They called it salvation. A coordinated strike spanning nations, governments, and all major cities. Every villain, every insurgent, every underground den was burned out in the first forty-eight hours.
It was surgical, clean. Heroes who once argued in courtrooms now moved with military precision. From F-rank to SSS, the Association had never been this unified.
It was all for one reason.
To isolate the one they feared most.
The one they never saw.
The one they only knew by color.
Crimson-black.
He didn't issue a threat. He never announced his arrival. But they knew he was coming. Maybe that's why they acted first. Maybe that's why they needed to believe it would work.
They built mana suppression towers, deployed flight restrictions, and blanketed the capital in shielding so dense it distorted sunlight.
They called it a fortress.
It turned out to be a grave.
Nightmare arrived without sound. Not because he moved quietly—but because everything around him simply stopped participating. Light dimmed, time dragged, and no one remembered exactly when they first saw him. There was no dramatic entry, no flash of presence.
Just the sudden, suffocating realization that he was already there.
And then it began.
The explosion didn't erupt—it inverted. The sky didn't light up—it folded inward. And the world didn't scream—it held its breath and forgot how to breathe.
A wave of color, deeper than black, brighter than blood, swallowed 240 kilometers of land like it had always owned it.
Skyscrapers crumbled into nothing. Asphalt liquefied into smoke. Heroes standing at the edge of the zone dissolved without fire or sound. Not burned. Not killed. Just… erased.
No resistance mattered.
SSS rank? Irrelevant.
Named artifacts? Gone before activation.
Hero formations? Swallowed without a trace.
The Five were the only ones who lived. Not because they fought well. Not because they escaped.
But because someone threw them.
At the last moment—before the core of the wave hit—five dying SSS-ranked heroes used every last bit of mana to eject their juniors out of the zone. They were unconscious when it ended. They missed the moment the earth cracked and the sky flattened.
When they woke, there was no battlefield.
No blood.
No corpses.
Just glass.
As far as the eye could see.
And him. Standing in the center of it all. Alone.
He didn't speak. He didn't look around. He didn't celebrate. He simply stood in the ruin he had created, as if waiting for something. There were survivors.
Dozens. Hundreds maybe. Those who had dropped their weapons, begged, screamed, cried. He didn't touch them. He didn't even acknowledge them.
He had no interest in people who no longer fought.
The Five watched him. One of them tried to rise, felt her ribs break just from movement. Serica sat in silence. She recognized the silhouette, not because she remembered it—but because something in her soul screamed.
It couldn't be.
It shouldn't be.
But the way he walked…
The way he didn't look at them…
The way the air bent around him…
She knew.
And yet, when he passed by her—just meters away—he didn't flinch. Didn't turn.
Didn't even slow down.
Because she was no one now.
And he had no more questions left to ask.
He reached the edge of the crater. Wind pulled at his coat. The world watched through trembling cameras and failed drones. Everyone saw him—every nation, every screen. And then, without drama, without pose—
He rose.
Just floated upward. Slow. Unrushed. As if the air recognized it was no longer qualified to hold him.
He vanished into cloud, leaving behind no trace of sound, no trail, no declaration.
Just silence.
And a world that finally understood what EX truly meant.
The world didn't end the day Nightmare walked into the capital.
But it stopped pretending it could be saved.
Governments tried to cover the damage.
Hero Association press releases claimed "controlled fallout."
But footage said otherwise.
A 240-kilometer radius.
Gone.
An entire city leveled.
A population segment erased so cleanly the census department collapsed under grief.
And then came the collapse of control.
With the heroes dead, the underground didn't rise — it starved.
Black markets dried up.
Hero-led trade circuits vanished.
Economies that fed off dungeon cores and villain bounty systems began to devour themselves.
But the worst wasn't economic.
It was ecological.
The dungeons—those ancient scars that bled monsters into the world—had no shepherds left.
Especially the SSS-ranked ones.
Now, they were opening.
Slowly.
Silently.
But no one stood in front of them anymore.
***
Social media was a storm.
Every newsfeed, every video reel, every trending post carried only one name:
"Nightmare."
But it wasn't just fear anymore.
"The Hero Association provoked him."
"They sacrificed our cities for pride."
"How many innocents died for their failure?"
What was once blind belief began to crack.
Not because people loved the villain.
But because they hated the ones who claimed to protect them… and failed.
***
The last five SSS heroes never gave a statement.
They didn't post.
They didn't argue.
They vanished.
But behind the world's silence, their rage had not burned out.
It had gone inward — molten, slow, and patient.
They remembered the moment they were thrown — like cargo.
Watched their mentors smile with blood in their teeth.
Watched the world disappear in crimson-black light.
Powerless.
Helpless.
And worst of all—
Spared.
***
Now, they stood in a subterranean lab buried beneath the western edge of the Australian desert.
Nothing around but scorched dust and wind.
The lab hummed softly. White lighting. Mana-sealed doors.
Too clean for what it was preparing to do.
Madeline stared at the screen. Her coat hung off one shoulder. Her eyes hadn't rested in days.
The others stood behind her, arms crossed. Eyes dark. Some still healing.
She didn't turn to face them.
She didn't need to.
Just said,
"Why not go to a time where Nightmare wasn't one...
and kill him?"
The silence didn't object.
It couldn't.
They had been preparing ever since.
They'd refined the temporal folding array.
Finalized anchor calibration to prevent soul rejection.
Mapped the timelines precisely enough to land within a three-day range.
They would arrive 33 years in the past.
Back when he a student.
A civilian.
Unawakened.
Unknown.
"We find him. We end it before it begins."
That was the plan.
Six women who had failed to kill a man at his strongest…
were now going to try again when he was weakest.
But none of them called it revenge.
That word was too small.
To them, this wasn't about emotion.
It was a correction.
A desperate, unholy undoing of the moment the world broke.
-To Be Continued