The silence in Universe 3588 wasn't empty; it was the silence of aftermath. The silence of a void that had just consumed parts of Shinji Kazuhiko, reducing him from transcendent warrior to maimed remnant in the span of heartbeats. Saganbo's finger, a conduit of absolute negation, remained unwaveringly pointed at Shinji's remaining right arm. The pinprick of infinite night at its tip pulsed with hungry, patient anticipation.
"Your right arm," Saganbo reiterated, his voice a chilling monotone that resonated with the finality of a closing tomb, "has served its purpose admirably. Its destruction is... overdue."
Shinji hovered, a broken monument to defiance. The loss of his leg below the knee and three fingers wasn't just physical mutilation; it was an ontological amputation, a surgical removal from the ledger of what-is. The smooth, inert stumps weren't wounds—they were absences, brutal declarations that parts of his fundamental existence had been irrevocably erased from the tapestry of causality itself.
The Voidheart Surge thrummed uselessly within his core, a frantic engine searching for damage to repair and finding only void. His regeneration—legendary, evolutionary, transcendent—spun its wheels against nothing, unable to heal what had never been wounded because the concept of "wound" required something to have been damaged. These weren't injuries. They were conclusions.
The boundless calm of the Innate Self State churned now, no longer a serene ocean but a storm-tossed sea heaving under impossible pressure. Shinji could feel it—the State wasn't collapsing from exhaustion or strain. It was rejecting him.
The realization hit with cold, terrible clarity.
'"The Innate Self State exists outside struggle, outside effort, outside fear," Saganbo had said. '"It is cessation of trying."
But Shinji was trying. Desperately. Every fiber of his being was straining, fighting, resisting the verdict Saganbo had delivered. He was clinging to existence with white-knuckled desperation, and that desperation—that fundamental, human need to persist—was antithetical to the very nature of the State he inhabited.
The Innate Self State wasn't a technique to be maintained through will. It was a perspective that required the absence of will. And Shinji, faced with erasure, had rediscovered his will to survive.
The State couldn't coexist with that.
Like a hand releasing something it can no longer hold, the Innate Self State let him go.
The severance was instant and absolute. The profound calm evaporated like mist under a supernova. The infinite clarity shattered into a thousand jagged fragments of terror and pain. The effortless command over his power dissolved, leaving only the familiar, desperate golden-green glow of his base spiritual energy—raw, unstable, fueled by fear rather than transcendence.
The crimson light blazing around him winked out, replaced by that frantic golden-green pulse. The pressure he'd been existing beside rather than under slammed into him with full, brutal force, crushing his spirit, driving the air from lungs that didn't need to breathe. His vision swam. His remaining limbs trembled.
He felt small. Fragile. Mortal.
The mountain had become a pebble, and the ocean of Saganbo's power was preparing to swallow it whole.
*It discarded me* Shinji realized, the thought carrying a peculiar, hollow devastation. *I reached the State through cessation... and lost it through desperation. I became unworthy of it by trying too hard to keep it.*
The irony would have been almost beautiful if it wasn't so horrifying.
Saganbo observed this transformation with clinical interest, violet eyes tracking every flicker of destabilized energy, every tremor of Shinji's remaining limbs. "Ah," he said, and there was something almost like satisfaction in the single syllable. "There it is. The State has released you. Fascinating. It seems even cessation-transcendence has its limits—not of power, but of context. When survival instinct reasserts itself, the State recognizes the incompatibility and... withdraws. You are mortal again, Fourth Trascender. Fully, completely mortal."
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Trascender : The Fourth Gust
FantasiWhat happens when death becomes impossible? Nineteen-year-old Shinji Kazuhiko's life shattered the night a masked killer invaded his home. Left for dead, he made a horrifying discovery: he cannot die. And with each death, something inside him grows...
