Arata wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand.

  "So as I was saying," he said, grinning through the blood. "Since your sister is the White Witch... should I call you the White Reaper?"

  After the beating he gave him, Arata took it as an opportunity to provoke him even more.

  He laughed at his own joke.

  The sound echoed through the warehouse, sharp and wrong, like breaking glass in a silent room. It bounced off metal walls and concrete floors, distorting into something uglier with each repetition.

  Nobody else made a sound.

  The spectators pressed against the walls were too tense to think about smiling. Some had stopped breathing entirely, frozen mid-gasp, waiting to see what would happen next. The veterans who'd survived combat in war zones—men who'd seen friends die and enemies broken—stood with hands hovering near weapons they no longer carried.

  Fear had a smell, Arata had learned. Sweat and adrenaline and something sharper, more animal. The warehouse reeked of it.

  The Reaper's head snapped up.

  His white hair—stained red at the tips with blood that would never wash out—fell across his face. For a moment, his eyes were hidden. Then he lifted his chin, and Arata saw them clearly.

  Empty. Hollow. Dead.

  Until they weren't.

  "What..." His voice came out strangled, barely human. "WHAT DID I TELL YOU..."

  "DON'T SAY HER FUCKING NAME."

  His body erupted.

  White energy exploded outward from his chest like a detonation. A white haze that didn't illuminate so much as consume, bursting out in waves that made the air itself scream.

  His aura crashed into Arata like a physical wall.

  The pressure was immediate and crushing. Arata's knees buckled. His vision blurred at the edges. The air felt solid—too thick to breathe, too heavy to move through. His lungs burned trying to pull oxygen from atmosphere that had turned hostile.

  Shit.

  This wasn't just power. This was something beyond votes, beyond simple accumulation of strength. This was ten years of harvesting souls, ten years of feeding an eldritch entity, ten years of becoming something that shouldn't exist—all condensed into a single moment of absolute rage.

  Even Arata, who prided himself on staying rational, couldn't underestimate this.

  Then, at the same moment, two giant scythes that had been hanging motionless near the ceiling came alive.

  Not falling.

  Launching.

  They screamed through the air toward Arata from opposite sides—twin executioner's blades designed to crush him between them like meat in a vice. The sound they made cutting through air was horrible, a metallic shriek that set teeth on edge.

  Time slowed.

  Or maybe Arata's perception accelerated. Either way, the world became crystal clear. He could see every detail—the rust stains on the blades, the dried blood caked in the joints where the chains connected, the way they spun in perfect synchronization, cutting air into visible spirals that distorted everything behind them.

  ***

  "GUYS, RUN!" One of the veterans screamed, voice cracking with panic. "THE REAPER'S GONE MAD!"

  Bodies scattered.

  Men who'd fought in war zones alongside Genda—soldiers who'd held positions against overwhelming odds, who'd pulled wounded comrades from burning buildings, who'd earned their scars through years of disciplined combat—broke and ran like children. They scrambled over each other toward the exits, abandoning dignity and training in favor of pure survival instinct.

  All except one.

  The oldest veteran didn't move.

  He stood perfectly still near the far wall, a statue carved from scar tissue and experience. His face was a roadmap of violence—old wounds layered over older wounds, bruises that had never fully healed, skin that had been cut and burned and broken so many times it barely resembled human flesh anymore. An empty socket gaped where his left eye should have been, the lid sewn shut decades ago.

  The remaining eye was sharp, though. Calculating. Taking in everything with the cold precision of someone who'd survived far worse than this.

  Genda had met him during an operation in the Middle East. A demilitarized zone that hadn't been demilitarized at all—just abandoned by official forces and left to rot. The man had been there longer than the war itself, it seemed. No name anyone knew. No history worth recording. Just experience compressed into human form, knowledge earned through years of staying alive when smarter men died.

  He was the sage. The one even Genda had deferred to when things got complicated.

  And now he spoke for the first time since the game began.

  "The Reaper..." His voice was gravel and smoke, ground down by years of shouting orders and breathing dust. "He has unconsciously started the Harvesting Game's final round."

  A veteran beside him—younger, maybe mid-thirties, with a scar bisecting his left cheek—turned pale.

  "What?"

  Matsuda Tenji's remaining eye tracked the scythes arcing toward Arata, calculating trajectories and outcomes with mechanical precision.

  "No one has ever made it this far," he continued, voice flat. "The third edition was the longest. It ended at Round 27. The participants died before reaching the final game."

  The screen above them flickered.

  Static ran across its surface like insects crawling under glass. Then the image stabilized, displaying text in archaic characters that somehow everyone could read:

  HARVEST FOR ???????????????????????????????????????????????

  A progress bar appeared beneath the text. Empty. Waiting.

  0%

  Matsuda Tenji's remaining eye widened.

  "This can't be real," he whispered.

  For a man who'd survived three wars and never shown fear, the way his voice broke on those words was more terrifying than any scream.

  "We're done."

  ***

  What followed wasn't a fight.

  It was a slaughter.

  Dozens of scythes dropped from the ceiling. Not in sequence, not one at a time—all at once, a rain of blades that fell like judgment itself. They spun as they descended, shrieking, carving through everything in their path.

  The first one caught a spectator mid-scream.

  SLASH

  "WHAT THE FUCK IS TH—"

  The blade bisected him diagonally, cutting from shoulder to hip. His upper half slid sideways, held together only by a few strands of tissue, before separating completely. The bottom half remained standing for a full second—muscles still contracting, nerves still firing—before collapsing.

  Blood painted the concrete in a wide arc of arterial spray.

  SLASH

  "AAAARGH!"

  Another man went down, both arms severed at the shoulders. He didn't die immediately. Instead he stumbled backward, screaming, staring at the stumps that pulsed blood with each frantic heartbeat. The shock would kill him in minutes. Blood loss in seconds.

  SLASH

  "AAAAARGH, MY ARM!!"

  A veteran—one of the younger ones who'd run—tripped over a body and fell. A scythe caught him across the back, spine visible through split flesh. He clawed at the ground, trying to drag himself forward with arms that no longer connected to working legs.

  The bar on the screen climbed.

  12%

  19%

  27%

  Each death fed it. Each soul harvested pushed the percentage higher, filling the emptiness with something worse than blood.

  Arata dodged left.

  A scythe screamed past his ear, so close he felt the displaced air cut his cheek. Warm blood trickled down his face. He rolled right as another blade embedded itself in concrete where his head had been a fraction of a second earlier, the impact sending cracks spider-webbing through the floor.

  Now this is serious.

  His eyes flicked to the screen between dodges. To the strange characters that spelled out something ancient and terrible.

  Harvesting for ??????????????????????????????????????????????? ?

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  He didn't recognize the name. Didn't know what kind of entity demanded this specific ritual, this particular flavor of suffering. But he understood one thing with perfect clarity: This wasn't about killing intruders anymore.This was about feeding something that hungered.

  He turned around and barely dodged a scythe coming at him at full speed, the blade passing close enough to shear several strands of hair from his head.

  That was close.

  Then the Reaper was there.

  No warning. No buildup. No sound of footsteps or displacement of air. One moment Arata was alone, dodging blades. The next, Kuroda Shigure materialized directly in front of him.

  His left fist was cocked back, radiating white energy that distorted the air around it.

  Arata's body moved on instinct.

  He raised his guard—both arms crossed, knees bent, weight distributed for maximum stability.

  Too slow.

  The fist came too fast, too hard, backed by power that transcended simple physical strength.

  THOOM

  The impact felt like being hit by a truck.

  No—worse than that. Trucks distributed force across a surface area. This was concentrated into a single point, driving through his guard. His bones held—barely—but the kinetic energy had nowhere to go except through him.

  "UGH!"

  Arata's body ragdolled across the warehouse. His feet left the ground. The world spun—concrete, ceiling, blood-painted walls, concrete again. He was airborne, helpless, physics having taken control away from skill or will.

  Before he could hit the far wall—

  The Reaper was already there.

  A kick caught Arata mid-flight, redirecting his momentum at a ninety-degree angle. His ribs screamed. Something cracked—not broke, but definitely damaged. The air exploded from his lungs.

  Then the Reaper was above him.

  Two fists came down like hammers, driving Arata into the concrete floor with enough force to crater it. The impact sent shockwaves through his entire skeleton. Stars exploded across his vision. His ears rang with a single high-pitched note that drowned out everything else.

  He tasted copper. Blood filled his mouth.

  Get up.

  The thought came from somewhere primal, somewhere that didn't care about pain or damage.

  Arata forced himself to his feet.

  Blood ran from his nose, his mouth, a cut above his eye that he didn't remember receiving. Every breath felt like glass in his lungs—sharp edges scraping tissue with each inhale.

  But he was standing.

  The Reaper came again.

  A blur of white energy. Fists like pistons. Dozens of strikes compressed into seconds, each one aimed with surgical precision at vital points—throat, solar plexus, liver, temple.

  Arata blocked what he could.

  Left arm up—deflect the hook aimed at his jaw. Twist right—dodge the straight that would have collapsed his windpipe. Drop low—avoid the knee that scraped his ear instead of breaking his nose.

  But some got through.

  One connected with his face as cartilage broke and blood exploded from both nostrils, while another slammed into his stomach and doubled him over, forcing bile up his throat. A kick to his leg nearly buckled his knee, the joint bending at an unnatural angle before snapping back into place.

  He's faster than me.

  That was the fundamental problem. Not stronger—Arata could match his raw power, could trade blows if they were stationary. But speed? The Reaper moved like someone who'd spent ten years making his body a weapon, optimizing every motion, eliminating every wasted movement until violence became an art form.

  Arata's world narrowed to pure reaction.

  Block. Dodge. Block. Block. Dodge.

  No time to think. No time to plan. No time for strategy or tactics or anything beyond the immediate, desperate need to not die in the next half-second.

  ***

  Flow state.

  That's what fighters called it. The zone. The moment when conscious thought disappeared and your body just knew. When exterior stimuli faded and only the fight remained. When hours of practice compressed into split-second decisions that felt like they were being made by someone else.

  The human brain was designed to multitask for survival. Scan for threats. Monitor the environment. Plan the next move. Process pain. Regulate breathing. Track allies and enemies. Calculate escape routes. All at once, all the time, the prefrontal cortex juggling dozens of inputs simultaneously and prioritizing what mattered most in any given second.

  It was exhausting, inefficient, but necessary.

  But sometimes—rarely, in moments of extreme stress or perfect training—the brain achieved something different.

  Flow state.

  A neurological phenomenon where the prefrontal cortex went quiet. Where self-awareness dissolved like sugar in water. Where the internal monologue that never shut up finally stopped talking.

  In this state, all processing power funneled into a single task. The motor cortex took over, accessing muscle memory built through thousands of repetitions. The limbic system handled threat assessment without conscious input. Decisions happened faster than thought could follow, reactions occurring before the forebrain even registered the stimulus.

  For most fighters, flow state was the ultimate weapon. Pure reaction without hesitation. Perfect efficiency without waste. The difference between life and death.

  But in this case, it wasn't doing Arata any favor.

  Because while his entire consciousness focused on the Reaper's fists—tracking the subtle weight shifts that preceded each strike, reading the micro-expressions that telegraphed intent, predicting trajectories based on shoulder angle and hip rotation—two blades were coming at him at full speed from each side.

  The first time the Reaper had tried this, Arata had dodged them fairly easily. His attention hadn't been monopolized. He'd been able to track multiple threats, split his focus between the immediate and the peripheral.

  But this time, locked in flow state, his brain had already made the triage decision: The Reaper was the immediate threat.

  Everything else—including the scythes arcing toward him from opposite directions—got filtered out as irrelevant.

  His subconscious had killed him.

  ***

  "ARATAAAAAAAA! WATCH OUT!!!!"

  Takeda's voice cut through everything.

  The sound hit Arata like cold water, shocking him out of the zone. The flow state shattered like glass. Consciousness slammed back into his skull with enough force to make him dizzy.

  He saw.

  His hands shot up. Left. Right. Both palms open, fingers spread, catching the scythe tips just as they converged on his head from opposite sides.

  BAM

  Energy flooded his hands—instinctive, desperate reinforcement. The kind you accessed when death was measured in milliseconds. His palms met the razor-sharp points and held, energy creating a barrier between steel and flesh.

  But they didn't stop pushing.

  "GGHHH—"

  The scythes pressed down with immense mechanical strength, trying to crush him like hydraulic presses. His arms trembled. Sweat poured down his face, mixing with blood. Every muscle in his shoulders and back contracted to the point of tearing, fibers screaming in protest.

  How?

  The question cut through pain and desperation.

  How were the blades perfectly timed? Not just close—perfect. They'd aimed for the exact spot where he'd land during his clash with the Reaper, accounting for his momentum, his trajectory, even the millisecond delay before he could redirect his weight.

  It was as if—

  It's as if the blades were an extension of him.

  Of course.

  Metal manipulation. The same power his sister possessed, refined and mastered over ten years of harvesting. Every blade in this warehouse responded to the Reaper's will like they were his own limbs.

  This wasn't a fight.

  It was an execution choreographed by a man who could weaponize the entire building.

  "FRRGH."

  He was clenching his teeth hard enough to crack enamel.

  The scythes pushed harder, driven by inhuman strength that never tired, never faltered. His reinforcement was slipping. Energy flickered around his palms like dying flames, guttering as his reserves depleted.

  He was completely open now. Vulnerable. Every defensive posture abandoned to deal with the immediate threat of being bisected.

  One good strike from the Reaper would end him.

  The Reaper would come now. Had to. This was the perfect opportunity, a moment of absolute vulnerability that might never come again.

  But he still hasn’t moved.

  Why?

  Arata looked up, fighting to keep the blades from crushing his skull.

  And saw it.

  A third scythe—thrown by the Reaper while Arata was distracted—spinning at full speed toward him. The chain trailed behind it like a comet's tail. Aimed directly at his exposed throat where major arteries pulsed just beneath skin.

  I'm fucked.

  The thought was calm. Clinical. The kind of clarity that came when you'd already accepted death and were just observing its approach with detached interest.

  ***

  The scythe stopped.

  Inches from his neck. Just... stopped. Hanging in mid-air, still spinning, the chain pulled taut like a fishing line catching a weight.

  What?

  Arata's eyes tracked the chain backward, following its length across the warehouse.

  Takeda stood behind the Reaper.

  Both hands wrapped around the metal links. Every muscle in his body contracted—not just tensed, but contracted, pushed past normal limits into territory where tissue damage became inevitable. Veins bulged across his forearms, his neck, his forehead, standing out like cables under skin. His face had gone purple.

  "GRRGHH—"

  The sound that came from Takeda wasn't human. It was something primal and terrible—the noise a body makes when survival instinct overrides every biological safety mechanism. When pain receptors get flooded with signals they can't process. When adrenaline dumps into the bloodstream in quantities that would kill weaker hearts.

  The Reaper turned slowly, expression shifting from focused violence to genuine confusion.

  "What are you doing?"

  There was no malice in the question. Just incomprehension. He hadn't even noticed the boy sneaking up behind him during the fight. Hadn't registered the threat because Takeda was weak—beneath notice, beneath concern, not worth the mental bandwidth to track.

  A mistake.

  "Saving..." Takeda's voice cracked, words forced through a throat constricted by effort. "My friend..."

  Blood poured from his nose now—not a trickle, but a steady stream. His eyes were bloodshot, tiny vessels bursting from the strain of holding something that should have been impossible to hold. His hands shook so violently the chain rattled, metal links grinding together.

  Arata stared.

  The scythes crushing his hands were forgotten. The pain was forgotten. Everything narrowed to Takeda's face—to the desperate determination written across features twisted by agony.

  "TAKEDA!" The words ripped from Arata's throat, raw and desperate. "I MADE A MISTAKE BRINGING YOU HERE! IF YOU STAY—YOU'LL DIE! YOU HAVE TO LEAVE, NOW!"

  "Don't... say that..." Takeda's legs trembled. His knees buckled but he stayed upright through sheer will, muscles locked in place by something beyond physical strength. "Grghh—you brought me here... grhg... because you know I can be useful!"

  More blood. His gums were bleeding now too—teeth cutting into soft tissue from how hard he was clenching his jaw. Something was tearing inside him, ligaments and tendons pushed past their breaking point.

  "WE ARE FRIENDS!" Takeda screamed, voice breaking on the last word. "AND FRIENDS HELP EACH OTHER!"

  Muscles ruptured. Veins exploded across his arms like fireworks detonating under his skin, capillaries bursting in cascading patterns.

  The Reaper's eyes narrowed, calculation replacing confusion.

  If I let go, the other boy will have time to escape.

  Simple tactical assessment. Simple solution.

  He stopped pushing the scythe forward with his metal manipulation.

  And pulled.

  Hard.

  The force was immense—not just human strength but supernatural control over metal itself, every molecule in the chain responding to his will.

  "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO—"

  "Arata..." Takeda's voice was barely a whisper now, most of his remaining breath devoted to holding the chain. "I'm glad I met you..."

  Blood ran from his ears. From the corners of his eyes. His body was giving out, systems shutting down as damage accumulated past the point of recovery.

  "You were my first and only friend."

  The Reaper caught his scythe mid-flight.

  One smooth motion. Practiced. Efficient.

  And swung.

  The blade cut through Takeda's body horizontally. Clean. Precise. Separating torso from legs in one perfect arc.

  Blood sprayed.

  Not arterial—there wasn't enough pressure left for that. Just gravity pulling it downward in thick streams.

  Takeda's upper half hit the ground first. His eyes were still open. Still looking at Arata.

  Still trying to smile.

  Then his legs collapsed.

  The sound they made was wrong—wet and heavy, the sound of meat rather than a person.