The Old District was a graveyard of rebar and ash, where the only light came from the flickering, dying buzz of a single streetlamp. Standing beneath it, less than five meters away, the man with his black eyes was standing, menacingly.
He didn't move. He simply raised his hand, pointing his index finger into the air, and the air around it began to scream. A sphere the size of a tennis ball materialized, a knot of pitch-black space rimmed with a faint, nauseating purple glow.
Without a word, he flicked his wrist.
"Kami, move!" Kaito's voice cracked the silence.
Kami threw himself to the side, the asphalt scraping his palms. He felt a rush of cold air, not wind, but a literal absence of temperature, as the orb hissed past his ear. It struck a rusted iron lantern ten meters behind him. There was no explosion. No sound of breaking glass. The lantern simply ceased to be. Where it had stood, there was only a perfectly spherical bite taken out of the air, as if a cosmic eraser had rubbed it out of the third dimension.
Kami scrambled to his feet, chest heaving. He hadn't seen the destruction. His eyes were locked on the stranger.
"My turn," Kaito hissed. He reached into his pouch, drawing one of his signature iron balls. His fingers traced the surface, calculating the vectors of force and air resistance in a heartbeat. "Let's see how you like that, asshole"
Kaito launched the projectile. It was aimed straight for the stranger's throat.
The man didn't flinch. He casually raised his hand again. A second purple-rimmed orb appeared and collided with the iron ball mid-air. The metal didn't bounce; it didn't dent. The moment it touched the purple event horizon, the iron was simply... gone.
"Who the fuck are you?" Inu snarled. She shifted her weight, her muscles tensing beneath her skin, ready to trigger her Pet ability and tear the man apart in her panther form.
The stranger's lips pulled back into a thin, jagged smile. "I wear the same name as my ability," he whispered. "Void."
He didn't wait for an answer. Another orb formed, more violent than the last. He launched it directly at Kami's chest.
Kami's legs felt like lead. He tried to focus on the orb, tried to envision it as a flat, harmless image on a page, but the thing moved too fast. It defied the logic of the three dimensions he knew.
"I am Dead." was, what went through Kami's head.
The orb veered sharply to the left, missing Kami's ribs by an inch. Kaito stood with his hand outstretched, sweat beads rolling down his forehead. "Don't just stand there, Bro! I can't redirect these things forever! The math is... it's wrong! These things are weird!"
Void's smile vanished, replaced by a twitch of irritation. "Annoying flies. You think you understand the rules of this game? You think your little 'vectors' and 'dimensions' mean anything in the face of nothingness?"
He stepped forward, and the ground seemed to recoil. His smile was bigger than before, he began to look like a total maniac.
"Reality Override: Endless Void."
His eyes didn't just glow, they ignited in a swirling nebula of black and dark purple. From beneath his boots, a stain of absolute darkness bled outward. It wasn't a shadow, it was a hole in the world. The color, a shade that shouldn't exist in the visible spectrum, crawled up the air, turning the oxygen into a thick, purple-black haze that expanded in a ten-meter radius.
Kami felt the weight of it. The "Pocket" had always felt artificial, but this was different. This was reality itself was rewritten around him.
Inu backed away, her fur standing on end. "Kami... the system... look at the system!"
Kami fumbled for his phone. The gold lettering was flickering wildly, the screen bleeding purple around the edges.
[WARNING: REALITY OVERWRITE INITIATED] [CODER #86: VOID - RANK S]
"He's an S-Rank?" Kami gasped, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
"I told you," Void screamed, his voice escalating into a pitch of ecstatic madness. "You don't stand a chance! You are bugs trapped in a jar, and I am the one who shatters the glass!"
Previously, he had only manifested a single orb at a time. Now, within the aura of his Reality Override, the limitation vanished. One orb became two. Two became four. Within seconds, twenty of the small, screaming purple spheres were orbiting him like a crown of dark stars.
The air smelled of the rain, that was previously falling. Or rather, it was still falling but as soon as the raindrops got within a 10 meter range of Void, they just vanished.
"Die for Umbra!" Void laughed, a sound of pure, unhinged joy.
With a single, violent gesture, he sent all twenty orbs screaming toward the trio at once.
Kami looked at Kaito. Kaito looked at Inu. There was nowhere to run. The orbs were closing in and Kaito could barely manage to redirect a single one.