The scream of Yume Sato, muffled by the roar of collapsing stone pillars, was like a final signal before a storm. Akira's team, torn between duty and tactical calculation, rushed into the trap sector. What they saw made even Ryūnosuke freeze for a moment.
The weak Tokyoites, Kota and Yuma, hadn't just stumbled into a trap. They stood at its very epicenter, surrounded by a ring of five columns from which thick, crimson light now oozed like blood from old wounds. The air hummed with a growing, low, ancient sound, full of mute fury. This wasn't just a mechanism. It was a Scar, an ancient seal of protection, and someone had deliberately, roughly broken it open, driving it to a state of unstable flare-up.
"Damn idiots!" Ryūnosuke hissed, seeing shadows begin to crawl from cracks in the floor between the columns—formless, coiling masses of darkness with glowing dot-eyes. "Shadows of Ancestral Wrath"—ancient guardian spirits bound to the place, fed by grievance and forgotten oaths. Individually weak, but there were dozens, and their touch burned not flesh but the will itself, leaving an empty shell.
Kaede, assessing the situation in a split second, delivered the calculation:
"Third-level trap, but modified. Scar overloaded, energy output exponential. We can't just smash the columns—the blast will take out half the sector with them." She nodded at the pale, trembling Tokyoites. "Their lives are part of the anchor. If they die, the Scar will collapse into a singularity."
Akira was already moving. He didn't run through the shadows—he walked between them. His "void" was invisible to them. They bumped into him as if against an invisible wall and recoiled, hissing in confusion. But there were too many, and the path to the columns was blocked by a veritable wall of swirling darkness.
It was at that moment that he entered the corridor leading to the trap.
Hajime Saime appeared soundlessly. His white yukata and creamy-gold kesa were immaculately clean, as if he walked not through a dusty labyrinth but the halls of his own palace. His silvery hair barely stirred in the thick, charged air. His dark gray eyes, cold and indifferent, slid over the scene: his helpless subordinates, the "Tenran" students heroically trying to save enemies, the pulsing crimson light of the ancient Scar.
His face showed no concern, no anger. Only a slight distaste, like a master finding dirt in a flawlessly cleaned room.
"Chaos has no place in an ordered world," he uttered, and his quiet, even voice cut through the hum like a blade.
He raised a hand. Not for a complex mudra. A simple, elegant gesture, as if adjusting a curtain.
"Covenant of the Slumbering Sovereign: Wall of Memories."
The air before him, between the advancing horde of shadows and the columns, trembled and grew misty. Not thickened, but became cool, damp to the eye. Then, from nothing, with the quiet murmur of a mountain stream, water poured forth. But not a flow—a flat, vertical wall. It was crystal clear, shimmering from within with millions of tiny bubbles, and in its depth danced reflections like memories. The wall stood in the shadows' path.
The first shadows, driven by blind rage, crashed into it. And didn't bounce off. They began to dissolve. Their formless bodies melted like sugar in water, and their malicious, primitive Scar—their very essence—was absorbed, soaked up by the shimmering waters. The wall didn't reflect or block. It erased. Assimilated. Absorbed everything weak, illegitimate, having no right to exist before the face of the ancient authority Saime embodied.
A shocked silence hung for a second. Even the shadows, devoid of reason, slowed their onslaught, sensing an instinctive horror before this power.
But the crimson light of the columns only flared brighter, as if throwing down a challenge. A new, more powerful swarm erupted from the cracks, and the columns themselves groaned, ready to explode. There was too much energy. The "Wall of Memories" began to tremble under the pressure.
Saime sighed, barely noticeably. Something like disappointment flashed in his gaze—the disappointment of a teacher whose pupil doesn't grasp a simple truth. He lowered his raised hand and crossed both before his chest, his fingers weaving into a complex but refined lock.
"Covenant: Fangs of the Raging Depths."
The air in the hall became moist, salty to the taste. It smelled of the ocean abyss and thunder. Behind Saime, space tore, and from the rift, with the roar of a cascading waterfall, It erupted.
A serpentine dragon woven from furious water currents and billowing mist. Its body shimmered with all shades of a stormy sea, from dark turquoise to leaden gray. Instead of a maw—a spinning vortex studded with tusks of compressed, hardened sea foam. Its eyes were miniature, madly spinning whirlpools. It wasn't summoned. It was manifested—as nature's wrath put in service to one man's will.
The dragon lunged forward, bypassing its own "Wall of Memories." It didn't consume the shadows. It passed through them, and where its watery body touched, the shadows didn't dissolve—they were torn to shreds by the crushing pressure of thousands of atmospheres. Streams of water, thin as needles and hard as steel, pierced the darkness, tearing it apart. The dragon coiled around the crimson columns, and from its maw poured not just a flow, but a miniature hurricane. Water mixed with icy shards and thunder crashed down upon the ancient Scar.
The sound of shattering crystal echoed. The crimson light wavered, cracked, fissures running along the columns. The hum gave way to the screech of tearing reality. Then—deafening silence and a click. The light went out. The columns, now mere gray stones, ceased radiating threat. The shadows dispersed like smoke.
Kota and Yuma, untouched by shadow or water, stood amidst the subsided chaos, their faces masks of mute horror and awe before the power that had saved them, but not for their sake.
Saime lowered his hands. The dragon of the raging depths evaporated with a quiet hiss, leaving behind only light mist and damp stone. He didn't even breathe heavily.
The pressure emanating from him wasn't physical. It was the pressure of law. Order. Authority. He didn't fight the elements. He reminded them who they belonged to. A shocking demonstration of power that disdained brute force, for it was itself its source and legislator.
And this pressure, cold, all-encompassing, struck not at the body, but at Seiya's soul.
The boy stood leaning against a wall, his eyes fixed on Saime. Inside him, everything constricted. His own Echoes, that chaotic swarm of fear, rage, instinct, cowered in panic before this icy, perfect authority. They felt they had no right to exist here. And one of them, the most ancient, most tied to the concept of eternity and immutability, perceived this challenge not as a threat, but as a call to confrontation.
Involuntarily, without thought, Seiya exhaled. And his breath turned into a cloud of frost.
The air around him crackled. The temperature dropped dozens of degrees in a second. On the stone floor beneath his feet, ice spread with lightning speed—not just water, but complex, perfect crystalline structures resembling frost patterns on glass, but a palm's width thick.
From his own shadow, lengthened and darkened, It rose.
Echo of Eternity: The Ice Colossus.
It wasn't tall. It was massive, squat, as if carved from the very heart of an age-old glacier. Its body consisted of blue, perfectly transparent ice, within which frozen stars of air bubbles shimmered. It had no face—only a smooth ice plane with two indentations from which a cold, lifeless light shone, the color of moonlight reflected on snow. Its whole figure radiated silence, stillness, and the inexorable, slow force of permafrost.
The Colossus took a step. Its movement was unhurried, but each step left a layer of glittering frost on the stone. It raised a hand, and in the air before it instantly grew a wall of interwoven ice crystals, barring the path—not to anyone in particular, but simply as a sign of its presence, its eternity.
Saime turned his head. For the first time that day, genuine, sharp interest, almost intellectual hunger, flashed in his dark gray eyes. He saw not a threat, but a phenomenon. An illegitimate, wild, but incredibly potent phenomenon.
"Curious," he uttered, and the first notes of something besides icy indifference sounded in his voice. "A wild anomaly contesting order. Requires correction."
The Ice Colossus responded not with sound. It slowed time. Not around itself—in a beam emanating from its "eyes." The air in this beam grew viscous, sound muffled, the movements of Akira, who tried to step between Seiya and the danger, became unnaturally smooth, slowed.
Now the crisis had shifted to a new, even more dangerous confrontation. And Saime seemed ready to accept the challenge. He raised his hand again, and this time his fingers formed a different, more fluid sign.
"Covenant: Scales of the Eternal Stream."
Beside him, from droplets of moisture left by the dragon of the depths, a new form gathered. An elegant, long dragon of crystal-clear, shimmering water. It didn't attack. It coiled around Saime himself and his two stunned subordinates, and from it emanated a soft, healing light. Wounds from flying stone fragments on Yume's cheek closed, bruises faded. This was a power of protection and purification, as absolute as the previous destructive force.
Then Saime's gaze fixed on the Ice Colossus. His expression grew colder.
"Wildness must know its place. Covenant: Breath of the Frozen Flow."
The air thickened and turned blue. Behind Saime, as if growing from the very darkness of the hall, a third form began to take shape. Massive, heavy, ponderous dragon of blue, almost black ice with obsidian inclusions. Its wings were ice floes, and from its maw wafted vapor of absolute zero. It wasn't fully manifested yet, but its very formation caused the Scars in the air—residual trap energy, traces of techniques—to slow, congeal, lose coherence.
Hajime Saime prepared not to subdue, but to demonstrate superiority. He intended to show that his authority over the elements was perfect and all-encompassing, and even the wild Echo of Eternity was merely another unruly vassal to be brought to its knees.
And the "Tenran" team, caught between Seiya's out-of-control Echo and the three incarnations of the ancient, cold authority of the Tokyo aristocrat, found themselves on the front line of a battle none of them had started and whose rules they didn't understand.