"He sounds more like a 9-year-old cringe kid hyping himself," Seko muttered under his breath, his tone flat and cold.
"Yeah..." Kenji replied, voice fading as he activated his cloaking, "He thinks the same about himself."
Then—vanished.
Seko's eyes flickered, instantly adjusting to scan thermal signatures. He could still sense him—barely—a flicker of heat darting across the field like a whisper of fire in a storm. But before he could process it, BAM!
Both Seko and Daisuke were slammed into the ground, pinned by sheer speed and precision. Dust exploded outward as Kenji moved in an erratic blur, faster than Seko's reflexes could compensate.
Seko gritted his teeth. Too fast… he moves before I can finish reading the heat...
Kiyomi, rage boiling inside her, extended her arms and amplified gravity to its full range—a crushing weight pressing on everything within several hundred meters.
"WHERE IS HE, SEKO?!! TELL ME!!" she shouted, struggling to keep control of the field.
Seko raised his arm, fingers trembling under the pressure—not pointing at her, but past her, his eyes locking with something behind her.
She turned.
But she was too late.
CRACK!
Kenji appeared behind her for a split-second—just enough time to snap Kiyomi's neck with ruthless precision. Her body dropped like a marionette with cut strings.
Seko's pupils shrank.Silence fell.A split second stretched into eternity.
Was she... dead?
A wave of something dark rose in him—not the usual vampire bloodlust, but something heavier. Despair... and rage... A silent, cold fury.
But then—
CRKKKK!
Kiyomi's fingers twitched. Her neck realigned—cracking in reverse with a sickening pop. She rose slowly, her face pale with pain, yet her eyes burning with a raw, unfiltered wrath.
No witty remark. No hesitation.
Her aura ignited—gravity folding in waves, warping the air, snapping pebbles into dust. She unleashed her power without restraint, crushing the terrain around her. The ground bent under her fury.
Seko stood up as well, the despair not gone, but now tamed—channeled. Bloodlust pulsed through him like a second heartbeat, but he was oddly in control this time. Focused. Intense.
He summoned his Composite Sword.
The air split.
Fragments of the blade spun into the air, reassembling mid-flight like intelligent shards dancing into place. The weapon shimmered, still unstable—but tamed through willpower.
Seko held it low, blade humming faintly with the vibrations of rage, pressure, and something darker.
The battlefield had changed.
Kenji, once smiling, now froze. For the first time, his smirk wavered.
Two monsters stood before him—
Kiyomi, fueled by agony and vengeance.
Seko, a vampire with tempered fury and a blade that mirrored his torment.
And this time... They weren't going to hold back.
Daisuke's breath fogged the air as he moved forward, the tension crackling like a frozen lake about to shatter.
"If they kill him..." he muttered, eyes wide with urgency, "they'll be eliminated."
Without waiting, he clenched his fists—the temperature around the three combatants dropped drastically. But it wasn't just cold. The air itself thickened, condensed into something dense, something immobile. Time didn't stop—but movement nearly did.
In the frozen snapshot of violence, Kenji hung in the air with his grin fading, Kiyomi's unleashed wrath paused mid-burst, and Seko's blood-soaked blade crackled with barely restrained energy.
Daisuke approached slowly, the frost climbing his limbs like loyal vines. He reached out and grasped Kenji's throat, locking eyes with the immobilized ninja.
"SUB-ZERO."
The word echoed—not loud, but absolute.
Instantly, everything in the field melted back to equilibrium—pressure, gravity, temperature—all restored, but Kenji remained frozen, encased in an immovable crystal of glacial magic, shimmering in refracted blues and silvers.
Kiyomi blinked. The rage that had consumed her—gone, cooled so fast it left steam rising off her skin. Her breathing steadied.
"Ice powers?" she asked, genuinely impressed.
Daisuke didn't respond. He simply turned slightly, one hand still gripping Kenji's frozen collar. His eyes were calm—serene even—but unreadable.
Seko tilted his head, examining Daisuke with mild interest. "Subtle. Controlled. Not flashy, but effective."
Kenji, still trapped in his icy prison, couldn't move—but his eyes darted frantically.
Suddenly—
"Who are you really?" Kiyomi demanded.
"What's your connection to Madala?" Seko followed, voice low.
"How long were you watching us?" Daisuke added the third question himself, finally breaking the silence as he tightened his grip slightly on Kenji's neck.
Three questions. One target.
Kenji's frozen face didn't shift much—but the shimmer in his eyes showed he was far from broken.
Through the thin layer of enchanted ice, his voice echoed—muffled but perfectly audible.
"Madala's shadow is long. But I don't cast it."
Daisuke narrowed his eyes. Deflection?
Kenji continued, his tone almost playful, yet something darker lingered beneath.
"I watch who needs watching. And sometimes… I let them watch me back."
Seko raised a brow. "Cryptic. Do you ever speak clearly?"
Kenji chuckled faintly. The frost around his face cracked just enough to show a sly grin.
"Clarity is for the innocent. None of us here qualify."
Kiyomi folded her arms, unimpressed. "So you're just a drama queen with stealth tricks?"
Kenji's eyes darted to her. "Maybe. Or maybe I'm the warning bell... the kind you hear right before the avalanche."
Daisuke leaned in a little. "Are you a threat?"
Kenji paused… then smiled wider.
"No. I'm the prelude."
The temperature dropped again for a split second—though this time, it wasn't Daisuke's doing.
Something about Kenji's aura—what little seeped through the ice—made the air feel like it was watching them.
Whatever his full motives were, he wasn't going to spill them here.
But one thing was certain.
This wasn't the last time they'd hear his riddles.
Kenji's voice fractures—one moment human, the next something else. Not silence, not void, but an absence that shouldn't exist. A sound that bypasses the ears and scrapes directly against the mind.
Seko recognizes it. A memory? A dream? Or something older—something that was never meant to be remembered.
Before the trio can react, Kenji's body begins dissolving, not into ash, but into nothingness itself, particles unraveling like a forgotten thought. His mouth moves, but the voice isn't his anymore. It's the sound of a star collapsing inward, of a name erased from history.
It was His voice... definitely his.
As Kenji's form crumbled into fine particles, they didn't float or fall. They simply ceased—disintegrating with a silence that wasn't mere quiet, but a refusal of sound. It was like watching ash vanish not in the wind, but in thought.
Then the voice.
It didn't arrive. It didn't echo.It was just there, inside their minds, bypassing ears, bypassing language.Unformed, uncolored, unfelt... and yet undeniable.
"I am not there to watch...""I am nothing to watch."
It was like their souls flinched.The voice wasn't male or female, ancient or young—it was everything and nothing, a void dressed in syllables that had no right to exist.
Kenji's shape shimmered, for a flicker of a moment. Not like light, but like reality glitching, uncertain of whether to remember him or not.His eyes had narrowed—not with malice or pride, but a dreadful certainty. A man aware he was never a man to begin with.
"Everything has nothing."
And then he vanished. Not into thin air—into absence.The kind that left no hole, no smoke, no ripple in space. Just stillness.The kind that erased memory while it happened.
And when it ended, Seko, Kiyomi, and Daisuke realized something had changed.
They were kneeling.
No one remembered falling to their knees. Their bodies had decided for them.
Kiyomi blinked rapidly, arms crossed, goosebumps rising despite the heat of her own compressed gravitational energy.
"What the hell was that..." she whispered.
Her voice was small. A rare thing.
Daisuke stared ahead, jaw clenched, the mountain breeze swaying his hair. He had frozen the world before. But he couldn't stop this.He couldn't even process it.
Seko didn't speak at first.
His body was tense but still. His hands didn't shake—but his eyes…
His pupils were tiny. Not from bloodlust.But something deeper.
Recognition.
He whispered, almost too softly:
"I've heard that voice before."
Both Kiyomi and Daisuke looked at him. His tone wasn't confused or curious. It was resigned.And that was the scariest part.
Seko's gaze was locked on where Kenji had disappeared, as if trying to recall something carved not in his memory, but beneath it.
"Not in dreams... not in pain... but something... else."
Kiyomi crossed her arms tighter. She had felt cold before. But this—this felt existential.
"That wasn't just a shapeshifter," Daisuke muttered, voice lower than usual."Whatever was inside him… it was observing. Testing."
Seko nodded. "Not us. Not even this tournament."
Kiyomi turned to him. "Then what?"
Seko finally stood up, dusting off his hands with slow, deliberate motion. His voice was quiet.
"It was watching… for itself."