No one saw Rikishu Kairo fall.

They saw the moment before it.

The sky above the battlefield had lost its color, stretched thin as if reality itself were being pulled apart. Shattered structures floated midair, caught in a pressure no one could name. Shuryoku saturated everything—too dense to breathe, too heavy to ignore.

At the center stood Rikishu Kairo.

He looked untouched at first glance. Calm. Upright. Almost distant. But blood seeped through the fabric at his side, dark against the pale glow of his Shuryoku. Each pulse came slower than the last, not from exhaustion, but restraint.

Across from him, something vast shifted.

It had no single shape—only mass and intent. A presence that bent space simply by existing. Every instinct screamed that this was not an enemy meant to be defeated, only endured.

Rikishu exhaled.

“So this is it,” he murmured—not in fear, not in awe. Just acknowledgment.

Deep beneath his collarbone, something clicked.

The chip activated silently, threading itself through his neural pathways like a second heartbeat. Data bloomed behind his eyes: coordinates, thresholds, resonance conditions. A final protocol—one he had prepared long before this battle ever began.

Not for victory.

For aftermath.

Rikishu stepped forward. Shuryoku surged, not outward, but inward—compressed, folded, forced into perfect circulation. The world screamed in response. Space fractured. Light bent away from him.

For a brief moment, it looked like he was winning.

Then the sky collapsed.

A surge of force swallowed the battlefield whole. Observers miles away saw only a flash—white, then nothing. The pressure snapped back into place, and the ruins came crashing down as if they had never left the ground.

When the dust settled, the battlefield was empty.

No body.
No signal.
No trace of Rikishu Kairo.

Only silence.

Upbringers’ Citadel — Archive Hall

Hours later, deep within the Citadel, alarms whispered rather than screamed. A restricted chamber lit up on its own, ancient systems waking as if from a long sleep.

A single hologram flickered to life.

A man appeared—bloodied, calm, very much alive.

Rikishu Kairo looked out at an empty hall and spoke anyway.

“If you’re seeing this,” he said evenly,
“then I’m either dead…”

A pause. Barely perceptible.

“…or somewhere too far away for you to matter to me.”

The systems logged the message. Filed it under Posthumous Record.
Status: Missing. Presumed Dead.

The hologram dissolved.

Rikishu Kairo vanished from history that day.

But far away—so far that distance lost its meaning—his consciousness remained awake.

Waiting.