Sector Seven

  Deep within a sealed-off sector of Sector Seven's underbelly—a reinforced prison chamber designed to suppress the Mad Dog.

  *BOOM!*

  An explosion rang out, making the chains groan. Azrael stirred, muscles flexing against the reinforced bindings. His eyes snapped open, gold with hunger.

  “...That smell.”

  From the darkness, the crack in the sky bled through the walls—not literally, but as an instinct. A disturbance. A challenge.

  “A portal?” he chuckled low. “You think you can hide a fight from me?”

  Screams echoed from above—metallic, beastly, unnatural. A mix of Voids, Nox fragments, Shadows, and monstrous anomalies from other worlds tore through the lower facility, heading straight for him.

  “KEK—FINALLY.”

  The seals shattered as the distortion reached the chamber. Azrael tore through containment like paper, grabbing the first mook that dared lunge at him and snapping it in half with a feral grin.

  “More. More!”

  His voice was manic as he leapt headfirst into the convergence of portals above, voluntarily.

  “You better not disappoint me, portal!!”

  And with that, Azrael vanished into the crack, laughter echoing like a war cry.

  Kagutsuchi

  A remote hill under a starlit sky, quiet—almost too quiet. Es stood beneath the trembling stars, her eyes scanning the sky above. She had felt it—something unnatural splitting across existence. Not with emotion, but certainty. A faint glow shimmered above her, a crack bleeding violet light into the sky. Her hand instinctively moved to the sword at her side. This disturbance… it did not belong to this world. Then came the voice. Metallic. Hollow.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  [Keystone fragment… incomplete. Retrieval initiated.]

  Es narrowed her eyes. “That word again... Keystone.”

  She had no recollection of it, but something inside her trembled. From the fissure, shapes surged—unnatural distortions of monsters, and mechanical limbs of Nox Nyctores constructs, swirling together with a gravitational pull that aimed at her.

  She stepped back, blade raised. “This world is compromised. Protocol—unknown.”

  The ground beneath her shattered as the pull intensified, and before she could calculate the threat, the portal consumed her entirely.

  Alternate Kagutsuchi

  A ruined cityscape, dim with neon remnants. Naoto Kurogane paced atop a broken rooftop. He stared at the sky, exhaling slowly.

  “That’s not normal.”

  He’d seen plenty of strange things—alternate timelines, Observers, the Boundary. But a tear across the sky that screamed through his blood? That was new. He gripped his hand, the faint shimmer of his Drive sparking.

  “Es… did you feel this too?”

  The voice answered him, not hers. [Next target located. Priority: high. Subject: Kurogane, Naoto.]

  His eyes widened. “What the hell—?!”

  A monstrous fusion of Voids and Nox echoes emerged from the crack, forcing Naoto to dive forward, punching one aside. But the pull was stronger. Reality buckled beneath him. He dug in his heels—too late.

  “Damn it! Not again—”

  A pulse of light and sound—and he was gone.

  Phantom zone

  It was now a dark and stormy night. Actually, the correct term was glowing and cataclysmic. Cracks were everywhere, each glowing a different color: pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. Pouring out of the cracks were locations, and monsters—falling into a world that shouldn’t exist, but did, due to the breakdown of the cosmic order.

  *BOOM!*

  Lightning flashed near a cliff where a sword with a red handle stood.

  *BOOM!*

  The lightning struck closer, growing louder with each strike.

  Voices echoed: “It’s time to wake up, hero. The unit has been revived. The old wheels of fate have fallen. Falling into a state of entropy, and on the verge of creating a new one. And it’s turning as we speak. You can’t escape from crossing this new wheel of fate.”

  *ZAP!*

  The lightning hit the sword, causing the ground to crumble.

  “Rise from your bed. Pick up the sword. And show the multiverse why you were called the Grim Reaper. The Central Fiction. The most dangerous criminal in Kagutsuchi—Ragna the Bloodedge!”

  *BURST!*

  The ground exploded, revealing a white-haired man with one green and one red eye. There was only one thing he could say as he looked around the fractured sky:

  “I’m… alive.”

  Part Two is coming. The boundary isn’t done breaking yet.