September 26, 1401. Colony No. 2, "Market of Sleeping Shadows."
The air here was thick, but different. Not chaotic like in other reality fragments, but heavy with frozen time. This wasn't just a market. It was a congealed memory of millennia of trade—ghostly rows of stalls with goods that hadn't existed for hundreds of years: scrolls of forgotten spells, amulets made from spirit bones, spices smelling of other worlds. Samurai in armor covered in centuries of patina stood motionless as statues, their eyes empty yet directed at nothing. Merchants were frozen mid-shout, hawking wares to phantom customers. Sound here was muffled, as if coming from behind thick glass. This place was an open-air museum, an exhibition of bygone life preserved by Narikawari's magic.
Akatsuki Magoro passed through it in twelve seconds.
His journey began in Colony No. 10—"Castle of Probabilities." From there, he simply stepped through. Not through a portal, but through the very fabric separating these pocket realities. For him, whose will was once law for space, these artificial barriers were no stronger than cobwebs. Twelve seconds—not travel time. It was the time it took for the reality around him to register his presence, shudder, and freeze in respectful, chilling horror.
He walked unhurriedly, his ashen kimono not rustling in the dead air. His gaze, sliding over the frozen faces of samurai and merchants, held no interest. These were decorations. Background. His thoughts were elsewhere.
"Homura En'en... I don't recall such a Majutsushi from my time."
The name didn't resonate in his memory spanning millennia. Not in the annals of great clans, not in lists of dangerous renegades, not in legends of heroes. This was a new power. Or a very, very old one that knew how to hide.
The market ended as abruptly as it began. One step—and the phantom hum, smells of dust and decay were replaced by… silence. Absolute.
He emerged onto a plain.
It lay between a ring of mountains like a giant, unnaturally smooth bowl. Dozens of kilometers in diameter. The ground was smooth, as if polished by a giant grinding wheel, without a single blade of grass, without the slightest variation in elevation. The mountains at the edges weren't natural creations—their slopes were unnaturally steep, symmetrical, like crown teeth carved into the leaden sky. This place wasn't born. It was carved. Forcibly, with monstrous effort, everything extraneous was erased, creating a perfect, sterile arena. An arena for battle.
And at the very center of this flawless emptiness, on a perfectly even point, stood she.
Homura En'en.
Magoro stopped. His eyes, heavy as lead ingots, appraisingly slid over the figure. The three glowing keys floating at her waist marked her status in Narikawari's game. But they were almost the least notable thing about her.
An androgynous, fragile-looking figure in strict monastic attire. Short, perfectly straight hair, white as the first frost, fell to her chin as if cut from ice in a single stroke of a blade. Her face—a calm, almost emotionless mask with delicate features and porcelain-pale skin. Eyes the color of cold ash, and deep within them, behind an impenetrable restraint, embers glowed. The flame of cold, analytical curiosity mixed with resolve honed to razor sharpness.
She didn't move. Simply looked at him. The white antaravasa and black uttarasanga didn't stir. On her left wrist—a simple black cord with nine tight knots. An amulet? A counter? A limiter?
And then his presence, Magoro's "Aura of the Ascending Demon," crashed down upon her.
This wasn't an attack. It was simply Akatsuki Magoro existing at full strength. The air around him didn't tremble—it groaned, becoming denser than steel. Pressure descended upon the plain, the mountains, the very reality of this place. The stone under Homura's feet emitted a quiet, plaintive creak. Her impeccable hair was swept back as if by an unseen gale.
That was enough.
The embers in Homura's ashen eyes flared. Calm was replaced by lightning-fast, animal understanding of threat. She didn't chant spells, didn't summon flame. She vanished from the spot.
Not in the sense of teleportation. She moved. With speed that would have torn any modern Majutsushi to shreds. The space between them shrank to zero in a fraction of an instant. Her hand, folded into a chopping blade, was already delivering a strike aimed at the carotid artery—precise, lethal, devoid of excess.
Akatsuki Magoro didn't even change his expression.
He simply… tilted his head a centimeter. The chopping palm passed millimeters from his skin, cutting only the heavy air. In the same moment, his own hand shot forward. Not to block. To counterattack. A strike with the heel of his palm to Homura's solar plexus was fast as thought and inexorable as the law of gravity.
She barely managed to shift her torso, taking part of the force on her forearm. The bone didn't break—it cracked, sending a wave of pain through her whole body. She was thrown back several meters but landed in a low stance, not losing balance. Her ashen eyes narrowed. She charged again.
A dance began. Or rather, a demonstration.
Homura En'en was a virtuoso of close combat. Her style was a mix of monastic martial arts and something ancient, bestial. Kicks, whiplash-fast; chopping palms capable of cleaving a mountain; lightning-fast entries into close range. She was a lethal whirlwind.
Akatsuki Magoro was her complete opposite.
He merely reacted. He read every movement before muscles even tensed. He parried blows not with force but with minimal, graceful shifts, using her own inertia. His body moved with terrifying, unnatural smoothness, as if he weren't flesh and blood but a shadow evading light. He dominated not with overwhelming might but with absolute, humiliating superiority in skill. For him, this wasn't a battle, merely study.
The climax came when Homura, furious at her own powerlessness, unleashed a crushing straight punch, putting all her speed and strength into it. Magoro didn't dodge or block. He stepped forward, inside her attack. His body curved, and he literally slid over her striking arm like an eel over a stone. In the moment she missed, his leg, bending at the knee with unimaginable force, slammed into her abdomen.
A dull, wet sound. Not a crack—the sound of torn air and compressed viscera.
Homura's body was torn from the ground. It didn't fly—it vanished from the spot, turning into a blurred streak heading for the horizon. She broke the sound barrier hundreds of times over, leaving a fiery trail of ionized air.
And Magoro, still standing in place, simply raised a hand. His index and middle fingers formed a casual gesture, like an artist about to apply a final stroke.
"Dissection," he uttered quietly.
The space before his fingers didn't tremble. Simply… a scar appeared on it. Two perfectly straight lines intersecting in an X. They didn't glow, didn't sparkle. They were invisible.
And this "nothing" shot forward. It didn't fly through space—it existed at every point of its trajectory simultaneously, ignoring the concept of distance. Its speed wasn't physical—it was instantaneous, like a verdict. It raced after Homura's body to erase it from reality, like wiping a mistake off parchment.
At the last, impossible-to-perceive microsecond, already at the very ring of mountains, Homura's body in flight did the inconceivable. It twisted, contracted, and the monstrous G-forces shattered half her ribs, but she shifted from the trajectory. By half a meter.
"Dissection" passed by. It touched the first mountain.
And the mountain… didn't explode. Didn't split. It simply crumbled. Its entire colossal body, from base to peak, turned into a cloud of perfectly even stone dust, which immediately settled like a gray blanket. A second, third followed… In the end, the entire chain of mountains on that section ceased to exist, leaving behind only a melted, smooth plain.
Homura, tumbling across the ground, leaving a furrow of her own blood, rose to one knee. The pain was all-consuming. But in her ashen eyes there was no despair. There was cold, crystalline calculation. Hand-to-hand combat was useless. Then another way is needed.
She raised a hand. On her palm, as if from nothing, flame ignited. But not ordinary. It was white. Dazzlingly, sterilely white. It held no warmth. It radiated emptiness, a return to primordial chaos.
"White Flame: Primordial Breath Surge."
She charged forward with new fury. Her fist, wrapped in this ghostly radiance, struck. Magoro, for the first time in the entire fight, took a step back. Not from threat, but from curiosity. He let her attack.
Her fist passed a centimeter from his kimono. And where the white flame touched the air, the air itself… didn't catch fire. It faded. Colors distorted, sound died. This wasn't combustion, but simplification, decay into fundamental, meaningless components.
Sixteen strikes. Lightning, whirlwind, typhoon of white death. Magoro dodged, deflected, studied. His smirk beneath the black scarf grew wider. Interesting. Very.
On the seventeenth strike, the flame on Homura's fist wavered and went out. The cost was too great. She froze for a moment, exhausted.
And that moment was enough.
Magoro's leg traced a short arc and came down on her head. The blow wasn't furious, but… businesslike. Precise. No crack sounded—Homura's body again turned into a hypersonic projectile heading for the horizon.
This time she was ready. Still in flight, her hands formed a mudra. From them, like black ink, another flame splashed forth. Not white. Deep, all-consuming black. It didn't burn. It absorbed.
"Black Flame: Impassive Water Veil."
The flame spread before her not as a wall but a funnel, instantly transforming into a dense, viscous beam that turned and raced back towards Magoro. This beam didn't carry destruction. It carried oblivion. It devoured not matter but intention, the very will to act, to exist at that point.
Magoro saw the beam and finally… became genuinely interested. His eyes gleamed. He raised a hand, not in defense but like a conductor giving a signal to an orchestra.
"Boil forth…" his voice sounded quiet but echoed hollowly across the whole plain. In his palm, from nothing, fire was born. Scarlet. Furious. Alive. It condensed, stretched, took the shape of an arrow. On its tip, from tongues of flame, the head of a mythical bird with ember-eyes and gaping beak formed. "…Scarlet Phoenix."
Homura, having already landed and seeing this, felt shock piercing her icy calm. "Flame…!? I thought Magoro's Kokurō was absolute control over space, but fire… I'll still overpower him! This is my specialization!"
The black beam, devouring meaning, and the scarlet arrow, carrying purifying annihilation, met at the center of the plain.
There was no light. Only the sound of reality tearing. Then—absolute, for several moments, silence.
And when sight returned, a hemisphere gaped at the collision site. Perfectly smooth, five kilometers in diameter, delving deep into the earth. Everything inside that sphere—stone, memory of stone, the very fact of its existence—was annihilated. Two opposing principles of destruction mutually erased each other and part of the world along with them.
From the dust cloud at the crater's edge emerged Homura. Her clothes were scorched, blood flowed from a split eyebrow down her face. But determination burned in her eyes. She folded her hands into a new sign, and her body began to move.
Slowly. Smoothly. This wasn't a fighting style. It was a dance. Ritualistic, hypnotic.
"Flame Dance: Samsara Roundelay."
She spun, and her movements left double trails in the air—white and black, intertwining like Yin and Yang. She approached. Her touches were like butterfly kisses. A finger wrapped in white flame brushed Magoro's sleeve—and the fabric didn't burn but became brittle, crumbling under its own weight. Following it, an elbow strike wrapped in black flame passed by—and Magoro felt his desire to parry evaporate for a moment, leaving emptiness in his mind.
This was refined torture. Weakening and oblivion. Deprivation of form and will.
Magoro parried, dodged, but for the first time, a light, almost weightless concentration appeared on his face. He was relaxed. Intrigued. And in this moment of relaxation, in the gap between white decay and black oblivion, Homura found a breach.
Her fist, clenched into a lump of purest Black Flame, plunged straight into his chest.
The blow wasn't loud. There was a quiet, wet sound. And Akatsuki Magoro's body turned into that same hypersonic streak, but this time flying backward, across the entire plain, towards that very market.
He pierced through one of the remaining mountains like a bullet through a paper screen. Flew out onto the phantom market, pierced through a dozen frozen samurai who crumbled to dust, and crashed at the end of the main street, raising a fountain of ancient stones and ash.
Silence. On the market. On the plain.
Homura stood, breathing heavily, her monastic robe in tatters. She looked into the distance, where her opponent had vanished. She had done it. She…
From the dust cloud on the market, something slowly rose. And floated back through the air towards the plain. Unhurriedly, as if strolling through a park.
Akatsuki Magoro returned. Not a speck on his ashen kimono. No scratch on his face. He looked as if he'd just stepped out for a morning walk.
And in his hand lay… a yōkan.
A pale, dense bar of traditional sweet, which he had apparently taken from one of the phantom stalls of the Market of Sleeping Shadows. He broke off small pieces with his thin, elegant fingers and put them under his scarf.
His thoughts, cold and clear, flowed parallel to his actions: "Homura's Black Flame," he thought, examining the smooth break of the sweet. "It devours not matter, but connections, the history of an object. If I eat this yōkan…" He took another bite, chewed thoroughly. "…only memories of its sweetness and a feeling of fullness would remain. Her flame would have devoured the very fact that I ate it. And fullness would have come without cause. Like a dream forgotten upon waking. The White one simplifies and returns to a state before form and meaning. Interesting mechanics."
He finished the yōkan, brushed non-existent crumbs from his fingers, and raised his gaze to Homura. His eyes held no anger. There was warm, almost paternal approval of a scientist who'd found a promising specimen.
"Shall we continue?" he asked, his voice soft as a whisper.
Homura En'en, standing before this imperturbable being, for the first time in many years felt something distantly resembling an icy needle of fear plunging into the very heart of her impassivity.
Meanwhile, in the foothills below Kyoto. The abandoned temple of Myōshin-ji.
The air here smelled of old wood, incense, and damp moss. It didn't smell of people. Their presence was something fleeting, superficial, like dust on ancient Buddha statues. The temple was a haven not for prayer, but for silence.
A seventeen-year-old hermit Majutsushi named Tokuga Shikigami, known in the surrounding valleys as the "Shaman" or, with a tremor in the voice, "He Who Commands Vengeful Spirits," sat in lotus position on a slightly raised tatami in the center of the main hall. Light filtered through half-ruined shōji, drawing dusty stripes on the floor in which myriad midges swirled.
He looked fragile, almost sickly. A tall, slender youth with not a trace of healthy peasant coarseness. His face was sharp, pale, with features refined to aristocratic delicacy: high cheekbones, a thin straight nose, narrow lips of a natural pale pink. It might have been beauty, had it been less immobile and cold.
His eyes, gray as a pre-storm sky, looked upon the world with detached, almost bored indifference. Long, straight hair of a dark color with a distinct bluish-gray sheen was swept back and gathered in a careless but impeccably aristocratic mounded knot at the nape, secured by a simple bone hairpin shaped like a spindle. Several strands escaped, framing his pale face and slender neck.
He wore a dark purple kimono the color of buke-murasaki—a deep, almost black shade with a cold purple undertone, a color once accessible only to the highest nobility. The fabric was expensive, heavy, but without a single adornment—only the play of dull light on perfect folds. A wide black obi was tied in a simple but strong knot at the back. Over the kimono was draped a short, thigh-length korērina—a Buddhist cloak of coarse dark fabric. His bare feet were crossed, pale soles seeming carved from marble.
Before him, on a simple wooden tray, lay offerings: a handful of unwashed rice, two dried fish, an ear of corn, a few copper coins. Gifts from valley dwellers who saw in him not a man but a capricious, terrifying kami, a guardian (or curse) spirit of these lands who needed to be appeased.
In the doorway, shifting nervously, stood a man. Not a Majutsushi. A simple peasant, face weathered, hands calloused, in worn homespun clothes. Fear and hope fought in his eyes.
"G-Great Shikigami-sama…" the man whispered, prostrating himself.
Tokuga didn't even turn his head. His gray eyes looked somewhere into the space above the tray.
"Speak," his voice was quiet, melodious, but devoid of warmth, like the ring of an ice bell.
"My… my daughter… she is sick. Fever, cough… the healers are powerless. They say it's… the evil eye. I beg you, great one, exorcise the impurity! Return her health!"
Tokuga slowly turned his gaze to the peasant. Something flickered in his gray eyes—not sympathy, but cold, appraising interest, like a jeweler examining an uncut stone.
"Approach," he said.
The peasant, trembling, crawled forward on his knees, stopping a step from the tatami. Tokuga unhurriedly raised a hand. His fingers were long, thin, pale. He touched the tips of his fingers to the man's chest, right over the heart. The touch was cold, like that of the dead.
"Kokurō: Cocoon of Silent Silk," Tokuga uttered, and his voice took on a metallic, emotionless tone.
Nothing visible happened. But the peasant gasped. His eyes widened. He felt something penetrate him, not into his body but into his very life force, into his connection with his daughter, into his parental anxiety. He saw flashes—images of a healthy, smiling girl. The pain receded. Not from her, but from him, as a fact. He understood—his daughter's illness would be expelled. The price was already being exacted.
Tokuga removed his hand.
"Done. The payment—your primordial memory. The memory of the first sunrise you saw. Of the first taste of your mother's milk. Of the feeling of earth under your feet when you took your first step."
The peasant's face whitened. This wasn't a material payment. It was pieces of his own soul.
"B-but, great one… that's… I can't… Perhaps land? I have a plot on the slope… Or… or I'll serve in the temple all my life!"
Tokuga Shikigami slowly, with almost serpentine grace, unfolded his legs and stood. He was a head taller than the peasant. His dark purple kimono fell in silent folds. The indifference in his eyes was replaced by cold, swift fury that flared like blue fire on ice.
"You bargain?" his voice became hissing, dangerous. "With me?"
He didn't even approach. Simply raised the same hand, his fingers forming a pinch as if holding an invisible thread.
"Cocoon of Silent Silk: Summation of Touch."
He snapped his fingers.
A meter from him, the peasant's head…
There was no blood. No sound. Simply the upper part of the skull, the brain, all that complex content—it collapsed. Compressed into a point the size of a pea and vanished, leaving behind only a neat, perfectly even cut at eyebrow level.
The body froze on its knees for a second, then fell lifelessly to its side.
Tokuga Shikigami looked at the headless corpse without a trace of emotion. Then his gaze fell on the offering. On the copper coins. His thin lips twisted in an expression of deepest contempt.
He turned and soundlessly headed deeper into the temple, into the shadows where his true interlocutors dwelled—not the living, but those whose voices sounded in the silence of his mind, whispering ancient, forgotten truths about the nature of the soul and the price of miracles.