Chapter 21 — Fields of Green, Echoes of StarsIt had been months.
Kazuki's dimension was a simple lie of paradise he had carved out of nothing: rolling green grass, a ring of old-growth forest, a lake that reflected an impossible sky. The place smelled of rain and fresh-cut stems. It was perfect for training — because nothing about them ever remained small for long.
Seraphina sat in the middle of the plain in slime form, a smooth black-gold puddle with golden motes drifting inside her. For three months she had rested, her form hunched into quiet regeneration as the wounds of the last war mended. The rest had been necessary. Power like hers did not simply refill; it had to be coaxed back from the edges of things.
Now she rose.
Her slime stretched, condensed, and folded into human shape. Jet hair fell over her shoulders. Her golden eyes blinked open like suns finding the horizon. She flexed. The world felt loud again.
Kazuki was already there — shirt open, sleeves rolled, breath steady. He watched her with the same amused, dangerous calm he always wore. In his lap a small bag of chips sat open, a floating drink lazily orbiting his shoulder like a bored satellite.
"You look… rested," he said.
Seraphina smirked, bouncing on bare feet. "You have no idea. Try not to get shredded."
He stood with the lazy grace of someone who could also end things before breakfast. "Warm up then," he said. "Let's see how tired you really are."
They moved.
It was not sprinting. It was not running. One instant they stood twenty paces apart; the next breath they were face to face — impossible velocity folded into muscle and will. Their first clash sent the grass away in a ring.
CLASH. WHOOM.
Swords flashed — Seraphina's katana a black-gold line, Kazuki's fists glowing with red-black brass-knuckle energy. The sword met fist; a hurricane of pressure exploded outward. A gust rolled across the plain and toppled a stand of distant trees.
"Faster," Kazuki grinned, voice like a blade sliding from a scabbard.
Seraphina answered, moving like water that had learned to cut. She folded space with each step, appearing in after-images that sliced the air until sound became texture to be torn. Kazuki's fists became meteor strikes; Seraphina's blade became the seam between breaths.
They traded techniques that read like lesson plans for annihilation: Kazuki's Hell Fang Barrage—a storm of elbows and knees—followed by an improvised Phantom Cross of blade and knuckle; Seraphina's Void Petal Dance counters, Mirage Bloom feints that unmade the trajectory of his attacks.
The field was a strobe of motion. Dust, spray from the lake, and grass—everything folded to their rhythm.
SWISH — THUD — KRAASH.
System notifications pulsed softly into the space between them, like an unseen referee.
⚠️ SYSTEM: Enemy detection module engaged.
⚠️ SCAN: Danger level — UNKNOWN.
⚠️ ANALYSIS FAILED: Incoming. Do not linger.
⚠️ NOTE: Disruption to sensors increasing exponentially.
Seraphina's eyes flicked upward. Her body kept moving, fight always first; her mind listened. The warning sat in her like a bruise.
"Something's wrong," she murmured, tone flat and sharp.
Above the tree-line the sky did not just warp. It melted. The blue sagged like wax and the stars bled through.
From the thinning fabric of the dimension stepped a figure — small at first against the horizon, then enormous as the illusion collapsed. Ignis hovered in the air, one hand tucked behind his back, the other empty. He looked absurdly casual for a being who had arrived through a cracked sky.
Ignis smiled like a match struck. "Oh? What do we have here?" His voice was warm but edged. Fire would have been a poor comparison; there was some colder combustion in him, bright and precise.
Seraphina came to a smooth halt. "Identify yourself," she said. Her voice had the seasoning of someone who could read threat signatures in a heartbeat.
"I'm... just a guy who wants to fight," Ignis said, effortless and bored. He flexed. The air around him slid into color: a hard, white-hot core of glare with black-purple edges, like a star that had decided to scream.
Kazuki blinked once. He rose from his cross-legged seat — chips forgotten — and his grin flicked into place. "You want to fight?" he said. "Nice of you to drop by."
Ignis's aura tightened. Something in that tightening made the grasses around them weigh less, made the horizon a soft suggestion. Seraphina's system bleeped again.
⚠️ SYSTEM: Ambiguity detected. New signature: IGNIS (UNKNOWN-CLASS).
⚠️ ANALYSIS: Attempts to quantify failing. Data corrupted.
⚠️ RECOMMENDATION: Extreme caution. Do not engage at full resonance.
Seraphina's smile went cold-lively. "I like stealing interesting things," she said. "If you have power I can't analyze, I'll borrow a piece."
Ignis cocked his head, delighted. "Sounds like fun."
He unlocked.
His aura uncoiled—the air cracked like glass, then like falling mountains. Light spilled from him in stripes that chewed at the trees and made the lake hiss. His shape blurred and stabilized into something that made space report its injuries.
RUMBLE — WHOOM — CRACK.
Seraphina's face hardened the way stone does. She stepped forward slowly, not in fear, but in the kind of confidence that makes storms pause to watch. Her gold-and-black aura swelled, burning with the quiet hum of galaxies folding. Kazuki's red-and-black haze pushed at Ignis too, a hunger in color.
Where their auras met, the world screamed.
The grass melted as if it had been waxed into nothing. Trees unspooled like thread. The lake's skin shivered and vaporized; the water climbed into the sky and boiled into a rain of light.
MELT — SSSHHH — FZZZ.
Seraphina's system, which normally narrated data like an efficient librarian, stumbled and produced something that sounded like a distant historian gasping.
⚠️ SYSTEM: Archive recall override.
⚠️ REFERENCE: Memory of destruction operations — LEVEL: CATASTROPHIC.
⚠️ HIGHEST ALERT: Historical effects detected.
⚠️ OUTPUT: You have destroyed galaxies. You have destroyed many universes.
The message was a punch that didn't land on a face but on the ledger of reality. For a beat, they all looked out beyond the field and the dimension and saw the trace of truth: where the rip had opened, from nearest stars to the farthest spiral, galaxies bled like ink into water. Universes that had been would the next moment not be, and the sky outside Kazuki's dimension peeled and showed those absent webs like holes in lace.
Kazuki's voice cut the silence with a flat, almost teasing tilt. "It's no fun to just destroy everything."
He rose; when Kazuki moved now, his aura switched from predator to craftsman. Red-black ribbons uncoiled into hands and began to stitch. The grass and trees that had turned to steam folded back into place like a rewinding film. The lake repaired itself droplet by careful droplet. Where Ignis's arrival had snipped creation, Kazuki's presence seamed it back — not naïvely, but with careful, colder intent.
KSHHH — ZZZIP — PLINK.
"My turn," he said, and the reconstructed cosmos answered. He did not erase Ignis' violations — he remade the fragments into functioning histories again. Galaxies knit; timelines reknit. The system that had screamed about lost archives quieted into a low, respectful hum.
Seraphina watched him, her golden eyes bright with a new light. She had been a thief of power; now she watched the man who mended unmakeable things.
Ignis' grin broke into something like fascination and a sharpened edge. "You rebuild fast."
Kazuki shrugged. "If you want real work done, do it properly." He popped a chip into his mouth like a man setting a timer. "Where to? Preferably somewhere with less... collateral."
Seraphina's system chimed again, softer, intelligent now that the immediate panic had passed.
ℹ️ SYSTEM: Alternative engagement zone located.
ℹ️ TARGET: Vacant universe — no sentient life, no registered archives, blank causal lattice.
ℹ️ RECOMMENDATION: Containment optimal. Minimal collateral.
ℹ️ ACTION: Teleport vectors established.
Ignis' aura shifted as if he were considering the ethics of a storm. "Fine," he said finally. "Outside your pretty patch. I don't owe your gardens anything."
"Good," Seraphina replied. "Then let's take it where it matters to no one."
Kazuki snapped his fingers. The grass underfoot folded in on itself and opened into a doorway that smelled faintly of ozone and stale air. The little portal hung like a window.
Ignis laughed. "Space then? Empty sky? This will be fun."
He stepped through. Kazuki and Seraphina fell in step behind.
In an instant they were not on a field but adrift in black water. No stars, at first; then a slow smear of distant light as if some distant galaxy had been returned to a different clock. They hung there — bodies free, feet useless. Kazuki sat cross-legged as if on a park bench, placed his bag of chips on an invisible plate, and took another bite. A floating drink orbited him.
"Comfortable?" Seraphina asked. Her voice carried perfectly in vacuum here, not because of biology but because these rules were Kazuki's to bend.
Kazuki popped a chip into his mouth and nodded. "Perfect view." He set the drink floating near his mouth, resting his hands on his knees. He looked at Ignis with the amused patience of a man waiting for a show to begin. "Start when you're ready."
Ignis drew in a breath. The void did not swallow sound here; it gave resonance. He let his aura breathe out like a bell tolling.
SILENCE — HUM — RUMBLE.
Seraphina's slime form rippled for a fraction of a second, then smoothed. Her gold-and-black aura climbed to shimmering fever. Kazuki's red-black haze tightened like coiled wire.
They were set.
"Next chapter?" Kazuki asked, voice calm as a man ordering a drink at a bar.
Ignis answered with a smile that tasted of fireworks. "Next chapter," he echoed.
Above them, a shard of a ruined galaxy winked and then righted itself — Kazuki had made sure nothing vital remained in the place they'd chosen. Below them, nothing to name. Around them, only the hush of the vacuum and the small, ridiculous bubble of warm air that clung to Kazuki's chips.
Silence settled like a hand on a shoulder. Every molecule waited.
Seraphina flexed her fingers. The katana hummed in the air beside her, her system quietly reciting potential outcomes, probabilities spooling like thin threads.
⚠️ SYSTEM: Combat readiness optimal.
⚠️ NOTE: Unknown-class entity engaged.
ℹ️ TACTIC SUGGESTION: Keep severance zones clear. Avoid timeline collapse. Avoid recreational universe-loss.
USER PROMPT: Proceed?
Kazuki tapped the side of his mouth. "Proceed."
They all smiled in different ways — a predator's curl, a craftsman's half-grin, a spark's flare. The air between them drew tight as a drumskin. The field of green, the forest, the lake — all belonged to them for training. The empty universe belonged to no one, and that was exactly why they had chosen it.
One more breath.
WIND AIR BLOW.
The fight would begin in the next chapter. For now, they floated in the black like gods deciding whether to be kind.
Seraphina leaned back in and, with a casual, almost childlike voice that hid the weight beneath it, said: "I tell you, Kazuki. If he has anything pretty, I'm taking it."
Kazuki popped another chip and chuckled. "That's the spirit. Just ask first."
Ignis' laugh crackled like a bonfire. "Bring it."
The void waited. The stars watched. The next second would make history — or not — depending on the bell and the choices men made when they stood against one another.
END OF CHAPTER 21 — PREPARE FOR BATTLE.