Approaching the Barrier Colony was like approaching madness. The air hummed with tension, and the landscape beyond the sphere's border shifted like an image on water. Grass would instantly grow to the sky and then rot, or freeze in complete petrification. Time streams mixed, creating eerie mirages.
"Don't wander off, kiddos," Kagetori tossed over his shoulder, walking ahead with the air of a man on a morning stroll. A serene, almost playful smile played on his face. "It can be slippery here. In both the literal and figurative sense."
Akira felt particularly strange. His "void" raged, trying to compensate for the chaotic surges and dips of Kokuro around him. Kaede walked with extreme concentration, her fingers gripping her fan, ready to rewrite reality at any moment. Ryūnosuke frowned, trying to stabilize his connection to metal by force of will, and Shiori, pale, instinctively reached for scrolls in search of any stability.
As soon as they crossed the invisible boundary, the world flipped. They were enveloped in a zone where Kokuro behaved like a wild beast. Shiori tried to summon a weak glowing orb, and it exploded with the force of a small bomb, nearly knocking her off her feet. Ryūnosuke, trying to reinforce his sword, almost tore it apart at the molecular level.
"Relax," Kagetori advised, watching their torment. "Don't try to control it. Just go with the flow. Or, in your case, just stand still."
That's when they heard thunder. But not from the sky. From the ground.
A hundred meters away, a storm raged. A young samurai with disheveled blue hair and wild, furious blue eyes moved so fast he left only bluish glowing trails. His entire body was wreathed in lightning discharges. His opponent, a mighty warrior in ancient armor, tried to parry, but his shield and sword melted and turned to dust under crushing, invisible blows. This wasn't a battle—it was a beating. Pure, unbridled fury clothed in the form of lightning.
"Hm," Kagetori tilted his head, assessing. "Approximately Mach thirty. Hypersonic. Impressive for someone in that body."
"You... can you handle him?" Ryūnosuke asked, unable to hide his awe.
"Me?" Kagetori smirked. "Probably. In a one-on-one duel. But if I start dancing with him..." he gave them all a carefree look, "...then who will protect you, kiddos? With your training, you'd be torn apart like kittens here. So, I might be faster... but with you lot in tow, that's just nonsense."
Shiori swallowed. There was no malice in his words, just a statement of the humiliating fact.
The blue-haired lightning warrior, Raiden Inazuma, finished his fight, incinerating his opponent into a cloud of ionized gas. His gaze lingered on the group for a second, assessing, but finding no immediate challenge, he roared away deeper into the colony, leaving a smoldering trench in the ground.
The team moved on, and soon they stumbled upon another player. She stood in the middle of a field turned to glass. An androgynous figure in an immaculately white kimono. Her face was calm, almost detached, but her eyes burned with cold inner fire. This was Homura Enen.
She showed no aggression. She just stood. Ryūnosuke, still wound up from what he'd seen, lunged toward her out of inertia. He hadn't even taken a step when a wall of white, silent flame appeared between them. It didn't burn. It erased. The stone under Ryūnosuke's feet didn't melt—it simply vanished, and everyone immediately forgot what it looked like. The memory of its texture was erased from their minds.
"Don't move," Kagetori said quietly but authoritatively, and Ryūnosuke froze.
Homura turned her head to them. She raised her hand, and a small, perfectly round sphere of white flame appeared in her palm. She casually, as if brushing off dust, threw it toward a distant mountain ridge on the horizon.
The sphere, the size of an apple, whistled through the air and touched the rock. There was no explosion. The mountain—all of it, from base to peak—simply ceased to exist. In its place remained only a perfectly smooth, glassy plain. And she did it without showing the slightest effort.
"Yeah..." Kagetori drawled, and interest sounded in his voice again. "Players must fight and survive... There must be rules. And, most likely, a prize. Perhaps those 'keys' the dying man babbled about."
At that moment, the temperature in the colony dropped dozens of degrees. From the twisted space at the edge of their field of vision, he emerged. Shiroyama Raidou. His white kimono and icy gaze were incongruously harmonious in this chaos. He was alone. He looked at Kagetori. Not with hatred, not with challenge. With cold, analytical recognition.
Kagetori met his gaze. Not a word was spoken. But a spark of understanding flashed between them. Their war, their ideological dispute—all of it was postponed. Before them was a new, common chaos. A new game. And its rules had yet to be figured out.
Raidou slowly nodded, almost imperceptibly. Kagetori smirked in response. Enemies momentarily became observers on opposite sides of a chessboard set by a third party. The game was only beginning.