All fiction reaction to the Agony Series

AGONY SERIES: THE WATCHING A Multiverse Theater React Fiction

PROLOGUE: THE GATHERING

The theater was unlike anything any of them had ever seen.

It stretched endlessly in both directions, rows upon rows of plush crimson seats cascading downward toward a screen so vast it seemed to swallow the far wall entirely. The ceiling above was dark, not merely unlit but dark in a way that suggested it didn't truly exist, as though the room simply faded into an infinite nothing above them. Soft golden sconces lined the walls at intervals, casting a warm but somehow melancholy glow across the assembled faces.

And what faces they were.

They had arrived without warning. One moment they were in their own worlds, their own stories, their own battles and quiet moments and everything in between, and the next they were simply here, deposited into seats with no explanation, no preamble, no choice. Just a theater. Just a screen. Just a quiet, electric sense that something was about to happen that none of them could stop.

The seating arrangement was deliberate.

On the left side of the theater, the heroes sat. The good. The kind. The ones who had fought for something, bled for something, believed in something beyond themselves. They filled the seats in clusters, some recognizing each other from rumors and whispered legends across dimensions, others sitting in confused silence, still trying to understand where they were.

On the right side, the villains sat. The cruel. The ambitious. The ones who had torn worlds apart, who had looked into the eyes of the innocent and chosen destruction anyway. They were quieter than the heroes, for the most part. Some lounged in their seats with the lazy arrogance of predators at rest. Others sat rigid, suspicious, scanning the room with calculating eyes.

And between them, the aisle.

No one crossed it. No one needed to be told not to. The divide was instinctive, magnetic, absolute.

LEFT SIDE — THE HEROES:

In the front rows, Son Goku sat with his arms folded loosely across his chest, his orange gi bright even in the dim theater light. He was leaning back, legs stretched out, looking more confused than concerned. Next to him, Vegeta sat with the rigid posture of a man who refused to be comfortable in any situation he hadn't chosen, his arms crossed tight, his jaw set.

Behind them, Naruto Uzumaki was already fidgeting, turning in his seat to look around, his blue eyes wide. He'd grabbed the armrest between his seat and Sakura Haruno's, who was sitting with her hands in her lap, brow furrowed, already trying to analyze the situation. Kakashi Hatake sat beside her, his single visible eye scanning the room with the practiced calm of a man who had seen too many traps to be caught off guard by one more.

Izuku Midoriya was in the third row, notebook already in hand, muttering to himself. His pen was moving even though there was nothing to write about yet, the habit of preparation so deeply ingrained that his hand moved on instinct. Ochaco Uraraka was beside him, her hands clasped together, and All Might—in his deflated form—sat at the end of the row, his gaunt face thoughtful.

Tanjiro Kamado sat with Nezuko beside him, her small form tucked into her seat, her pink eyes blinking in the low light. Tanjiro's hand rested near hers, a quiet reassurance. His nose twitched, as it always did, reading the room in ways others couldn't.

Monkey D. Luffy was draped over his seat like a rubber puddle, his straw hat tipped forward. He didn't look worried. He rarely did. But there was a stillness to him that his crew would have recognized as attention. Nami sat beside him, already annoyed at the lack of explanation. Zoro was two seats down, eyes closed, apparently asleep but with one hand resting on the hilts at his hip.

Tanjiro could smell something. He wasn't sure what. It wasn't a physical scent exactly. It was more like the feeling of a scent, the memory of something sharp and sad hanging in the air like smoke from a fire that had been burning for a very long time.

Further back, Finn the Human sat with his legs swinging off the edge of his seat, Jake the Dog stretched out beside him in a comfortable blob shape. Steven Universe was a few rows behind them, his hand instinctively touching the gem at his navel, his round face creased with a gentle worry that never quite left him anymore.

Ruby Rose sat with her team: Weiss, Blake, and Yang, the four of them in a tight cluster. Ruby's silver eyes were fixed on the blank screen with the focus of a huntress waiting for the shot.

Star Butterfly was bouncing slightly in her seat, wand clutched in one hand, looking around with the wide-eyed curiosity that had gotten her into and out of trouble in roughly equal measure throughout her life.

Sailor Moon—Usagi Tsukino—was near the middle, clutching her transformation brooch like a security blanket, her long twin-tailed hair draped over the back of her seat. She had a bad feeling. She always had bad feelings before something terrible happened, a sort of cosmic early warning system built into her soul.

And there were others. Edward Elric with his automail arm resting on the armrest, his golden eyes sharp. Gon Freecss, sitting forward with eager tension. Asta, barely containing the urge to shout. Hinata Hyuga, quiet and watchful. Erza Scarlet, armored even here. Saitama, looking bored, one hand propping up his chin. Mash Burnedead, sitting politely with her hands on her knees.

Heroes upon heroes, legends upon legends, all gathered on the left side of a theater none of them had chosen to enter.

RIGHT SIDE — THE VILLAINS:

The right side was quieter, but the silence had teeth.

Frieza sat in the front row as though it were a throne, one leg crossed over the other, his tail curling lazily behind him. His wine-red eyes surveyed the theater with the bored contempt of a being who considered everything beneath him until proven otherwise.

Beside him—though not by choice—Muzan Kibutsuji sat with perfect posture, his pale face expressionless, his red eyes catching the light like embers. His fingers were laced together in his lap. He did not fidget. He did not blink.

Madara Uchiha occupied a seat in the second row, his arms folded, his Rinnegan and Sharingan eyes both active, casting faint purple and red glows in the dim theater. He radiated power the way a bonfire radiates heat: passively, inevitably, without effort or concern.

All For One sat shrouded, his destroyed face hidden partially in shadow, but the smile—that terrible, knowing smile—was visible. He looked comfortable. He always looked comfortable. That was part of what made him terrifying.

Aizen Sosuke was further back, one hand resting against his cheek, his brown eyes half-lidded with an expression that suggested he had already figured out what was about to happen and found it moderately interesting.

Dio Brando lounged with the theatrical arrogance that defined him, one arm thrown over the back of his seat, golden hair catching the light. His red eyes gleamed with predatory amusement.

Hisoka Morow sat with his legs crossed, shuffling a deck of cards between his fingers, his yellow eyes scanning the heroes' side with an interest that made several of them instinctively tense.

Bill Cipher—somehow occupying a seat despite being a floating triangle—hovered just above his chair, his single eye darting around the room with manic glee.

Griffith sat with an almost angelic calm, his white hair framing a face so beautiful it was difficult to reconcile with the atrocities attached to his name. His blue eyes were fixed on the screen with an expression that could be mistaken for serenity.

Overhaul—Kai Chisaki—sat with gloved hands folded precisely, his golden eyes narrowed above his plague mask. Mahito was beside him, slouching with the casual cruelty of youth, his stitched face twisted in a lazy grin.

Sukuna occupied a seat that seemed to strain under the weight of his cursed energy, his four arms folded across his massive chest, all four eyes half-closed.

And others. Doflamingo, grinning behind his sunglasses. Blackbeard, laughing at nothing. Tomura Shigaraki, scratching his neck. Father from Amestris, sitting with philosophical patience. The Lich from the Land of Ooo, a cold void in the shape of a person.

Villains upon villains, monsters upon monsters, all gathered on the right side.

And between the two groups, the aisle.

The lights dimmed further.

Every conversation, every murmur, every shuffled card and nervous fidget stopped simultaneously, as though the theater itself had pressed a finger to its lips and whispered hush.

The screen flickered.

And then, in stark white text against absolute black, words appeared:

⚠ WARNING ⚠

The following contains depictions of:

TORTURE

BLOOD

CRUELTY

Pushed to the possible and theoretical limit of what can be inflicted upon living beings.

Viewer discretion is not merely advised.

It is begged.

The silence that followed was different from the silence before. The first had been the quiet of anticipation. This was the quiet of a room full of beings who had all, in one way or another, experienced or inflicted suffering, suddenly being told that what they were about to see would test even their limits.

Goku unfolded his arms. His expression shifted from confusion to something sharper. Beside him, Vegeta's jaw tightened by a fraction.

Naruto read the words twice. Then a third time. His fidgeting stopped.

Deku's pen froze mid-stroke. He looked at the screen, then down at his notebook, then back at the screen. He slowly closed the notebook.

Tanjiro's hand found Nezuko's and held it. She looked up at him. He didn't look back. His eyes were fixed on the warning, and his face—the face that had seen his family slaughtered, that had fought demons and tasted death more times than any boy his age should have—had gone pale.

On the right side, Frieza read the warning with one raised brow ridge. A small, intrigued smile touched his lips. "Possible and theoretical limit," he murmured. "How... ambitious."

Muzan said nothing. But his fingers, laced together in his lap, pressed harder against each other.

Madara's eyes narrowed slightly. Not with fear. With interest.

All For One's smile widened.

Aizen tilted his head. "Interesting framing," he said to no one in particular. "It doesn't say fictional limit. It says possible and theoretical."

Griffith's serene expression didn't change. But something behind his eyes—something very far back, in a place he'd locked away centuries ago—stirred.

The warning faded.

The screen went black again.

Then, slowly, new text appeared:

AGONY SERIES

Part 1: Worship

The title sat on the screen in letters that seemed to have weight, seemed to press against the fabric of the screen as though trying to push through into the theater itself. The word Worship was rendered in a font that was almost beautiful, almost holy, the kind of lettering you'd find in ancient religious texts or carved into the walls of cathedrals.

But the word Agony above it bled. Not literally—not yet—but the letters were rendered in a way that suggested they were straining, pulling apart, as though the word itself was in pain.

Steven Universe gripped the armrests of his seat. His gem glowed faintly pink—a stress response he'd never fully learned to control.

Finn looked at Jake. Jake looked at Finn. Neither said anything. Jake's shapeshifted form pulled in a little tighter, a little closer.

Usagi—Sailor Moon—clutched her brooch harder. Her eyes were glistening already, and nothing had even happened yet. She could feel it. She could feel the weight of what was coming the way she could feel dark energy, and it was pressing down on her like an ocean.

"I don't want to watch this," she whispered.

No one answered, because no one could leave.

The screen changed.

EPISODE 1: THE TELLING (Explain and Basics)

A voice filled the theater.

It was a man's voice—warm, deep, resonant. The kind of voice that belonged behind a podium or beside a fireplace, the kind of voice that drew you in and made you lean forward, because surely anything said in that voice must be worth hearing. It was the voice of a storyteller, and it carried with it the faint, comfortable authority of someone who had told many stories before and knew exactly how to shape the words so they landed softly.

The Narrator appeared on screen.

He was older, perhaps sixty, with a weathered face and kind eyes and silver hair that swept back from a high forehead. He was seated in a simple wooden chair in a room with no other furniture, no decoration, no distraction. Just him. Just the chair. Just the faint warm light from a source that wasn't visible.

He smiled. It was a gentle smile.

And he began to speak.

"Every story," the Narrator said, "begins the same way."

His hands rested on his knees. His posture was relaxed, open, the posture of a man at peace with the words he was about to say.

"There is a world. There are people in that world. They love. They fight. They build. They dream. They struggle against something—an enemy, a flaw, a force of nature—and in the struggling, they discover who they truly are."

He paused, letting the words breathe.

"And then, at the end, the struggle resolves. Good triumphs or evil prevails, a lesson is learned or a warning is issued, and the story closes like a book being shut, and the reader sets it down and carries something new inside them."

In the theater, the heroes recognized this. It was their story he was describing. The fundamental architecture of narrative, the skeleton upon which every tale they'd ever lived had been built.

Deku was nodding unconsciously. This was the structure of heroism itself—the journey, the challenge, the triumph. He'd studied it. He'd lived it.

Naruto's lips moved slightly, forming shapes that might have been believe it, the instinctive response of a boy who had fought his way from nothing to everything through the sheer force of his refusal to accept defeat.

Even on the right side, there were nods. Madara recognized the shape of it. He'd been part of such stories—he'd been the struggle others defined themselves against. Aizen understood narrative perhaps better than anyone in the room; he'd spent centuries crafting his own.

The Narrator continued.

"This is what we expect. This is what we are told. That stories have arcs, that pain has purpose, that suffering leads somewhere. That there is a reason for the tears, a reward for the endurance, a light at the end of whatever dark tunnel the characters are forced to crawl through."

His voice was so warm. So reassuring. The theater leaned in.

"And this expectation—this trust that the audience places in the storyteller—is perhaps the most sacred contract in all of human creation. The promise that if you follow me into the dark, I will bring you back into the light."

A pause.

Longer this time.

The warmth in his voice didn't fade, exactly. But something underneath it shifted. Like the ground beneath a house settling by a fraction of an inch—not enough to notice, but enough that somewhere, a crack appeared in a wall that had been solid moments before.

"We tell ourselves that this is how the universe works. That all pain is temporary. That all cruelty has a counter. That somewhere, buried beneath the suffering like a seed beneath the frost, there is meaning. Purpose. A reason."

His hands, which had been resting on his knees, now clasped together. It was a subtle movement. But in a frame that had been perfectly, carefully still, it was seismic.

"We tell ourselves this," he repeated, softer now.

And then his eyes changed.

It was not a dramatic shift. There was no thunderclap, no sudden lighting change, no crescendo of ominous music. It was just... his eyes. They had been warm. Kind. The eyes of a storyteller who loved his craft.

And now they were something else.

Now they were the eyes of a man who was standing at the edge of something vast and terrible and looking down into it, and the warmth was still there—that was the worst part—the warmth was still there, but it was the warmth of a man who was about to tell you the worst thing you've ever heard and was sorry about it, genuinely, deeply sorry, but was going to tell you anyway, because—

"But the truth..."

His voice was quieter. The resonance was gone. The confidence was gone. What was left was stripped bare, a voice standing naked before an audience, and it trembled.

"...is much simpler..."

He swallowed. On screen, his throat moved. His clasped hands tightened. His jaw worked, the muscles in his cheeks bunching and relaxing and bunching again, the physical evidence of a man wrestling with the words in his mouth as though they were living things that didn't want to be spoken and he didn't want to speak them and yet—

"...and..."

He stopped.

The word hung in the air. And. A conjunction. A bridge between what was known and what was about to be known. A threshold.

He didn't finish.

The Narrator sat there, in his simple chair, in his simple room, and his mouth was slightly open, the shape of the unspoken word still pressed against his lips, and his eyes—

His eyes.

They filled the screen. The camera had moved closer, or the world had shrunk, and now there was nothing but his face, and his face said everything, and what it said was this:

I don't want to tell you this.

I don't want you to know.

But it is the truth, and the truth is that nobody has told you, and the reason nobody has told you is not because they didn't know but because they knew, they all knew, and they were afraid, and they were right to be afraid, because this truth does not free you, it does not enlighten you, it does not make you stronger or wiser or better, it simply IS, and the knowing of it will take something from you that you will never get back.

And I am sorry.

But I have no choice.

Because someone has to say it.

He closed his eyes.

The theater was silent.

Utterly, completely, profoundly silent.

Goku's hands were on his knees now, gripping. He didn't know why. His body knew before his mind did—the Saiyan instinct that had kept him alive through a thousand battles was screaming at him that danger was here, that something was coming, that he needed to move, but there was nowhere to move to.

Vegeta was staring at the screen with an expression that would have alarmed anyone who knew him. Because Vegeta, Prince of Saiyans, who had watched his planet die, who had served a tyrant and been broken by one, who had learned through agony after agony to build something worth protecting—Vegeta recognized that face. He recognized the expression of someone forced to speak truth that would shatter the listeners.

He recognized it because he'd seen it in the mirror, the day he finally admitted to himself what Frieza had really done to him.

Naruto had stopped fidgeting entirely. He sat perfectly still, his blue eyes wide, his pupils contracted. Kurama stirred inside him, not with aggression but with something older, something primal—the ancient fox recognized the shape of dread.

Sakura's medical instincts had kicked in without her permission. She was reading the Narrator's body language the way she'd read a patient's chart: elevated stress hormones, probable cortisol flooding, muscular tension consistent with extreme psychological distress. Her clinical assessment was automatic and precise and utterly useless, because what she was seeing wasn't a medical condition. It was a man who was about to crack open the shell of reality and show them what was inside.

Deku's notebook was on the floor. He didn't remember dropping it. His hands were covering his mouth, a gesture so instinctive he didn't even know he was doing it.

Tanjiro's enhanced sense of smell hit him like a wall. Through the screen—through the impossible barrier between their reality and the one being projected—he could smell it. Not with his nose. With something deeper. Something in his blood that understood suffering the way fish understand water. And what he smelled was—

Despair.

Not ordinary despair. Not the despair of a battle lost or a friend hurt or a setback endured. This was architectural despair. Foundational. It was despair baked into the bedrock of a world, woven into the air, dissolved in the water, pressed into the soil. It was a despair so complete that it had stopped being an emotion and had become a law of physics.

Nezuko made a small sound beside him. A soft, high, frightened sound. And Tanjiro held her hand tighter and said nothing because there was nothing to say.

Luffy was sitting up straight. His hat was pulled low over his eyes, but beneath the brim, his expression had changed. The lazy comfort was gone. What replaced it was the look he wore when someone threatened his crew—not anger yet, but the promise of it, the gathering storm.

On the right side, the reactions were different but no less profound.

Frieza's intrigued smile had faded. Not entirely—Frieza's expressions never fully disappeared; they merely retreated to lurk behind his eyes—but the amusement had been replaced by something more cautious. He was a conqueror. He understood the weight of truths that could unmake civilizations. And the Narrator's face, in that frozen moment of unspoken words, carried the weight of exactly that.

Muzan's perfect composure had developed a single, hairline fracture. His eyes had widened by a millimeter. For a being who had spent a thousand years perfecting his mask, it was the equivalent of screaming.

Madara leaned forward. Just slightly. Just enough that the shift was visible. His Rinnegan spun slowly, analyzing, processing.

All For One's smile, for the first time, held something other than amusement. It held... recognition. As though he were seeing something familiar. Something he'd encountered before, perhaps, in the depths of his centuries-long existence.

Aizen's hand had left his cheek. Both hands were now resting on the armrests, and his half-lidded eyes were fully open for the first time since the screening began.

Griffith—

Griffith hadn't moved. Hadn't changed. His angelic face was exactly as serene as it had been before. But there was something wrong with the serenity now. It was too perfect. Too still. Like a painting of peace rather than peace itself, and somewhere behind the canvas, something was pressing outward.

The Narrator opened his eyes again.

The screen shifted.

What replaced him was not a scene so much as a world.

It unfolded slowly, the way dawn breaks over a landscape—first the vague shapes, then the details, then the full, overwhelming scope of it. And it was a world that looked, at first glance, almost normal. Almost earthlike. There were cities and fields and mountains and oceans. There were people—human, or close enough—going about the business of living.

But something was wrong.

It took a moment to identify. Not the architecture, which was functional if unadorned. Not the landscape, which was neither beautiful nor ugly. Not the people themselves, who moved and spoke and interacted in ways that were recognizably human.

It was their eyes.

Every single one of them had the same look in their eyes.

It was not fear, exactly. Not sadness. Not resignation. It was something beyond all of those things, something that encompassed them and transcended them. It was the look of people who understood something so fundamental about their existence that it had rewritten their operating code, replaced whatever had been there before with a single, immutable truth that colored every moment of every day of every life from first breath to last.

The camera moved through the world, showing crowds, showing individuals, showing children and adults and the elderly, and they all had it. The look. The knowing.

And then the camera found a structure.

It was enormous. It dwarfed everything around it. A temple, or a cathedral, or something that had no name in any language the viewers knew, a building so massive that it seemed to bend the landscape around it, not physically but conceptually, as though the building was the point and everything else was merely the space the building had not yet consumed.

People flowed toward it like water toward a drain. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Walking in orderly lines with that look in their eyes, moving with the quiet purpose of people fulfilling an obligation so deeply embedded in their existence that questioning it would be like questioning gravity.

They were going to worship.

The Narrator's voice returned, but it was different now. The warmth was gone. What replaced it was a kind of raw, exhausted honesty that sounded like it hurt to produce.

"They call him Lord."

The screen showed the inside of the temple. Vast. Echoing. Filled with people on their knees, faces pressed to the floor, bodies prostrate in a posture of total submission. At the far end of the temple, on a raised platform that seemed to extend upward into infinity, there was... something. A presence. A shape that the camera refused to fully capture, as though the lens itself couldn't bear to look directly at it.

"It was never explained who he was."

The camera moved among the worshippers, close, intimate, showing their faces as they pressed against the cold stone floor. And their expressions—

They weren't afraid.

That was the thing. That was the thing that made the watching heroes shift in their seats and the watching villains go still. The worshippers weren't afraid. Their faces were alight with something that looked horrifyingly like genuine devotion. Genuine love. Genuine reverence so deep it had restructured their very being.

"It was never explained why."

The camera found a woman's face. She was perhaps forty, with weathered skin and dark hair and eyes that shone with tears—tears of devotion, not pain—and the look in those eyes said everything.

It said: You don't understand. You can't understand. You haven't stood where I've stood. You haven't seen what I've seen. And even if I told you, even if I showed you, even if I opened my chest and let you look inside at the truth of what I know, you still wouldn't understand, because understanding this isn't something you do with your mind. It's something that happens to your soul.

It said: He is Lord. And you are not even close to knowing anything about him.

It said: And I pity you for that.

"But the look in their eyes," the Narrator continued, his voice cracking now, a visible fracture in the composure of a man who was forcing himself to narrate the unnarratable, "said everything. This was Respect. Not the respect born of fear or power or authority. This was the respect of beings who had glimpsed something so far beyond their comprehension that the only response—the only possible, sane response—was to kneel."

"And..."

The Narrator paused again.

"You weren't even close to knowing anything about him."

The way he said it. The quiet, absolute finality. It wasn't a taunt or a challenge. It was a statement of fact so fundamental that arguing with it would be like arguing with mathematics. The Lord was something. And that something was beyond comprehension. And the worshippers knew this, and the knowing had become their entire world.

In the theater, the weight of it settled.

Goku's hands had tightened on his knees. He'd fought gods. He'd trained with gods. He'd surpassed gods. And yet the look in those worshippers' eyes—that absolute, unwavering certainty—disturbed him in a way that power never had. Because power he understood. Power he could measure, match, exceed. But this wasn't about power. This was about something else entirely.

"That's real," Vegeta murmured beside him. His voice was barely audible. "Whatever they're feeling. It's real."

Goku glanced at him.

"I've seen that look before," Vegeta continued, his dark eyes fixed on the screen. "In the eyes of slaves who loved their chains. In the eyes of the Saiyans who served Frieza not because they had to but because they'd forgotten they were anything else."

On the villains' side, Frieza heard this. His tail flicked. Once.

Naruto was watching the worshippers with an expression of deep, troubled recognition. He'd grown up despised. He'd grown up worshipping the idea of being Hokage, of being seen, of being acknowledged. He understood devotion. He understood what it meant to give yourself entirely to something larger than yourself. And he understood, with a cold clarity that settled in his stomach like a stone, that what these people were feeling was genuine.

That was the terrifying part. Not that they were forced. Not that they were brainwashed. That they believed.

Sakura saw it too. "They're not under any jutsu," she said quietly. "There's no external influence. They're choosing this."

Kakashi said nothing. His eye was fixed on the screen, and behind his mask, his expression was unreadable.

Tanjiro was crying.

Not sobbing, not breaking down. Just... crying. Tears running silently down his cheeks as the scent of that world's despair continued to wash over him, and he understood—with the empathy that defined him, the empathy that let him feel for demons and humans alike—that these people were drowning in something they called faith, and they were calling the drowning devotion, and they didn't know the difference because there was no one left to tell them.

Nezuko pressed closer to him. She couldn't speak, but her eyes said enough.

On the right side, Aizen had his chin resting on his steepled fingers now, his pose contemplative. "The architecture of belief," he said softly. "Fascinating. No coercion necessary. No force required. Just... knowing. Just the weight of truth, pressed against the human soul until the soul reshapes itself to accommodate."

Madara's Rinnegan swirled. "This Lord," he said. "Whatever he is. He is beyond the scope of what these people can comprehend. And rather than rebel against that incomprehension, they worship it."

"As they should," Frieza said. But his voice lacked its usual conviction.

Griffith watched the worshippers. His face was a mask of perfect calm, but his hand—his right hand, the one that bore the mark of sacrifice—had curled into a fist on the armrest. He understood what it meant to be worshipped. He understood what it cost.

"But," the Narrator said.

And on that word, the screen changed.

The warmth of the temple was gone. The devotional tears, the prostrate bodies, the shining eyes—all of it vanished, replaced by a darkness that was not the absence of light but the presence of something that consumed it.

And in the center of that darkness, a single word appeared.

BUT

It was rendered in blood red. Not metaphorically. The letters bled. They dripped. They pulsed. They throbbed on the screen like a wound that had just been opened, and the crimson ran down the black background like tears down a face, like blood down skin, like—

The word hung there. Throbbing. Bleeding. A warning and a readiness and a promise and a threat all wrapped into three letters that filled the massive screen from edge to edge.

Every hero in the theater went rigid.

Every villain in the theater went still.

The word stayed for five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. Long enough that it burned into their retinas, long enough that when they blinked, they could still see it—BUT—carved into the darkness of their closed eyelids.

And then the Narrator spoke again.

His voice was barely a whisper.

"This is the cruel part."

"The Lord needed hatred."

The words landed like a physical blow. Several heroes flinched. Even some villains shifted.

"Negative emotions. Any and all negative emotions. Every year."

The screen showed the worshippers again, but now the camera was looking at different ones—or perhaps the same ones, at a different time. And their eyes, those shining devoted eyes, now held something else alongside the devotion. Something that made the devotion more terrible rather than less.

Knowledge.

They knew what was required. They had always known. It was part of the worship. Part of the contract. Part of the truth that had reshaped their souls.

"Most of them would say it was just that. Negative emotions. Collected yearly. A tax. A tithe. A price paid for... whatever it was the Lord gave them in return."

A pause.

"But..."

The word appeared on screen again.

BUT

Blood red. Bleeding. Throbbing.

And this time it stayed longer. This time the blood dripped further, pooled at the bottom of the screen, began to rise, filling the frame from the bottom like a room filling with water, and the word floated in its own blood, and the theater watched in mounting horror as the red climbed higher, higher, until—

"It was..."

The Narrator's voice was destroyed. There was no other word for it. Whatever mechanism produced human speech, his had been taken apart and reassembled wrong, and what came out was the sound of a man speaking through ruins.

"...Worship..."

The screen showed what Worship meant.

An old man.

He was sitting in his home. A simple home. A poor home. He was alone, because his family was at the temple, because it was that time, and he had known it was coming, and he had sat down in his chair and he had waited, because what else could he do?

A figure approached.

A worshipper. Young, strong, with that look in his eyes—that devoted, shining, terrible look—and he walked toward the old man with the calm, purposeful stride of someone performing a sacred duty.

And what he did—

What he did—

The theater watched.

The theater watched as the worshipper began.

It started with words. Precise, calculated, surgical words designed to find the most vulnerable parts of the old man's psyche and press. Words about his failures. Words about his dead wife. Words about the son who had stopped visiting. Words spoken not in cruelty—that was the horror—but in devotion, with the same shining eyes and the same reverent tone, as though each wound inflicted was a prayer, each sob extracted was a hymn.

The old man broke down in minutes. He wept. He begged. He screamed.

And the worshipper continued.

The verbal assault gave way to physical. Not beatings—not at first. First it was the stripping away of comfort. The chair taken. The blankets taken. Food withheld. Water withheld. The old man left on the cold floor of his own home, shivering and weeping, while the worshipper knelt beside him and prayed over his suffering, whispering thanks to the Lord for this gift of negative emotion, this offering of pain.

Then it became physical.

The theater saw things that cannot and should not be described in full. The systematic, methodical, devotional breaking of a human being—not to kill him, never to kill him, because dead men produce no suffering—but to reduce him to a state of pure, undiluted negative emotion. Pain beyond the threshold of consciousness. Despair beyond the threshold of sanity. Terror beyond the threshold of—

The old man's screams filled the theater. They echoed off the walls and the ceiling that wasn't there and they bounced back down and mixed with the sounds from the screen and the result was a cacophony of anguish that seemed to come from everywhere at once, seemed to seep into the seats and the floor and the air itself.

And through it all, the worshipper's eyes shone.

Tanjiro buckled.

He folded forward in his seat as though he'd been punched in the stomach, and a sound came out of him—a raw, animal sound of sympathetic anguish that silenced the nearby rows. Nezuko was already at his side, her small hands on his back, her pink eyes wide with fear for her brother, because Tanjiro felt everything, he felt the old man's pain as though it were his own, and the scent of suffering coming through that screen was a tsunami and he was standing on the shore.

"Tanjiro!" Zenitsu—who had appeared somewhere in the middle rows, blond hair disheveled—shouted from three rows back, his own face white with terror.

"I'm okay," Tanjiro managed, but he wasn't okay. He was shaking. His whole body was shaking.

Goku stood up from his seat. Not to leave. Just to stand. His fists were clenched at his sides, and the air around him vibrated with restrained power. His hair flickered—gold for an instant, the brief, involuntary flash of Super Saiyan triggered not by combat but by rage.

"This isn't right," he said. His voice was low. Deadly. "This isn't a fight. This isn't battle. This is—"

"Sit down, Kakarot," Vegeta said. His voice was granite. "We can't interfere. It's a screen."

"I KNOW THAT!" Goku's shout was so loud that several people on both sides jumped. He stared at the screen with eyes that had fought Frieza, Cell, Buu, Jiren, Broly—eyes that had stared into the face of annihilation countless times and never blinked—and those eyes were burning.

He sat down. But he didn't unclench his fists.

Naruto's hand had moved to his own stomach, to the seal that had once held Kurama. Inside him, the memory of what remained of Kurama stirred, and the fox's voice echoed in his mind: This is old, kit. This is the oldest thing. Cruelty for cruelty's sake. I've seen it for centuries.

"This isn't cruelty for cruelty's sake," Naruto whispered back, and the words tasted like poison. "That's the problem. They think it's holy."

Sakura had both hands pressed flat against her thighs to stop them from trembling. Her medical training was screaming at her—cataloguing the injuries, assessing the damage, calculating survival probability—and the fact that she couldn't do anything, couldn't heal anyone, couldn't intervene, was a kind of torture all its own.

Kakashi's eye was closed. His hands were folded. He looked, to anyone who didn't know him, perfectly calm. But his hands were trembling, and behind his closed eye, he was seeing Rin. He was seeing Obito. He was seeing every failure, every loss, every student he couldn't protect, and the faces were blurring with the old man's face on screen, and—

"Kakashi-sensei," Sakura said quietly.

"I'm fine," he said. He wasn't.

Deku had his hands pressed over his mouth, his green eyes enormous and brimming with tears that he couldn't seem to stop. His entire body was rigid with the effort of not screaming, not moving, not—his whole life, his entire life, had been built around the principle that when someone was suffering, you helped. You ran toward the danger. You extended your hand. You said I am here. That was what being a hero meant.

And he couldn't do any of it.

"This is wrong," he said through his fingers. "This is wrong, this is wrong, this is—"

"We know," Ochaco said beside him, and her voice cracked, and her hand found his arm and gripped it.

All Might—deflated, diminished, a shadow of the Symbol of Peace—sat at the end of the row with his head bowed and his skeletal hands clasped between his knees. Blood leaked from the corner of his mouth—it always did when he was stressed—and he wiped it away without looking, his sunken eyes fixed on the screen.

I am here.

The words echoed in his hollow chest like a bell in an empty church.

But I'm not. Not there. Not for him.

Luffy's expression had changed completely. The lazy ease was gone, replaced by something thunderous and terrible. His eyes were shadowed beneath the brim of his hat, and his jaw was set with the kind of fury that had toppled governments and shattered empires. Beside him, Nami had her hand over her mouth, tears streaking her face. Zoro's eyes were open now, and they were hard as steel.

"That old man," Luffy said, and his voice was so quiet it was almost inaudible, "didn't do anything."

"No," Zoro confirmed.

"They're hurting him because they want to."

"Because they think they should," Nami corrected, and the distinction was somehow worse.

Edward Elric was gripping his automail arm with his flesh hand, the metal creaking under the pressure. His golden eyes were wide and horrified and furious. "Equivalent exchange," he muttered. "That's not—there's no exchange here. There's no balance. There's nothing being given back. It's just—"

"Taking," Alphonse—who had appeared beside him—finished softly.

Steven Universe was crying. Not the quiet tears of someone managing their emotions, but the open, helpless crying of someone whose defining gift—empathy, compassion, the ability to see the good in everyone—had become a curse. Because he could see these worshippers, and he could see their devotion, and he could see that in their minds they were doing something good, and the dissonance between their belief and their actions was tearing his understanding of the world in half.

His gem was glowing brighter. Pink. The color of his mother's shield, the color of his healing powers, the color of everything he was—and it meant nothing here.

Finn the Human was rigid in his seat, his hands balled into fists so tight his knuckles had gone white. Jake was wrapped around him—not in his usual casual drape but in a protective cocoon, as though he could shield Finn from what they were seeing by simply covering more of him.

"Dude," Finn said.

"I know, buddy," Jake said.

"That's—that's not—heroes stop that. Heroes stop that."

"I know."

Star Butterfly's wand was sparking. Literally sparking, small motes of magical energy popping and fizzling at its tip as her emotional state destabilized her magic. Her eyes were wide, her cheeks flushed, and her free hand was gripping the armrest so hard it had begun to crack.

Sailor Moon—Usagi—was sobbing.

Not quietly. Not gracefully. She was sobbing the way she had sobbed when she lost her friends, when the world had ended around her, when everything she loved had been stripped away. Because Usagi Tsukino felt everything, it was her greatest weakness and her greatest strength, and what she was feeling now was the raw, unfiltered agony of an old man being systematically destroyed by people who thought they were praying.

"Stop it," she whispered. "Please stop it. Please—"

No one stopped it.

On the right side, the reactions were different.

Frieza watched in silence. His face was unreadable, which was itself unusual—Frieza was theatrical by nature, a being who wore his cruelty like a crown. But now his expression was blank. Smooth. Empty. And the emptiness was telling, because Frieza had done worse. He had done so much worse. He had destroyed planets, murdered billions, tortured Vegeta as a child, killed Krillin in front of Goku, committed atrocity after atrocity with a smile on his face.

And yet.

And yet something about what was on the screen made his tail go still.

Perhaps it was the devotion. Frieza's cruelty had always been personal—the cruelty of a tyrant who enjoyed the suffering of others because it affirmed his superiority. What was on the screen was something else entirely. It was cruelty without ego. Cruelty as worship. And that distinction—the removal of the self from the equation—made it something that even Frieza, Emperor of the Universe, found... disquieting.

"Hmm," he said. Just that. Just hmm.

Muzan Kibutsuji watched with absolute stillness. His red eyes did not blink. His pale face did not move. He was a being who had spent a millennium consuming humans, who had created demons from human flesh, who had torn families apart with less thought than a child gives to pulling wings off flies. He should have found this routine.

He didn't.

Because Muzan understood something about the nature of evil that most villains didn't. He understood that evil with purpose was different from evil without purpose, and evil done in the name of worship—genuine, devoted, wholehearted worship—was different from both. What was on the screen was not evil at all, by its own framework. It was the most sacred act imaginable. And the gap between what it was and what it looked like was an abyss that Muzan found himself standing at the edge of, staring down.

His fingers tightened against each other. Just slightly. Just enough.

Madara watched with the eyes of a man who had seen the Infinite Tsukuyomi, who had tried to trap the entire world in a dream because he believed reality was too cruel to be borne. And what he saw on the screen confirmed everything he had ever believed and made him wish it hadn't.

"This is why I wanted the dream," he murmured. Not to anyone. To himself. To the ghost of Hashirama. "Because reality... allows this."

All For One's smile had returned, but it was different now. Less amused. More... understanding. As though he recognized something in the structure of this world, something that resonated with his own philosophy. Power as worship. Suffering as offering. The complete, total subjugation of individual will to a higher purpose.

"Beautiful," he whispered. And he meant it.

Aizen watched with his chin on his steepled fingers and his eyes fully open and his mind—that vast, labyrinthine, incomprehensible mind—turning over what he saw with the precision of a jeweler examining a diamond.

"The Lord doesn't need to enforce anything," he said. "He doesn't need armies or threats or punishments. He has something better. He has truth. He is what he is, and they see him for what he is, and the seeing breaks them so completely that they rebuild themselves around the worship. No coercion required."

He paused.

"That is the most efficient form of control I have ever witnessed."

Dio Brando had stopped lounging. He was sitting up straight, his red eyes fixed on the screen, his expression uncharacteristically serious. Dio understood worship—he had demanded it, sought it, built his entire existence around the idea that he deserved to stand above all others. But what he was seeing was worship on a scale and with an intensity that dwarfed his wildest ambitions, and it wasn't directed at anything he could understand.

"What is this Lord?" he demanded of no one in particular. "What is he that they worship him like this?"

No one answered. Because no one knew.

Griffith.

Griffith sat in his seat with his hands folded and his white hair gleaming and his beautiful face perfectly, terrifyingly serene, and he watched the old man being destroyed, and he watched the worshipper's shining eyes, and he said nothing.

Because Griffith understood.

Griffith, who had sacrificed everything he loved to ascend to godhood. Griffith, who had walked through the Eclipse and emerged divine and monstrous and alone. Griffith, who had built his kingdom on a foundation of betrayal and suffering and the broken bodies of his comrades.

He understood worship that cost everything.

He understood it because he had demanded it.

His right hand, curled into a fist on the armrest, trembled once. Just once. Then it was still.

The screen continued.

The text appeared again. Blood red. Bleeding.

FOR EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE.

Each word appeared separately, punctuated by a heartbeat sound that throbbed through the theater's speakers like a dying pulse.

FOR.

Thud.

EVERYTHING.

Thud.

AND.

Thud.

EVERYONE.

THUD.

And then the babies.

The screen showed a nursery. Clean. Well-lit. Rows of cribs stretching into the distance, more cribs than should fit in any building, more cribs than any city should need, because this wasn't one nursery—this was every nursery, and the camera was showing them all at once, a mosaic of infant life rendered in soft blankets and tiny hands and round faces and—

Crying.

The babies were crying.

All of them.

Every single one.

It started as background noise—the familiar, almost comforting sound of infants fussing, the universal cry of the newly born demanding attention, food, warmth, comfort. But it didn't stop. And as the camera lingered, and the sound grew, and the cries layered over each other and built and built and built—

In the background.

Behind the cribs.

Barely visible, almost out of frame, but there—

The worshippers.

Doing their usual thing.

The camera didn't focus on them. It didn't need to. The audience's imagination—forced to fill in the gaps between the wailing infants in the foreground and the shadowy figures moving in the background—was worse than anything the screen could show. What were they doing? What were they doing to make those babies cry louder, and louder, and louder—

The cries crescendoed. They became screams. Infant screams—the most primal, most disturbing sound the human animal can produce—filling the theater with a wall of anguish that bypassed the brain entirely and struck directly at something ancient and protective and furious in every being present.

The theater broke.

Not physically. Emotionally. The heroes' side erupted in a chorus of reactions that overlapped and merged into a single, overwhelming wave of horror and rage and grief.

Goku was standing again. This time Vegeta didn't tell him to sit. Vegeta was standing too.

"They're BABIES!" Goku's voice shook the theater. His aura flared—gold, then blue, then a blinding white that made several people shield their eyes. "THEY'RE HURTING BABIES!"

"Kakarot—" Vegeta started, and then stopped, because what was there to say? His own eyes were wet. The Prince of all Saiyans, the man who had once slaughtered entire civilizations without a second thought, was crying, and he didn't seem to notice or care.

Because Vegeta had children. Trunks. Bulla. And the sound of those babies screaming had reached into his chest and grabbed his heart and squeezed, and he was standing not because he thought he could do anything but because sitting felt like complicity.

Naruto was on his feet, shaking violently, his eyes cycling between blue and red as emotion and chakra destabilized. "No," he said, and his voice had a double-toned quality—his own and the remnant of Kurama, speaking in unison. "No, no, no, NO—"

"Naruto, you need to breathe," Kakashi said, and his own voice was barely holding together.

"THEY'RE BABIES, KAKASHI-SENSEI!"

"I know."

"THEY'RE JUST BABIES!"

"I know."

Deku had stopped trying to maintain composure. Tears streamed down his face unchecked, and his hands had left his mouth and were now gripping the seat in front of him, the metal bending under One For All–enhanced fingers. Beside him, Ochaco was crying silently, and All Might—

All Might was shaking.

Not standing. Not speaking. Just shaking, his skeletal frame vibrating like a tuning fork struck by a hammer, and the blood at the corner of his mouth was flowing freely now, and his sunken eyes were hollow and vast and filled with a grief that went beyond words, because this was what he'd failed to stop. Not this specifically—he didn't even know this world existed—but the principle. The idea that somewhere, in some reality, the strong preyed upon the utterly helpless, and there was no Symbol of Peace to stand between them.

Tanjiro was doubled over, Nezuko holding him, his enhanced senses drowning him in a flood of infant terror and pain that no human being should have to process. Tears and snot and anguish poured from him in equal measure, and the sound he was making—a low, keening wail—harmonized with the screaming babies on screen in a way that made several nearby heroes look away.

Luffy's hand was on his hat. Pressed tight. The shadow beneath the brim was absolute, hiding his eyes completely. But his other hand—his free hand—was gripping the armrest, and the armrest shattered under the pressure of rubberized fingers that were channeling every ounce of Conqueror's Haki he possessed.

The shockwave rippled outward. Several weaker-willed individuals on both sides of the theater slumped in their seats, unconscious. Even the stronger ones felt it—a pressure wave of pure, royal fury that said, in no uncertain terms, this is unforgivable.

Nami was sobbing into her hands. Zoro had drawn one of his swords—not to fight, there was nothing to fight—but because holding it was the only way he knew to channel what he was feeling into something that wasn't destruction.

Edward Elric had buried his face in his hands. Alphonse was holding his brother, armor arms gentle around flesh shoulders.

Steven Universe had stopped crying. His gem was blazing pink—not the soft glow of earlier but a harsh, angry light that cast long shadows across the nearby seats. His expression had shifted from grief to something harder, something that looked uncomfortably like the face his mother had worn when she'd started a war.

Finn the Human was crying openly, Jake still wrapped around him. Star Butterfly's wand was shooting sparks wildly, small magical discharges that fizzled harmlessly against the theater seats. Ruby Rose had her face pressed against Weiss's shoulder, and Weiss—the Ice Queen of Beacon—was holding her with both arms and not even pretending she wasn't crying too. Blake's cat ears were flat against her head, and Yang's eyes had gone red.

Sailor Moon—Usagi—had stopped sobbing. She had stopped making any sound at all. She sat in her seat with her hands in her lap and her eyes fixed on the screen and the Silver Crystal at her chest was blazing, throwing light across the theater in prismatic arcs, and her face was wet and her lips were trembling and she looked, in that moment, like the thing she truly was beneath the clumsiness and the crying and the failing grades—

A goddess. Staring at an atrocity. And weeping not from weakness but from the sheer, unbearable weight of compassion.

Erza Scarlet had requipped unconsciously—her armor shifting without her command, cycling through forms as her emotional state destabilized her magic. She sat in a half-dozen different armors in as many seconds before settling on her base form, tears streaming down her face.

Saitama—the One Punch Man, the hero who had become so powerful that nothing moved him anymore—was staring at the screen. Just staring. His blank expression hadn't changed. But his fists, resting on his knees, were clenched so tight that his knuckles had gone white, and something in his dead-fish eyes had stirred, something that hadn't stirred in a very long time.

Something that looked like it hurt.

On the right side.

Silence.

A different kind of silence from the heroes' side. Where the heroes were loud in their grief, the villains were quiet in their... something. It wasn't grief, for most of them. But it wasn't nothing, either.

Frieza was looking at the screen with an expression that had no name. His red eyes were fixed on the images of screaming babies, and his face was—empty. Deliberately, forcefully empty. He had ordered the destruction of an entire Saiyan race. He had killed children. He had done so without remorse. And he stood by it.

But.

There was a difference between killing and this. Killing was an end. A conclusion. However cruel, however monstrous, it was finite. What was on that screen was not an end. It was not a conclusion. It was ongoing. It was worship. And the babies didn't die. They cried and cried and the worshippers continued and the babies kept crying and it didn't stop—

"Turn it off," Frieza said.

He said it quietly. Almost too quietly to hear. And the fact that he said it—that Frieza said it—sent a ripple of stunned disbelief through both sides of the theater.

The screen did not turn off.

Muzan Kibutsuji closed his eyes. For the first time since the screening began, his perfect composure broke completely. His jaw tightened. His hands, clasped in his lap, clenched until the knuckles went white. And behind his closed eyes, something moved—something ancient and vast and cold that might, in another being, have been called conscience.

He had eaten children. He had turned children into demons. He had destroyed families and consumed innocents and done so with the casual indifference of a being who considered humans to be food and nothing more.

But he had not done it in worship. He had not done it in devotion. He had done it for survival, for power, for the simple, selfish desire to continue existing. His cruelty had purpose. It had a center. It had him at its core.

This had no center. This was cruelty as ecosystem. Cruelty as religion. Cruelty as the fundamental operating principle of an entire world, and it turned his stomach in ways his own atrocities never had.

Madara's Rinnegan had stopped spinning. His eyes were still. Fixed. And his expression—the expression of a man who had lived and died and been reborn and seen the full scope of human suffering—was one of quiet, absolute recognition.

"The Infinite Tsukuyomi," he said, "was mercy."

No one argued.

All For One's smile was gone.

Simply gone. The face that always smiled, the face that wore amusement like a second skin, the face that had tortured All Might and destroyed countless lives with a grin—it was blank. Neutral. And in the absence of the smile, something else was visible: the faintest, barest trace of what might, in a generous interpretation, have been discomfort.

"This is... thorough," he said. And the word thorough carried a weight that suggested he was reassessing several things about his own philosophy.

Aizen had lowered his hands from his face. His composure was intact—of course it was; Aizen's composure would survive the heat death of the universe—but his eyes were narrower than before, and the contemplative look had been replaced by something sharper. Analytical. As though he were dissecting what he saw with clinical precision because the alternative—feeling it—was unacceptable.

"The inclusion of infants," he said, his voice precise and measured, "is not incidental. It is fundamental. If the worship requires negative emotion from everything and everyone, then there can be no exemptions. No lower limit. No threshold of innocence below which one is protected."

He paused.

"There are no innocents in this world. Not because innocence doesn't exist, but because the system doesn't recognize it."

Dio had gone quiet. His theatrical bravado was absent, replaced by a stillness that was, for Dio Brando, profoundly unsettling. He sat with his hands on his knees and his red eyes fixed on the screen and he was thinking, visibly thinking, and whatever conclusions he was reaching, they weren't ones he enjoyed.

Hisoka had stopped shuffling his cards. They were held loose in one hand, forgotten. His yellow eyes were fixed on the screen with an expression that mixed his usual hunger with something new—something that looked almost like nausea.

Sukuna, the King of Curses, four arms folded, four eyes watching, was... quiet. He who laughed at death, who reveled in destruction, who considered humans to be entertainment at best and insects at worst—he watched the babies scream, and he said nothing, and his silence was louder than any curse he'd ever uttered.

Doflamingo's grin had faded. Blackbeard had stopped laughing. Shigaraki's hand had gone still on his neck.

And Griffith—

Griffith was crying.

One tear. A single tear, tracking down his perfect cheek, catching the light from the screen as it fell. His face was still serene. His posture was still perfect. But the tear fell, and it fell, and it hit the armrest, and it was the loudest sound in the theater.

Because Griffith knew. He knew. He had done this. Not this exactly, not on this scale, but the principle—the sacrifice of the innocent for the elevation of the self—he had done it. He had walked through the Eclipse, and his friends had screamed, and he had ascended, and the screaming hadn't stopped, not really, it had just... gone somewhere he couldn't hear it anymore.

Until now.

Now he heard it.

EPISODE 2: THE MECHANICS (How It Works)

The screen shifted to something that was almost worse than the horror that preceded it: normalcy.

Daylight. Streets. People going about their lives. Markets and homes and children playing and all the mundane, ordinary rhythms of civilization continuing as though the previous scenes had never happened.

But they had. The old man was still alive somewhere, still broken. The babies were still crying somewhere, still suffering. And the people walking the streets—buying fruit, chatting with neighbors, ruffling their children's hair—knew. They all knew.

The Narrator's voice returned, steadier now but with a fundamental weariness that hadn't been there before.

"It happens once a year."

The screen showed a calendar. Not like any calendar the viewers knew, but recognizable as one—a system of days and months marked by symbols that counted inevitably toward a date circled in red.

"The Day of Offering. Some cultures in this world celebrate it. Some endure it. All participate."

The scenes shifted rapidly now—a montage of preparation. Homes being reinforced. Doors being locked. The vulnerable being—not hidden, because hiding was impossible and forbidden—but prepared. Parents sitting with children and explaining, in gentle voices that barely concealed their own terror, what was going to happen. Grandparents settling into chairs and closing their eyes and breathing slowly, the way one breathes before surgery, before the needle, before the pain that you know is coming and cannot stop.

"The mechanics are precise. On the Day of Offering, every citizen of this world is both worshipper and offering. Those who are chosen to perform the worship do so with devotion. Those who are chosen to receive it do so with... endurance."

The system was laid out in clinical detail. The selection process: partly random, partly based on a calculus of suffering that assigned higher value to certain types of pain. The elderly and the young were favored—not out of cruelty, but because their suffering produced the purest negative emotion, unfiltered by the coping mechanisms that adults developed over time. Physical pain was supplemented by psychological torment, which was supplemented by spiritual degradation, and each form of suffering was catalogued and quantified and tithed to the Lord with the precision of an accountant filing taxes.

"Everyone serves. Everyone suffers. The roles rotate. The man who performs the worship this year may be the one who receives it the next. There is no permanent class of victimizer or victim. There is only the system."

Kakashi leaned forward. His mind, despite everything, was working. "That's the genius of it," he said, his voice hollow. "No one can rebel against the system because everyone is in the system. Today's torturer is tomorrow's victim. There's no enemy to fight. There's no oppressor to overthrow."

"It's like the caste system," Sakura said, "except it rotates. Everyone takes a turn at the bottom."

"Which means everyone has a stake in maintaining it," Kakashi continued. "If you destroy the system, you destroy the structure that also gives you your turn at the top."

Naruto shook his head violently. "That doesn't make it right—"

"I didn't say it was right. I said it was stable. There's a difference."

Shikamaru—who had materialized in a seat nearby, because the theater seemed to add occupants as the narrative demanded—clicked his tongue. "Troublesome. It's a Nash equilibrium. No individual benefits from changing their strategy while everyone else maintains theirs. The only way out is collective action, and collective action requires trust, and trust is exactly what a system like this erodes."

He paused.

"It's perfectly designed. That's what makes it hellish."

The episode continued with more detail. How the emotional "tithe" was collected—channeled upward through the temple structure to the Lord, whose nature remained stubbornly undefined. How the society functioned between Offering days—with remarkable normalcy, suggesting that the human capacity for compartmentalization was not limited to the viewers' reality. How the worship had continued for generations, perhaps always, with no recorded beginning and no anticipated end.

The hardest part of Episode 2 wasn't the violence—there was less of it here than in Episode 1. The hardest part was the normalization. The way mothers made lunches for children who might be chosen for the Offering. The way coworkers discussed the upcoming Day with the casual resignation of people talking about tax season. The way lovers held each other in bed and whispered maybe it won't be us this year and if it is, I'll be strong and I love you no matter what happens.

The ordinariness of horror. The domestication of the unspeakable.

Deku was writing again. Not coherently—his handwriting was a wreck, emotions making his hand shake—but he was writing, because the alternative was sitting there and feeling it without processing it, and his mind needed to work.

"The system creates complicity," he muttered. "By making everyone both perpetrator and victim, it eliminates the moral high ground. There's no hero to rise up because everyone is equally guilty and equally innocent. It's—it's the opposite of heroism. It's the death of heroism."

All Might placed a skeletal hand on Deku's shoulder. "No," he said. His voice was thin but firm. "Heroism isn't a system, Young Midoriya. It's a choice. An individual choice. And where there are individuals, there is always the possibility of that choice."

Deku looked at him with desperate hope. "Then someone there—"

"Episode 3," All Might said. "Fatal Resistance. I believe we'll see."

Edward Elric was muttering calculations. It was his way of coping—reduce the impossible to equations, to variables, to something his scientist's mind could grip. "If the population is—assuming a yearly cycle—the cumulative suffering over a single generation would be—" He stopped. The numbers were too large. The human cost was incalculable. He put down his imaginary pen and sat in silence.

Luffy hadn't spoken since the babies. He sat in his seat with his hat over his eyes and his arms crossed and the shattered remnants of his armrest scattered around him. His crew sat in tense, watchful silence around him—they knew this version of their captain. This was the Luffy who had punched a Celestial Dragon. This was the Luffy who went very, very quiet before he did something that changed the world.

EPISODE 3: FATAL RESISTANCE

The word FATAL appeared on screen in the same blood-red text, but this time it was joined by a second word: RESISTANCE. And the juxtaposition of those two words—the first bleeding, the second burning with a defiant light—told the audience everything they needed to know about what was coming.

Someone would fight back.

And someone would die for it.

The screen showed a man.

Not a hero. Not a warrior. Not a chosen one or a prophesied savior or a legendary figure. Just a man. Middle-aged, unremarkable, with the kind of face you'd forget five minutes after seeing it. He had calloused hands and tired eyes and a slight stoop to his shoulders that spoke of years of physical labor.

His name, the Narrator said, was Teren.

And Teren had a daughter.

She was seven. Small and dark-haired and gap-toothed and she laughed at everything. She laughed at birds and clouds and puddles and the faces her father made when he was tired and the way the cat next door refused to come when called. She laughed the way only children laugh—completely, without reservation, with her whole body—and the sound of her laughter was the brightest thing in Teren's world.

The next Day of Offering was three weeks away.

And the selection had been posted.

His daughter's name was on the list.

The theater went cold.

Not literally. The temperature didn't change. But every being present felt it—the drop, the plunge, the moment where the story crossed the threshold from terrible to unbearable.

Tanjiro made a sound. Just a sound. Not a word. A sound that came from somewhere deeper than language.

Goku's hair had gone gold. He hadn't done it consciously. His body had simply decided that the situation required more than his base form, and Super Saiyan had engaged without his permission.

Usagi was glowing. The Silver Crystal was responding to her distress with escalating intensity, and the light it threw was no longer soft—it was fierce, almost angry.

On the right side, even Sukuna's four eyes had narrowed.

Teren did what no one had done in living memory.

He said no.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. Not with a speech or a raised fist or a battle cry. He simply went to the registry office—a bland, bureaucratic building that processed the selections with the soulless efficiency of a tax bureau—and he said, "I won't allow it. Not my daughter. Not this year. Not ever."

The official behind the desk looked at him with that look. The worshipper's look. The look of someone who understood something Teren didn't, or shouldn't, or wouldn't.

"It is the Lord's will," the official said.

"I don't care."

The silence that followed was the silence of blasphemy. In a world built on worship, those three words—I don't care—were not a statement. They were a detonation.

The official's eyes widened. Then narrowed. Then filled with something that might have been pity or might have been contempt or might have been the particular sadness of a true believer encountering heresy for the first time.

"You would defy the Lord."

"I would protect my daughter."

"They are the same thing."

"They are NOT."

In the theater, the heroes leaned forward. Every single one of them. A dozen battles, a hundred wars, a thousand moments of defiance flashed through their collective memories, and in Teren—this ordinary, unremarkable, unexceptional man—they saw themselves. They saw the fundamental, primal impulse that made a hero: the refusal to accept the unacceptable.

"Yes," Naruto breathed. His eyes were blazing. "Yes, fight. FIGHT."

"Go," Deku whispered, tears still on his cheeks but his jaw set. "Don't stop. Don't give in."

Goku was grinning. It was not a happy grin. It was the grin he wore in the heat of battle when he saw someone tap into their true potential, the grin of a warrior recognizing the spark of defiance that transcended power levels and techniques and abilities.

"That guy's got guts," he said.

Luffy lifted his hat. His eyes were visible now—dark, burning, absolute.

"He's free," Luffy said. And the way he said it—the reverence, the respect—said everything about what the word meant to a man who would become King of the Pirates.

What followed was not a battle. Teren had no powers, no weapons, no allies. What he had was desperation and the love of a father for his child, and he took his daughter and he ran.

The episode followed their flight through a world that offered no sanctuary. Every door was closed. Every face turned away. Not from cruelty—the neighbors and friends and even family who refused to help were crying as they shut their doors, weeping as they turned their backs, devastated by their own compliance—but from the same crushing certainty that defined the entire civilization.

You cannot defy the Lord. Not because we forbid it, but because it is the truth of this world. And the truth cannot be outrun.

Teren ran anyway.

He carried his daughter through fields and forests and mountains. He found hidden places—caves and ruins and forgotten corners of the world—and he hid. He built shelters. He foraged food. He told his daughter stories to keep her from being afraid, stories about brave heroes who fought against impossible odds and won, stories that the audience recognized as their stories, the heroes' stories, whispered in the dark by a man who was trying to be the hero his daughter believed he was.

And for a while—a brief, beautiful, agonizing while—it seemed like it might work.

It didn't.

They found him on the fourteenth day.

Not soldiers. Not enforcers. Not agents of any organized power. Just worshippers. Ordinary people with that look in their eyes, walking calmly through the forest, following the trail that Teren had tried so desperately to hide.

There were hundreds of them. They emerged from between the trees like the trees themselves had become people, a silent, devoted, implacable tide of humanity guided by something that required no tracking, no technology, no skill—just the simple, absolute knowledge of where the defiant one had gone, as though the Lord himself had pointed and said there.

Teren held his daughter behind him. His hands were empty. His face was set. And when he spoke, his voice carried the terrible calm of a man who knew he was going to die and had decided to die standing.

"You will not take her."

The lead worshipper—a woman about Teren's age, with gentle eyes and a soft voice—said, "We must. It is worship."

"It is murder."

"It is love."

"LOVE?" The word tore out of him like a wound. "You call THIS love? Torturing a child? Torturing MY child? In the name of some being who feeds on tears?"

The woman looked at him with infinite sadness. "You don't understand."

"I UNDERSTAND PERFECTLY!"

"No," she said, and her voice was gentle and certain and devastating. "You don't. And I am sorry."

The heroes watched what came next.

They watched as the worshippers—gently, carefully, with the tenderness of mourners at a funeral—took Teren's daughter from his arms. She screamed and reached for him and he reached for her and they were separated with the methodical precision of people who had done this before, because they had, because this was what they did, because this was worship—

Teren fought. He fought with his fists and his teeth and his elbows and his knees and every ounce of desperate strength his body possessed, and it wasn't enough—of course it wasn't enough—because he was one man against hundreds, and they didn't even fight back, they just absorbed his blows with that terrible patience, that devoted acceptance, letting him beat against them like a wave against a cliff.

They restrained him. Not with violence. With bodies. With hands. With the weight of consensus. And they held him there, on his knees in the dirt, while his daughter was carried away, her cries growing fainter and fainter until—

They stopped.

Not because she was out of earshot. Because the Offering had begun.

The camera showed nothing of what was done to the child. Instead, it showed Teren's face. It stayed on his face for the entirety of the Offering, and it showed every moment—every second—of what a father's face looks like when he can hear his child's screams and cannot stop them.

It was, by consensus of every being in the theater—heroes and villains alike—the worst thing any of them had ever seen.

The aftermath was shown in cold, unflinching detail.

The child survived. Of course she survived. The system didn't kill—it harvested. She was returned to Teren afterward—physically intact, at least in the ways that could be measured. But her eyes had changed. The gap-toothed laugh was gone. Something behind her gaze had been taken, or broken, or simply... used up.

And Teren—

Teren held her. He held her in a room that was very quiet, and he rocked her back and forth, and he said her name over and over, as though by repeating it he could call back whatever had been taken from her.

She didn't respond.

He rocked her and said her name.

She stared at nothing.

He rocked and rocked and rocked.

"What happened to Teren," the Narrator said, his voice barely audible, "is what happens to everyone who resists."

"Not punishment. Not retribution. Just... the natural consequence of trying to stop the tide."

"The Lord's will is not enforced."

"It simply... IS."

"Fatal Resistance is what the people of this world call it. Not because the resistor dies—though sometimes they do. But because the part of them that resisted... that defiant spark, that fire of 'no'... is killed."

"Teren never spoke the word 'no' again."

"His daughter never laughed again."

The theater was devastated.

There are no words adequate to describe the state of the audience. The heroes' side was a landscape of grief—some openly weeping, some silently shaking, some staring at the screen with expressions of such profound horror that they seemed to have left their bodies entirely, their consciousness retreating to some protected place deep inside where the images couldn't reach.

Tanjiro had stopped crying. He had gone past crying. He sat in his seat with Nezuko on his lap—she had climbed there at some point, seeking comfort or giving it, it didn't matter which—and his eyes were open and wet and empty in a way that recalled the thousand-yard stare of soldiers who had seen too much.

Goku was in his seat, Super Saiyan dropped, his black hair flat and his dark eyes staring at nothing. His fists had unclenched. His body was slack. The fighter who had never given up, who had found a way through every impossible situation, who had turned defeat into victory a hundred times—he looked defeated.

"He couldn't save her," Goku said. "He tried everything and he couldn't save her."

Vegeta said nothing. He was looking at his own hands.

Naruto was holding himself. Arms wrapped around his torso, fingers digging into his own jacket, rocking slightly—the unconscious self-comfort of a child who had grown up alone, who had learned to hold himself because there was no one else to do it.

Deku had written three words in his notebook, large and shaking:

IT'S NOT FAIR.

Beneath them, smaller, shakier:

but when has it ever been

Luffy's face was hidden again. But his crew—who knew every version of their captain—could see his shoulders trembling. And Nami, who had been sold to a fishman tyrant as a child, and Zoro, who had made his body a weapon out of sheer will, and Sanji, who had starved as a boy, and Robin, who had watched her entire world burn at the age of eight—they all sat in their own memories of helplessness and watched a man on a screen live through theirs.

Usagi had stopped glowing. The Silver Crystal had gone dark. She sat in her seat with her brooch clutched to her chest and her eyes closed and her lips moving in what might have been a prayer, except she didn't know who to pray to in a world where the god was the monster.

On the right side, something had shifted.

The divide between the two sides of the theater—the aisle that no one crossed—felt thinner. Not because anyone had moved. Not because any villain had suddenly become a hero or any hero had lost their way. But because what they were watching was so far beyond the scale of their own conflicts, their own rivalries, their own wars, that the usual categories felt... small.

Frieza was not looking at the screen anymore. He was looking at his own hands. The hands that had destroyed Planet Vegeta. The hands that had killed billions. And for the first time in his existence, he was comparing, and the comparison was not flattering.

I kill to demonstrate power, he thought. They torture to demonstrate love. Which is worse?

He didn't like the answer.

Muzan had not opened his eyes. He sat in darkness of his own making, behind closed lids, and processed what he had heard with the cold, clinical precision of a being who had survived a thousand years by never allowing emotion to compromise his judgment. And his judgment said: This is wrong.

Not morally wrong. Muzan had no framework for morality. But wrong in the way that a fundamental error in an equation is wrong—a flaw in the logic of existence itself, a proof that the universe's source code contained a bug that no one could patch.

Madara's words from earlier echoed in the silence: The Infinite Tsukuyomi was mercy. He had not spoken since. He sat in his seat, his legendary eyes dim, and he understood—with a clarity that cut him to the bone—why he had wanted to put the world to sleep. Because reality, left to its own devices, produced this.

All For One's face was blank. Utterly, completely blank. The man who always had a plan, who always had an angle, who could find the manipulation in any situation, sat in his seat and found... nothing. No angle. No plan. No way to use this. Just the raw, unprocessable fact of systematic cruelty beyond even his considerable imagination.

Aizen's analysis had stopped. His mind—that vast, brilliant, terrifying mind—had been running calculations since the screening began, dissecting the system, mapping its architecture, identifying its strengths and weaknesses. And somewhere during Teren's story, the calculations had stopped. Not because he'd found the answer, but because the answer didn't matter.

What is the point, he thought, of understanding a system that should not exist?

EPISODE 4: BEYOND PUNISHMENT

The title card appeared, and the word BEYOND seemed to stretch across the screen infinitely, as though the concept it represented had no boundaries, no endpoint, no limit.

This episode was shorter than the others. But it was the one that broke them.

The Narrator did not appear for this episode. There was no voice-over. No explanation. No framing. Just images. Just sounds. Just the raw, unmediated documentation of what happened to those who resisted after the resistance had already been crushed.

Because Episode 3 had shown what happened to the resistor.

Episode 4 showed what happened to everyone the resistor loved.

Teren's wife. His parents. His siblings. His friends. His neighbors. Everyone who had ever been close to him, who had ever shared a meal with him or laughed at his jokes or watched his daughter play—they were all subjected to the Offering. Not on the Day of Offering. Not in the usual rotation.

In addition to it.

The system's response to resistance was not punishment. The Narrator had been clear about that. It was correction. The way a body's immune system responds to an infection—not out of malice, but out of the simple, biological necessity of maintaining homeostasis. Teren's resistance had created a deficit in the year's emotional tithe, and the deficit had to be made up.

So it was. With interest.

The screen showed face after face. Person after person. The web of human connection that radiated outward from Teren like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond, and each ripple was caught and held and squeezed until the person at its center produced enough negative emotion to satisfy the deficit.

It was not random. It was not chaotic. It was systematic. Each person's suffering was tailored to their individual vulnerabilities with a precision that suggested the Lord—or the system that served the Lord—had an intimate, comprehensive knowledge of every soul in its domain. What frightened them most. What they loved most. What they would grieve most deeply for.

And each of them was shown Teren. They were told: This is because of him. This is the cost of his defiance. This is what happens when someone says no.

Not to turn them against him. Not as propaganda or manipulation. But as education. So they would understand. So they would carry the knowledge forward. So the next person who thought about resisting would hear the stories and know the cost, not just for themselves but for everyone they had ever touched.

The theater watched in silence. There were no more outbursts. No more declarations. The heroes had passed through shock and anger and grief and come out the other side into a place that had no name—a place where the usual responses were inadequate and all that remained was the witnessing itself.

Tanjiro sat with his sister and watched and breathed and endured, because that was what he had always done. He endured.

Goku sat with his fists on his knees and his jaw set and his eyes fixed on the screen, and he thought about Gohan, and he thought about Goten, and he thought about Chi-Chi, and the thought of them being caught in a web like this—of them suffering because of his defiance—was a horror so specific and so personal that it bypassed his warrior's courage entirely and struck at the father underneath.

Naruto thought of Hinata. Of Boruto. Of Himawari. Of Iruka and Kakashi and Sakura and Sasuke and every person in the village that he loved, and the weight of imagining them punished for his defiance—punished for the very quality that defined him, that had saved them all—was crushing.

Deku looked at his notebook. At the three words he'd written.

IT'S NOT FAIR.

He picked up his pen. His hand shook. And beneath the words, he wrote:

There has to be a way.

And then, smaller:

Please.

On the right side, Griffith's tears had dried. His face was serene again. But the serenity was different now. It was the serenity of a man who understood exactly what he was looking at because he had built something like it, and the understanding was not a comfort—it was a mirror, and the reflection was monstrous.

EPISODE 5: ACCEPTANCE... FOREVER

The ellipsis in the title was the cruelest punctuation the audience had ever seen. Those three small dots contained everything—the hesitation, the reluctance, the universe-sized pause before the final, irreversible word.

Forever.

This episode was quiet.

Devastatingly, unbearably quiet.

It showed the world in the aftermath of all that had come before—after the Offering, after the resistance, after the correction. It showed the people returning to their lives. Rebuilding. Continuing. Getting up in the morning and making breakfast and going to work and talking to each other about ordinary things in ordinary voices.

And accepting.

Not because they were beaten. Not because they were broken. Not because they had lost the capacity for resistance. But because they had understood. They had stood at the edge of defiance and looked over and seen what lay beyond, and they had stepped back, and the stepping back was not surrender—it was wisdom. The terrible, toxic, inescapable wisdom of beings who had exhausted every other option and arrived at the only one that remained.

This is how it is. This is how it has always been. This is how it will always be.

Accept.

Forever.

The Narrator returned for the final minutes of the episode. He was in his chair again, in his simple room, and he looked older than before. Not physically—his appearance hadn't changed. But something behind his eyes had aged by centuries in the span of five episodes, and the man who sat before the camera now was not the same man who had begun the story with warm words about how stories worked.

"This is the world," he said. "Not a metaphor. Not a warning. Not a cautionary tale. A world. Real. Living. Populated by people who love and dream and hope and suffer and accept."

"And the Lord remains. Unseen. Unexplained. Worshipped."

"And the worship continues."

"And the crying continues."

"And the acceptance continues."

He paused. And then, for the first time, his expression shifted from exhausted narration to something personal. Something direct. He looked into the camera—into the audience, into the theater, into the eyes of every hero and every villain—and he said:

"And if you're wondering why I told you this—why I showed you this—the answer is simple."

"Because someone had to."

"Because truth does not require your consent to exist."

"Because those babies are still crying."

"And someone should know."

The screen went black.

The lights in the theater came up slightly—not to full brightness, but enough to see.

Enough to see each other.

For a long time, no one moved.

The heroes sat in their grief and their rage and their helplessness, and the villains sat in their silence and their recognition and their unnamed discomfort, and the aisle between them was still there but it felt like nothing—a line drawn in sand while the ocean rose around them.

Goku was the first to speak. His voice was hoarse. "Is it over?"

The screen answered. New text appeared:

AGONY SERIES

Part 1: Worship — Complete

Part 2 will begin shortly.

"No," Goku whispered. "There's more?"

There was more.

There was so much more.

The theater took a breath. A collective, shuddering, insufficient breath. The air that filled their lungs was the same air that had carried the sounds of screaming infants, and it tasted like ashes and salt and the particular bitterness of truths that cannot be unlearned.

Tanjiro held Nezuko. Naruto stared at his hands. Deku clutched his notebook. Luffy gripped his hat. Usagi held her brooch. Goku sat in his seat and felt, for the first time in his life, that being the strongest wasn't enough.

On the right side, Frieza looked at his hands. Muzan kept his eyes closed. Madara sat in the ruins of his philosophy. All For One calculated nothing. Aizen analyzed nothing. Griffith's tear had dried on the armrest, a small, glistening mark that caught the light like a scar.

And between them, the screen waited.

Patient. Relentless. Full.

END OF PART 1: WORSHIP

Episodes 1–5

The theater lights dimmed again.

The screen began to glow.

Part 2 was beginning.

And the babies were still crying.

[TO BE CONTINUED — Part 2: Episodes 6–9]

Author's Note: This concludes Part 1 of the Agony Series React. The emotional weight of this viewing has settled unevenly across the theater—heroes drowning in empathy, villains confronting mirrors they never asked for. When Part 2 begins, the foundations laid here will crack further, because the truth the Narrator couldn't finish saying in Episode 1 has only just begun to unfold. The word he never spoke still hangs in the air, three letters short of complete, and every being in that theater can feel it pressing against their teeth like a scream that hasn't happened yet.

The screen is patient.

It has four more parts to show them.

And it will show them all.