[Notice: "Faith" has been expended… Swordsmanship EXP increasing… +10… +50… +100… +1000…]
[Current Swordsmanship: Lv3 (7548/10000) → Lv4 (142/100000)]
[Note: Lv4 (Sword Domain). Hint: With Nen ability "Gate of Cognition" and your "Sun" as the core "image," the user can now expand their path of the sword…]
Imitation → borrowing → then creation.
[Sword] and [Sun]…
Yamamoto Genryūsai Shigekuni.
As the "Gate of Cognition" flared, an image formed in Roy's mind: a scarred old face, harsh without needing to scowl, cross-shaped wounds carved deeply into its brow. White brows, white beard, a long braided goatee nearly dragging on the floor. Those old, clouded eyes, tempered by two thousand years of war, narrowed just slightly—
And that alone was enough to make the heart seize and breath hitch.
Former Water Pillar Urokodaki Sakonji had once told Roy that Shallow Hit was just a practice blade. Once Roy officially passed the Final Selection and became a demon slayer, Swordsmith Village would send a real Nichirin blade to his door.
But Roy had turned that offer down the very first day he held the short katana.
A blade forged by somebody else always carries another person's "will." It's not truly pure.
No matter how good the sword is—how finely crafted, how sharp, how easily it cuts hair and flesh—if it wasn't born for you, becoming "one blade, one body" will always be harder.
But Shallow Hit is different.
It's a "mass-produced" katana. Every Shallow Hit is cast from the same mold. No special features—and so everything is a feature. It's an open-ended blank, capable of being pushed toward "infinity."
Especially when, within his own cognition, Roy had a higher-ranked existence to model as a "master."
He stroked along the blade, his gaze unexpectedly gentle.
Then he opened all his aura nodes. Nen surged out, fully converted into the "True Meaning of Scorching Heat," reaching up to tug on the great sun hanging above the chapel ceiling.
He poured it all into Shallow Hit and whispered:
"Bankai—Zanka no Tachi."
A gust of wind swept through the ruined church. In the next instant, all sound died.
It was as if the world had been paused.
Only a single blade and a single man remained—
In the eyes of Bolton, Illya, Kastro, the three kids on the trash mountain, and everyone else—this was the only light left in the world.
Silence.
Fire and radiance flowed inward, swallowed entirely by the sword. Not a single visible flame leaked out; Shallow Hit simply lay quietly in Roy's hand as the color shifted from "red" to "black," like a wooden stick burned to charcoal.
It no longer burned outward—
But it still radiated the terrifying "heat" of something that had burned too far to turn back.
At that moment—
There was a soft "creak" somewhere far away.
On the sea of his cognition, among the many doors, one door marked by a grotesque skull emblem shook. Sensing something, it opened a narrow crack…
Through that crack, Roy glimpsed a small courtyard and a wooden walkway. An old man, a middle-aged man. Two small creatures, Jūmonji and Taneko, lounging peacefully.
As the old man sitting cross-legged on the veranda—long beard pooled at his knees, hands resting on a wooden staff—slowly opened his eyes…
Twin rays of light flashed from those narrow, ancient eyes, startling Jūmonji and Taneko into puffed-up panic.
In a black shihakushō over a high-collared undershirt, white hair bound high, the old man looked every bit the West-inspired noble with his haori draped like a western coat. The other man, Sasakibe Chōjirō, paused in tending a pair of potted plants and turned back.
"What is it, 'Jūjisai'?" he asked.
("Jūjisai"—a private nickname Chōjirō used for Genryūsai. That cross-shaped scar on Yamamoto's brow? Chōjirō gave him that in a duel long ago.)
Yamamoto said nothing.
He only reached a bony hand up to press it against his chest, feeling the heart that had beaten steadily for over two thousand years suddenly skip—just once.
He looked up toward the sun in the sky and murmured,
"Chōjirō… my heart wavered."
"You're still worrying over Kyōraku and Ukitake?" Chōjirō chuckled. "They're lazy and sickly, but the Thirteen Court Guard Squads are full of talent. Even if they can't take your place, there's no lack of candidates."
He poured water into the pots and added, "You're bored, that's all. If you can't stand it, just take another student. It'd at least pass the time."
Whether that student could inherit the full weight of "Captain-Commander of the Thirteen" or the heritage of the man called "Genryūsai" was another matter entirely. It was almost impossible.
How many suns can one world hold?
"One more student…?" Yamamoto's hand lingered over his chest as he sank into thought.
That strange extra heartbeat echoed again.
The cracked door in Roy's mind slowly closed.
The skull-marked gate sealed once more.
Back in Meteor City—
Roy, through Taiichi's body, remained immersed in Bankai. Shallow Hit throbbed with excitement, joy, impatience. It wanted to show its full power, here and now.
Dressed as a priest, Taiichi moved. The sword in his right hand drew a simple horizontal cut—no flourish, no shout, no visible flame.
"Zanka no Tachi, Higashi: Kyokujitsujin."
A hair-thin line tore across space.
Just as Bolton's fists tapped together, just as Illya snapped his fingers to launch another "vector arrow" to drag the explosion into Roy's face, just as everything reached the tipping point—
The "explosion" died.
Like a misfired shell, its energy vanished in an instant—
And anything the line passed over simply… ceased to exist.
Tables, floors, pillars.
The air itself shimmered and vanished.
"Damn it, use [Ken]! Now!"
"That sword is wrong!"
"You're too late to say that…" Illya muttered.
He threw himself backward with everything he had.
Bolton, always confident in his aura, had barely layered[Ken]over his body before his lower half disappeared. He stared at Illya in mute horror, and then he too began to vanish, bit by bit—
Not burned, not shredded, not blown apart.
Just… erased.
[Zanka no Tachi, Higashi: Kyokujitsujin] isn't flame. There is no firestorm, no sea of red.
It is heat, concentrated to the point that everything in the sword's path is turned into gas—gone, down to the last molecule.
In the original story, when Yamamoto drew his blade and invoked his real Bankai, the entire Seireitei dried out under the weight of its heat. People's throats cracked from the dryness alone. At its peak, they say the temperature of his blade approached that of the sun's core.
Taiichi's casual swing was nowhere near that.
He could feel it in the way the church vanished—how much more tenuous it was than Yamamoto's "simple" Shikai.
"…Still too weak," Roy muttered through him.
He could feel it: the temperature wasn't high enough, his understanding of the Sun wasn't deep enough, he'd only walked this path for a short time—and Taiichi was just a clone, limited to 80% of Roy's true output.
Still, the result was undeniable.
From the hands of Bolton and Illya to the pews and altar, everything within that line had been reduced to nothing.
Only the stone walls and a few ragged edges at the far boundary of the slash remained, the church now a hollowed-out shell.
Illya stared at the growing line crawling along the floor, closing in on his shoes.
He, the "Controller," finally broke.
He leapt back. Then back again. And again.
He didn't stop until his back hit the wall and he scrambled up onto a broken windowsill.
"Stop!"
He stared down at Taiichi, panic finally cracking through his calm mask.
"Aren't you afraid of Kakin putting you on a global wanted list? You may not fear Morena—but she's the king's daughter! Fourth Prince Tserriednich's sister!"
"Dead is dead," Chrollo said quietly from his vantage on the trash mountain. "That priest clearly doesn't care."
That one slash was something even Hunterpedia Theater could never have taught him how to fake. The effect was beyond any fight he'd ever imagined.
"It's hot…"
Pakunoda wiped sweat from her brow, eyes wide as she watched the church vanish.
Shalnark shoved in to share the binoculars again.
"What the hell? The whole place is empty?" he yelped.
He fumbled the focus and saw only the priest in white, sword still in hand, walking slowly through the hollowed-out nave.
Then Taiichi flicked his wrist. The blade extended like a spear—[Kamishini no Yari] without the name—and in the blink of an eye, it was at Illya's face.
Illya gritted his teeth.
"Vector Control: Return!"
Another vector arrow latched onto the blade and dragged it back toward Taiichi.
"You think I'm afraid of you?" he spat. "I was giving you a chance."
"Vector Control: Eightfold Strangulation!"
[Vector Control]—using [En] as radar and Nen as a medium, Illya dominated directional force itself.
He could designate a target and instantly launch one to eight arrows, each one grabbing onto motion, redirecting it, twisting it.
It was beyond mere power—it was a mechanic.
The eight arrows streaked toward Taiichi, closing in from all sides like invisible blades.
Taiichi sighed.
"This church isn't half bad," he said quietly. "I really didn't want to wreck it."
He stepped.
Zanka no Tachi vanished. The Sun's heat faded, though the air still shimmered where it had passed.
In the same instant, Taiichi himself vanished—
And reappeared behind Illya.
"Vector, come back!" Illya shouted.
First in, first to land.
The eight arrows reversed course—
But Taiichi had already thrust.
A single stab, wrapped in heat so intense it punched straight through Illya's[Ken]and his chest in one go.
He went flying out through the wall, dragged by the sword, stone exploding around him.
Pinned in place, Illya stared at the length of blade emerging from his sternum, blood boiling as it tried to flow.
"You're not just a Conjurer," he choked. "You're… a Specialist…"
"You conjure; I conjure too," Taiichi said softly, twisting the blade. "The difference is—my 'conjuring' isn't just conjuring."
With a final wrench, the heat turned Illya into a cloud of steam.
"Clang."
Shallow Hit slid back into its sheath.
Taiichi reached out and caught a single wisp of vapor between his fingers, rolling it thoughtfully.
"Looks like Morena doesn't care much about you after all," he said.
"Didn't even tell you the one thing every real Master should know—that all paths eventually converge on the Specialist's road."
[Notice: Life Energy +120… +150…]
[Notice: Life Energy is struggling violently… attempting to flee… Interception… Success.]
As the text scrolled across Roy's inner vision, he felt it—
A pair of dead-grey eyes gazing at him through the dying souls of Illya and Bolton.
She reached out to grab—
But those souls split apart into countless gaunt, hollow-faced figures: men and women, their bodies etched with the marks of suffering. Some screamed, some went blank, some wept with a strange, relieved joy.
Then they all turned toward Roy and bowed, one after another—
And flew into him as motes of light.
The woman, hair tied with a ribbon, grasped only air.
She stared for a moment, taken aback; then, as her image faded, she gave Roy one long, measuring look.
"You're… very interesting."
"Pop."
Her projection shattered like a pond struck by a stone.
In the empty church, Taiichi—priest's robe fluttering, sun-pendant glinting—stood alone.
His silhouette, framed in the broken arch of the once-holy building, flickered across the dead-grey eyes of the woman far away.
Kakin Empire, Heil-Ly family headquarters.
Morena Brute blinked back to herself.
The dog-headed man standing at her side, always hovering around her as bodyguard and fixer, noticed immediately.
"You zoned out, Morena," he said.
"Ah, Dog," she murmured, propping her cheek on one hand, idly tapping a pen beside Prince Tserriednich's latest contract. "Illya and Bolton are dead…"
"Who?"
"Illya and Bolton," she repeated.
Those dead-grey eyes brightened for the first time in days, glittering with an almost girlish amusement.
"I saw it," she said. "A boy… dressed as a priest. He killed my Illya and Bolton."
The dog-headed man—something like old Koller, perhaps a beast, perhaps a man twisted by Nen—fell silent for a beat, then asked,
"So? You want revenge? For those two losers?"
"No."
Morena's red lips curled into a smile as she recalled the priest's calm gaze.
His faint, mocking smile.
And the way his Nen felt—so very familiar.
"I don't care if they're dead. But my Nen was stolen. And from him…"
"I smelled something," she said softly. "Something just like me."
Her tongue slipped out to wet her lips.
"He might be my kind."
"Then he's definitely a lunatic," Dog said bluntly.
"Handling you is already a nightmare. I don't have the energy to babysit a second—"
"Woof."
His bark filled the room.
Morena just laughed, low and delighted, the sound sliding through the air like smoke.