He had been standing in the ruins of a street that existed almost a hundred kiloter away, looking at buildings that were half mory and half lie.
The first thing that crossed his mind was the possibility of an Illusion, but he knew that was wrong. It was not an Illusion, it was so other trick that he could not quite identify.
Was there sothing around him that could reach and see his mories. That was the worst kind of opponent he could think of...
’No, no, no Fuck!’
Then he suddenly felt as though his visibility was getting less and less. The first thing that told him sothing was wrong was the light.
He looked up and his pupils constricted.
There was no gradual shift, no long-drifting front of weather rolling in from the distance. One mont the sky was the color of dirty glass; the next, a sheet of dark cloud slid over it like an eyelid closing.
The temperature dropped a fraction. The air thickened. Sowhere above the broken line of rooftops, thunder rolled once.
’Screw that, it was way too fast.’
He had lived long enough under open sky to know how storms behaved. Even in this ruined world, even with Synth Energy and System activity warping local conditions, weather did not simply decide to change on a whim.
"This isn’t right," he gritted his teeth.
There was no one to answer him.
Shiro was gone, so was the guy in black suit. The street he had been walking on had already revealed itself as not his street, not the place he thought it was. It was as if so kind of cloth was placed over this place... just like a movie set.
And, now for fucks sake, the sky was wrong too.
He turned back the way he had co.
The ruins behind him were still — a corridor of broken buildings and leaning fras and shadowed interiors, the sa as they had been when he walked through them ten minutes ago, except for the light.
The shadows had thickened now, drawn out and inked in, the edges of things less clear than they had been.
He started running.
He pushed his legs harder than he needed to — not because speed would necessarily change anything, but because the part of his brain that had survived multiple situations understood that when the environnt started lying to you, ti was the first thing you had to drag back under your control.
The ruins blurred around him as his boots hamred the broken ground. Dust and small fragnts skidded under his soles.
Half-ford thoughts flickered across his mind.
’If I get back to the truck, I can at least see what is happening. If they’re there, it’s not complete. If they’re not—’
He looked at the sky once more and found that the stormy clouds now even covered past the walls in the distance. They had consud the wards as well.
’What the heck is happening... and why now? ’
The scream cut across the ruins like a knife.
Not close or right beside him. It was distant and from the direction of the wall. From the direction of the gate. From the direction where the mini truck sat parked at the end of the barren lane, with the old driver.
The scream lasted less than a second.
It was a human scream and It was cut off mid-word.
Then, after the silence, ca the sound of an engine turning over.
The mini truck’s engine.
It coughed once — the sound of an old machine that hadn’t expected to start so soon — then caught, then rose into a steady, accelerating growl.
Ishiki skidded to a halt.
"...Fuck."
[Ghost Blade] had been active since they stepped into the ruins in an area of 100 ters. He had suppressed the range in order to increase the effectiveness and for a fact, It had shown him nothing unusual until now.
Now though. He was not so sure. It was as creepy as it could get. He was suddenly seeing a twenty existence around him almost simultaneously.
They were all around him, like soone had pressed twenty fingers into the mbrane of his perception from every angle at once.
Xenons!
Just then, he heard another scream.
This one was close and clearer.
"Kashima-san!"
It was shiro’s voice.
"We are under attack, thirteen Xenons are visible and converging on , where are you—!"
Ishiki bit down hard enough on the inside of his cheek that he tasted blood.
"I am currently being attacked by twenty of them," he shouted back. "I believe you can take care of thirteen!"
There was no answer from the other side.
Then, a second later, the sound of automatic fire — short, controlled bursts, the rhythm of a professional.
Not panicked spray, but aid shots. That would be Shiro. Black Suit might have been firing too, but there was no way to tell with the sound coming from all sides at the sa ti.
The engine noise from the direction of the gate rose, then began to fade, the truck was moving away.
’Was it that Black suited bastard? Did he leave us here? No that seems very unlikely. ’
He didn’t have the bandwidth to decide which interpretation was truer in this mont.
Soon, the first Xenon hit the edge of his vision.
He summoned Sorrow’s Edge.
The sword ford in his hands from white motes of light...
The blade was long and straight, with a greenish tint to its surface. Then at the edges where it thinned, it was consud by purple flas that burned constantly to consu.
Powered by the endless hunger of the two tassels behind the grip that writhed with black flas.
The first wave of Xenons converged on him from all directions. They jumped out of the shadows under the safety of black clouds. Now that they were closer, Ishiki could tell that out of the twenty, fifteen were normal Xenons.
While five were superior Xenons!
Leaving tht for latter, Ishiki first focused on the normal Xenons attacking him.
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