Chapter 9;??Shattered Real!ty — Dust! 9

  Zenshu didn't knew what was going on as he wondered what he was doing here.

  He walked oustide and saw Hatsuki standing, his silhouette sharp against the dim, overcast sky.His eyes, narrowed as Zenshu approached. Without a word, he handed him the suitcase.. Hatsuki's brow furrowed in confusion but he accepted it as concluding that he must have given to him for some reason.

  The Third World War did not begin with a decration of war, nor with grand speeches from world leaders. It began with a single bullet.

  When North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Dong-un, was assassinated in his underground bunker, the world barely had time to react. The killing was orchestrated by operatives from a fractured European faction—one of many rogue organizations vying for power in the political chaos of the early 21st century. With the dictator dead, North Korea—a nation already on the brink—descended into turmoil.

  The power vacuum sparked civil war within North Korea. Factions rose and fell in rapid succession, each vying for control. The government, desperate to maintain order, cracked down with brutal force. Yet in its desperation, it only hastened its own downfall. The oppressed masses, long silenced under the weight of totalitarian rule, took up arms. What began as disorganized uprisings soon coalesced into a revolution. The people no longer fought for freedom alone—they fought for vengeance. The identity of the assassins no longer mattered; the mere fact that a foreign entity had dared to interfere was enough to ignite the fmes of nationalism. The streets of Pyongyang ran red with blood, and the world watched in stunned silence.

  The silence did not st long.

  With no clear leadership and its own military fractured, North Korea sought to unify its people the only way it knew how: war. It decred an all-out assault on Europe, framing the assassination as an act of war by Western imperialists. Fueled by rage, desperation, and its long-standing distrust of foreign powers, North Korea unched a relentless military offensive. Missiles rained down on European cities. The first strike alone cimed over 4.7 million lives, reducing historic capitals to smoldering ruins. What was meant to be a show of strength only provoked an even greater response.

  The war spread like an unchecked wildfire. South Korea, seeing an opportunity amid the chaos, turned its gaze toward Japan. The isnd nation, still recovering from decades of political instability, was an easy target. The conflict spiraled out of control. Sensing imminent destruction, Japan, South Korea, and China set aside their differences to form the Asian Alliance—a fragile coalition bound by survival rather than trust. Only 54% of Asia joined, the rest choosing neutrality or isotion. But neutrality was a death sentence. Nearly 20% of those neutral nations were obliterated within the first year, wiped from existence in the face of relentless nuclear devastation. The remaining 36% clung to existence, battered and broken.

  With the Asian Alliance desperately seeking reinforcements, they turned to Russia. But Russia had no intention of standing beside its neighbors. It had its own ambitions, and Europe had already extended its hand. When Russia formally allied itself with the European forces, the world was irreversibly divided. What had begun as a regional conflict had now erupted into a pnetary war.

  North Korea responded in the only way it could: with annihition. Knowing it could not win a prolonged war, it gambled everything on a single move. With its missile silos emptied and its cities crumbling, it unched its final weapon—one that had long been whispered about but never confirmed. The Demon's Wrath. A nuclear device of unprecedented power, dwarfing even the Tsar Bomba in sheer destructive capability. It was not a weapon of conquest. It was a weapon of spite.

  The bomb detonated over the heart of the United States. Half of America was consumed in an instant. The nd burned, reduced to a lifeless wastend of irradiated ruins. Cities that had once stood as monuments to human progress were erased, their histories lost in the radioactive wind. The world had known nuclear warfare before, but never on this scale. The very fabric of the pnet seemed to shudder beneath the weight of its destruction.

  Nature itself rebelled. The delicate bance that had sustained life for millennia colpsed. Dormant volcanoes, long thought to be relics of the past, roared back to life, spewing magma tainted with lethal radiocarbon gases. Within a 218-kilometer radius, life ceased to exist, suffocated beneath the toxic clouds. Massive tornadoes, unlike anything ever recorded, carved paths of destruction across continents. The oceans churned, their once-blue waters bckened by pollution and blood. The Earth's crust, weakened by years of relentless warfare and nuclear detonations, began to fracture. Cities that had stood for centuries were swallowed whole by gaping chasms, vanishing into the abyss. The very core of the pnet trembled, its electromagnetic field growing unstable, leaving the Earth vulnerable to cosmic radiation.

  In the chaos, North Korea itself fell—not to foreign invaders, but to a force far older. The British Empire, once thought to be a relic of history, recimed its pce in an unexpected resurgence. With North Korea’s infrastructure already in ruins, British forces moved in with calcuted precision, subjugating the fractured nation under colonial rule. But even their victory was short-lived. China, having spent years perfecting its nano-tech weaponry, unleashed a countermeasure that left no room for resistance. The British forces were annihited, their bodies reduced to dust before they could even register their own deaths.

  The war had sted only a handful of years, but in that time, it had undone centuries of human progress. The Earth's axis tilted slightly—a change so minute that it should have been inconsequential. But even the smallest shift had catastrophic consequences. Seasons became erratic, entire ecosystems colpsed, and what little food sources remained grew increasingly scarce.A nuclear winter came. Those who survived the initial devastation found themselves in a world unrecognizable from the one they once knew. Fortified encves became the st bastions of humanity, each one its own isoted kingdom, ruled by warlords and remnants of governments clinging to the st vestiges of power.

  The origins of the war faded into obscurity. For those who lived through it, the reasons no longer mattered. What had started as an act of assassination had spiraled into a conflict so vast, so absolute, that no one could remember a time before it. The few historians who remained debated endlessly—was this inevitable? Had humanity always been on a path to self-destruction? Or had it all been orchestrated by unseen hands, pulling the strings from the shadows? Theories ran wild, but the truth was as unreachable as peace itself.

  The world had become a graveyard. The scars of war stretched across every continent, each ruin a silent monument to the arrogance of man. The sky, once blue, was now a sickly shade of red, a reflection of the blood that had been spilled. Rivers ran bck with toxins, their waters undrinkable. The air was thick with the scent of decay, of burned flesh and broken dreams.

  But in the end, none of it mattered.

  Hatsuki thought as he rememberd why was he even fighting in the first pce.

  Hatsuki, who had heard the siren, destroyed the chip and ran toward the campsite. The moment the device shattered in his grasp, something imperceptible yet overwhelming rippled through the air. It was a signal—a silent, unseen command sent across the battlefield, transmitted directly into the neural interfaces embedded in every soldier’s brain.

  As if possessed, the soldiers, their eyes hollow and devoid of thought, moved in perfect synchronization. Without hesitation, they gathered in rigid formation, standing in rows as straight as a bde's edge. The silence between them was deafening. These were men and women who had long since abandoned their own will, their minds shackled to the war machine that had consumed the world.

  Then, the sky darkened.

  From beyond the horizon, colossal airships, each rger than the entire isnd of Okinawa, loomed overhead. Their metal frames glistened under the dim, polluted sunlight, casting massive shadows that swallowed the nd beneath them. The low hum of anti-gravity thrusters reverberated through the air, a mechanical heartbeat of war.

  Floating mechas, their forms sleek and menacing, descended from above, their jet propulsion systems leaving burning trails of blue light in the sky. Each one was equipped with weaponry that far surpassed conventional understanding—nanite guns, energy-based artillery, and defensive barriers capable of withstanding nuclear bsts. The soldiers below remained motionless, their uniforms bck as the void, rifles gripped tightly at their sides. Behind them, the medical teams stood at attention, their faces unreadable beneath their augmented visors.

  And then, the commander stepped forward.

  Kyotaro stepped forward, his gaze sweeping over the assembled ranks, his voice cutting through the stillness like a bde.

  "This war did not begin with strategy or necessity. It began with something far simpler—something pathetic. A desire. A whisper in the dark that festered into a storm."

  The soldiers remained motionless, their breaths shallow, their eyes locked onto him.

  "We are creatures of contradiction. Gifted with reason, yet sves to instinct. Capable of understanding, yet bound by selfishness. We—who dream of peace—are the very architects of war. We, who call ourselves civilized, have reduced our world to ash, not in ignorance, but in full awareness of our crimes. And yet… we marched forward, as if fate had already decided that reason would always kneel before desire.

  "We cim to cherish life, yet we hesitate when it is in our power to save it. Again and again, we look upon suffering and ask, *‘What can I do?’* And again and again, we do nothing. We tell ourselves we are powerless until regret gnaws at our souls—but regret is the currency of the weak. The world does not care for hesitation, nor does it grant mercy to those who wait for righteousness to prevail.

  "Some fought against this tide of destruction. Some tried to salvage what remained. But peace has never been written into the ws of existence. It is not a natural state. It is an illusion—one that crumbles the moment the strong decide it no longer serves them. We waited for reason to triumph, but reason never came. We waited for justice, but justice was never ours to cim.

  "And so, we stopped waiting.We looked upon those who had taken everything from us and understood a simple truth: they are not our enemies because they are different. They are our enemies because they chose to be. Because they stood upon the ruins of what was once ours and called it their victory. They did not hesitate. They did not wait. They carved their will into history and left us with nothing but bones and dust."

  Kyotaro raised his arm, his voice now an unshakable force.

  "Today, we will carve our will into history. Not with words. Not with reason. But with fire and steel. Today, we fight—not for peace, not for ideals, but because we refuse to kneel. We fight because we must. We fight because they left us no other choice!"

  A roar erupted from the soldiers, their voices shaking the very earth beneath them.

  "WE FIGHT!!!!"

  The sound swallowed the wastend, drowning out the wind, the distant hum of war machines, the cold silence of a dying world.

  "We will not forgive! We will not forget!!!!"

  "WE WILL MAKE THEM SUFFER!!!!"

  Another eruption of voices.

  Kyotaro closed his eyes for a brief moment. Perhaps, in another life, he might have been someone who chose differently. But in this world, in this moment, there was only one path left.

  He opened his eyes.

  "FORWARD!!!"

  As the echoes of their battle cry faded into the cold, a man stepped forward. His hair was a striking shade of red, his sharp eyes hidden behind the gre of his gsses. His movements were deliberate, his posture betraying nothing of his thoughts. He adjusted his gsses with a single push of his fingers before speaking.

  "You know it's pointless."

  Xian Wu’s voice was smooth, calm, as if he were merely stating an undeniable fact.

  Another man joined him—a figure with golden blond hair, a long scarf wrapped tightly around his neck. His presence was different, almost unbothered, like the eye of a storm. He smirked.

  "After all, the world is a wastend now."Ji-Hwan's voice was lower, edged with something dangerously close to amusement.

  Kyotaro did not turn to them. Instead, he let the silence stretch, as if allowing their words to settle in the air. Then, he spoke.

  "I know."

  His voice was steady.

  "The world, power, this war—it doesn’t matter anymore."

  He turned his head slightly, just enough for them to see the flicker of something burning deep in his eyes.

  "But do you think I would let scum like them win? Do you think I would let them rule over what’s left of us?"

  The two men exchanged gnces.

  And then, they ughed.

  Then, together, they nodded.

  And in unison, the three commanders spoke.

  "Today, we will win this war!"

  ***

  The war raged on, an orgy of violence stretching across continents. The sky was thick with smoke and death, its once-vivid blue now a rotting expanse of red and bck. Above the battlefield, the Russian airships loomed, their metallic husks swallowing the dying light, casting twisted shadows over the ruined earth. The Asian forces surged forward, their mechanized behemoths carving through ranks of flesh and steel alike.

  The earth quaked beneath their march.

  Russia had not begun this war. It had merely pyed its part, as all nations did, shackled to the relentless script of history. It had defended itself, fought to exist in a world that had already decided its fate. Its soldiers, gaunt from rationing, frostbitten from the ever-looming nuclear winter, clung to their rifles not out of loyalty but out of habit. They had long ceased to believe in victory. In their trenches, among the bones of their comrades, they whispered not of patriotism but of the days before, when the cold had not bitten so deep, when ughter had not been an alien sound.

  But the Asian Alliance did not stop. It could not. The weight of the dead pressed against them, pushing them forward. It was no longer about victory. It was about erasure. The st act of defiance in a world that had already condemned itself. The final offensive was swift, brutal, and without mercy. The Russian line shattered like gss beneath a hammer. Their commanders, realizing the inevitable, issued a final order—one that had been anticipated since the war’s inception. Not surrender. Not retreat.

  Extermination.

  The Russian forces, unwilling to hand their homend to those they saw as conquerors, activated their fail-safes. Underground silos, once considered relics of a bygone era, roared back to life. Warheads, programmed with coordinates etched in desperation, screamed into the heavens. They did not target military instaltions. They did not aim for strategic advantage. They sought annihition. To deny their enemies the very nd they fought for.

  And then the world burned.

  Germany had already colpsed. The European forces, fractured and leaderless, were a mockery of their former power. They fought among themselves, nations once allies now devouring each other in the absence of structure. The nuclear winter had come, and with it, starvation. Germany, once the pinnacle of order, had become a tomb where the dead outnumbered the living. Those who remained did so at a cost no rational mind could accept. In the ruins of Berlin, tongues were ripped from the mouths of the weak, their screams denied even the dignity of sound. The w had dissolved. Morality was a forgotten concept. The strong took, and the weak gave.

  The st Russian stronghold fell, not with a fight, but with silence. When the Asian forces entered, expecting resistance, they found only emptiness. Empty streets. Empty homes. Empty people. The survivors did not resist. They merely stared, their bodies hollowed out by famine and radiation.

  A soldier would pause mid-step, looking at his hands in confusion, as if some unseen force had plucked away at the seams of his existence. Flesh turned to dust. Bone crumbled into the wind. It spread like a whisper through the ranks. An entire battalion reduced to nothingness in the space of minutes. Across the world, the same fate unfolded. Cities, already on the brink of ruin, became graveyards in an instant. The victors, the defeated, the innocent, the guilty—none were spared. The war had been won. And in winning, they had lost everything.

  Kyotaro stood among the ruins, his boots sinking into the ash that had once been his men. He did not move. There was nowhere to go. He did not speak. There was no one left to hear him. The world had become a wastend. He had fought for power, for vengeance, for something—though he could no longer remember what. And now there was nothing.

  Xian Wu’s voice, once calm, was gone. Ji-Hwan’s ughter had died long before his body did. The silence stretched, endless, unbearable. It was not death that terrified Kyotaro. It was the realization that even in death, there would be nothing. No reincarnation. No afterlife. Just the oblivion he had fought so hard to outrun.

  Was this inevitable? Had humanity always been running toward its own destruction, blind to the cliff’s edge? Or had they simply been pushed, by unseen hands, by whispers in the dark that had steered them toward ruin? Were they ever truly free? Or had history merely repeated itself in an infinite cycle, each iteration believing itself unique while marching the same path as those before?

  The war had not mattered. The suffering had not mattered. The victors had not mattered. In the end, the nothing matterd.

  Kyotaro closed his eyes as he took his st breath.

  Eventually, he died.

  After some time, not a single living organism remained on Earth.

  No trace of humanity endured.

  Billions of years ter, the Sun expanded into a red giant, swallowing Earth along with the rest of the sor system.

  And after an unfathomable stretch of time, the universe itself withered. Every star burned out, leaving only bck holes, which, too, eventually exhausted their energy and faded away, until nothing remained.

  Dark matter was the st to persist.

  And then—time unfroze for Natsumi.

  He floated in emptiness, if it could even be called that.

  His consciousness flickered.

  Time had lost its meaning.

  Time reversed for him, forcing him to witness the birth of the universe. Then, it resumed its course, dragging him toward its inevitable end.

  He watched as everything turned to dust.

  I saw humanity, over and over again, cwing at existence, shaping and destroying their world, as they desperately tried to build something sting, only for entropy to tear it down.

  As the cycle reached its conclusion.

  I saw their joys and their sorrows, their lies and their truths, their murders and their suicides, their dreams and their despairs. No matter how cruel or kind they had been, no matter their sins or their virtues, they all shared one thing in common—They struggled to live.

  Through suffering, through cruelty, through fleeting moments of hope, they fought against the void, even when they wanted to give up. Even when the weight of existence crushed them, they kept moving forward, in one way or another.

  Humans are simple—yet impossibly complex creatures.

  Even nothingness was turning to dust. Even dark matter faded.

  And as the final remnants of darkness crumbled, something impossible emerged from beyond it.

  My vision wavered.

  There, beyond the empty universe, y something else. Not emptiness. Not silence. But scattered pinpricks of light in the abyss.

  Ah...

  My pupils dited in reverse as I realized—each light was another universe.

  How pretty..

  A smile formed on my lips as my body disintegrated, merging with the void.

  And I faded into nothingness.

  And nothingness faded into something beyond reality.

  And that reality dissolved into something beyond nothingness.

  And that nothingness twisted into something beyond comprehension.

  But Natsumi's soul did not fully fade away as it was already broken beyond any recovery and drifted through the emptiness of the bnk universe, finding itself in the fifth dimension.