The blade of light didn't just cut.
It sang. A high-pitched, heavenly frequency that promised to harmonize my flesh into nothingness.
As the edge neared my neck, I felt a phantom tongue in the back of my throat wither and die. The price was collected. My sense of taste—the memory of salted meat, the bitterness of the moss, even the metallic tang of my own blood—vanished instantly.
The world became a grey, flavorless slab of existence.
**[Payment Received: Gustatory Sense Extinguished.]**
**[Causality Synchronization: 24%.]**
**[Condition: Optimal.]**
The sword hit my skin.
Aira's eyes were blank, two empty craters of amber light. She wasn't seeing me. She was seeing the code Kaelen had written into her mind.
I didn't move. I didn't breathe.
I focused on the point of contact. My "Ketsubetsu" didn't flare outward this time. I pulled it inward, concentrating the rejection into a single, microscopic layer on the surface of my throat.
The sword of light hummed against my skin, unable to pierce the layer of "No" I had constructed.
"Is this all your 'miracle' can do?" Kaelen's voice was laced with a cruel, melodic laughter. He stood behind Aira, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders, like a puppeteer admiring his favorite doll. "She is a Gen, Rai. Her soul is a reservoir of pure causality. And I have the tap."
He squeezed her shoulders.
Aira let out a sound—not a scream, but a jagged burst of static. The sword of light doubled in size, the heat from it blistering the walls of the corridor.
I felt the pressure. My "Rejection" was buckling. The obsidian scales on my knuckles began to bleed a thick, black fluid that smelled of nothing.
"Rai..."
It was a whisper, buried beneath the static of her brainwashing. Aira was still in there, drowning in a sea of Imperial runes.
"I hear you," I whispered back.
I reached out and grabbed the blade of light with my bare hand. The heat was astronomical. I could smell my own skin burning, but I couldn't feel the sting of the heat. My nerves were becoming as numb as my palate.
"You think you can save her by enduring?" Kaelen mocked. "Every second she fights you, her soul burns. If you keep holding that blade, she'll be a hollow shell before the sun sets."
He was telling the truth. I could see the strings now—not the ones connecting me to the world, but the ones connecting Kaelen to Aira. They were golden, translucent threads of Seishin-kei magic, anchored into the base of her skull.
If I killed him, she might die from the feedback.
If I didn't, she would burn out.
It was a perfect, calculated trap. The kind of chess move Tomas Velin would appreciate.
But Kaelen forgot one thing.
I was never a chess player. I was the dirt the board sat on.
"I'm not trying to save her from you, Kaelen," I said, my voice vibrating with a frequency that cracked the floor beneath us.
I let go of the blade.
Instead of retreating, I stepped *into* her reach. I let the sword of light bury itself in my shoulder. It went through bone, muscle, and sinew, exiting out my back.
Aira's eyes flickered. For a split second, the amber turned back to a soft, grieving gold.
"Rai...?"
I ignored the hole in my body. I ignored the smoke rising from my shoulder.
I reached past her, my long, obsidian-stained arm stretching toward Kaelen's face.
The Knight sneered, raising his backup dagger—a black-steel blade meant for close-quarters execution.
"Too slow, peasant."
He lunged for my throat.
But I wasn't aiming for his throat.
I opened my palm. The black veins on my skin pulsed, and the "Key" inside my chest—the seal Aira had placed there—screamed in protest.
"I refuse the connection," I roared.
I didn't hit Kaelen. I hit the air between him and Aira.
**[Causality Application: Severance.]**
The golden threads didn't snap. They dissolved.
The rejection wasn't physical; it was conceptual. I was denying the existence of the bond he had forced upon her.
The feedback was catastrophic.
Kaelen was thrown back as if he had been hit by a runaway carriage. The runes on his armor shattered, the gold filigree flying off like shrapnel. He hit the far wall with a crunch of breaking ribs and stayed there, coughing up a mixture of blood and pulverized mana.
Aira collapsed.
The sword of light vanished, leaving a charred, cauterized hole in my shoulder. She fell into my arms, her body limp, her silver hair spilling over my blackened hands like moonlight over coal.
She was breathing, but it was shallow. The amber glow was gone, replaced by a terrifying, hollow grey.
"Aira?"
She didn't answer. Her eyes were open, staring at nothing.
"She's gone, Rai," a voice called out.
I looked up. Tomas Velin was standing at the edge of the corridor, his hands tucked into his sleeves. He looked disappointed, like a teacher whose star pupil had failed a basic test.
"You severed the connection, yes. But you did it with the grace of a sledgehammer. Her mind was the bridge. When you broke the bridge, you sent her consciousness into the abyss."
I looked down at the girl. My one good eye burned with a cold, dry heat.
"Can she be brought back?"
"In this facility? No. The Empire will only see her as broken equipment now," Tomas said, stepping over a piece of Kaelen's armor. He looked at the fallen Knight with total indifference. "Kaelen will survive. And he will be very, very angry. You have perhaps three minutes before the garrison arrives."
I stood up, cradling Aira against my chest. She weighed nothing. She felt like a bundle of dry sticks.
"Why are you helping me, Velin? You're one of them."
Tomas paused, his spectacles reflecting the flickering emergency lights.
"I am a man of logic, Rai. And the current Empire is becoming... illogical. They want to create a world where every cause is controlled by the throne. That is a boring world. A world without variables."
He pointed toward a small, inconspicuous ventilation grate near the floor.
"That leads to the waste disposal chutes. It will dump you in the sewers outside the city walls. From there, you go to the Grey Forest. Find the one they call the 'Drunken General'. Tell him the Strategist sent you a toy that needs fixing."
"Why?" I asked again.
Tomas smiled. It was a thin, cold thing.
"Because I want to see what happens when the variable finally meets the equation."
I didn't thank him. There was no room for gratitude in a world that had just taken my eye and my taste.
I moved toward the grate.
**[Warning: Host Integrity at 11%.]**
**[Internal Bleeding: Critical.]**
**[Recommendation: Cease movement immediately.]**
*Shut up,* I told the system.
I kicked the grate open. The metal screeched and folded under my "Rejection."
I looked back one last time.
Kaelen was stirring. He was pulling himself up, his face a ruin of blood and broken pride. Our eyes met—his pale blue against my solitary, dark one.
"I will find you, Kurotsuki," he wheezed, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth. "I will peel those black veins off your body while you're still awake."
"Try it," I said. "I won't even taste the blood."
I jumped.
The fall was a blur of darkness and the smell of stagnant water. I held Aira tight, shielding her body with mine as we tumbled through the iron bowels of the city.
We hit the waste pool with a splash that felt like hitting concrete.
I dragged us out of the filth, my muscles screaming, my vision flickering like a dying candle.
We were outside.
The city of Astra loomed behind us, a sprawling fortress of white stone and golden light, glowing like a fake sun in the middle of the night.
Ahead of us was the Grey Forest. A place of twisted trees and ancient, hungry shadows.
I laid Aira down on the damp grass. I looked at my hands.
The obsidian scales were growing. They had reached my wrists now. My skin was becoming harder, colder.
I was alive.
But as I looked at the silent girl beside me, and the massive, uncaring city behind me, I realized the "Addiction Engine" of this world had only just begun to turn.
I hadn't won anything.
I had merely survived the first harvest.
I reached out and touched Aira's cheek. It was cold.
"I'll bring you back," I whispered. It wasn't a hero's vow. It was a threat to the universe. "I don't care how many things I have to reject to do it."
I stood up, but my legs gave out. I slumped against a tree, the darkness finally closing in for real this time.
And as my consciousness faded, I heard a sound from the depths of the forest.
The clinking of a bottle against stone.
And a deep, gravelly laugh.
"Well, well," a voice rumbled from the shadows. "The Strategist has a strange sense of humor. He sent me a half-dead demon and a hollow doll."
A man stepped into the moonlight.
He was huge, his hair a wild mane of grey, a massive gourd slung over his shoulder. He smelled of cheap ale and expensive lightning.
This was Shiden Ragnor. The Man who refused to Lead.
He looked at my black veins, then at the hole in my shoulder.
"Kid," he said, taking a long swig from his gourd. "You look like shit."
"Help... her," I managed to say before the world turned into a single, flavorless point of black.
"Help her?" Shiden laughed, but there was no mirth in it. "I can't even help myself. But I suppose I can teach you how to bleed properly."
He reached out and picked me up with one hand, as if I were a discarded rag.
"Sleep now, Little Rejection. Tomorrow, the real pain begins."
**[Causality Synchronization: 25%.]**
**[Hidden Quest Triggered: The Drunken Path.]**
**[Objective: Break the General's Pride.]**
**[Reward: The Logic of the Void.]**
I didn't see the screen. I didn't hear the voice.
I was busy dreaming of a world that didn't exist.
A world where a boy could eat a piece of bread and tell you exactly how it tasted.
And in that dream, I cried.
But when I woke up, my eyes were dry.
Because in Enkai Sekai, tears are just another form of mana.
And I had none left to waste.
***
In the heart of the Astra Dominion, in a room filled with the scent of clinical incense, Tomas Velin stood alone.
He was looking at a map of the world.
He picked up a black stone—the one representing Rai—and placed it in the center of the Grey Forest.
Then, he picked up a golden stone—representing the Empire—and crushed it in his palm.
"The variable has entered the forest," he whispered to the empty room. "Now, let's see if the forest survives the variable."
Outside, the Hounds began to howl.
But for the first time in a century, they weren't howling at the moon.
They were howling in fear.
The Rejection was growing.
And the world was starting to feel the chill.