The silence in Saganbo's sanctum should have been absolute. The five broken bodies scattered across the obsidian floor—Merus, Kagaya, Miryoku, Shirou, Netsudo—lay still as corpses, their shallow breathing the only evidence they hadn't yet crossed into death. The air was thick with the psychic residue of despair, with the ozone of spent power, with the coppery tang of blood in a dozen different colors: cerulean, emerald, luminous white, crimson, amber.
And hovering near the shattered ceiling, less than a ghost, was Shinji Kazuhiko.
A single blue eye, wide and bloodshot with impossible will, stared down from a ragged patch of scalp trailing yellow-green hair. Beneath it pulsed his Trascender Core—cracked like ancient porcelain, fissures spreading through its crystalline structure, dark lightning arcing between the fractures. Golden-green light bled from every wound in wisps that dissipated immediately, wasted energy hemorrhaging into nothing.
But it pulsed. It existed. It persisted.
Saganbo stood with his back to the carnage, one hand raised toward his nearly-complete throne repair, the other extended toward Shinji with index finger pointing. At that fingertip, a pinprick of infinite darkness pulsed—not purple-black like his aura, but deeper. A point of absolute nothing that devoured even the faint light struggling through the ruined ceiling.
His violet eyes tracked the fragment with cold calculation. "I'LL HOLD YOU... UNTIL MY LAST BREATH!" The psychic declaration still echoed in the sanctum's psychic atmosphere, raw and desperate and utterly futile.
Saganbo's thin smile widened slightly. "Admirable sentiment," he murmured, his voice carrying the finality of a closing tomb. "But last breaths, Fourth Trascender, are precisely what I specialize in ending."
The darkness at his fingertip pulsed, growing. The surrounding reality began to decay at its edges—obsidian flaking to dust, dust to molecules, molecules to conceptual absence. The pressure radiating from it made the cracked Trascender Core vibrate violently, threatening complete shattering.
Within the core, Shinji's consciousness was a scream without sound. Not fear of death—he'd died hundreds of times. This was terror of unbeing. Of Kiyomi's memory being erased. Of his aunt's sacrifice meaning nothing. Of Tamago, Yamato, the billions extinguished in Saganbo's graveyard domains—all of it going unavenged because he would cease to have ever mattered.
He poured every spark of remaining spirit into defiance. Golden-green energy—thin, desperate, pathetic—flared erratically around the core and eye. A final, futile shield against inevitability.
*It's not enough,* his consciousness screamed. *It was never enough. I'm going to disappear. I'm going to—*
"Pathetic," Saganbo stated, not with anger but profound disappointment. He began channeling more power into the fingertip. The pinprick expanded, becoming a sphere of pure negation hovering above his palm. It pulsed with the promise of final silence, of Shinji Kazuhiko being reduced to a footnote that would itself be footnoted into non-existence. "To think this is what forced me to use Intermediate Stage. This... fragment. This barely-coherent ghost clinging to—"
Space didn't tear.
It unfolded.
Like dark velvet curtains parting without sound, a point in reality near Shinji's hovering fragment began to shimmer. Not a portal—those were crude. Not a spatial fold—those left residue. This was something else entirely: reality opening from within, peeling back layers of dimensional membrane to reveal something that existed behind the universe itself.
YOU ARE READING
Trascender : The Fourth Gust
FantasyWhat 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...
