Death wasn't a void. It was a shattered mirror.
Shinji Kazuhiko lay on the gore-slicked floorboards of his ruined home, consciousness clinging by frayed threads to a body that should have been in two pieces. The phantom agony of the sword's passage, the cold, impossible sharpness that had severed spine, organs, hope, still screamed along neural pathways that logic insisted were severed. Yet, his lungs hitched, drawing in air thick with the coppery stench of his aunt's and sister's blood, mingling with dust and the ozone tang of violence. His vision swam, blurring the edges of the nightmare. The overturned furniture, the shattered family photos, the dark, wet stains spreading like obscene flowers across the tatami.
And towering over him, the architect of this ruin. Kokuto.
The Swordwrath Monarch wasn't just tall; he was an implacable monument carved from shadow and violence. Short, stark white hair, like bleached bone. A thin black jacket, clung to a frame radiating contained, lethal power. But it was the scarf that snagged Shinji's fading focus. A slash of arterial crimson, unnervingly pristine against the carnage, hanging utterly still as if defying the laws of physics, or perhaps simply untouched by the brutality it witnessed.
His gauntleted hand rested lightly on the hilt of the blade that had ended lives and, impossibly,not ended Shinji's. The weapon itself was a study in grim functionality, unadorned, slightly curved, its edge still gleaming wetly under the fractured light filtering through the demolished wall.
"So this is it" Shinji thought, the words thick and sluggish, like tar in his mind. *Home... Mom's grave visited just hours ago... Kiyomi... Aunt... gone. All gone. Because of... this thing. Damn it... damn it all...* He waited for the darkness, the release. It stubbornly refused him.
Instead, a horrifying dissonance took root. He felt death's icy proximity, the profound wrongness of a body catastrophically breached. Yet, a terrifying vitality pulsed beneath the ruin. The pain radiating from his core wasn't the clean shock of bisection; it was a deep, cellular unraveling, a frantic, alien rebellion against annihilation. It felt... hungry. *Why?* The question pierced the haze of shock. *I saw the blade... felt it cut... through bone, through everything! Why am I... whole?*
Driven by a surge of desperate, agonized confusion, Shinji marshaled the dregs of his strength. With a guttural gasp that sprayed blood onto his chin, he forced his eyelids open. Blurred vision swam, focusing with monumental effort downwards, past the ruin of his shirt, towards the epicenter of impossible pain.
Torn fabric. Blood, so much blood, soaking into the wood. Exposed muscle, pale bone peeking through deep, horrific gashes that wept crimson. A visceral tapestry of near-death. But... connected. His torso, though ravaged, remained stubbornly, terrifyingly one piece. He lay crumpled, eviscerated, dying... but not divided.
"Wh... why...?" The word escaped as a wet, ragged whisper, barely audible over the ringing silence of the slaughterhouse his home had become. Blood bubbled on his lips. "Not... cut...?"
Kokuto hadn't moved a muscle. His gaze, seemed fixed not on Shinji's face, but on the horrifically wounded, yet intact, flesh. A low, resonant hum vibrated from the Monarch's chestplate, a sound felt more than heard, like the grinding of tectonic plates. It resonated in Shinji's shattered bones, in the raw meat of his wounds. Then, the gravelly voice, devoid of triumph, laced with a chilling sort of clinical observation: "So," Kokuto murmured, the word hanging heavy in the blood-scented air, "it already awakened. Faster than Amado projected."
*Awakened? Amado?* The names meant nothing, yet everything. They were keys to the nightmare. Before Shinji could grasp at the implications, before he could even draw another agonized breath, the world ended.
It wasn't sound first, but pressure. An invisible fist slammed Shinji flat against the sticky floorboards, driving the air from his ruined lungs in a silent scream. The house itself seemed to flinch, timbers groaning in protest. Then came the noise; a deafening, subsonic THUMP that wasn't so much heard as felt in the marrow, followed instantly by the apocalyptic KRA-KOOM! of imploding matter.
Kokuto didn't dodge. He didn't move. He simply ceased to be in his position. One moment, the grim monument stood over Shinji; the next, he was transformed into a projectile of pure kinetic annihilation. An unstoppable force struck him head-on, blasting him backwards through the remaining wall of the Kazuhiko house. But it didn't stop there. Wood, plaster, brick – it vaporized before him. The force carved a tunnel of pure destruction, a perfectly cylindrical void punched through the neighboring house, then the next, and the next, extending in a straight line down the Tokyo street, vanishing into the distance. Glass exploded outward in a synchronized wave for blocks. Furniture, concrete, entire sections of walls disintegrated into flying shrapnel. The shockwave slammed Shinji like a physical blow, pressing him deeper into the gore, rupturing his eardrums into a high-pitched whine that drowned all else.
Silence. A ringing, dusty silence filled the sudden, gaping maw where the front of Shinji's house; and half the neighborhood; had been.
Standing framed in this new portal to devastation, amidst swirling dust motes dancing in the moonlight, was the source.
He was tall, like Kokuto, yet fundamentally different. Where the Monarch was shadow and sharp edges, this being radiated an aura of profound, unsettling stillness. Short, stark white hair, almost luminous, caught the pallid light. His skin was an impossible, deep cerulean blue, like the heart of a glacier or the twilight sky over an alien ocean, smooth, cool, and utterly inhuman. He wore a form-fitting suit of seamless, pearlescent material that seemed to drink the light and softly radiate it back, shifting hues like mother-of-pearl. It wasn't bulky like armor; it was a second skin woven from solidified nebulas. His face was angular, ageless, devoid of lines yet holding an unfathomable depth of time in eyes the color of absolute zero, pale, glacial blue, currently fixed with cold intensity on the path of destruction Kokuto had unwillingly carved. He stood utterly motionless, yet the air around him vibrated with a contained power that made the dust tremble.
"I see," the blue-skinned being spoke. His voice wasn't loud, yet it resonated with a clarity that cut through the ringing in Shinji's ears, a timbre both ancient and terrifyingly present. It held no anger, only a chilling assessment. "So, Saganbo truly deems me a threat warranting a Monarch's blade. And for mere... prey." His glacial gaze flickered, almost imperceptibly, towards Shinji's broken form on the floor.
*Saganbo*. The name echoed from the fragmented memory of a cosmic throne room, a lifetime ago in this waking hell. *Prey? Me?*
From the distant darkness at the end of the destruction tunnel, a pinpoint of crimson light flared. It wasn't fire; it was a contained energy, angry and defiant. It grew rapidly, hurtling back along the path it had been expelled. Kokuto landed with a ground-shaking CRUNCH on the fractured street outside, cratering the asphalt beneath his armored boots. Dust billowed around him. His black jacket was torn at the shoulder, his pristine red scarf now smudged with grime and whipping in the disturbed air. A hairline fracture marred the dark material of his chestplate. He glared at the newcomer, his grip tightening on the hilt of his sword until the metal groaned. The blood on its edge seemed darker, more sinister.
"Took you long enough to grace us with your presence," Kokuto growled, his voice a low rumble carrying easily across the devastation. The gravelly tone held no fear, only a warrior's focused fury. "God of Creation, or so. Lord Merus."
Merus didn't flinch, didn't shift his stance. His icy eyes remained locked on the Monarch. "And you," Merus stated, his voice devoid of inflection yet heavy with an unspoken condemnation, "have finally moved against the Trascender. Impatient, or simply following orders with grim efficiency?"
*Trascender?* Shinji's mind reeled, the word echoing in the hollow space where his understanding used to be. *That's... me? What does that even mean?* The pain in his gut flared, a sickening counterpoint to the cosmic absurdity unfolding above him.
Kokuto let out a harsh, humorless bark of laughter that scraped like stone on stone. "Amado's chronometric projections were precise to the nanosecond, Merus. Act One of his power regeneration was slated to awaken within this terrestrial temporal window." He gestured dismissively with his bloodied sword towards Shinji, a chillingly casual indication of a life deemed insignificant beyond its utility. "I merely... observed. Ensured the parameters manifested. The slaying of the females was... necessary to trigger the stress response." His voice held a flicker of something then; distaste? Regret buried under layers of duty? "Their deaths served the awakening."
*Regeneration? Amado? Act One?* Shinji's thoughts were a frantic, disjointed counterpoint to the searing pain in his gut and the icy dread flooding his veins. *My family... killed... to trigger something... in ME?* The monstrous implication stole what little breath he had left. Saganbo... The name felt like a curse whispered by the universe itself.
"Determined is a pallid word for Saganbo's obsession," Merus replied, his glacial eyes narrowing almost imperceptibly. The air around him seemed to grow colder. "To send a Monarch not merely to harvest the fledgling power, but to bait me... to attempt my excision from the board..." A faint shimmer, like heat haze over ice, rippled across Merus's pearlescent suit. "He overreaches. And he underestimates."
Kokuto's posture shifted, a subtle coiling of immense power. It wasn't just physical; the shadows in the ruined room seemed to deepen around him, drawn to his presence. "Misunderstand me not," he rasped, the hint of something other than fury momentarily surfacing; a stark, chilling pragmatism. "Opposing a God... much less achieving deicide... lies far beyond my mandate. Or my desire." He raised his sword slowly, deliberately. The blade began to hum, a low, dangerous frequency that vibrated in Shinji's teeth, in the raw edges of his wounds. Dark energy, like visible static, crackled along its length. "My task is elegantly simple. To pull you away from that." The sword tip pointed unerringly, accusingly, at Shinji. "The Demon Seed must be isolated. Its nascent power contained. Or excised. Your proximity... complicates the harvest."
*A God? Demon Seed? Harvest?* Shinji's breath hitched, a strangled sound in the sudden silence. The world tilted further into madness. *This isn't real. Can't be real. Like some... some nightmare manga! Who ARE these things?! What AM I?!* He tried to push himself up, to run, to scream, but his body was a prison of agony and shock, unresponsive.
Kokuto moved.
There was no blur, no dramatic wind-up. He simply wasn't standing on the street anymore. He reappeared in the ruined living room, directly in front of Merus, his sword already a blinding streak of condensed darkness slicing through the air faster than thought, aimed with lethal precision at the God of Creation's throat. The air itself shrieked, torn apart by the sheer, impossible velocity.
Merus didn't dodge. He ceased occupying the space where the blow landed. His body seemed to phase, to become momentarily intangible, the lethal blade passing through empty air with a vicious whoosh. Simultaneously, Merus's right arm moved; not with speed, but with the terrifying inevitability of a collapsing star. His fist, wreathed not in light, but in a nimbus of pure, localized gravitational distortion, lashed out. It didn't travel; it manifested against Kokuto's cracked chestplate.
The impact was beyond sound. It was a fundamental violation of physics.
KRA-VOOOOOM!
The detonation wasn't contained. Kokuto vanished again, not backwards this time, but downwards and outwards. He smashed through the floor, pulverizing foundations, then erupted sideways through the reinforced concrete flank of a six-story office building across the street. The structure didn't just collapse; it disintegrated. Entire floors vaporized in a cataclysmic bloom of pulverized concrete, atomized glass, and vaporized steel. A shockwave, visible as a rippling wall of pure force, radiated outwards.
It shattered every remaining window for blocks, lifted cars like toys, and slammed into Shinji, hurling him like a ragdoll against the far wall of his ruined home. The world dissolved into a roaring, blinding maelstrom of dust, debris, and apocalyptic noise. Sirens, already wailing, were utterly drowned. The ground bucked and heaved like a dying animal. Water mains erupted in geysers that quickly turned to mud. Electrical transformers exploded in cascades of actinic blue sparks, adding strobe-light flashes to the hellscape.
Shinji choked, buried under a cascade of plaster and splintered wood, agony flaring white-hot from his wounds. He couldn't see the combatants through the thick, choking dust cloud; he could only witness the apocalyptic aftermath unfolding like a speeded-up film of Armageddon. Buildings groaned and toppled blocks away. The street in front of what was once his home buckled, asphalt splitting open into jagged crevices. The air was thick with powdered death.
*I can't... I can't see them!* Shinji thought desperately, spitting out dust and blood. His ears rang, muffling the world-destroying cacophony. *It's like... like ants watching mountains fight! They're tearing the city apart! Gotta... gotta move... get away... before...*
He never finished the thought.
A shockwave, different this time – not a blunt force, but a searing, high-frequency slice, ripped through the street. It wasn't aimed; it was the catastrophic byproduct. Shinji glimpsed, through a momentary tear in the dust, Kokuto's blade deflecting a sphere of Merus's coalesced creation energy. The deflected energy didn't dissipate; it sheared off as a crescent of pure spatial distortion, screaming through the air.
It passed through the pile of rubble Shinji was half-buried under with the indifference of a laser through fog.
And through Shinji.
There was no pain this time. Only a sensation of profound, icy separation. He saw the dust-choked sky tilt crazily. He saw the jagged edge of concrete where his lower half had been seconds before. Two perspectives. One mind. His vision tunneled rapidly, the roaring chaos fading into a muffled, cottony silence. The last shards of consciousness registered a streak of brilliant blue light lancing towards him through the murk, and a voice, raw with a fury that seemed to vibrate the crumbling foundations of reality, cutting through the din:
"DAMMIT!"
Then, mercifully, the mirror of consciousness shattered completely into absolute, silent darkness.
Darkness wasn't empty. It was filled with the echoes of tearing steel, the phantom sensation of separation, and the fading roar of a city being unmade. Shinji Kazuhiko didn't drift; he shattered, consciousness fragmented across a void where the concept of "self" dissolved into icy shards of before and after.
Then, light. Not warm, welcoming light, but the harsh, flickering orange glow of distant fires refracted through dust-thick air. Sensation returned ; not pain at first, but a profound, bone-deep coldness, as if his very blood had been replaced with liquid nitrogen. Then came the feeling of weight, of lying on something hard and uneven. Rubble. He was lying on rubble.
Memory slammed back with the force of Kokuto's sword. The blood. The bodies. The Monarch. The God. The impossible blade slicing through his shelter, through him. The split-second vision of his own bisected reality. Merus's furious cry.
*Dead. I have to be dead.*
But the cold was real. The grit digging into his cheek was real. The acrid stench of smoke, pulverized concrete, and something vaguely electrical... ozone mixed with burnt meat... was horrifyingly real.
He gasped, a raw, involuntary sound scraping his throat. Agony followed the breath; not the sharp agony of a fresh wound, but a deep, pervasive aching, a cellular exhaustion that seemed to leech the warmth from the world. It radiated from his core, a hollow furnace burning on fumes. He felt... drained. Emptied.
Trembling violently, Shinji pushed himself up onto his elbows. The movement sent waves of nausea and dizziness crashing over him. He looked down, expecting to see the horrific separation, the spill of viscera.
His hands flew to his stomach, patting frantically. Torn, blood-stained fabric met his touch. He ripped the tattered remains of his shirt aside.
Beneath was skin. Raw, angry red, stretched taut over muscle like badly healed burns. Hypersensitive to the touch, radiating deep soreness. But whole. Unbroken. His legs were there, intact beneath his ruined trousers. He wiggled his toes inside his scuffed shoes. They moved.
*How?* The question was a silent scream in his mind. *Twice! I was cut in half TWICE!* The phantom sensation of the bisection; the cold, clean severance; warred violently with the tactile reality of wholeness. His stomach roiled, threatening to expel nothing but bile. He dry-heaved, tears stinging his dust-caked eyes.
The sound of shifting rubble made him freeze. He looked up, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Across a desolate expanse that had once been a Tokyo street; now a jagged canyon of shattered asphalt, twisted rebar, and the skeletal remains of buildings; landed Lord Merus. He descended lightly, almost gracefully, onto a mound of broken concrete. His pearlescent suit was scorched and torn in several places, revealing glimpses of the luminous blue skin beneath, crisscrossed with deep lacerations.
His expression was grim, etched with weariness that seemed millennia deep. His glacial eyes scanned the apocalyptic vista before settling, heavily, on Shinji.
Shinji scrambled back instinctively, his raw skin screaming in protest against the rough debris. Fear, primal and overwhelming, choked him. *This being, this 'God' was part of the nightmare. He brought the Monarch. He brought the destruction. He was... connected*.
A heavier impact shook the ground nearby. Kokuto landed, staggering, on the fractured edge of a massive crater that hadn't been there minutes ago. The Swordwrath Monarch was a ruin. His dark armor was rent and buckled, deep gashes weeping some blood. His red scarf was tattered, barely clinging to his shoulders. His breathing was ragged, wet, labored. One arm hung limply at his side. His sword, miraculously unbroken, was chipped and dull, its dark energy flickering erratically. He leaned heavily on it, using it as a crutch, his head bowed for a moment before he forced himself upright.
He locked eyes with Merus across the devastation. There was no hatred in Kokuto's gaze, Shinji realized distantly, only a bone-deep exhaustion and a warrior's grim assessment. Merus met the look, his own icy eyes reflecting the city's burning glow.
"Hmph," Kokuto grunted, the sound thick with pain and something resembling... respect? He spat a mouthful of the blood onto the rubble. "Won't... keep you from that being... this time." He shifted his weight, wincing visibly. "The plan... requires revision." He straightened as much as his injuries allowed, defiance flaring in his posture despite the ruin. He raised his damaged sword slightly, not in threat, but in a final, grim salute. "But mark this, Merus..." His voice, though strained, carried absolute conviction. "We will return , no that's not quite right... I will return personally, I was only sent here to assess anyways, I wasn't instructed to seriously fight. The Trascender... will be captured."
Without another word, Kokuto crouched, gathering the dregs of his immense power. The ground beneath his feet cracked and compressed into glass. With a final, earth-shattering leap that sent shockwaves through the ruins, he launched himself into the smoke-choked sky, becoming a dwindling streak of darkness against the inferno's glow, heading towards the unseen horizon.
Merus watched him go, the tension slowly bleeding from his shoulders as he sighed. The shimmering energy in his wounds pulsed slightly, then stabilized. He turned, his gaze sweeping the hellscape; the burning ruins of homes and offices, the cracked earth, the choked sky; before finally settling fully on Shinji. He moved then, not with the impossible speed of before, but with a deliberate, almost weary purpose. He stepped over fissures and mountains of rubble with unnatural, silent grace, closing the distance.
Shinji shrank back as Merus approached, pressing himself against a chunk of broken wall. The God of Creation stopped a few paces away, then slowly knelt. The movement wasn't threatening, but Shinji couldn't suppress a flinch. Merus ignored the reaction, his ancient, icy eyes studying Shinji with an unnerving intensity. A soft, cool blue light emanated from Merus's hand, hovering just above Shinji's chest. It wasn't warm; it felt like being scanned by liquid ice.
"Your physical wounds are healed, Shinji Kazuhiko," Merus stated, his voice calm, resonant, yet carrying the weight of mountains. He gestured vaguely, encompassing the shattered cityscape, the smoldering ruins where Shinji's home once stood. "The damage wrought here... the loss..." His glacial eyes held Shinji's terrified gaze. "...is merely the surface scar of a far deeper conflict."
Shinji stared, his mind reeling. *Healed? Healed?* His body might be whole, but the image of his aunt and sister, the feel of the sword, the tearing separation... those wounds felt deeper than bone. The words tumbled out, raw and fragmented: "Wh-what...? Who...? My... my family...? That monster... Kokuto? I was... cut...? Twice! How...? Why?" His voice cracked on the last word, tears finally spilling over, cutting tracks through the grime on his face. He hugged his knees tighter, shivering violently despite the heat radiating from the nearby fires. The raw skin of his torso stretched painfully.
Merus regarded him for a long moment, the blue light from his hand fading. The sounds of the dying city; the groan of collapsing structures, the relentless wail of sirens growing closer yet still distant, the hungry crackle of flames; filled the heavy silence. The air tasted of ash and despair.
"Answers are owed," Merus finally said, his voice low. "Complexities that span realities. Truths that will shatter the world you knew." He paused, his ancient gaze seeming to look through Shinji, into the very fabric of his being. "Looks like I have a great deal to explain."
Shinji could only stare back, his eyes wide pools of shock and primal fear reflecting the fires of his ruined world. His mind, once analytical, overthinking, was now a fractured landscape mirroring the city around him. Reduced to sheer, overwhelming terror and utter, paralyzing confusion, all he could manage was a trembling, broken whisper: "I... I guess so."
Merus rose slowly to his full, imposing height, smiling. He didn't look down at Shinji this time. Instead, he gazed upwards, towards the roiling, smoke-choked sky where no stars were visible, only the sullen glow of the burning city reflecting off the toxic haze. He seemed to be looking beyond it, beyond the atmosphere, into the cold, infinite dark Shinji had found solace in. His pearlescent suit, torn and smudged, still held a faint, ethereal shimmer. The blue light was gone.
"Understand this, Shinji," Merus spoke, his voice dropping to a low, resonant register that vibrated in the rubble beneath them, humming in Shinji's newly healed bones. It wasn't loud, but it carried an absolute, chilling certainty that cut through the cacophony of destruction. "What transpired tonight? The horror visited upon your home, the loss of those you loved, the impossible violence you witnessed, the very death you tasted..." He finally looked down, those ancient, glacial eyes locking onto Shinji's with terrifying intensity. "This was not an ending."
The words hung in the acrid air, heavier than the smoke, colder than the void Kokuto had vanished into.
"This," Lord Merus, God of Creation, pronounced with finality, "is just the beginning."