The impact did not feel like striking flesh. It felt like punching through a sheet of frozen glass.
Arthev's hand, coated in concentrated Soul Power, pierced the center of the chaotic vortex swirling within Lian's chest. He felt the resistance of the spatial energy, the heavy, vibrating hum of the rift, and then, he felt it shatter.
Lian gasped. It was a small, sharp sound, barely audible over the roar of the collapsing dimension.
Her eyes, which had been flickering between terror and agony, suddenly cleared. For a single, suspended micro-second, the phasing stopped. She was solid. She was warm. She was there.
She looked at him, and the ghost of a smile touched her lips, a smile of relief.
"Thank... you..."
Then, her heart stopped.
The Anchor was severed.
The reaction was instantaneous. The energy that had been channeling through her body to hold the time-loop open lost its bridge. The rift, denied its conduit, snapped shut with the violence of a falling blade.
SILENCE.
There was no explosion.
The village of Still Heart simply... ceased.
The screaming villagers, the burning lanterns, the thatched cottages, the cobblestone streets, they didn't crumble.
They were overwritten. The collapse of the spatial field created a wave of absolute erasure, wiping the physical matter from existence as the timeline corrected itself violently.
White. Everything turned a blinding, absolute white.
Arthev was thrown backward, not by wind, but by the sheer rejection of reality. He tumbled through the nothingness, his senses overloaded.
"ARGHHHHH!"
A new pain assaulted him. It wasn't physical injury. It was in his head. Specifically, in his eyes.
It felt as though someone had poured molten lead into his optical nerves. The pain was transcendent, eclipsing the grief, eclipsing the fear.
In the white void, Arthev clutched his face.
Blood, dark and viscous, began to stream from his eyes, leaking through his fingers and staining the festive blue silk sleeves of his tunic.
The irises of the Shinragan burned. The geometric pattern, began to spin wildly. It fractured, dissolved, and reformed.
The lines thickened. They curved. They interlocked into a new, terrifying design. A kaleidoscope of black geometry blooming over the lavender sun.
The Mangekyou Shinragan.
Arthev gasped, forcing his eyes open despite the agony. The white void was fading, revealing the truth of the aftermath.
He was kneeling in a crater. A massive, bowl-shaped depression in the earth, stripped down to the bedrock.
There was no village. There were no bodies. The villagers, the blacksmith, the baker, Elder Mu, had been erased so completely that not even dust remained. It was as if they had never existed at all.
Except for one thing.
Lying ten meters away, in the center of the rocky waste, was Lian.
Because Arthev had killed her before the erasure wave hit, her body had become an inert object, disconnected from the loop. She was the only thing left.
But the spatial turbulence was still settling. The edges of the crater were crumbling, and the residual energy was gnawing at the ground, inching toward her lifeless form. The chaotic space threatened to grind her corpse into nothingness, just like the rest.
"No," Arthev rasped. His voice was a broken ruin.
He tried to stand, but his legs failed him. He crawled. He dragged himself over the sharp rocks, leaving a trail of blood from his eyes.
"You don't... take her," he snarled at the empty air. "You took everything else. You don't take her."
The residual energy flared, a purple arc of lightning snapping toward Lian's body.
Arthev's right eye throbbed. A pulse of power, surged from the new pattern. It wasn't a conscious decision. It was an instinct, a desperate command from a soul that refused to accept loss.
'Preserve. Keep. Save.'
"Daikokuten."
The word tore from his throat.
His right eye focused on Lian.
The space around her didn't warp or twist. It simply stopped.
A black geometric cube, microscopic in size, materialized instantly. In a flash faster than light, Lian's body vanished.
She wasn't disintegrated. She was swallowed.
Arthev felt a sudden, heavy weight settle in a pocket of his mind, a new sense he had never possessed before. He could feel her. She was floating in a dimension where time did not exist. The blood on her dress would never dry. The warmth in her skin would never fade. She was frozen in a perfect, tragic stasis, safe from the rotting touch of the world.
Arthev collapsed face-first onto the cold stone of the crater floor.
The blood from his eyes dripped onto the rock.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The sound was deafening in the silence.
Inside his subconscious, the Tailed Beasts were silent. Even Shukaku, usually loud and abrasive, said nothing.
Arthev lay there for what felt like hours. The moon rose, casting a pale light over the scar in the earth where a happy village had stood only moments ago.
Eventually, the boy moved.
He pushed himself up to a sitting position. He wiped the blood from his face with his sleeve, smearing it across the fine blue silk.
He looked around.
Nothing.
No Grumpy the dragon. No apple cores. No red ribbons. Just cold rock and wind.
Arthev reached into his boot and pulled out his kunai. He stared at the reflection in the metal blade.
His eyes had returned to their normal state. But the innocence was gone. The eyes that stared back were hollow. They were the eyes of a ghost.
He stood up. His body ached, his Spirit Power was drained, but he felt a cold, burning engine starting up in his chest.
He closed his eyes, accessing his vivid memory. He rewound the tape to the moment the fake stone shattered. He focused on the distant peak.
He zoomed in on the fleeing figures.
The tall man. The woman with the shadow blades.
'Analyze,' Arthev commanded internally. His mental voice was so cold it made Matatabi shiver.
'Processing memory,' Matatabi replied immediately, falling into line. 'Target 1, Male. Estimated Rank, Spirit Sage (70+). Target 2, Female. Estimated Rank, Spirit Emperor (60+). Affiliation... unknown.'
Arthev focused on the symbol he had glimpsed on the back of the woman's cloak as she turned to leave.
It was a silver circle, shattered into three uneven pieces, with a single vertical line piercing through the center.
It looked like a broken world.
'A new player," Arthev whispered to the night. His voice was terrifyingly calm.
'I do not recognize that mark,' Isobu noted.
'It doesn't matter who they are,' Shukaku growled, feeling the boy's intent. 'They are prey.'
"Yeah," Arthev agreed aloud.
He didn't know who they were. He didn't know their name. But he had their face. He had their mark.
He adjusted his ruined blue tunic, tearing off the blood-soaked sleeves to free his arms. He turned his back on the empty crater, on the place that was almost home.
He had nothing but the clothes on his back and the corpse of a girl frozen in a timeless dimension inside his right eye.
He began to walk. The sound of his boots on the gravel was the only music left in the valley. The Wolf-boy was gone.
The Avenger had arrived.
To be continued....