### Volume 2: Upper World

  **Interlude Chapter: The Blade That Hunts the Darkness**

  The name Mara didn’t come from a birth certificate. It came from a scream in a storm.

  Thirty-five years ago, on a night when the sea off southern Japan decided to swallow a village whole, Haruto Tanaka was three years old. His family’s small fishing boat was out when the typhoon hit—waves taller than houses, wind that howled like something alive. The sky tore open. Not lightning. A rift. Black and jagged, leaking red light that burned the water black. The boat flipped. His father was gone in seconds. His mother held him tight, screaming prayers into the gale.

  Three days later, Haruto washed up on the shore alone.

  No scratches. No hypothermia. Just a small black heart mark burned into the center of his chest, right over where his own heart beat too slow, too deep. The villagers found him curled around a piece of driftwood—his mother’s wooden prayer beads still clutched in his tiny fist. They called him cursed. They called him Mara—after the demon who tempted Buddha, the one who brought desire and illusion and ruin. His grandmother, the only one who still believed, kept him. She said the mark was a sign. Not of damnation. Of survival.

  He grew up quiet. Too quiet. Kids avoided him after the first time a shadow stretched too long behind him, wrapping around a bully’s ankle and pulling until the kid cried. Teachers whispered. The government noticed—early rift awareness programs were just starting back then. At nine, a man in a dark coat came to the house. Jones Academy scout. He saw the mark. Saw the way shadows moved when Haruto was angry. Offered training. Haruto’s grandmother said no. She’d lost enough family to rifts.

  At twelve, during a school trip to Kyoto, the first real swarm came.

  They were on a bridge when the sky split—dozens of demons pouring through, red eyes, claws, teeth. Teachers screamed. Kids ran. Haruto didn’t. He felt it—the hum inside him, the same one he’d felt since the boat. Will energy. It woke up like a fist unclenching.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Shadows poured from his fingertips—thick, black, alive. They wrapped the nearest demon’s throat, squeezed until the thing burst into goo. He didn’t stop. More shadows came, coiling, binding, draining. He saved his entire class. Twenty-three kids alive because of him.

  But the backlash hit hard. Black veins crawled up his arms, permanent, like ink under skin. His left eye turned pitch black—no pupil, just void. He could see through illusions after that. See the truth behind every lie.

  The academy came again. This time, his grandmother let them take him.

  They gave him the name Mara officially—said it suited the mark, the power, the way he hunted darkness without flinching. At thirteen, he forged his first pact with Yami no Ken—the Darkness Blade. A relic sword from a sealed vault, black steel that drank light. The pact was simple, brutal: “I will hunt the darkness in others, but never let it consume me.” It gave him **Illusion Cleave**—a single slash that cut through any deception, real or fake. Later came **Desire Drain**—touching an enemy to sap their will, leaving them hollow, broken, easy to finish.

  By sixteen, he was leading raids. By twenty, he was the youngest SS-rank in recorded history. His party formed around him—Kage, Hono, Mizu, Kaze, Tsuchi. They were unstoppable. Rifts closed. Cities saved. Demons died by the thousands.

  Then came the Kyoto Rift Crisis.

  He was twenty-five. The rift was massive—Upper World bleed, thousands of devils pouring through. The Temptation King waited at the center—a towering thing of smoke and mirrors, feeding on doubt. It showed Haruto his mother drowning again, his grandmother dying alone, his party dead at his feet. It offered power. “Bring them back,” it whispered. “Just open the rift wider. Let me in.”

  Haruto refused.

  He fought. The King’s illusions broke under his Cleave. But the beast was fast—claws raking his face, tearing out his left eye. He didn’t scream. Just kept swinging. The final blow came when he made a deeper vow—sacrificed the eye willingly. The void in the socket opened, and **Nightmare Realm** unfolded.

  A domain of pure black—enemies trapped inside their worst memories, reliving them until their will shattered. The Temptation King screamed for the first time in centuries. Then it died.

  Haruto—now fully Mara—walked out alone. His party survived, but the cost was heavy. Kage lost an arm. Hono’s fire turned inward, burning her lungs. They never fought the same again.

  After that, Mara changed the rulebook. He hunted Vessels. He hunted anyone who carried the black heart mark. Because he knew what it meant. He’d seen it in the Temptation King’s eyes—hunger. Endless hunger.

  When the academy fell, when the Shipping Games began, when word spread that a boy named Sky carried the core—the most powerful fragment—Mara didn’t hesitate.

  He forged a new pact with Yami no Ken.

  This one was final.

  “I will end the Demon King, even if it costs my life.”

  The blade drank deep—black veins crawled further up his arms, his remaining eye flickered with void-light. He became the executioner.

  Because if the Heart won, the world ended.

  And Mara had already lost enough family to rifts.

  He wouldn’t lose the rest.

  The chapter ended.

  To be continued…