William Augustus I had just torn open the Spirit World, about to step through, when a lopsided, wobbling paper crane suddenly burst out of the rift.
Complex, mercury-colored symbols leapt rapidly from the crane's body, linking together into a massive, illusory, interconnected serpent — just as it had minutes earlier, this serpent curled its body through the void and bit its own tail.
The vast, illusory wheel descended once more.
"Reboot."
A bright, childlike voice rang out.
William Augustus I's eyes went wide with fury, but all he could do was watch everything around him rewind rapidly, watch his own fingers slip free from Vincent's throat, watch him drift back out of reach once more.
And right then, Vincent's right hand suddenly swept lightly through the empty air, and a strange, unremarkable-looking blade seemed to be drawn straight out of the void itself.
Gripping the hilt tightly in his right hand, letting his left hand trail lightly along the blade, Vincent spoke — not loudly, but clear enough for everyone present to hear:
He spoke the sword's release chant — calling all things back to nothing, calling fire to run like a living blade.
BOOM!
Blazing flame ignited along the blade's edge, the surrounding temperature spiking violently, cracks spreading through the very air itself under the heat.
Without pausing, Vincent swept the flame-wreathed blade toward William Augustus I and the others, speaking a second phrase — the release word that unlocked the weapon's true, final form.
An instant later, wisps of scorched smoke rose from the blade's edge, its surface charring black, and boundless smoke and flame poured out from the sword in every direction, and the already-cracked space around them shattered completely in that single moment.
Yes.
Within the Nation of Disorder, having spent every last scrap of gray crystal he had, the blade Vincent had pulled from "Black Box" was, genuinely, the zanpakutō belonging to Head Captain Yamamoto Genryūsai from Bleach — the blade renowned as the single most destructive weapon in that entire story.
It wasn't some tastelessly ironic sealed item crafted by a Beyonder as a reference to that blade. It was the real thing — pulled directly from the world of Bleach itself.
Which was exactly why, the moment its full nature had flooded into his mind, Vincent had been so utterly floored, so disbelieving, so completely thrown.
He couldn't begin to imagine how something like this had ended up crossing over into the Lord of Mysteries' Western Cthulhu-mythos setting.
And right on the heels of that came the far more urgent question: could this blade — famed in Bleach as the strongest attack in its own story — actually help him escape four Sequence 1 Beyonders?
Comparing power levels across completely different fictional universes was the kind of thing people loved to argue about for fun — except right now, it wasn't just for fun. His life was on the line.
In Bleach, this blade's final form could reach temperatures rivaling the sun's core, reducing everything in its path to ash — hot enough, supposedly, to boil away every drop of water in the entire afterlife realm.
At a glance, that sounded incredibly, overwhelmingly powerful.
But in the world of the Lord of Mysteries, what would that actually translate to? Genuinely hard to say.
A Sequence 0 Fool, as far as anyone knew, could graft a supernova onto reality, could destroy an entire star outright — most Sequence 0s across the various pathways commanded roughly star-destroying levels of power.
Sequence 1s fell noticeably short of that — most could probably only manage something on the scale of leveling a city with a single blow.
But the real issue was that, once you reached Angel level in the Lord of Mysteries, the game stopped being about raw destructive power and became about rules and authority — in other words, this world ran on "mechanics," not brute force.
No matter how strong an attack, how devastating its damage, if it couldn't actually land, it meant nothing — and worse, an opponent might even turn that very attack back against you.
The instant Vincent completed the blade's transformation, he understood with total clarity: this "strongest zanpakutō" was, and yet somehow wasn't, quite the same blade from Bleach's story.
Because the flame pouring out of it wasn't inflicting purely physical damage — it was tearing apart the very "rules" and "order" the four Sequence 1s had just constructed, too!
At the same time, all four Angels, caught in the "Reboot," froze in place, staring in shock and disbelief at Vincent standing at the center of that sky-consuming inferno. As "old-timers" from the Fourth Epoch, all of them had lived through the divine wars of that age, had witnessed the Eternal Blazing Sun — a true god — unleash its own power firsthand.
And the man who, moments ago, had been utterly helpless in their hands — right now, he was giving off exactly that same feeling they'd once had, standing before the Eternal Blazing Sun.
"Hah—"
Vincent drew in a breath of scorching air, his voice warping under the heat as he spoke the blade's next command, invoking the flame's western form — a burning shroud wrapping around him like a cloak of fire.
ROAR—
Flame reaching fifteen million degrees wrapped itself loosely around Vincent's body, draping over him and the blade both like a mantle woven from the sun itself.
Then, invoking the blade's northern command, Vincent swept the sword upward from below, calling down annihilation upon everything before him — heaven and earth alike, reduced to ash.
"!!!"
All three Sequence 1 Angels' expressions shifted violently at once, tearing open the Spirit World and fleeing at their absolute top speed.
But they failed.
Under that extreme heat, the space around them had already been scorched and shattered, exposing the void and darkness beneath. The rifts they tore open led not into the Spirit World, but straight into the void itself.
The next instant, the strike arrived.
Everything in its path turned to ash in an instant.
It was both an extreme of heat and an extreme of destruction. All three Sequence 1s threw everything they had into rules and order, layering protection after protection around themselves, and, at devastating cost, barely managed to escape the area alive.
As for Derek Augustus — already wounded — the instant the strike arrived, the flame burned his flesh to ash entirely, leaving nothing but a charred skeleton, clinging to the last thread of life only through the protection of "the power of Balance."
In the wake of that single strike, a rift tens of thousands of meters long, leading straight into the void, tore across the earth — ripping a hideous gash through the forests and plains outside Backlund, molten earth and stone, ignited by the extreme heat, pouring out of the rift like lava, the whole scene resembling something out of hell itself.
"Hah... hah..."
Vincent's arms hung limp at his sides, weakly holding the blade — its charred blackness now faded, restored to a bright sheen — his chest heaving violently, his breath ragged and labored.
In Bleach, every attack a zanpakutō unleashed drew on its wielder's spiritual pressure — and among Soul Reapers, the final measure of strength always came down to spiritual pressure itself.
But Vincent obviously had no "spiritual pressure" of his own to draw on. Which meant that last strike had drained his spirituality, his very life force — and the blade itself, too.
Creak. Creak.
Cracks began surfacing across the blade, spreading rapidly outward. Within seconds, they covered the entire weapon, and finally, with a sharp crack, the blade shattered completely, leaving nothing but a bare hilt in Vincent's grip.
The blade was broken.
Not destroyed for good — but repairing it would take time, and far more gray crystal. There was no chance of using it a second time anytime soon.
Vincent had no idea exactly how much damage that single strike had done to the three fleeing Sequence 1s, but the fact that they'd fled at all meant it had succeeded in buying him a real chance to survive.
He immediately began drawing on what little spirituality he had left, preparing to slip through the Spirit World and escape.
But a figure suddenly stepped out of thin air — unmistakably George III, who'd been exiled moments earlier.
Having been exiled, he'd actually missed that terrifying attack entirely.
By the time he returned, he found his own ancestor and the other two Angels gone, Derek Augustus reduced to a dying skeleton, and — worst of all — the tomb he'd worked so hard to build, gone without a trace.
"You're going to die."
To be continued…
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