The Higher Realm was not your typical neighborhood. Here, the house didn't sit on a street—it drifted atop a sea of solidified moonlight, and the backyard was a rotating collection of newborn galaxies that Ichikawa's mother used for light gardening. At seventeen, Ichikawa had returned to this place after graduation, feeling the weight of the red ring more than ever.
He was currently sitting on a porch that technically existed in five different dimensions at once, staring at a sun that didn't set so much as it simply changed its Opacity setting.
The sound of footsteps echoed—not from behind him, but from the air itself. Kyoki walked into the living space, her presence so immense that the local laws of physics took a polite step back to make room for her. She was carrying a tray of tea that smelled faintly of Eternal Youth and Earl Grey.
"You look troubled, Ichikawa," Kyoki said, her voice a soothing melody that could also probably shatter a planet if she hit a high note. "Graduation blues? Or are you just missing that silver-haired headache you call a partner?"
"I'm enjoying the silence, Mom," Ichikawa lied, taking a cup. He looked around the vast, shimmering halls of their home. "Where's Dad? I haven't seen him since I got back."
Kyoki sighed, a sound that caused a localized thunderstorm three realms away. "Your father has been incredibly busy lately. He's currently overseeing the 'Great Reset' of the Seventh Sector. Apparently, someone forgot to turn off the gravity before they went to sleep, and now the whole sector is shaped like a pretzel. It's a mess."
Ichikawa nodded thoughtfully. In this family, "busy at the office" usually meant preventing the collapse of a few trillion lives.
"Mom," Ichikawa started, his eyes narrowing as he looked at the red ring on his finger. The 1% power he was currently allowed to use felt like a pressurized ocean behind a very thin dam. "Lately, I've been sensing... something. A different kind of mana. It's not from the academy, and it's not from the lower worlds. It felt like a 'cold' gaze. Like something trying to read a book that hasn't been written yet."
Kyoki paused, her hand hovering over the teapot. She closed her eyes for a moment, her divine senses expanding across the infinite framework of the cosmology, brushing past the layers of transcendence that Teacher Yoshiro had yapped about.
"I don't sense anything of the sort, dear," she said, her expression perfectly calm. "Perhaps it's just residual static from your time with Ruleus. That boy's energy is... let's call it 'unconventionally loud.' It probably rattled your internal sensors."
Ichikawa didn't look convinced. If his 1%—which was now vastly larger than it had been five years ago—could feel it, why couldn't she?
"Regardless," Kyoki said, her tone shifting into something more official. "Since you've officially graduated from Ama-no-Gawa Academy, it's time you put that education to use. There is a world in the lower-mid tier that needs... intervention."
"Can't someone else do it?" Ichikawa groaned, the lazy spirit of wanting a nap rising within him. "I just got my diploma. I was planning on being a 'Zero' for at least a month."
"This is different," Kyoki insisted. "The reports say that the very concepts of Space and Time are being corrupted there. It's as if someone is chewing on the fabric of that reality, leaving 'holes' where history used to be. It's messy, it's glitchy, and it's spreading."
She stepped closer, her eyes flashing with a brief, terrifying authority.
"I want you to check it out. Investigate the source of this 'Conceptual Rot.' But Ichikawa..." She reached out and touched the red ring. The sinkhole beneath it hummed in recognition of its creator. "I am warning you. Do not remove this ring. Not for a moment. Not even if you think the world is ending."
"I know, I know," Ichikawa muttered. "The seal stays on."
"I'm serious," Kyoki whispered. "Your 1% is more than enough to handle anything in that sector. If you unseal the other 99%, you won't just fix the world—you'll erase it by accidentally breathing too hard. Handle it with the precision I taught you."
Ichikawa stood up, his blazer fluttering in the non-existent wind of the Higher Realm. He thought of Ruleus, who was probably currently trying to eat his own graduation certificate.
"Fine," Ichikawa said, his eyes glowing with a faint, golden light. "I'll go look at the 'glitchy' world. But if I find out Ruleus is already there making it worse, I'm coming back and charging you double for the overtime."
Kyoki laughed. "Just go, my little Disaster. And try not to break the space-time continuum on your way down."
Ichikawa turned to leave, his boots barely touching the solidified moonlight of the Higher Realm's porch. Thered ring felt like a lead weight, a constant reminder that he was a walking apocalypse on a leash.
"Ichikawa!" Kyoki called out, her voice cutting through the shimmering air.
He stopped, glancing back. His mother wasn't smiling anymore. Her expression was grave, her eyes reflecting the birth and death of a thousand constellations. "That world... It has its own Stories. The being corrupting it isn't just eating space and time—they are capable of Conceptual Erasure of Narratives. They can unwrite the 'Plot' of a person's life until they never even had a beginning."
She stepped forward, her aura briefly flaring with a protective, divine heat. "Keep yourself immune. Don't let the 'Story' of that world touch your core. Stay detached. Stay the 'Zero.' And for the love of the stars, don't let the plot manipulate you into doing something heroic and stupid."
"I'm a 'Zero,' Mom," Ichikawa said, his voice flat. "Heroes are for people who aren't tired. I'm just here for the investigation."
Ichikawa didn't just walk into a portal. He reached into the empty air and, with a sharp motion, slashed through the dimensions as if they were wet paper.
He stepped into the rift. He didn't move at a 'fast' speed. He moved at a Trans-Temporal Velocity—a speed that existed simultaneously in the Past, Present, and Future. To an outside observer, he hadn't moved—he had simply ceased to be in one place and had already arrived in the next before he even decided to leave.
He materialized in the center of a nightmare.
The sky wasn't blue—it was a churning, lava-red soup of broken physics. The sun looked like a bruised eye, leaking black ichor into the atmosphere. Ichikawa's boots hit the ground, but the ground didn't feel solid—it felt wrong, as if the concept of 'Firmness' had been edited by someone who didn't know what it meant.
"Tch," Ichikawa muttered, his eyes narrowing. He could feel it immediately—the Conceptual Rot. The air tasted like static and old memories. Time here wasn't a line; it was a tangled ball of yarn. Space was bending in ways that made his 1% divine brain itch.
He closed his eyes, extending his senses to find the source of the corruption. He could feel a presence nearby—something cold, something that didn't belong to any story.
"Found you," he whispered.
CRACK-BOOM.
The dimension directly above his head shattered like a dropped mirror.
"GUESS WHOOOO!"
A massive weight slammed into Ichikawa's back, driving him face-first into the glitchy, lava-colored dirt.
"Ruleus!" Ichikawa muffled into the ground, his voice vibrating with pure, unadulterated annoyance.
"Ichikawa-kun! You were leaving without me!" Ruleus chirped, sitting comfortably on Ichikawa's shoulder blades as if he were a park bench. At seventeen, Ruleus was even heavier, and his silver aura was currently deadass sparking with excitement. "I sensed you going to a different world and I thought, 'Hey! Ichikawa-kun probably forgot his snacks! And his emotional support Disaster Partner!' So I broke the ceiling of reality to find you!"
Ruleus looked up at the lava-red sky and let out a whistle. "Wow. This place has a really 'aggressive' color palette. It's very... edgy. Do you think the lava tastes like strawberries, or is it the 'burn your soul' kind?"
Ichikawa groaned, pushing himself up and dumping the silver-haired teenager into the dirt. He stood up, dusting off his blazer, his golden eyes glowing with a weary light.
"Ruleus, this is a corrupted world. The concepts of space and time are being eaten. This isn't an adventure, it's a cleanup job!"
Ruleus stood up, his silver hair shimmering even in the hellish light. He gave a wide, cheeky grin, his eyes reflecting the lava-red sky. "A cleanup job is an adventure if you don't use a broom, Ichikawa-kun! Besides, if someone is erasing stories, I'm the best person to have around! I don't even remember my own story half the time!"
Ichikawa looked at the red ring on his finger, then at the grinning idiot standing in a dying world.
"Mother warned me about story manipulation," Ichikawa whispered to himself. "But she forgot to warn me about the most powerful force in the multiverse: Ruleus's sheer, unblinking audacity."
his blue eyes scanning the horizon. The lava-red sky pulsed like a dying heart, and the ground beneath him felt less like dirt and more like a low-resolution texture.
How am I supposed to track a conceptual parasite in a world where 'North' is currently a flavor and 'Five Minutes Ago' is a physical wall? Ichikawa thought, his hand hovering near his red ring.
He began calculating the output required to perform a Multi-Layered Chronos-Scan, a divine technique that would allow him to see the stains left by the corruption on the tapestry of time. It was a complex, delicate process that required focus, precision, and—
"Hey, Ichikawa-kun," Ruleus said, interrupting the divine math.
"Not now, Ruleus. I'm trying to find the source of the—"
Ruleus didn't listen. He simply turned toward a random, empty patch of red air. He looked bored, his silver hair flickering with a faint, lazy static. He closed his eyes, tilted his head as if listening to a very quiet radio station, and reached out a single hand.
"I think I found a loose thread," Ruleus muttered. "It feels... pointy."
Ruleus's hand gripped the empty air. Suddenly, his silver aura didn't just glow—it flared with a sudden, violent intensity that pushed back the lava sky. The 'Deadass' energy he emitted was so concentrated it forced the reality in front of him to solidify.
CRACK.
It sounded like the universe was being unzipped. Ruleus yanked his hand back, and with a shockwave that flattened the nearby glitching trees, he literally dragged an entity out of the conceptual layer and forced it into a physical, three-dimensional form.
Ichikawa's eyes widened. He hadn't expected Ruleus to just... reach out and grab a non-physical concept.
Standing in the center of the silver-cracked crater was a girl. She looked like a celestial nightmare—a breathtaking, eerie breed between an Elf and an Angel. Her skin was pale as moonlight, her pointed ears were tipped with silver, and two massive, tattered white wings protruded from her back, though they were currently stained with the same lava-red corruption as the sky.
But it was her eyes that stopped Ichikawa's heart. They weren't the blue or gold of a celestial being; they were a piercing, hollow red.
She didn't move. She stood there, suspended in a slight hover, her body twitching with the same glitchy static that infected the world.
"Whoa," Ruleus said, his serious expression instantly melting back into a vacant grin. "She's a real looker, Ichikawa-kun! But I think she's broken. She has that look my mom gets when she realizes she left the oven on for three days."
"Ruleus, get back," Ichikawa commanded, his voice dropping into a low, divine rumble.
He didn't need his full power to see it. He could sense the Conceptual Threads wrapped around her limbs, sinking into her soul. This wasn't a villain acting of her own accord—she was a puppet. Her mana was being forcibly inverted, her very Story being rewritten by the Unknown Figure to serve as a biological weapon for the erasure.
"She's not in control," Ichikawa whispered, his blue eyes locking onto her red ones. "Someone didn't just corrupt the world... they turned a High-Tier Celestial into a living delete key."
The girl's head snapped toward them with a mechanical, bone-chilling click. A low, distorted hum began to emanate from her, a sound that bypassed the ears and vibrated directly into their Existential Core.
"Target... identified," she whispered, her voice sounding like a thousand people speaking at once. "Erasing... Narrative... Segment... Ichikawa."
"See?" Ruleus chirped, raising his fists. "She knows your name! She's a fan!"
"THAT'S NOT A COMPLIMENT, RULEUS!"
Ruleus was mid-grin, probably about to make a joke about the girl's wings looking like 'overcooked waffles,' when the universe skipped a frame.
There was no 'movement' in the traditional sense. It was a 'VEEOOM'—a sound that wasn't heard by the ears, but by the very fabric of existence as it was forcibly torn asunder.
One frame, Ruleus was standing there with his deadass confidence. The next, he was gone. The impact punched him through the lava-red sky, through the atmospheric crust, and straight through the spatial membranes of three adjacent dimensions. The speed was so absolute that Ruleus—the boy who casually transcends linear time—didn't even have time to blink.
"RU—!"
Ichikawa's shout died in his throat. He didn't even finish the name before the air in front of him shattered.
The Elf-Angel girl was already there. Her red eyes were bleeding Narrative Static. She swung a palm strike aimed directly at Ichikawa's chest—a move designed not to break ribs, but to delete the heart from the story.
WHAM.
Ichikawa caught her wrist, the shockwave of the parry liquefying the ground beneath them for miles. At seventeen, his 1% power was no longer just a fraction—it was a refined, dense wall of divine authority.
"I'm not a side character you can just edit out," Ichikawa hissed, his blue eyes burning with a cold, focused fire.
He spun, delivering a roundhouse kick that carried the weight of a collapsing star, but she moved like a glitch in a video game—flickering from one position to another without crossing the space between.
The combat was a blur of high-speed CQC (Close Quarters Combat) that defied every law of physics. Every time their limbs collided, the air erupted in purple sparks of corrupted data.
Ichikawa could feel it—her aura was like a parasitic ink. It was crawling up his arms, trying to seep into his soul and rewrite his 'Beginning.' He felt his memories of the Academy, of his mother Kyoki, even the memory of his miserable past life, start to flicker and dim. The world around him began to look like a rough sketch, the 'Story' trying to conclude that Ichikawa never existed.
"Resist... focus..." Ichikawa muttered, his red ring pulsing a violent crimson.
He pushed his 1% to the absolute limit of its capacity, using his divine essence as an Existential Anchor. He wasn't just fighting her body; he was fighting her Authorial Intent. Every punch he threw was a statement of his own existence.
She's fast... too fast, Ichikawa thought, narrowly dodging a finger-thrust that erased the mountain range behind him just by passing near it. If I didn't have five years of training against Ruleus's total lack of logic, I'd be a blank page by now.
"Subject: Zero... persistent," the girl droned, her voice echoing from the past and the future simultaneously. "Initiating... Chapter... The End."
She clapped her hands together, and the lava-red sky began to spiral into a massive, conceptual whirlpool centered directly on Ichikawa.
"Where the hell is that silver-haired idiot when I actually need him?!" Ichikawa shouted, skidding back as the ground beneath him was literally deleted, leaving him standing on a void.