The city had no name.
Netero realized this immediately—
not because no one had recorded it, but because the thought itself slid away when he tried to grasp it. The structures stood vast and solemn, carved from stone that should not have endured this long. Towers rose like petrified prayers. Streets stretched with purpose, not chaos. This was not a ruin born of time.
This was a ruin born of decision.
Nen clung to the place like old incense. Not aggressive. Not malignant. Just lingering. The will of countless lives, settled into the stone as if the city itself had chosen to remember when its people could not.
Even Netero, at the height of his strength, felt it.
'These people were not weak,' he thought. 'They were resolved.'
They found the mural deep within the city's core, on a wall that should have collapsed long ago.
Yet it stood.
Untouched by erosion.
Untouched by calamity.
Untouched by time.
The first panels were almost serene.
A vast circular opening, etched again and again—variations of the same shape. Portals. Gates. Windows torn into reality itself. Figures passed through them freely, some returning with strange flora, others with beasts, still others with technologies and symbols that no longer existed anywhere in the known world.
Exploration.
Expansion.
Conquest.
The city had not merely discovered other worlds.
It had grown accustomed to them.
Then the mural changed.
The brushstrokes grew heavier.
Nen saturated the pigment—not passive residue, but intent, sealed into every line. Netero felt his heartbeat slow as he looked upon it. For a moment, the world tilted, and he was no longer standing in front of the wall.
He was there.
The portal in this panel was different.
Wider.
Deeper.
Wrong.
And from it—
A hand.
Not flesh as humans knew it.
Not bone.
Not aura.
A presence.
The hand reached outward, fingers curling slightly, as if the act of touching this world required restraint. Even painted, it carried weight—pressure that made Nen users instinctively tighten their Ten.
Someone whispered behind Netero.
"That's not a creature."
They were right.
It was a higher existence—something that did not arrive so much as allow itself to be perceived.
A god.
And yet—Opposite the hand stood something else.
A figure, barely defined.
Not painted poorly—
painted incompletely.
Its edges collapsed inward, like a hole punched through the mural itself. No face. No form. No detail. Just a silhouette that devoured the paint around it, as though the artist's hand had refused—or failed—to define its existence.
Netero frowned.
*If a god can be drawn*
*what is this?*
The figure held a sword.
The sword alone was perfect.
Every line sharp.
Every detail absolute.
The blade seemed to cut through the mural, rather than rest upon it.
Even unsharpened, it radiated certainty.
This was not a hero's depiction.
This was a confrontation.
The next mural answered the question no one dared to ask.
The city—this very city—was depicted in ruin.
Towers shattered. Streets swallowed. The portals gone. The sky fractured like broken glass. Entire sections of the mural were scratched away, not by time, but by intentional erasure, as if someone had tried desperately to forget what came next.
Beneath it, ancient script remained.
It took days to translate.
The story it told was worse than any calamity record.
The portals were not merely for exploration.
They were for dominion.
World after world fell beneath the city's reach, until one gate opened to a realm that was never meant to be touched—a place that could only be described as hell, inhabited by beings whose very existence bent causality.
Gods.
Not myths.
Not constructs.
But entities whose presence alone unraveled the continent.
One reached through.
And the world nearly ended.
There was no battle.
There was only a decision.
The script spoke of a gathering—an act so desperate that reality itself resisted it. Every remaining citizen, every Nen user, every life that still burned poured their existence into a single individual.
Not to empower them.
To erase them.
A sacrifice so total that even memory could not survive it.
The name of the act was preserved:
Ittō Shura
A blade to kill the gods.
The price was absolute.
Not death.
Nonexistence.
Did it work?
The mural did not say.
The script ended abruptly, fractured mid-sentence, as though even stone could not bear the conclusion. The god's hand was gone. The portal erased. The city destroyed.
The Dark Continent descended into chaos regardless—scarred by the briefest touch of divinity.
All that remained was:
A sword
A name
And the will to sacrifice
Everything else—forgotten.
Netero stood before the mural long after the others had left.
For the first time in decades, his smile did not come easily.
"So even gods can be challenged," he murmured. "And even victory can be too expensive to remember."
He turned away.
Behind him, the mural remained—silent, patient, enduring.
As if waiting to see whether humanity would ever again choose a blade that demanded everything.
And somewhere, unseen, a sword bore a single, quiet mark.