The world didn't shift gently. It snapped. Akira felt it the moment his feet touched the ground again—the violent kinetic transition of space-folding that Gojo had mastered, but executed through the raw, jagged power of the shard. He wasn't in Tokyo anymore. There were no neon veins, no hum of a million air conditioners, no pulse of modern cursed energy. Instead, there was something older. Something quieter. The air itself felt heavy, soaked with time and a forgotten, suffocating memory.
The ocean stretched endlessly before him. It was a gray, flat horizon under a sky that seemed to have forgotten the color blue. No ships broke the surface. No birds circled the cliffs. There was just water and a silence so profound it felt like a physical weight pressing against his eardrums. Akira narrowed his eyes, scanning the shoreline. The sand beneath his boots was damp and uneven, crusted with thin, white sheets of salt that cracked softly under each step like the breaking of tiny bones. The wind moved slowly, carrying no scent of life—only the dry, biting trace of the sea.
"This place…" he muttered, his voice sounding thin in the vast emptiness.
"…is wrong," the Abyss King finished inside him, his tone unusually somber.
Akira didn't respond immediately. He looked down at his hand. The Red Tower shard, which had been a burning furnace of unstable crimson power atop the spire, was now cold. It wasn't dormant, but restrained, as if the very atmosphere of this coast was a shroud designed to suppress it. Or perhaps something here was watching it, waiting for the right moment to let it breathe. A faint, magnetic pull guided his senses forward. It didn't lead toward the horizon where the sun should have been. It led down.
"…Underneath," Akira whispered.
The ocean answered. A low, distant sound rolled across the surface—not quite a wave, not quite a voice, but a subterranean groan. The water trembled, vibrating in perfect resonance with the shard in his palm, then stilled again. Akira stepped closer to the water's edge. Each movement felt deliberate, as if the world were measuring his worth, judging the weight of the Sovereign's soul against the depths of the Atlantic.
"This is where the third shard is," he said quietly.
The King's voice was slower now, careful and coiled. "…Not just a shard. A grave."
Akira stopped, his boot hovering over a tide pool. For the first time since arriving, the cold mask of his expression shifted. "A grave for what?"
The answer didn't come in words. It came in pressure. Suddenly, the surface of the ocean split. It didn't happen violently or with the explosive force of a technique; it happened cleanly, as if something beneath the crust of the earth had simply decided that the sea no longer needed to exist above it. The water rose on both sides, suspended in impossible, vertical walls of translucent gray. Between them, a path of ancient, barnacle-encrusted stone revealed itself, descending slowly into a darkness that light refused to touch.
Akira didn't move. His eyes sharpened, the gold and violet flicking toward the abyss. "…A path?"
"…A summons," the King corrected.
For several long seconds, nothing happened. No enemies emerged. No sound echoed from the trench. There was just that open, wet descent into the unknown. Akira exhaled slowly, forcing the tension out of his shoulders, and then he stepped forward. The moment his foot crossed onto the submerged path, the silence broke. A deep, echoing resonance surged through the space, vibrating through his bone and thought alike. Symbols—ancient, fractured, and fundamentally wrong—lit up along the walls of suspended water, glowing in dim blues and dying golds.
Akira's shard reacted instantly, a sharp pulse of crimson heat radiating from his palm. "…It remembers this place," the King murmured, a hint of dark nostalgia in his voice.
Akira kept walking. Step by step, he moved deeper into the ocean's throat. The light from above faded quickly, swallowed by the crushing depths. The water walls stretched higher and higher until the sky disappeared entirely, leaving only the faint, sickly glow of those strange markings to light his way.
Then, he saw it. Far below, at the end of the stone ramp, lay a city. It was a ruined sprawl of massive structures leaning at impossible angles, covered in coral-like growths that weren't truly alive. Towers were snapped in half like dry twigs. Streets were buried under centuries of silt and silence. This was the origin—or the end—of a kingdom that had existed before the first pharaoh was born.
And at the center, something moved. Akira stopped, his hand going instinctively to the hilt of his resolve. "…So it wasn't abandoned," he said.
The King's tone darkened, reaching a level of gravity Akira had never heard before. "No. It was sealed. And the seals have grown hungry."
A shape rose slowly from the ruins. It didn't rush. It didn't attack with the frantic energy of the Tokyo invaders. It observed. Its form was incomplete, flickering like a dying flame, but it felt heavier and more defined than anything he had faced at the tower. Its presence didn't just distort reality; it weighed on it, making the air in the trench feel like lead.
"…You carry it," the entity spoke. The voice didn't travel through the air. It appeared directly inside Akira's mind, cold and wet, like salt water in the lungs.
He didn't flinch. "I carry what's mine," Akira replied, his voice echoing off the walls of water.
The thing tilted its head, its featureless face reflecting the dim glow of the shard. "…No. You carry what was never meant to return to the sun."
The water walls trembled again. More shapes began to emerge from the coral-choked ruins. One. Three. Ten. Dozens. They rose slowly, a silent audience of ghosts, all watching him with a singular, terrifying focus. Akira's aura flickered to life—not in an explosive burst, but in a controlled, lethal shroud. His grip tightened around the cold crimson crystal.
"Good," he said quietly, his eyes burning.
The King laughed softly, a sound of pure predatory anticipation. "You're finally starting to understand, Akira. The Crown isn't just a title. It's a target."
Akira took a single step forward, the stone beneath him cracking. "I'm not here to ask for the next piece. I'm here to take it."
The ocean groaned in response. The path beneath him fractured slightly, but the authority of his presence held the stone together. The entities below reacted—not with fear, but with a chilling, synchronized recognition.
"…The Crown…" "…The Usurper…" "…The Sovereign…"
Their voices overlapped in his head, forming an unbearable screech of static. Akira's eyes sharpened to pinpoints of light. He raised his hand, the shard finally igniting in the dark. "Come take it, then."
For a split second, everything froze. The water stopped dripping. The symbols stopped glowing. Then, reality itself collapsed inward. Not the water walls, but the space between Akira and the city. The first entity moved—faster than the eye could track, closer than his instincts could predict. And this time, it didn't phase through the world.
It struck.
Akira's eyes widened as a fist made of solidified pressure slammed into his guard, the impact sending a shockwave through the trench that threatened to bring the ocean crashing down upon them both. The war for the third shard had begun.