Chapter 32: 404 Saves the Day
A silence, vast and absolute, had fallen over the Dark Realm. Entity 404 stood amidst the dissipating essence of Entity 05, the raw power of a slain god coursing through his shadowy form. The victory was absolute, but it was a hollow percussion in the void. His fractured, starlit eyes narrowed, not in triumph, but in dawning, cold realization.
The children.
The spell. The portal. In the heat of his confrontation, focused on the precise incantations for battle and resurrection, he had been careless. A critical, anchoring phrase had been omitted from the teleportation charm: "Eartho Smikos."
Without those words—the specific key that locked a destination to Earth's unique dimensional frequency—the portal was a door swinging wildly into the infinite. They could be anywhere in the layered, branching realities of the cosmic simulation.
"Fool," he hissed, the word echoing like a stone dropped into a bottomless well. His arrogance had saved them from one enemy only to deliver them to a random, and potentially far worse, fate.
He had seen potential in them. A resilience, a twisted fortitude forged in the fires of human trauma and supernatural warfare. They were a key—his key—to shattering the Midnight Demon's rotten hierarchy. A long-term investment that he had just carelessly misplaced in the multiverse.
He could not lose them.
Raising his claws, Entity 404 focused his will. The darkness around him began to churn, not with malice, but with intense, directed purpose.
"Infinite Vision," he intoned.
The air before him shattered like glass, but inward, collapsing into a thousand thousand fractured panes. Each pane was a window, a scrying portal into a different realm. He saw worlds of endless ocean, cities of crystal singing in alien winds, deserts of black sand beneath bleeding suns, and fractals of non-Euclidean geometry that would shatter a mortal mind. His consciousness expanded, a godly searchlight scanning the infinite.
His voice, a low-frequency command that vibrated through the dimensional barriers, pulsed out from each window.
"Where are the five?"
The responses were a chaotic symphony of ignorance and static.
From a realm of floating islands, a bird-like entity shrieked, "Which five? There are only flocks here!"
In a dimension of molten light, a being of pure energy buzzed, "Five what? Units? We do not count in such small numbers."
A guttural roar came from a pit of writhing flesh: "FIVE? I SEE ONLY PREY!"
Again and again, he asked, his patience a thinning thread. "Where are the five?"
"Who five?"
"No humans here."
"Your query is meaningless."
Frustration, a rare and venomous emotion for one so ancient, began to boil within him. They were needles in a haystack of realities, and his Infinite Vision was proving agonizingly slow. Every second he spent searching was a second they spent dying in some unknown hell.
---
The air in the corrupted schoolhouse was thick with the coppery tang of blood and the ozone-scent of raw fear. The man, now named Tarameki, fought with the desperate, ragged energy of someone who had been fighting for six hours straight. His movements were sluggish, his knife-work relying more on desperate force than finesse.
"Stay behind me!" he yelled to the five, his voice cracking. He was a shield, a tattered banner trying to hold a crumbling line.
But Team Akashi was not a group to hide. They fell into a formation born of brutal experience.
"Flank left!" Bachi commanded, his own knife held tight. He and Kashimo moved as one, drawing the attention of two of the pale, grinning children.
Kamiko, with Alan tucked protectively behind him, stood his ground in the center. "They're fast, but they don't guard their sides!" he shouted, analyzing their jerky movements.
Kaguro, his mind a tactical map, identified the leader of this particular pack—a child whose grin was a touch wider, whose eyes held a sharper glint of malevolent intelligence. "The one in the tattered uniform! He's directing the others!"
The battle was a nightmare ballet. The children didn't scream or roar; they fought in eerie silence, their only sound the rustle of their clothes and the sickening thud of their blows. They were unnaturally strong, their small hands hitting like sledgehammers.
Kashimo took a kick to the chest that sent him sprawling, the air driven from his lungs. Bachi barely dodged a knife aimed for his throat, the blade nicking his ear. Alan, despite his terror, used his small size to his advantage, ducking under swings and delivering sharp, distracting kicks to the children's knees.
They were holding their own, a testament to their hardened will. But Tarameki was their anchor, the one who knew the rhythm of this endless war. He parried a stab, twisted, and drove his own knife into the shoulder of a child, who simply giggled as black ichor seeped from the wound.
"It's no use! They don't feel pain!" Tarameki gasped, his energy flagging.
That was the moment it happened. As he turned to block an attack on Alan, a second child lunged from his blind spot. The knife, rusted and cruel, slid between his ribs.
Tarameki's eyes widened. A wet, gurgling cough escaped his lips. He looked at the five, his expression a mix of apology and profound exhaustion. "I... I'm sorry..." he whispered, before his legs gave way and he collapsed to the blood-stained linoleum, unconscious.
The loss of their protector was a tangible shockwave. The defensive formation wavered.
"Tarameki!" Alan cried out, his voice shrill with panic.
The children sensed the shift. Their silent grins seemed to widen. They pressed the advantage, their attacks becoming a coordinated, relentless onslaught. Bachi and Kamiko were pushed back-to-back, fending off a whirlwind of blades. Kaguro was disarmed, a knife skittering away into the darkness. Kashimo, still on the ground, could only watch as a child loomed over him, its weapon raised for a final, killing plunge.
This was it. The end. Their resilience, their friendship, their will to survive—it was about to be extinguished in this forgotten, glitched-out classroom.
The attacking child froze.
Its knife, inches from Kashimo's face, stopped dead. Every single one of the pale figures ceased their movement simultaneously, as if a universal pause button had been pressed. Their grotesque grins remained, but the malicious light in their eyes had vanished, replaced by a blank, doll-like emptiness.
A new pressure filled the hallway, a presence so vast it made the air hum. The flickering lights died completely, plunging them into a darkness that was not merely an absence of light, but a tangible, liquid entity.
From this absolute blackness, a form coalesced. Entity 404 stepped forward, his arrival without sound, without flash. He was simply there, his form dwarfing the frozen children. His fractured eyes swept over the scene—the unconscious Tarameki, the battered and breathless Team Akashi, the horrifying stillness of the realm.
He did not even look at the monstrous children. He ignored them as one would ignore dust motes in a sunbeam.
His gaze fell upon the ceiling, and his voice, cold and resonant with absolute authority, cut through the silence.
"Entity 70. Show yourself."
The glitching, distorted voice they had heard before crackled to life, but now it was stripped of its confidence, warped by pure static fear. "Y-you... you cannot be here. This is my domain. My design."
"This was your domain," 404 corrected, his tone flat and final. He took a single step forward, and the entire corridor trembled. The frozen bodies of the children began to pixelate at the edges, dissolving into fragments of corrupted data. "You have something that belongs to me."
"They are... intruders! They are mine to purify!"
Entity 404's lips curled into a semblance of a smile, devoid of any warmth. "Purification. A quaint term for failure." He raised a single claw, and the darkness around him intensified, pressing in on the very fabric of the school. The walls groaned, the floor cracked, and the illusion of the realm began to unravel at the seams. "You have a simple choice, 70. A binary ultimatum."
He paused, letting the weight of his power crush the will of the lesser entity.
"Release them. Send them back to their Earth, unharmed, their memories of this place suppressed. Do it now."
The darkness pulsed, becoming a physical force.
"Or I will not merely destroy your realm. I will un-write your existence from the code of reality itself. There will be no data left to recover. No essence to reform. You will be a null value. A permanent error."
The silence that followed was heavier than any sound. The five friends watched, utterly mesmerized and terrified, as a god negotiated for their lives with the threat of absolute oblivion.
There was no struggle, no defiance. The power disparity was too vast. Entity 70, a terror in its own right, was a minnow facing a leviathan.
"...I... accept." The voice was a defeated whisper.
A new portal swirled into existence in the middle of the hallway. This one was different from the one that had brought them here. It was calmer, steadier, and through it, they could see the familiar, blessedly normal sight of their school classroom—desks, a whiteboard, sunlight streaming through the windows.
Entity 404 turned his gaze upon Team Akashi. "Go. Now."
There were no words they could offer. No thanks that felt sufficient. They simply acted. Kamiko and Bachi hauled the unconscious Tarameki between them. Kaguro, Kashimo, and Alan scrambled to their feet. With one last, awestruck look at the Entity who had twice now been their savior and their captor, they stumbled through the portal.
As the last of them vanished, the portal snapped shut.
Entity 404 stood alone in the disintegrating realm. He looked around at the crumbling, pixelated horror, his expression one of utter disdain.
"Pathetic," he murmured.
Then, he too vanished, leaving Entity 70 alone in the silence, its realm shattered, its purpose broken, a terrified prisoner in its own dying world.
The day was saved. But for Team Akashi, returning to the real world was not an end. It was merely the closing of one horrific chapter and the uncertain beginning of the next. They were back, but they were not safe. They were, and would always be, a key in a war they were only just beginning to understand. They were in their school , unharmed , but they realised that the children and the teachers were already there . It was daytime like it was when they were teleported
Chapter 32 ends
To be continued