The world slowed down, as death approached our protagonists at a fast pace.
As the twenty obsidian orbs shrieked through the air, trailing ribbons of violet static, the sensory overload finally snapped something inside Kami's mind. The "A-Rank" label on his system had always felt like a cruel joke, a theoretical potential he couldn't grasp. But facing the total erasure by Void, the theoretical became real.
The air felt thin, like a sheet of paper.
"I won't let it end here!" Kami roared.
He didn't just reach out with his hands, he reached out with his mind. He stopped seeing the orbs as spheres of infinite density and started seeing them as mere inkballs on the canvas of reality. He leaned forward, his palms open, his fingers splayed as if pressing against a cold glass window.
The first orb was inches from Kaito's throat when Kami's power surged. With a violent, sweeping motion, he "pinched" the air. The sphere lost its depth instantly. What was once a hole in reality became a flickering, two-dimensional circle, no thicker than a shadow. And since a 2D object cannot exist in a 3D vacuum without a surface to cling to, the law of the Entity took over: the flattened void simply blinked out of existence.
Pop.
Then another. Pop. Pop.
Kami's hands moved in a blurred, rhythmic dance, a conductor orchestrating the disappearance of nothingness. He was hyper-focused, his pupils dilated until his eyes were as dark as the enemy's. Every time an orb entered his range he flattened it.
"Impossible!" Void's manic grin faltered, his black eyes widening. "I thought you were a good-for-nothing punk! A crybaby who couldn't even use his power properly!"
"Maybe I just needed a reason," Kami spat, his lungs burning from the sheer mental strain.
Void's face contorted. The purple nebula surrounding him intensified, his Reality Override pulsing with a desperate, jagged energy. "Then drown in the vacuum, asshole!"
He manifested a second wave, thirty, no, forty orbs at once. They rained down like a meteor shower of anti-matter. Kami's hands were a frenzy of motion, flattening and "destroying" the projectiles in mid-air. The sound was like a thousand sheets of paper being torn simultaneously.
But the sheer volume was too much. Three orbs slipped through the gaps in Kami's defense, curving toward Inu's flank.
"Kaito!" Kami screamed.
Kaito, teeth gritted and blood leaking from his nose from the strain of trying to redirect orbs of infinite mass, threw his hand out. "I can do it!" He didn't try to stop them, he couldn't. Instead, he did not redirect the orbs themselves but rather the air molecules around them, which made them move into the direction, Kaito wanted. Though this put him through huge pain, as he never did this before.
Suddenly, the purple haze around Void flickered. The screaming static of his aura died down to a low, pathetic hum. His Reality Override had reached its limit. As the Reality Override is a coder's ultimate weapon, it is a tool to win the fight and kill the opponent, making the user weaker and vulnerable afterwards.
Void slumped, his knees hitting the wet asphalt. His skin, previously glowing with dark energy, turned a sickly grey. He was gasping, coughing up blod, that was not red but something more of a dark purple.
"My... my ability..." Void wheezed, staring at his trembling hands. "How was I not strong enough?"
Kaito didn't hesitate. He wasn't a hero, he was a survivor. While Kami was still catching his breath, reeling from the sudden expansion of his own power, Kaito reached into his pouch.
He didn't pull out one iron ball or two. He pulled out three.
"You're too dangerous to leave behind," Kaito said, his voice flat and devoid of the lobby's nervousness.
He threw the balls with a deceptive softness. Then, his eyes glowed in a white tone. He applied a massive, linear acceleration to all three spheres simultaneously.
CRACK.
The sound was like a gunshot. The iron balls moved with such terrifying speed and force that the human eye couldn't even track them. They didn't just hit Void, they pierced right through him. The metal spheres smashed through his skull instantly, the kinetic energy spray painting the brick wall behind him in a gruesome dark red.
Void's body slumped forward, like a puppet with its strings cut.
Silence returned to the Old District. Even the rain seemed to fall more quietly.
"Kaito!" Kami yelled, his voice cracking. He and Inu stared at the corpse, shaking from the sudden change in Kaito's character, then looked back at him. "You... you just killed him. He was down! He was weakened!"
Inu still unable to speak, due to the shock.
Kaito didn't look at them. He was staring at his phone, his face pale in the golden light of the screen. "He would never have stopped, Kami. You heard him. He was a fanatic for Umbra. A lunatic. If we'd let him live, we'd be looking over our shoulders until the day we died. Which, by the way, just got more complicated."
Kaito turned the screen toward them.
[SYSTEM LOG: KILL CONFIRMED]
[CODER #007: KAITO - KILL COUNT: 1]
[QUOTA UPDATED: 30 DAYS REMAINING]
"Wait," Inu said, padding closer in her cat form, her green eyes narrowed at the display. "Your quota... it reset to thirty days?"
"Yeah," Kaito muttered, a look of profound confusion crossing his face. "I had twenty-eight days left on my initial timer. I thought killing someone would stop the timer for the rest of the month and then reset to 30, so you just had to kill one person a month"
Kami checked his own phone. His timer still read twenty-eight days. "But it didn't stop. It just... reset to the maximum, and keeps counting down from there"
"That means if you kill someone early, you basically lose days," Kaito realized, his voice trembling. "The System doesn't want us to pace ourselves. It wants us to kill at the last possible second, or kill so frequently that the reset doesn't matter. It's designed to keep us desperate."
The weight of the realization settled over them like a shroud. The "God Game" wasn't just a battle, it was a meat grinder designed to harvest efficiency.
Before they could process the horror of the mechanic, a sound echoed from the ruins of the ruined skyscraper Kami had seen in his dream. It wasn't a scream or a mechanical hum.
It was a voice, deep, resonant, and dripping with a cold, predatory invitation. It seemed to come from the very shadows of the gaping hole in the building's base.
It was Umbra's voice. Though now it didn't cause them to have a headache anymore, as it did before.
"Impressive display, punks," the voice boomed, vibrating in their chest cavities. "You've survived my little guard dog. But the master of the house, me, is waiting."
The shadows at the entrance of the ruin seemed to thicken, swirling like a dark velvet curtain.
"Come in... if you dare."
Kami looked at the blood on the wall, then at the dark maw of the building. He gripped his hands, feeling the lingering buzz of the 2D energy in his fingertips.
"We're going in," Kami said, his voice hardening. "I don't know how he hides within these skyscraper ruins but I'm not leaving without Asuka."