Title: The Black Flash Weapon
This chapter begins and the air was bitter, metallic silent, but for the slow groan of the chain creaking overhead.
A single column of light poured from the ceiling of the infinite void, bathing the suspended form of Shiki in a white glare that made his bloodied skin shine silver. His arms were yanked behind him, wrists torn raw by the weight of the enchanted chain that held him aloft. He dangled there, shirtless, bruised, and silent but his eyes burned beneath the fringe of his matted hair.
On the obsidian steps descending from a platform of dark crystal, Lord Arcade stood with one hand behind his back, the other resting casually on the hilt of a blade he never once needed to draw.
He looked up, studying Shiki as one might a specimen, then stepped closer until their faces were separated by no more than a breath.
"Shiki," Arcade said, his voice calm as a storm before the flood. "Where are the Upper-Ups currently hiding?"
No answer. Shiki's head hung like a broken pendulum, swaying slightly. The iron ring at his collar rattled faintly with his every breath.
Arcade's lips twitched into something that might have been a smile in a colder world.
He crouched slightly, eye level now with the bruised man.
"Hm. I expected no response from you," he muttered, eyes shifting down toward Shiki's left shoulder.
There, faintly beneath dried blood and grime, was a sigil. Etched into the flesh, ancient and angular, it flickered with a faint violet glow,the Mark of Bahophet. A symbol of oath one that no man could receive without consequence.
"The Protectors of the World Government…" Arcade said thoughtfully. "The Travelers,You bear their mark of course you're one of them,A hunter sworn to their creed."
He stood again, lifting his eyes to the endless dark above.
"Unfortunate," he mused aloud. "The truth lies far beyond your understanding. Their creed your purpose is a lie spun through centuries."
Shiki's head raised slowly. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. His teeth showed faintly a grin forged not from victory, but venom.
"You… don't have the power you think you do."
His voice was hoarse, every syllable cracked with strain.
"You're neither Light… nor Shadow."
Arcade chuckled, shaking his head like a disappointed tutor. Then he raised his hand palm out, five fingers extended. Each fingertip ignited with a different glow,gold, red, violet, white, and black.
"Yet you hang by chains, like a dog who once thought himself a wolf."
He stepped back.
"I'll return, Shiki. After I purify this poisoned world of yours."
And then he vanished torn from the air like a paper in wind, the colored lights on his fingers streaking briefly before fading to nothing.
Shiki's head dropped again. The chain above shaked The void returned to silence only leaving the sound of chains hitting on each other.
Meanwhile Alarms didn't blare in the SUHA war room.
They whispered.
Soft pulses of red light blinked across the ceiling. Silent icons pulsed on holographic panels. Something was wrong, and the room filled with rows of high-backed terminals, humming machinery, and officers in sharp black uniforms had frozen into collective stillness.
The air inside the underground command facility was cold, but the sweat on every brow said otherwise.
"Something's coming," one of the operators said, staring at his display. His voice barely made it across the table.
He leaned closer to his screen, fingers twitching over glowing runes as the tracking data updated again. And again.
"It's… traveling faster than sound," he said, disbelief distorting his voice. "It just broke through the upper stratosphere."
The senior comms officer turned sharply toward him. Her mouth moved, but the sound that came out was wrong too flat, too hollow.
"What… sort of object moves like that?"
Across the room, Minister Alfred rose slowly from his black leather seat. He wasn't a tall man hunched slightly, balding at the top but the room froze the moment his chair creaked. His eyes locked on the central display now filling with a warping silhouette above Greenland, the image pulsing with dark heat.
"That," he said, "is Satan 2."
The room didn't breathe.
"One of The greatest weapon mankind ever pretended to forget," Alfred continued, stepping forward. "It was used to wipe cities off the map. Continents at its full power… if necessary."
He stopped before the main projection wall. The image was beginning to distort, but even with static breaking across the edges, the unmistakable outline of a descending missile massive, ancient, wrapped in a black corona filled the screen.
"According to recovered history… it was Satan 2 that erased the Kingdom of Mu from existence."
He turned to the operations officer nearest to him.
"Activate the Dome of Satan," he said firmly. "And initiate mass recall. Every operative in the field bring them back. Use the same teleportation seals we deployed them with."
The operator hesitated only for a second. Then he straightened and barked:
"Yes, sir!"
His hand slammed down on a blackened, iron switch beside him a large red button labeled with a single bold letter: H.
A seismic hum began to rise.
The walls trembled faintly. Somewhere far below them, gears that hadn't turned in a hundred years began to spin. Outside, hidden under snow and steel, enormous metal plates began shifting as the Dome of Satan uncoiled from beneath the earth an iron cocoon built to survive the apocalypse.
Meanwhile, in the teleportation bay, a sealed room with a rotating triangular altar at its center lit with pulsing blue glyphs, an operator took the mic from its holster.
"This is Control," he said, voice steady. "Teleportation protocol is active. Begin phase locking."
A surge of energy burst from the triangular seal. The room glowed blue, then violet, then pitch black before spiraling into white.
Back in the war room, one of the younger officers barely twenty stared up at the central screen as the sensor data ticked.
"It's close… fifteen seconds… thirteen… ten…"
"Impact in eight seconds," the sensor technician shouted.
Outside, the winds howled above Greenland.
Far across the shattered fronts on frozen ridges, beside burning wreckage, amidst battles still raging something in the sky began to shift.
The soldiers in the war room stared, counting.
"Four."
"Three."
"Two."
The battlefield didn't go quiet.
It froze.
Across the plains of Greenland, amidst mangled steel husks and scorched patches of snow, the battle raged but the rhythm stuttered. Cries of pain and war, the clashing of blades and howls of monstrous warlords, slowed as fighters turned upward.
The clouds, once iron grey, had begun to twist.
They coiled unnaturally, curling into a spiral the size of a continent, the outer edges already blackening. Sunlight bled from the sky. The cold deepened not the normal chill of the arctic, but a deeper cold, the kind that sank into memory and marrow.
In the center of the front line stood Sakamoto, bloodied but unbowed. His blade hung low in one hand. Princess Egle stood near him, a sheen of frost on her lips, her wide eyes fixed on the heavens.
Across the ruined eastern slope, where towers had once stood, Shiva in his Nine-Tailed Fox form had one claw locked against the stone gauntlet of Hanuman. Both warriors pushed against each other, growling with power until they too turned their heads toward the sky.
High above, streaking down faster than any meteor, faster than any machine had a right to travel, came the black silhouette.
A single shape, A spear of ancient death.
Princess Egle's mouth trembled. Her voice cracked into the air:
"…Satan 2?"
Her pupils shrank.
Her right hand clenched, and from her scalp, strands of golden hair lifted unnaturally twisting like snakes in water. Then from that crown, Saharan emerged.
The serpent god burst forth scales shimmering with oily rainbows, its mouth yawning wider than the sky. It let out a soundless scream, one that bent the nearby wind and made the shadows shake.
In a single motion, it coiled around Egle's body and swallowed her whole.
Not in violence but protection. Her figure vanished within its coils just as the first pulse of darkness cracked the upper atmosphere and Saharan disappeared.
Meanwhile, across the southern edge near the Madagascar front, Wei, Asger, Vincent, Chiro, Osiris, Marcus, and other deployed agents saw the first ripples of teleportation sigils appear below their feet triangles of light etched in the snow, humming with dark energy.
"Return spell?" Asger said, blinking.
"They're pulling us back!" Chiro shouted.
In a flash of violet fire, their bodies were consumed by spiraling glyphs. They vanished, one by one, flickering like dying stars, teleported back toward SUHA's central Dome.
Above them all, the sky turned black.
Not cloudy. Not stormy.
Black.
An unnatural void that consumed all warmth, all light.
And from that void, the missile Satan 2 continued its fall, rotating slowly, like a god's hammer descending from heaven.
Cain whispered:
"…We're not making it out."
Sakamoto didn't speak. He stepped forward.
The wind screamed.
The countdown finished.
And then the world detonated.
From the instant Satan 2 struck earth, there was no sound.
Just obliteration.
A black shockwave erupted from the missile's point of impact, folding outward like a dead sun exploding in reverse. A spiraling wave of pure void expanded in every direction not heat, not fire, but anti-light, tearing the skin off reality itself.
At ground zero, Shiva, in mid-strike, vanished,One moment he stood, his nine tails blazing,The next gone Vaporized before his scream could reach the air.
Zuolin, facing down Wei and Asger, was caught in the first rip his body twisted, stretched, then shredded into mist. Not even ash remained.
The battlefield went black.
What trees remained curled inward and crumbled into powder. Mountains flattened, and the crust of the earth peeled backward like it was paper. Cracks, miles long, opened into the molten core of the world and were swallowed seconds later by more darkness.
From the dome inside SUHA, cameras went out one by one.
Each feed blurred, then static, then void.
Inside the control chamber, officers watched in silent paralysis as each display died. The final image was the overhead shot from Drone Delta-7: a burst of black eating through the cloud layer like ink spilled into milk.
Then the feed cut to black.
The room shook.
The iron walls of the Dome of Satan groaned as the blastwave slammed into it. The reinforced alloy held for now but loose panels above rattled and buckled. Dust sprayed from the ceiling as pipes hissed.
"System blackout!" shouted one of the tech officers. "Visuals are gone all external sensors offline!"
Another officer braced against her console, her face drained of color.
"Did… did it breach the dome?"
"Negative!" came a frantic voice from the engineering pit. "Structural integrity holding at 96% external shock absorption plate is engaged."
And then…
Silence.
No more tremors. No more alarms.
Outside, what had been Greenland was now something else.
A waste. A void.
The clouds, once swirling with black energy, began to dissipate, as if afraid to remain like it has angered something.
From horizon to horizon, there was nothing but scorched sand, twisted rock, and silence. The geography had been rewritten. There were no bodies. No wreckage. Just emptiness.
At the edge of that emptiness, the only thing left standing was a single black dome untouched.
And inside it, the world held its breath.
The steel door burst open, slammed hard enough to echo across the war chamber's reinforced walls.
Madagascar entered like a thrown blade, breath ragged from the teleportation room center, eyes wild, fists clenched. Behind him, the others Wei, Asger, Chiro, Vincent, Osiris, Marcus emerged into the cold fluorescence of the SUHA facility, their bodies still flickering faintly from the residual charge of teleportation.
But only Madagascar moved.
He stormed past the rows of stunned officers, past flickering terminals and shattered holograms, until he stood in the center of the room.
"Where is he?" he asked.
No one answered.
"Where the fuck is Sakamoto!?"
The command center stood in silence. The low hum of machines filled the void.
No one would look him in the eye.
Madagascar turned slowly, scanning the faces around him junior officers, tacticians, command aides all shifting uncomfortably under the weight of guilt.
He didn't need an answer.
"You left him," he whispered. "You left them all out there."
His eyes found Minister Alfred, who stood at the far end of the chamber beside the collapsed monitor bank. The older man adjusted the cuffs of his black tunic, unmoved.
"You son of a bitch," Madagascar snarled.
He stepped forward.
"You killed them. You killed the only ones who were actually trying to protect this goddamn world."
And then he was on him.
Madagascar seized Alfred by the front of his coat, slammed him back against the war table. The officers around them gasped, a few reaching for their weapons but General Soren, standing near the wall, raised one hand.
"Let him," Soren muttered.
Alfred didn't resist. He stared up at Madagascar's furious face, calm as if discussing weather patterns.
"Sometimes," Alfred said, voice low, "a few sacrifices are necessary."
His coat collar wrinkled under Madagascar's grip. He did not flinch.
"Can't you see?" Alfred continued. "We wiped out the Warlords. We saved our soldiers. Your young lives. What does it matter if one or two men die if it means the world survives?"
"That 'one man' held this line!" Madagascar shouted. "That 'one man' bled to buy you time! And you you murdered him like he was expendable!"
His voice cracked on the last word.
Behind them, the soldiers were silent. No one moved.
General Soren gave a small nod. Two armored guards stepped forward and pulled Madagascar back, arms locked tight around his shoulders.
"Let go of me!" Madagascar barked, struggling, feet dragging. "Let go! You coward! You killer!"
Alfred straightened his coat. He smoothed the wrinkles, then turned away without another word.
Madagascar stopped fighting.
He yanked free from the soldiers' grasp, tore a dark coat from a rack near the wall, and threw it around his shoulders. Then he walked shoulders hunched, pace heavy toward the south corridor.
The steel doors hissed shut behind him.
Up near the war table, Minister Tenzy remained seated.
He hadn't spoken a word since the blast. His fingers were still curled tightly on the arms of his chair. His eyes followed Madagascar's retreating form, distant.
Inside his mind, he whispered:
He's just like Kenzo.
And for the first time in hours, Tenzy felt something other than fear.
It was regret.