The moment the drug hit his throat, Evan felt as though he had swallowed a box of shattered razor blades.
The bitterness wasn't a flavor; it was a concentrated acid searing directly into his nerves. He writhed on the rusted iron floor of the shipping container, his fingernails clawing into the grooves, producing a high-pitched, agonizing screech. Rainwater dripped through a crack in the roof onto the back of his neck, but the moment it touched his skin, it hissed, boiling instantly.
His blood was too cold—chilled to the absolute physical tipping point.
Evan curled into a fetal position, gasping for air. With every exhale, tiny ice crystals materialized in the air. He tore open his soaked shirt, staring at his chest by the dim, fractured light of distant neon.
There were no scars, but the veins branching toward his heart were turning a corpse-like slate grey. They throbbed with a rhythmic, mechanical pulse, as if the blood within had been replaced by pulverized ore.
He reached up to steady his throbbing head.
In that instant, his body locked.
Under the drug's suppression, the familiar five-meter "silent circle" had snapped back into place. But this time, the void wasn't pure.
Thin, black, semi-transparent flocculent bits were drifting through the air.
They looked like ghosts trapped within a transparent sphere. When Evan waved his arm, these bits didn't scatter with the wind. They remained anchored to the edge of his five-meter radius, bobbing and weaving in sync with his movements.
He reached out to touch one.
His finger passed through it as if it weren't there. No tactile resistance, no temperature.
But immediately after, a sharp, piercing pain—driven by a logical contradiction—exploded through his nervous system. Evan's vision went dark for a second. In that heartbeat, he "heard" Rose's laughter, felt the despair of the blonde elite losing his power, and even smelled the acrid, chemical stench of Nightmare's dying breath.
"Sediment," Evan hissed, his voice raspy from retching.
He understood now.
His Null Zone hadn't been erasing rules; it had been consuming them.
Like a black hole without an exhaust system, the remnants of the abilities he had killed—the shards of reality he had crushed—hadn't vanished from the universe. They had turned into non-degradable "supernatural waste," piling up inside his radius.
He was no longer a pure Zero. He was a mobile cemetery for the miraculous.
Evan struggled to stand, his knees creaking dangerously from the cold and the sheer psychic weight. He moved toward the container door, every step feeling as though he were dragging the ruins of the entire city behind him.
His sense of balance was failing.
Because of the sediment's interference, his five-meter radius was no longer a perfect sphere. It was warping like a leaking plastic bag, bulging and thinning at irregular angles.
He pushed the heavy iron door open.
The world outside was the same decaying sprawl of District 3. Rusted freighters bobbed like massive steel carcasses in the swell.
Evan walked onto the catwalk.
The sense of "impurity" grew heavier. He passed a flickering streetlamp. Even though his radius should have snuffed out the current, the lamp didn't die. Instead, triggered by the sediment, it erupted into a ball of eerie purple fire.
BOOM.
The violet sparks splashed onto his sleeve, burning a small, charred hole.
Evan stopped, staring at the hole with dead eyes.
The laws of physics had become strangers to him. He used to be the end of the Code, but now he was the source of its mutation. The waste accumulated around him was randomly, illogically rewriting the world.
"There!"
A beam of a flashlight cut through the dark, locking onto Evan.
Two dock patrolmen—no, from their movement and breathing, they were Security Bureau plainclothes.
"Target locked. Grey hoodie. Wait... what the hell is that around him?"
The patrolman's voice was thick with a new kind of terror.
In their sight, Evan wasn't walking alone. The grey silhouette was surrounded by a swirling ring of black, distorted smoke. Sometimes the smoke pieced together into a pale, agonizing face; sometimes it became a fractured spike of ice or a string of meaningless, golden code.
It was a tombstone for everyone Evan had killed, accompanying him in this twisted form like a flock of hungry vultures.
"Stop! Hands in the air!"
One of them drew a vibration blade.
Evan didn't move. He felt the acid in his stomach churn again.
The urge to kill flickered across his mind. He instinctively calculated the distance: 4.5 meters, the hilt.
But he caught himself.
No.
If he acted now, or triggered a "Singularity," the waste built up in his radius would detonate like a pressure cooker. It wouldn't be an erasure; it would be a devastation. Everyone within a hundred meters would be ground into atomic dust by the distorted energy.
He didn't want to kill. At least, not in this "unclean" way.
Evan turned and threw himself into the bone-chilling sea.
The sound of his entry was a dull thud, like a slab of lead.
The weight of the water temporarily suppressed the vertigo. He opened his eyes in the dark depths.
The salt stung his eyes, but he saw something even more grotesque.
the black flocculent matter dispersed in the water like a swarm of dark jellyfish, greedily sucking away the heat from his body. They let out a faint low-frequency hum that only he could hear.
The residue of the dead.
He dove deeper, watching the flashlight beams above wobble and search before finally fading away.
On the edge of oxygen deprivation, Evan felt a loneliness he had never known.
He was a Zero. A Zero carrying the excrement of an entire supernatural civilization.
The sediment was etching itself into his marrow. If he didn't find a way to flush it, he would eventually be drowned by the things he had erased, becoming a monster of waste he wouldn't recognize.
He thought of Rose.
The look in her eyes when she saw him compress the Singularity—not fear, but a fanatic's hunger. She knew about the sediment. Or rather, Hephaestus Industries had been studying the value of this "waste" all along.
Evan kicked his arms through the water.
His movements were slow, mechanical, but driven by a silent resolve.
If the world was going to shove its trash into his body, then he would deliver that trash personally back to the people who manufactured it.
Rain continued to pour violently over the surface.
When Evan finally breached the water, he was far from the docks. He wiped the saltwater from his face and looked toward the distant Hephaestus Tower, soaring into the clouds.
Its lights were brilliant, like a tumor embedded in the darkness.
He was no longer a cleaner gliding through shadows.
He was a poisoned shadow.