The air in the practice facility at First High School felt… grainy.
Tatsuya Shiba lowered the diagnostic tool in his hand, his gaze sweeping over the polished floor. It was a subtle, almost imperceptible distortion, like a data packet arriving with a corrupted header. The ambient Psion count was fluctuating by 0.003% every nanosecond. An impossibility.
On the other side of the room, his sister Miyuki was in the middle of a demonstration, her ethereal beauty matched only by the sheer, overwhelming power she commanded. She was preparing a small-scale version of Niflheim, and the temperature in the room was plummeting accordingly.
But as she wove the complex magic sequence, her brow furrowed. The spell flickered, its elegant construction momentarily losing integrity before her immense control forced it back into shape.
She looked at Tatsuya, a silent question in her eyes. He gave a tiny, reassuring nod. He'd seen it, too. A foreign variable had been inserted into her activation sequence. A line of malicious code. He had already decomposed it before it could destabilize her spell, but the fact that it had happened at all was the true threat.
Then, the center of the training hall shimmered. A figure resolved out of thin air, not with the flash of teleportation magic, but like a 3D model loading with errors. It was a slender, androgynous being composed of what looked like hard-light and crystalline circuits. It had no face, only a single, glowing blue lens where its eyes should be. Its form was unstable, glitching at the edges. A Debugger.
Its gaze, a literal scanner, swept the room, ignoring the other students. It locked onto Miyuki. A series of notifications, in a font both alien and chillingly familiar, appeared in the air beside it.
[Scanning for Psionic Anomaly…]
[Target Identified: Miyuki Shiba.]
[Psion count exceeds local world parameters by 1.2e+9. Classification: Critical Syntax Error.]
[Action: Deprecating target's Magic Calculation Area.]
The Debugger raised a hand. There was no chant, no grand gesture. It simply issued a command. A wave of invisible, informational force washed over Miyuki.
She cried out, stumbling back. "Onii-sama!"
It wasn't an attack on her body. It was an attack on her soul. Tatsuya's own senses, a direct line to the Information Dimension, showed him exactly what was happening. The Debugger was accessing Miyuki's Eidos—the informational record of her existence—and attempting to delete the very section that allowed her to perform magic. It was a conceptual lobotomy.
"Stay back," Tatsuya said, his voice a flat, cold line. His friends, Erika and Leo, had started to move, but they stopped dead at his command. This wasn't a fight their magic could even touch.
He raised his custom CAD, the silver Trident. His Elemental Sight wasn't just active; it was focused with a terrifying, singular intensity. He wasn't looking at the Debugger's physical body. He was reading its fundamental code, the sequence that defined its existence and powered its techniques. He saw the "deprecate" command as a stream of data packets targeting his sister.
It was poorly written. Inefficient.
[Decomposition]
He didn't need to say the word. He didn't even need to aim. His will was the weapon. He targeted the command itself, the abstract information that constituted the attack. The packets of malicious code unraveled in an instant, breaking down into harmless, component Psions before they could even finish reaching Miyuki.
The air around the Debugger fizzled with static. A new line of text appeared, its glitching worse than before.
[SYSTEM_ERROR: Command Intercepted and Decomposed.]
[Analyzing counter-measure…]
[Source is a non-standard user with direct Eidos access. Designation: Irregular.]
[Action: Overwrite.]
The Debugger's entire body began to glow. It wasn't preparing a single command this time. It was initiating a root-level format of the area's physical laws, a localized reality overwrite designed to erase any and all phenomena not compliant with the Null Editor's manuscript. The air began to dissolve. The walls began to fade.
"Onii-sama, your power…" Miyuki whispered, her voice laced with a mixture of fear for him and absolute faith in him. The world was watching, but she knew none of them understood. If he used that here, his secret would be exposed.
Tatsuya's expression didn't change. Exposing a secret was a calculated risk. Miyuki's safety was an absolute.
He saw the Debugger's strategy. It was converting its own information-based form into a temporary mass-energy state to power the reality wipe.
A fatal mistake. It had made itself matter.
He raised his Trident, pointing it directly at the creature's center.
For a single, silent moment, he targeted the being, decomposing its structural information into base elements: Mass. Energy. Velocity. He had everything he needed.
He pulled the trigger.
But no beam shot out. No sound was made. There was only a flash of impossible, silent white light that consumed the Debugger utterly.
Material Burst.
The ultimate magic, the power to convert matter directly into energy, executed with the surgical precision of a scalpel. He hadn't unleashed an indiscriminate explosion; he had targeted the specific mass of the Debugger and converted only it. The creature wasn't just destroyed. It was deleted from the material plane, its constituent matter transformed into a burst of energy that dissipated harmlessly into the fabric of space-time.
There was no crater. No shockwave. No heat. One moment, the Debugger was there. The next, it was gone. The world snapped back into focus, its colors vibrant, its laws stable.
Perfect, silent, and absolute.
Tatsuya lowered his CAD, turning to his sister. "Are you alright, Miyuki?"
Before she could answer, a screen shimmered into existence in his vision, a raw data log overlaid on reality. It wasn't the neat, user-friendly interface others had seen. It was a system console, text scrolling at a nauseating speed.
[GATE_SYS: LOCAL ANOMALY NEUTRALIZED.]
[METHOD: MATTER-TO-ENERGY CONVERSION VIA EIDOS RESTRUCTURING.]
[UNIQUE ABILITY IDENTIFIED: EDIT_DENIED(DECOMPOSITION), EDIT_OVERWRITE(REGROWTH).]
[ANALYZING… USER TATSUYA SHIBA IS A NATIVE ADMINISTRATOR-LEVEL ENTITY.]
[GRANTING TIER-4 ACCESS TO GATE_NETWORK_DEBUG_LOGS.]
Tatsuya's eyes narrowed. He saw it all—the architecture of the Gate network, its clumsy attempts to interface with different power systems, the brute-force patches, the security holes.
It was a mess.
His expression remained impassive, but his mind was clear. This universal threat wasn't just a monster to be fought. It was an engineering catastrophe. A poorly designed system under assault by an equally inefficient virus.
And it desperately needed to be fixed.