The world was closing in on Jin. Everywhere he looked, the swarm tightened its grip. He scrambled up a crumbling brick wall, his muscles screaming in protest. The climb felt like a death sentence—his legs were heavy, still throbbing with the trauma from the fall at the skyscraper.
— "How am I supposed to get out of this?" Jin wheezed, looking down at the dozens of devils clawing at the base of the wall.
Suddenly, the earth didn't just shake; it groaned. The very foundations of the street began to buckle. Jin froze as a colossal, mountain-sized Devil barreled through
the city. The beast was blind—its eyes had been gouged out by some unknown force—and it was thrashing in agony, smashing its massive body into
the skyscrapers left and right. It didn't care what it crushed; it flattened buildings and swarms of smaller devils alike under its colossal weight.
Jin tried to turn back, but the wall he was standing on suddenly disintegrated. Giant, grey, leathery hands erupted from the earth like a surfacing nightmare.
A new horror emerged: a snake-bodied devil with matted black hair and a single, staring eye. It lashed out with its massive arms, destroying everything in its reach, just as the blind titan charged from the opposite direction.
Jin was trapped in the kill zone. The snake-devil's hand lunged for him while the blind titan's shadow loomed over his head. For a fraction of a second, Jin felt the cold breath of death. He closed his eyes. This is it. I'm dead.
WHOOSH.
In that heartbeat of silence, two tiny streaks of light hissed past Jin's face, so close he could feel the heat. One was a pitch-black sphere, the other a crimson-red sphere.
Jin's eyes snapped open in shock. The blind titan, instead of crushing him, seemed to be pulled forward by an invisible force, leaping clean over Jin to collide with the snake-devil.
[ABSOLUTE Technique: Rage]
High in the air, the black and red spheres collided. They didn't explode—they merged. The colors bled into one another, swirling violently until they transformed into a single, blinding electric blue orb of pure, condensed energy.
[ABSOLUTE Technique: Energetic]
The blue sphere struck the center of the two battling titans. The explosion was cataclysmic. It wasn't just fire; it was an erasure of space.
A shockwave of blue energy ripped through the street, vaporizing cars and shattering the pavement. The ground itself began to cave in, the energy so dense that the earth seemed to be swallowing itself to escape the pressure.
Black blood and grey flesh rained from the sky as the two massive devils were torn to microscopic shreds.
Jin stood in the center of the crater, his hair blown back, his skin tingling from the raw power. He was untouched, shielded by the very eye of the storm. He stared at the devastation, his voice a mere whisper of disbelief.
— "What... what the hell just happened?"
Akos reappears, walking out from behind a pile of rubble with a smug grin on his face. He's casually dusting off his red jacket as if he hadn't just rewritten the laws of physics.
Akos: "So? How was it? Give me your rating!"
Jin (staring at him with his jaw hitting the floor): "What do you mean, 'rating'?! You just wiped out every Devil in the sector! What the hell was that? What kind of power did you just use?"
Akos (winking): "It's a secret."
Jin (exploding with rage): "A SECRET?! You piece of trash! You left me alone! You ran away and let them surround me!"
Akos (laughing): "Hahahaha! Come on, you were great bait!"
Jin: "WHAT?! You used me as BAIT? I'm going to break you, you bastard!"
In a fit of fury, Jin spots a stray can of soda in the debris. He hurls it at Akos's head with enough force to dent steel. Akos reaches out, catches it effortlessly mid-air, pops the tab with a satisfying hiss, and takes a long sip.
Akos: "Ahh... thanks for the soda, Jin. Refreshing."
Jin (charging at him): "I'll show you 'refreshing'! I'm going to smash every cell in your body, you stinking brat!"
Jin starts throwing more soda cans like projectiles, while Akos just weaves and ducks, laughing his head off. "Hahaha! Missed again!"
"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TWO CLOWNS DOING?!"
A sharp, terrifying voice cuts through the air. Both of them freeze instantly. Standing there, covered in dust and radiating pure irritation, is Ronika. Her eyes are narrowed, and her aura is jagged with anger.
Ronika: "I'm only going to ask this once. Where did the Giant Devil go?"
Jin: "Uh... which one? There were two. One with massive hands and a fat one without eyes—it looked like someone had ripped them out."
Ronika stares at Jin with a cold, piercing gaze. "And if you keep acting like idiots, you're both next."
Jin (whispering to Akos, eyes wide): "Wait... did she pull the eyes out of that monster?"
Akos (whispering back, trying to look cool): "Big deal. I could've done that too if I felt like it."
Ronika (screaming): "ARE YOU GOING TO ANSWER ME?!"
Akos (pointing casually at the massive, steaming lake of black blood and shredded meat in the crater): "I think he's... right there. All of him."
Ronika (stunned, blinking at the devastation): "Eh? You killed it? ...How?"
Jin stared at the glowing residue in the crater, then back at Akos. "And those two spheres? The black and the red one that turned blue... what the hell were they really?"
Akos sat down on the curb of the ruined sidewalk, taking a long, calm sip of the soda. "The black sphere was Death, fueled by the essence of blood—it's the ABSOLUTE Technique: Deadly. I merged it with Rage, the ABSOLUTE Technique: Rage. When those two collide, they spark the raw energy dormant inside me. That's how ABSOLUTE Technique: Energetic is born."
Jin blinked, looking more confused than before. "Eh? I didn't understand a single word of that science fiction talk."
But Ronika didn't look confused. She looked at Akos with a chilling, clinical gaze. "So... you've truly begun to break out of the Fake World, haven't you?"
Akos nearly choked on his drink. He stared at her, eyes wide with shock. "Eh?! The Fake World? You know about that? Wait... how?"
Ronika turned her head slightly to the right, her expression hardening. In that moment, the realization hit Akos like a physical blow: Ronika wasn't just a gang leader. She was a sorcerer.
"Tell me everything," Akos demanded, his voice dropping an octave. "What exactly do you know?"
"I know that the biggest mistake of my life was meeting you two," Ronika said coldly. "We were all three sorcerers at the same academy. I managed to pull 80% of my soul out of the Fake World. My consciousness is almost fully returned."
Jin: "Hey! Question! What are you guys even talking about? What's a soul percentage?"
Ronika: "Listen carefully. A human soul is divided into parts: knowledge, memory, and the past. In the fake world, your souls were rewritten. Your 'past' is something that never actually happened. Your memories are fabrications."
She looked directly at Akos, her eyes piercing his. "For all you know, Akos, your grandfather might not even be dead."
Akos stood up slowly, his hands trembling. "I... I can't accept that. You're telling me the souls in our bodies are just fragments? That we've been 'upgraded' with fake lives? That everything we know is a lie? How do we even get the rest of our souls back?"
Ronika: "Now you're catching on, dummy. Your head isn't just empty; it's a placeholder. There are two ways. First, you break your limits—the Fake World has a ceiling for 'Nature Energy.' If you shatter that ceiling, your soul snaps back to its original state.
The second way is to find the physical fragments of your soul that were stripped away. I've remembered almost everything... except for the first 20% of my life. My childhood is still a void."
Akos and Jin stood there in absolute silence. The war with the Devils suddenly felt small compared to the war for their own identities. They weren't just fighting to survive; they were fighting to exist.
Jin stood frozen, his eyes darting between Akos and Ronika. He swallowed hard before asking the question that made the air turn to ice: "How long... how long were we actually in that Fake World? Was it days? Months? Years... or centuries?"
Ronika stared at the horizon, her voice devoid of emotion. "It was 12 days. Only twelve days have passed since we entered the Fake World."
Jin: "Twelve days?! It felt like a lifetime... but how did we even get in there?"
Ronika rubbed her temples, trying to force the fragmented memories to align. "I don't remember everything perfectly, but the Fake World... it's like a virus. It infected every Sorcerer simultaneously.
Twelve days ago, before the chaos started, I remember you, Jin, went to find Akos because this idiot was lost as usual. Akos had a mission in Sinish."
She turned to Akos, her gaze sharpening. "Your mission was to find Reino Shino. You see, 'gangs' don't exist the way we think they do. ALPHA isn't just a gang; it's an ancient lineage of Martial Arts and Ninjitsu.
After the 'War of Slash,' ALPHA was split. Half of that history is a lie, and the other half has been erased. The Higher-Ups realized that some organizations were training ordinary people to use Nature Energy. Simple street gangs were being turned into unauthorized academies."
Akos leaned against a ruined wall, his mind reeling. "So... I came here to stop Reino?"
Ronika: "Exactly. The Higher-Ups see anyone who learns Nature Energy outside of the PRIVATE HIGH FOR NINJITSU EDUCATION as a global threat. They sent you to shut it down."
Jin and Akos stood in stunned silence. Their entire reality—the gang wars, their friendships, their rivalries—was a distorted reflection of a much larger political struggle between authorized Sorcerers and "rogue" schools.
Ronika: "I don't know if you're actually following me, but our enemies are getting faster. They're afraid of what we're becoming."
Akos (straightening his jacket, his eyes determined): "We have to go to Tokyo."
Ronika laughed dryly. "Tokyo? Are you serious? Look around you. How do you plan to even get out of Sinish alive?"
Akos: "You said it yourself. The members of ALPHA, DELTA, and ECHO... they aren't just thugs. They know Ninjitsu. They're holding that 'Big Three' council right now. We need to find them, unite them, and turn this city into a fortress before we move.