Small villages crouched at the border of snowmelt, their houses huddled as if nature might decide, on a whim, to take them back. Fishing boats rocked and creaked where the Sea of Okhotsk sharpened the salt air into a blade. The arching emptiness above was less sky, more a suggestion—a blue so deep it promised to swallow every secret, every sin.
And then—
The world tore open.
CRACK.
A wound slashed through nothing, glowing golden at the edges, distorting the air so everything nearby warped—buildings bowing, trees bending, the wind reducing itself to silence out of a kind of respect. Through the slit stepped Brutus, neither hurried nor hesitant. Light and shadow twisted around her in reverence as she touched down, regal in gold and violet robes, each fold alive with the idea of perfection.
Behind her footsteps, reality bent. Space reasserted, like a drumskin snapping taut, but the echo of her arrival lingered—an aftertaste of geometry unresolved, of something vast and mathematical forced into the shape of footprints.
No mortal watched her, not truly. Faces in the street turned without knowing why, parting before her like a congregation startled by a silent sermon. A pair of old women—parishioners perhaps, their faces lined with the memory of lost gods—bowed low. Not conscious worship, but something coded deeper—a nerveless, compelled act, like a muscle responding to electricity.
Next, the air unzipped.
A fracture drew itself in perfect lines. Violet energy licked the edges, the color of starlight calculated instead of felt. The rift operated by a logic no human would understand—Blare emerged, one boot touching asphalt, her spear remembering how to exist in this world only when she reached for it. The tear closed with the sound of glass shattering, then healing: a rewind of every shard, a stitch in the weave of reality made so precise the wound left no scar.
The spear, Gungnir, glimmered with condensed possibility. Seven-dimensional residue still flickered in its shaft before winking out—a postponement, not an erasure, of complexity. Othinus’ coat swirled around her, a military green that looked like authority reborn for a different kind of battlefield. Her single eye, violet and endless, glinted with a satisfaction that was algorithmic—a conclusion drawn, a theory proved in transit.
For a moment—the world was too sharp. Every color heightened, every angle more real than physics should permit. The sensation passed, fading into the background like a memory that never had the chance to form.
Blare shrugged, letting herself come to a slow halt next to Brutus. For a moment, neither spoke. The city watched them as if in a spell—though that word would have been an insult to the science underlying Blare’s method, and to the ancient decree that was Brutus.
Brutus’s gaze swept the horizon—vast, untamed fields, the sprawl of Hakodate in the south, the frosted blue peaks of the east. Her lip curled slightly, the gesture invisible to anyone except the gods. “Japan’s attic,” she said. “The whole country forgot this place, didn’t they?” She took a single step and the crowd parted. Conversations faltered, bicycles turned down side streets, tourists discovered pressing appointments elsewhere. Behaviors were rewritten, not with force but with the rhetorical inevitability of a tide.
The silence was alive.
Blare’s steps matched hers, soft but implacable. “The pillar needs to be placed here,” she said quietly, voice the edge of a slide rule, “the resonance is freshest. Three pillars are already up—the merger waits for the last two. Here, and further south if all goes as projected.”
Brutus’s reply was a flicker of impatience. “It’ll go as I want. Where’s Beta Tower after this?”
Blare answered by not answering; the calculation was obvious, and so was the risk. Instead, she pulled her attention north, where clouds gathered like uncertain witnesses over the mountains. Then, with a tilt of her head—a subtle shift in posture that, if you knew her, meant she had just detected something operating outside her models—Blare offered a micro-frown.
It was the sonic boom that followed that made both of them look up, the ground vibrating as if Hokkaidō itself were an instrument being played by unseen hands. The horizon wasn’t horizon anymore—orange and violet energy raced each other in outrageous arcs above the sea, bright as afterimages scratched inside the eye. Electricity crawled over the water. The distant islands flashed in and out of phase, making even reality uncertain of their position.
A pause stretched.
Blare’s voice, when it came, was soft, slightly clipped. “Dash. That's him—locked in terminal velocity with the yokai hybrid of war.” She didn’t say Katsuki’s name, not out of disrespect, but out of professional courtesy. The boy made things unpredictable. Unmeasured.
Brutus’ arms crossed, her weight shifting enough to register against tectonic memory. “He’d meet Dash here of all places…” She sounded halfway between amused and intrigued—a queen catching a jester balancing on the edge of a guillotine. “He always shows up where I least want him. Like a bad habit.”
Blare: “He’ll adapt or die. Either way, data for the archive.”
They both fell silent again—watching as the streaks above the sea became a pattern, a double helix of violence. For a moment, the world remade itself for their benefit, framing the chaos through the lens of ancient rivalry. There was no mistaking what they witnessed: two calamities locked in a race so fast the world screamed beneath their crossing.
[CUT TO:]
—The ocean is a battlefield, flattened to infinity.
Sonic detonation splits the water—white spray leaping skyward in twin geysers. Dash runs across the waves, every stride a bulletproof equation—orange light coiling around every limb, every impact a solution written violently onto the surface of the planet. Opposite, a purple comet—Katsuki’s form disintegrates into swarms of streaks, flickering from wave to sky and back. Each exchange is a collapse and a rebirth. Gravity flips. Currents reverse. Clouds form and disperse in a heartbeat.
—CRACK! Orange and violet collide, and colors that shouldn’t exist streak the bruised sky.
[CUT TO:] Blare's perspective. Her eye gleams—calculating.
Blare: “He pushes him to superluminal speed. The island could fracture, if they keep escalating.” Her lips curl—not with joy, but with the cool anticipation of a scientist about to witness a new constant being rewritten.
[CUT TO:] Dash’s laughter—wild, echoing over the ocean, bouncing off the clouds.
Lyra would call it beautiful. Katsuki would call it a challenge. Blare calls it…expected.
Brutus doesn’t blink—eyes tracking the violence, recognizing the pattern. In the ultraviolet bands, primal shapes chase each other above the waves: not just boys, but war gods learning new tricks.
Brutus: “Should we let them break the world, or should we keep to the plan?”
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Blare, adjusting a dial etched into her spear, surveys the electromagnetic field unfurling around the two speedsters. “We need the pillars more than we need the planet unbroken. Let them test each other’s limit. It’s an experiment.”
Brutus shuts her eyes, inhales, the air around her humming with gold static. She speaks with a kind of authority that rearranges the world without waiting for permission. “Send backup.” Her tone is lazy, dangerous, intimate with catastrophe.
Blare: “What, afraid your favorite will lose?”
Brutus smiles. “No. I’m afraid we’ll run out of time before the new order arrives.”
A golden rift—tall as a cathedral door, thin as a regret—slashes the sky open in response. The wound shudders, leaking fractured light (divine? Or engineered?). From the fissure pour angels—but not any angel sung of by mortals.
They are rewritten.
They are delivered not in glory, but in code. Each hovers on algorithmic wings—iridescent vanes arcing far too wide, each feather stitched with mirrored circuitry, bands of living nanometal, luminous glyphs. Halos flare and shimmer, gold burning white, but beneath the skin: glyphs crawl, circuitry pulses, binary climbs up their throats.
Their irises are haunted with fractal patterns, spinning mandalas, engravings that look like network diagrams from too many dimensions at once. Rows of micro-seraphim orbit their bodies—cherubs, drone-like, their blank white eyes as cold as wet snow.
Armor grows across chests, segmented like the plates of a beetle, stained-glass and alloy at war. Sigils scroll—warnings in a dead language—across surfaces that ripple with prophecy and the logic of ancient engineering.
Where an angel hovers, physics moderates itself. The air tears, duplicating wings, faces, halos for a single broken frame of time, a staccato *glitch*—then recovers, unharmed but aware that it has been edited.
Their voices unfurl—not sung, but processed, layers of choir beneath autotuned command code:
"Transcendence protocol: Purge."
Their swords crackle into existence—light, yes, but also field. Each swing is a possibility erased, a quantum event collapsed to a single, undeniable outcome. Sliced objects don’t fall: they stutter, stammer, then vanish from trackable history, the data rolled back one frame.
The angels turn, scanning the crowd, scanning *reality* itself—not seeking sinners, only seeking resistance. There is no malice, only purpose. Miracles as viruses—rewriting not the heart, but the world.
A hush falls, impossible and absolute.
Brutus, head inclined to Othinus, voice low as a secret:
"Let’s see how they match up against exorcists who believe in equations more than faith."
Blare:
"We’ll finally test whether elegance outpaces belief."
The pillar’s base—an obelisk that hums with subdermal light—awaits the angels’ ministrations, but for a brief, mathematical instant, everyone stands transfixed. Above the fields and the broken sea, gods and equations have converged.
[Beneath this stilled world, far out on the dark ocean horizon, purple and orange collide again. Waves twist in their wake. The air scripts a prayer for mercy it knows will not be answered.]
—Not yet the end.
The sky above Shinjuku went biblical.
A thousand artificial angels breached the clouds, trailing algorithmic gold—half the city blinked and saw nothing, their minds politely refusing the miracle, but those with supernatural affinity saw a new dawn: unholy wings ticking across the firmament, their halos slicing moonlight into binary fragments and shards of prophecy.
The city held its breath.
Half the angels loosed downward—arrows raining from the clouds in algorithmic volleys, each shaft a streak of golden light. They fell with mechanical intent, not so much shot as executed: a divine firing squad, code and judgment coded into the geometry of their trajectory. Every arrow shredded the sky on its way down, rewriting gravity for an instant, turning the world beneath into a kill box of luminous punishment. It was not a barrage. It was an ultimatum delivered at the speed of apocalypse.
And then the air convulsed—
—a colossal silhouette ripped through the cloud deck, a living engine of apocalypse that made the angels look small.
It wasn’t flying so much as conquering the sky.
A god-sized dragon exploded from above, bipedal and monstrous—fifty feet at the shoulder, ninety feet of wings that carved sonic booms with every beat. Obsidian scales, lustrous and reflective, chased by crimson veins that pulsed with the rhythm of ancient heartbeats. When this beast raged, the veins turned incandescent, casting blood-red light like a curse over the rooftops.
Its snout, wedge-shaped and armored, housed ivory fangs in double rows—each one a monument to everything Oryx had ever slain. Horns like blackened halberds jutted from the skull, sweeping back in jagged defiance of gravity and reason. And the eyes—molten gold: nuclear, star-bright, so ancient you could feel centuries broiling behind those slit pupils. Looking into them was like staring into judgment. Looking into them was like knowing you’d already lost.
And leashed to the storm, perched one-handed on his back at terminal velocity, was a girl who should have looked swallowed by enormity, but instead outshone it.
High Warden Apphia—The Crimson Blade.
The Playful Reaper.
A contradiction made myth.
Everything about her pops in the afterimages—petite, yes, but kinetic. Brown hair whips around her in the slipstream, a mess of wild curls littered with “cute” pins. Cat-ear hood thrown back, mouth open in a howl of laughter.
The wind snaps at her cape, catches under her skirt until thigh and garter flash bright in the city’s ruin-light. Stockings hug sculpted calves; the outfit might as well be illegal in three prefectures. Somewhere down below, a pulse races faster just catching a glimpse.
She sees the effect. Winks at it.
—But then her gaze sharpens. She ties a slipknot of her skirt to keep it down, fingers moving with muscle memory that reads as both idol and assassin. Utility clips on the belt, panties armored, every inch of exposed skin mapped for movement and survival. Blood dries on one knee—a scratch from a fight she only half-remembers, a keepsake she wears without flinching. Her sword’s grip scuffed where her hands have worked it raw. Her smile for the crowd is a dare, not an invitation.
A brief moment on the dragon’s back—Apphia’s posture shifts: she rolls her neck, flexes her fingers, breathes in. Her eyes flick skyward, letting emotion streak through the bravado: anxiety, not excitement, wracks her nerves for half a second. (“It is cold up here. Who the hell wouldn’t be scared?”) The horizon glows with all the wrong colors—a thousand angels burning through the clouds, every last one coded for war.
A memory—her mother teasing her, “Jump in, kitten, if you’re brave.” A flash of flame, years old, across her family’s home. She shivers inside, jaw set. Her heartbeat steadies.
Oryx roars. Fire detonates across the ruined sky.
Apphia grins—full fan service again, flashes of thigh and midriff as she bounces to her feet, weightless on a scale. She salutes the apocalypse, back arched, cape fluttering in slow motion. “Hope you like the view, Tokyo!” she shouts—not caring who hears—and blows a kiss at the cameras she knowsare out there. It’s ridiculous, and she owns it.
CUT TO:
Apphia, standing, arms outstretched, knees bent, howling into the slipstream. “OOOOH WHOOOO—LOOK AT THIS, Oryx! This is what I call rush hour!”
Her grin was a detonation.
Oryx—voice like thunder dicing up heaven—“Apphia, I can’t go faster, there’s too goddamn many—hold tight, I’ll clean the sky, you break the ground!”
Apphia whipped out her sword—sharp, casual, weightless. “Now you’re speaking my language! Set ‘em up, I’ll cut ‘em down—SHOW ME SOMETHING HOT!”
Oryx inhaled—
—the temperature in the atmosphere jacked up like someone turned the sun back on.
Smoke geysered from his nostrils. His lungs flickered, then
FWOOM
A tidal wave of fire—so hot the clouds screeched, so bright the angels’ wings turned molten—scythed through the vanguard. At least half a hundred synthetic seraphs caught in the blast, code and circuitry melting, turning into falling stars as they spiraled. Their wings glitched into shrapnel, nanometal bodies warping as they slammed down towards the city in a rain of burning miracles.
Apphia kicked up to her feet, balanced on a single scale. “Showtime, Oryx!” she said, then launched herself skyward—no hesitation, all momentum. She somersaulted, skirt and cape flying, then pointed the blade downward. “Wish me luck!—or just watch me burn!”
She dove.
“Let’s see if I can beat some these angels~”
The wind tore her laughter away. She twisted in freefall, air around her lensing with impossible pressure—battle-artistry, tactical madness. Her lungs *inflated*—air, precise; her mind painted every oxygen molecule in the slipstream, reading barometric pressure and humidity like a symphony.
She held—
her diaphragm a grenade pin—
Aura sparking, every cell igniting against the friction of descent.
Exhale—pressure waves, microbursts as she flicked her wrist, sword humming like a thing alive.
She locked eyes on the swarming angels below, and called her shot, voice sharp and crystalline:
“FIREBURST BREATHING: FIRST FORM—CRIMSON CRESCENT!”
She swung.
What followed wasn’t a sword strike.
It was a horizon-shredding wave—a crescent of compressed air and radiating, self-propagating fire, curved like a predator’s smile. The slash traveled farther than sight, searing through obstacles, carving helixes of flame that spiraled out and engulfed the first angel phalanx.
BOOM—BOOM—BOOM—synthetic cherubim detonated, code crumbling as fire wall and pressure curving behind just kept burning, burning, burning.
Apphia landed, knees bent, shoes skidding, cape snapping open as a hundred-and-twenty tons of divine artillery crashed down in her wake. She flicked her sword, letting droplets of imaginary blood and molten metal spatter the ground.
Around her, as the smoke cleared, at least 250 corrupted angels began to re-form from scattered wings and halo fragments, circling with digital malice.
Apphia stood as if she’d planned the whole dance.
She traced a slow line in the dirt with her blade, then flipped it loose-wrist to point toward the sky—swagger, arrogance, neon-bright confidence.
“Alright!—LET’S DANCE!”
Her grin could swallow the apocalypse.
To be continued…