The outlines of the Zao Mountain Range faded into a bluish gray in the west, its long shadow covering most of the farmland.
Terraced fields lay buried under snow, leaving only the geometric lines of their ridges exposed. Frozen irrigation channels carved silver streaks across the slopes.
Farther to the northwest, Mount Chokai looked even harsher. Its sharp angles cut through the late light, and its shadow stretched over the edge of the square, making the half-finished snowman look like a giant melting under the sun.
Below, Go Fujiwara and his group looked hollow, empty.
With phones ringing nonstop and Devil Hunters swarming from all sides, a perfect descent had become impossible.
Aside from them, the massive square was deserted. The Devil Hunters had driven everyone else away.
At first, Himeno and the others refused to let Hoshino face this alone.
Hoshino had no choice, so he used the same trick again and forced them under control.
He knew full well that even if the Primal Fear descended in the simplest form possible, none of them could handle it. They'd only make things worse.
At the end of the first loop, he had stood on the roof of the ryokan like an old pine against the wind. His shoulders looked carved from steel. His sharp eyes stared at the figure known as the Okura-kun IV down below. Wind swept across from Mount Gassan, carrying sharp flakes of fir snow that whipped at his coat.
"It's here."
The moment he spoke, the sky shifted.
A sudden gale swallowed the plaza, dragging a wall of black clouds overhead. In two or three minutes, daylight smothered into darkness, and a suffocating pressure filled the air.
The pale Okura-kun shed its snow-white coat. Beneath it stood a tree of ice crystals holding up corpses, the trunk polished like sculpture, the bodies arranged like wild calligraphy, twisted yet strangely beautiful.
Crack.
The familiar sound hit straight into Hoshino's soul.
A black heart, thick veins bulging, fell from the branches.
Thump.
It beat.
The contractors surrounding the Okura-kun trembled. Their eyes went vacant.
They dropped to one knee, tore off their own bleeding faces, and raised the skin high like an offering.
The flayed masks spun in the wind with the falling snow, weaving together the first crude layer of the Primal Devil's form.
The contractors stood again. One by one, they ripped out their beating hearts and pushed them onto the glowing blue branches of the ice-crystal tree.
Then every single one of them collapsed.
The Primal Fear reached out.
The tree, swollen after devouring their flesh and blood, quaked violently before collapsing into a ring of icy blue. It circled the being's head at a point one-third down like a frozen halo.
It didn't move.
Hoshino knew it was staring at him.
This time, he stood higher than it did. He looked down at the monster.
He waited.
The Primal Devil suddenly raised its hand. Its whole body twisted. Even its fingers snapped and fell apart.
Hoshino smiled, flipped the dagger in his grip, and pointed the blade at his own heart.
"Wait."
It finally spoke.
Behind it, a burst of colorful powder drifted down, wrapped around a compact cluster of white snowflakes.
The cluster was made of countless overlapping flakes, different sizes meshing like intricate gears.
The powder blew away.
The snowflower floated in the wind and settled right in front of Hoshino.
"Two prices."
"Losing your sense of identity as a human."
"And enduring extreme cold. You can ask me to remove that condition one month from now."
Hoshino didn't answer.
He smiled and bit down on the snowflower.
[Freezing Point (A+): 65%]
He closed his eyes and felt the power settle inside him.
A plain name, almost vague, yet it was a force that dragged everything toward a single point: freezing.
Atmosphere, relationships, states of being, physical motion — everything.
It could extend into abilities like loss, frozen time, absolute zero.
Back then, the villagers turning on their own families wasn't coincidence. They'd been pulled by a violent emotional force that smashed their relationships straight to the freezing point.
Stretched across time, it created distance.
But collapsing a bond in an instant required overwhelming hatred.
To carry out that hatred, the rules had given them strength far beyond ordinary humans.
This power fit Hoshino perfectly. He could already imagine countless ways to use it.
He even believed he could use it to slip out of Makima's control.
Not to mention things like "time stop" or "absolute zero," which were basically cheat-level abilities.
With this, he could've easily fulfilled a dream from his previous life.
Becoming the classic harem-novel protagonist.
Enough.
It's basically free for a month. Take it.
"Again…" Hoshino murmured.
Standing once more at a turning point in his life, the voice deep inside him returned.
A real protagonist always keeps a level head.
Kobeni Higashiyama's already outside. You don't have attachments anymore.
Forget Himeno. Even if it's every Devil Hunter here, if you ask, it'll agree.
The voices pressed in from all sides.
"Shut up."
They scattered.
Hoshino looked up at the corpses hanging from the platform. A thin laugh escaped him.
"They're not to blame. The contractors tried, the devils tried, but their opponent is the protagonist. They never had a chance."
He knew the thing across the distance heard every word.
"Third loop. I begged the Blizzard Devil to spare me and my teammates, promised I wouldn't say anything once I got out. But do you know what it asked me? 'Say what?'"
He chuckled.
"You idiots caused so much nonsense in this village, I could talk for days."
"That meant it was suspicious of me. That I might know the details of the ritual. And with Naoto Kobayashi's phone call, I knew it must've figured out the time loops."
"So I didn't believe everything it said at the end of the third loop."
"'Even the smallest Authority can open the barrier' — that part I believed. Contracts end when one party dies. It had no reason to lie. Telling me only made things more hopeless."
"But 'the barrier can't be opened'? I didn't buy that."
"If that were true, all the Primal Devil had to do was slap a 'no breaking the barrier' clause on the Authority contract and the world would've ended already.
You gather a squad of powerful lackeys, find the spot, throw up a barrier, and wait a few months — maybe a few years — and boom. Perfect descents everywhere. The Primal Devil would be multiplying like rabbits."
"So I figured the barrier could be broken. It just takes time."
"That mission in the last loop made me even more certain."
"I knew you'd eventually give me the Authority. Maybe this loop. Maybe the next."
"I wanted to speed things up. That's why I killed myself last loop — to avoid dealing with your fully powered time stop, and to make one thing clear."
"If you try anything, I'll restart."
"And the only reason I was so confident…"
Hoshino's eyes narrowed.
"Is because I knew you were struggling."
"You're terrified I'll keep restarting until the barrier breaks. But you also don't want to break it yourself, because you'd lose the other sacrifice site and risk getting hunted down."
"You want me gone. You want to soothe me with the Authority, and if I refuse, then you'll consider killing me."
"That's the best outcome for both of us. Which is why you couldn't understand why I came back."
"Losing my human identity? You thought I wanted to save Okura Village, right?"
"You idiot."
"That crap doesn't matter at all!"
"I only came back to tell you three things!"
Hoshino's voice cracked into a furious roar, every emotion he'd bottled up exploding at once.
"Even if the loop restarts, the Authority stays with me!"
"There's only one restart left!"
He jerked his arm up and flipped his middle finger at the monster.
"I won, you bastard!"
And he drove the dagger into his heart.
Under the ryokan, the snow suddenly split apart.
A single fingertip, dusted with the same colorful powder, poked through the surface.
Gray spread outward, swallowing the world as everything froze.
Hoshino, only a dozen meters above, was caught instant