The Church did not mourn the loss of Sato Kenji's soul; they merely filed a claim for the lost hardware.
Through the Slime-Sync network, I watched the High Priests in Oros. They didn't panic when their "Hero" went dark. They didn't weep for the boy. Instead, they opened the Apostle's Vault—a subterranean chamber lined with lead and warded with blood-magic.
They didn't need a human anymore. They had the data. They had the "Heroic Residue" gathered from a thousand loops.
"Archivist," I pulsed, my humanoid form standing in the center of the Iron-Crag's command center. "Analyze the energy signature emerging from the Capital."
< Warning: High-Density Mana Convergence detected. > < Entity Identified: Apostle 01 - The Perfected Hero. > < Analysis: A biological construct devoid of free will. It is a 'Protagonist' without a personality, purely optimized for combat. >
"It's a Shonen trope in its purest form," I muttered. "The 'Emotionless Super-Weapon.' They've realized that Kenji's doubt was his weakness, so they've built a hero that can't think."
Three days later, the sky over the Iron-Crag turned white. Not the soft white of dawn, but the blinding, sterile white of a high-wattage laboratory bulb.
The Apostle arrived alone.
It was a humanoid figure clad in armor that looked like it was made of solid light. It didn't fly; it simply stood in the air, the laws of gravity seemingly too intimidated to apply to its presence. It carried no sword, but its very hands hummed with the power of a collapsing star.
"Aris!" Kenji ran onto the command deck, his arm still in a sling, but his other hand clutching a modified Starmetal-ion welder. "That thing... it feels like me, but hollow. It's like looking into a mirror and seeing nothing."
"It's the System's 'Hard-Reset,' Kenji," I said, my skin shifting into its combat-silver state. "It's not here to talk. It's here to delete the anomaly."
I stepped out onto the balcony. "Baron! Activate the Kelvin-Field! We can't fight 'Miracles' with heat; we have to fight them with Absolute Zero!"
The battle was a clash of fundamental realities.
The Apostle moved with "Instantaneous Displacement"—a move that bypassed the speed of sound entirely. One moment it was a mile away; the next, it was inches from my face, its fist wreathed in a solar flare.
In a Shonen story, I would have been sent flying through three mountains. But I was a student of physics. As the Apostle's fist connected, I used [Matter State Manipulation]. I turned my chest from a solid to a superfluid. The Apostle's hand passed through me like a ghost through a fog, the kinetic energy dissipated into the air behind me.
"Physics Lesson Number Three," I whispered, my eyes glowing with the blue light of the Archivist. "A force can only damage an object that offers resistance."
I reformed my hand around the Apostle's arm, turning my fingers into Molecular Monofilaments. I began to shear through the light-armor at an atomic level.
The Apostle didn't scream. It simply calculated. It released an Omni-Directional Nova.
The explosion was enough to vaporize the forest below, but I had anticipated the thermal dump. I opened my [Gluttonous Synthesis] maw, not to eat the creature, but to act as a Heat Sink. I funneled the energy directly into the mountain's refineries.
"Baron! Now!"
From the peaks of the Iron-Crag, three massive rings of Starmetal—the Cyclotron Cannons—began to rotate. They didn't fire slugs. They fired a "Vacuum Wave"—a pulse of air so cold it forced the mana in the atmosphere to condense into liquid.
The Apostle slowed. Its "Light-Speed" movements were tied to the excitation of photons. By dropping the temperature to near absolute zero, we were literally freezing the "Hero's" ability to move.
"Kenji! The Welder!" I roared.
Kenji stepped forward, his face set in a grim, scientific determination. He didn't yell a battle cry. He aimed his welder at the Apostle's core—the point where the stolen "Heroic Mana" was being housed.
"This is for the 'brave soul' you stole!" Kenji shouted.
He fired an Ion-Disruption Beam. It wasn't "Holy," but it was "Logical." It targeted the frequency of the Hero-System's feedback loop.
The Apostle flickered. Its light-armor began to pixelate. For a brief second, the "Perfected Hero" looked like what it truly was: a collection of stolen memories and broken dreams held together by a Church's greed.
< Alert: Narrative Integrity at 15%. > < The 'Perfected Hero' is becoming a 'Glitch'. >
The Apostle's face—a featureless mask of gold—cracked. A single sound escaped it: a recording of a thousand dying heroes from a thousand previous loops, all screaming for home.
I didn't feel pity. I felt the urgent need for a conclusion.
"Archivist," I commanded, my silver body expanding until I was a towering pillar of liquid metal. "Initiate the Great Desynchronization. Let's show the System what happens when you divide by zero."
I wrapped my silver mass around the Apostle, pulling its collapsing mana-core into my own. I wasn't absorbing its power; I was short-circuiting it.
The sky over the Iron-Crag didn't just turn dark. It began to "pixelate." Huge blocks of the blue sky turned into black-and-white static. The trees at the base of the mountain began to stretch into infinite, geometric lines.
The world was breaking.
[Volume 3: Chapter 5 End]