a moment. His fist, moving with seeming slowness, actually compressed the space before him. The blow was aimed not at the Void, but at the floor in front of it, to cause a controlled fracture.
It didn't work.
The Void didn't even notice the blow. The Scar of the earth-shattering strike, which should have split steel, simply disappeared, absorbed by its insatiable void before it could manifest. Masato staggered back, his face twisted in shock, cracks crawling up his arm—his own technique had turned against him.
At the same moment, Kaede Himeji was already acting. Her crimson kimono was the only bright spot in the dimming hall.
"Kokuro: Crimson Loop of Fate! Paradox of the Distorted Blade!"
She didn't attack the Void directly. She attacked the reality around it. She rewrote the cause-and-effect connection for the very air, commanding it to become harder than diamond in a microscopic sphere around the creature. This wasn't a physical wall. It was a logical dead-end for any movement.
The Void froze for an instant. It seemed to have worked. But then, a black dot appeared in the perfectly smooth sphere of distorted reality. It expanded, devouring the paradox itself. The Scar of impossible movement that Kaede had created was eaten.
"Impossible..." she whispered, paling. Her Kokuro was powerless.
Meanwhile, Ryūnosuke Morohashi unleashed his power on Kurokawa.
"You released it, old man! That means you know how to lock it back up!"
His sword, still sheathed, vibrated with a low hum. "Kokuro: Iron Vow! Authority over Time's Rust!"
He commanded the Scar of decay, hidden in the molecules of Kurokawa's purple haori, to manifest a thousand times faster. The expensive fabric instantly yellowed, decayed, and began to crumble from his shoulders. But beneath the fabric was not skin, but complex tattoos glowing with a dull light—ritual Scars of restraint and control.
"Fool!" Kurokawa hissed, and his voice now sounded in two tones: his own and the soulless echo of the Void. "I don't control it! I am merely a vessel! 'Kureina' awakened on its own! It has always been hungry!"
The Void, meanwhile, ignored everyone. Its sole target was Akira. It glided through the hall, leaving a trail of absolute nothingness in its wake. The floor tiles weren't destroyed—they simply ceased to exist.
Shiori, trembling, stepped between it and Akira.
"I won't let you!" her voice shook, but her eyes burned with resolve. "Kokuro: Whisper of the Withered Scroll! Technique of Three Shadows!"
From the haze around her, three figures emerged. The first—a legendary spearman whose spear could pierce the moon. The second—a shield master whose defense once stopped lava. The third—a faceless assassin whose blades could cut shadow.
Three techniques fell upon the Void simultaneously. Spear, shield, blade.
And vanished. Without a trace. As if they had never existed.
«...PAST... DEAD...»
The Void extended a tentacle of non-flesh, and it, like a spear, shot toward Shiori's chest. She shut her eyes, awaiting the end.
But the end didn't come.
Akira stepped forward. He didn't block, didn't parry. He simply placed his own chest in the path of the strike.
The Void's tentacle entered him. And... stopped.
For the first time, the Void froze in indecision. It couldn't absorb Akira because there were no Scars within him. But it also couldn't pass through him because his physical form was real. To it, he was both nothing and a wall at the same time.
Akira stood, feeling the freezing cold of the non-being inside him. It wasn't pain. It was the absolute negation of everything he was. He raised his head and looked into the very depths of the Void, at that pulsating spark—the Tree fragment.
"You are not whole," he said quietly, and his words sounded louder than any scream in the ensuing silence. "You are a fragment. A wound. And you want me to become your other half? So that our voids would fill each other?"
He slowly raised his hand. Not to attack. In a gesture.
"I refuse."
And then he did the impossible. He didn't use Kokuro. He had none. He used what was his essence—his "nothingness." He focused on that very "burn" on his hand, the trace of the Void's touch. On the only "trace" he had ever possessed.
And he pushed it away.
He pushed away the very void that was inside him. Not a physical force, but its existential essence.
With a deafening mental shriek, the Void was torn from him and thrown back. For an instant, it lost form, shrinking into a swirling sphere of absolute darkness.
That instant was enough.
"SHIORI!" Akira shouted, his voice cracking from tension for the first time. "ITS SCAR! THE SCAR OF CONTROL ON KUROKAWA!"
Shiori, still in shock, obeyed instinctively. Her gaze fell on Kurokawa's nape. And she saw it. The thinnest, web-like thread of the "Scar," binding the old man to the pulsating sphere of void.
She didn't summon warriors of the past. She summoned something else. The technique of a humble monk-calligrapher, whose ink could momentarily "illuminate" any connection.
"Kokuro: Ink Seal of Severance!"
An invisible brush of light drew a line across the Scar of control.
The connection snapped.
Kurokawa screamed, and a stream of darkness poured from his mouth. The Void, deprived of its anchor, screeched and, collapsing into a point, vanished, leaving behind only a gaping hole in the hall's floor and the lingering horror in the air.
In the ensuing silence, only heavy breathing could be heard. The Council Hall was partially destroyed not by an explosion, but by annihilation. Akira stood, swaying, with a smoking hole in his chest that, however, did not bleed—it simply was.
He looked at the ashen-faced Kurokawa, now held by Takatori warriors.
"It is not destroyed," Akira said, addressing everyone. "It retreated to digest what it ate. And now it knows my taste."
He turned and walked away from the ruined hall, his figure a black shadow against the backdrop of the wreckage.
"The war has only just begun. And we have just given it the first map."