Chapter 17: Fragments Above the SkyDawn had not yet bled into day when Seraphina's voice pulled Kazuki from the silence like a pin through a bubble.
"Master—look up."
He was leaning against the guild parapet, nonchalance folded into the curve of his smile, watching the town wake. The voice was small, but the tone carried a weight that always meant trouble. Kazuki turned. Above the fractured horizon, where morning mist should have been, a tear hung in the air: a ragged, impossibly thin rip through the sky. Behind it, something watched.
At first glance there was nothing—only a tremor in space. Then two shapes resolved themselves like ideas snapping into focus: silhouettes that did not belong to the world's grammar. They stood with their hands behind their backs, looking down at Karuvia as if it were a child's painting left on a table.
"Master Kazuki," Seraphina said. Her small slime form jittered; in humanoid thought she sounded clipped, strained. "I spot two beings in the sky. They don't belong to this realm. They're—" her voice cooled, "—not from existence."
Kazuki's grin sharpened. The system in his head chimed nothing; curiosity alone made his fingers flex. "From the Fragments, then." He rose fluidly, boots whispering on stone. "Outerversal… Absolute. Fancy guests for a dull little morning."
They leapt. Seraphina was a streak at his side, wings of raw energy folding and reforming in a shimmer. The world below narrowed; wind tore at their clothes. Up in the void, the two figures turned—two faces that no one in Karuvia could have seen until now.
One wore red: long hair like molten copper, eyes flaring ember-red. Heat seemed to ripple around him. His smile was feral and bright, as reckless as a meteor. The other was colder—silver hair that fell like moon-silver, dark purple eyes that swallowed stars. Where the red one moved like flare and flame, the silver one moved like the end of things, measured and inevitable.
"You talk to us?" the silver voice said, amused, as if learning a child could whistle had been delightful.
"You read our thoughts?" the red added, brow dancing. "We thought we were alone here—this weak realm hardly worth looking at."
Kazuki landed with casual arrogance on the invisible line between air and nothing. He folded his arms. "You're wrong about one thing: you aren't alone anymore."
Seraphina pulsed. "They're not only from above. They're from fragments—higher than anything we can normally measure. Outerversal and Absolute Fragments. Don't engage—"
Kazuki's smile widened. "If Seraphina thinks she can take one of them, then the red-haired man is Outerversal—dangerous but readable. The silver-haired one… Absolute. He's beyond our usual scales." He let the words hang deliberately. Mystery served better than explanation when prying at a secret.
The two in the sky blinked as if rubbing sleep from eyes that had never belonged to sleep. "So," said the red, adopting a theatrical bow. "A new play. A morsel of fun."
Without further politeness they tore the air between them and created an arena: a patch of space the size of a field, the boundaries burning blue and black, ground that tasted like iron. Flames licked the rim. The red and silver men stepped into it and gestured in sync. "Let's have… fun."
Seraphina's tone squeezed sharp. "Alert. Do not engage, Master. I can handle one—but the other—" Her form dimmed; there was honest calculation in it. "I cannot scale to him. He's not just strong—he exists to unmake the idea of strength."
Kazuki let out a soft, satisfied laugh. "That sounds promising." He closed his eyes for a heartbeat and felt the world's hairline seams. He liked the idea of someone who thought themselves incomprehensible. It made for a warm beginning.
From nowhere and everywhere he pulled craft and favor. Red-and-black brass knuckles hummed into being over his hands, energy coiling around his fists like coiled snakes. The air bent to the sound of creation—metal singing into nightmare.
A portal opened at his feet: a slit of crimson and onyx, smoke wreathing its edge. Kazuki's hand slid into it and came out holding the thing he'd made yesterday in a fever of imagination and rage—the blade that had been born of void-heat and old vengeances. He set it across his back with a practiced thumb over an obsidian spine.
A hush settled, not from awe but because the world itself seemed to hold its breath at the presence of Abyssbreaker.
Abyssbreaker — The Demon King's Wrath.
Forged in the Void Crucible of Nihil, it was less metal than accusation: obsidian-black with crimson fissures, exhaling shadow-smoke. The crossguard were demonic wings, bone-feathered; its handle the spine of some primordial thing wrapped in dragonhide. A crystal skull stared out from its heart, whispering in a voice that promised ruin.
He didn't catalogue the sword aloud. He didn't need to. The fragments themselves tilted, curious.
The red-haired man's grin widened. "Cute little toy."
"You're from the Megaverse Fragments?" the silver one tried, testing.
Kazuki's eyes glinted. He let the question hang there, baited, then answered in the one way he loved best—entirely wrong on purpose. "I'm not telling." He shrugged. The act of withholding did more than words; it built the insinuation of power into stories around him without explaining a thing. The two watchers stiffened, annoyed at being toyed with.
"Very well," the red man said. Flames roared into being at his fingertips like a conjurer's applause. The silver-haired one unfurled a chain of shadow—metals and comet-dust braided into a meteor-hammer that hummed with dark gravity. Their weapons materialized as extensions of properties Kazuki's mind could taste: volcanic cadence, the slow inevitability of collapse.
Seraphina's voice was a razor. "If that red one is Outerversal, he will fight like everything is on fire. Don't let him bait you. The silver one—he cuts meaning." She shifted, a faint puff of smoke forming like an exhaled omen. "Both of them together… this may be the most brutal test we've seen."
Kazuki flexed the brass-knuckled fingers of his right hand. Darkness crawled up his arm and met the sword's curved spine at the small of his back, aligning like a predator arranging its talons. He felt his training—boxing, Lethwei, Muay Thai—twined with something older: sword instincts that moved his body before his mind could say fight. He tasted possibility. He was not eager to die, but if it were to happen, he would choose the most interesting way possible.
"Let's do something memorable," he said. He rotated his shoulders and the Abyssbreaker pulsed as if pleased.
The red-haired fighter's eyes flared. Heat rushed from him in a living wind; the arena's edges blistered. He stamped and the ground blistered like paper. "Then fight!" he cried. He lunged with violence, a comet in human shape.
Kazuki stepped in time. The brass knuckles glowed, and he moved with the practiced brutality of a man who'd bent ten thousand fights into one. He did not shout or call his strikes; he let muscle and will speak. With Void Step Slash, he blinked—a red smear where a blink had been—and the first impact hit like a meteor.
The collision did not end anything. It only rewrote the afternoon.
Heat met wrath. Steel met bone and idea. The red-haired man threw fire that sought to melt the laws of the arena; Kazuki braided through it, each foot planted as if dictating gravity. The Abyssbreaker sang: a vibration that shrugged off flame. When Kazuki's fist—wrapped in the brass-black coils—found the red man's jaw, the force was not mere physics. It was consequence. The red man stumbled, surprised. He had not expected a toy to dance like a god.
The silver-haired watcher remained a menace in stillness. He did not rush; he refined motion into inevitability. His meteor-hammer spun as if spinning galaxies with it, each rotation making the air grow colder, swallowing small concepts like 'distance' and 'moment'. When he struck, even shadows trembled. Seraphina's lips parted with an intake of dread.
"You're not… ordinary," the silver man said mid-strike, voice like a blade from elsewhere. "You hold something between 'existence' and 'non-existence'."
Kazuki answered by widening his grin and letting the Abyssbreaker hum. He tasted an edge to this fight that delighted him—someone who assumed too much, someone who mistook silence for weakness. He'd been building hints like breadcrumbs of rumor; now he would let one or two of the breadcrumbs catch flame.
Steel and fist and void moved. Tenfold strikes blurred into being. Kazuki's body sang in a language of damage and denial. His phantom after-slashes confused, each one a lie with one truth hidden inside. He parried the meteor-hammer not with direct defense but by bending the strike inward against the silver man's own momentum—an action so small it looked like a shrug. The meteor-hammer clipped nothing but air and the concepts that backed the air. The consequence was catastrophic.
Abyssbreaker's edge opened a thin rift with one clean arc. It did not swallow the red man whole, but a sliver of the arena folded into a black seam and spat out a scattering of ash and the smell of lost summers. The red man cursed, surprise cutting through his heat-warped features. The silver-haired one's eyes narrowed. He tasted a different coldness now—one that said the void could be wielded like a blade.
Seraphina swelled in power, raining magic like a storm's prelude, but she kept within the careful bracket Kazuki's presence demanded. He could see her thoughts—contingency, worry, delight—and he let her be the lens that kept their angle honest. This wasn't just a test of strength. It was a revelation, a measured peal of thunder that did not demand understanding.
Around them, the town on the edge of the horizon remained oblivious, because this was a fight meant for higher ears.
The red-haired man recovered first, flames knitting around his limbs, angry and quick as flint. "You are either braver than you have right to be," he roared, "or you're beyond being afraid."
"Both," Kazuki said simply. He invoked his Hell Fang Barrage, a torrent—Boxing refined and Muay Thai sharpened into fists like hammers. Each blow was a punctuation marked in the air with crimson light. Red met red; for a second the arena became a heartbeat.
Then the silver-haired one moved, slow as inevitability but every motion an indictment. He struck with the meteor-hammer, then followed with a spear of dark purple that spun like a thought—keening, precise. Kazuki's Shadow Parryanswered, and Abyssbreaker gleamed as the blade found the seam between the silver spear's intent and its reality, ripping an answer into existence.
Both fragment-beings stepped back, surprised in different ways. The red-haired man's pride didn't allow for flinching, but his eyes had a new line—respect or caution—and the silver-haired watcher gave the faintest of smiles: the kind of smile a mathematician gives when a proof almost holds.
"You are… not from anywhere simple," the silver man said. "You carry a silence that is many things."
Kazuki's throat tightened into a chuckle. He had been building a hint, yes. A slow, patient pattern of rumor, of deflection, of things half-seen. But the best hints were the ones that cut their own trail unseen—the rumor that the woods tell themselves at night. He let the blade speak a fraction of its true name and did not translate the rest.
"Practice," Kazuki said, voice low. "Practice and bad habits."
The two fragments glanced at each other. The arena held its breath. Somewhere, beyond the reach of their sight and meaning, the Absolute Fragments watched like children who had discovered a dangerous toy. They had come for diversion; they had found a story.
Seraphina drifted closer and tapped Kazuki's shoulder with a crystalline finger. "Master—this one," she said, voice thin with admiration and alarm, nodding toward the silver-haired being. "He's not just strong. He makes laws optional."
Kazuki put his hand to the hilt of Abyssbreaker. The sword hummed and answered. "Good," he replied. "I wanted to meet someone who could rewrite punctuation. It's rude to keep them waiting."
He planted his feet. The town's air felt farther away. The sky split. The two fragments advanced, and Kazuki smiled—equal parts predator, equal parts student—because this was the kind of fight a man could carve a lifetime from and still come back hungry.
"You asked for us," the red-haired man said, raising a hand in valedictory flame.
"We answered," the silver-haired one completed, his voice like glass and the end of stories.
"Then let's write something they can talk about," Kazuki said.
He moved first. Abyssbreaker sang a high, terrible note as it rose. The world tilted and the arena flared. The first clash did not merely begin the fight—it rewrote the rules of a morning and left the sky with a scar to remember.