The fabric of existence screamed as reality convulsed around them. Airi's vision blurred with shards of collapsing moments—a riot of broken timelines and screaming echoes. In that hellish instant, the world was nothing but a swirling maelstrom of twisted light and shadow.
Airi's heart pounded. She staggered, wide-eyed and spitting curses into the void.
"What the fuck is happening?!"
Her words tore from her lips as she flailed, desperate to find purchase in a reality that refused to hold together. Every instinct screamed to run, yet every step sank into the chaotic mire of unmade moments.
Stalin's grip on her was unyielding. Despite the swirling chaos, he stood calm—his eyes distant yet fixed, as if he were reading from an ancient, forbidden script written in the void. Without a word, his hand shot outward, and from the very essence of his being a bizarre, jagged sword materialized. Its blade shimmered with splintered light and raw, pulsating darkness, as if reality itself had been cleaved apart by its edge.
He had done it. He'd used Shattergrasp—an act so alien and terrifying that even Airi, for all her hardened training in dungeons, could only gape in horrified disbelief.
"Jesus Christ, Stalin…"
Airi's voice cracked, half anger and half terror. "What the fuck did you just do?!"
The sword pulsed with an eerie glow as Stalin raised it slowly. With one deliberate, almost casual swing, he slashed through the very dimension. The air split apart in a ragged seam, a bleeding wound across existence itself. For a brief heartbeat, the shattered world shuddered under the terrible precision of that strike.
Time and space rippled—the stars themselves seemed to weep as the dimensional tear widened.
Then, as if summoned by some cosmic error, multiple silhouettes of Stalin—alternate echoes of the man who'd forgotten his own beginning—materialized on the periphery, their eyes glinting with desperate hunger. They reached for the sword, each one intent on claiming its terrible power.
"No—get away from it!" Stalin barked, his voice echoing coldly. With a swift, almost imperceptible motion, he wrenched his focus inward. The sword's monstrous form flickered and dissolved, as if its existence were tethered to a single, unyielding will. The other Stalin-echoes faded, spitting out curses and vanishing into the dissonant air.
In that suspended moment, the shattered dimension began to recoil, gathering itself as if reassembling from scattered memories. The furious maelstrom collapsed inward, pulling them along. Before Airi could scream another curse, the world snapped—
—back to the oppressive gloom of the dungeon.
Airi hit the ground hard, her breath a ragged, angry rasp. She lay there, fists balled, cursing at the unyielding darkness that had stolen even a fleeting chance at escape.
"Goddamn it, Stalin! What the hell was that?!"
Stalin's face was impassive, eyes vacant of all the turmoil that raged around him—a man who'd sacrificed the very memory of his origin to wield such unholy power. "It was the only way to rip the wound in this reality," he said, his tone flat, as though speaking of a mundane chore. "I had to slice the dimension itself."
Airi's mind reeled. She knew nothing of these forbidden forces—of the Shattercode, the Hollowing, or any of the damnable tongues of unmade reality. All she knew was that the world had broken open, and in its violent unraveling, Stalin had become something monstrous—and maddeningly necessary.
"What the hell even happened there?" she spat, scrambling to her feet despite the cold dread that clutched at her heart. "What type of magic did you even use, no--- what exactly are you?"
For a long, aching moment, Stalin said nothing. His eyes flickered momentarily to hers—a fleeting glimpse of regret buried beneath the weight of his sacrifice—but then they hardened again, returning to that distant, unreadable gaze.
"Do not question the path," he intoned quietly. "Survival demands that we tear through these lies—even if it costs us everything."
Before Airi could retort, the relentless pull of the dungeon reclaimed them. The walls closed in, the ambient chaos swallowed by the familiar, suffocating darkness of the depths. In that instant, the fragmented world, the cursed blade, and the echoes of forbidden power faded like a half-remembered nightmare—leaving only the stark, oppressive reality of the dungeon behind.
And in the silence that followed, Airi's mind roiled with terror and fury—a promise that the shattered pieces of that night would haunt her long after the dungeon's cold embrace.
The dungeon was too quiet.
Airi's breathing was still uneven, her pulse hammering against her skull like a war drum. The sheer absurdity of what had just happened pressed against her mind like an iron weight, her thoughts a chaotic storm of disbelief, horror, and anger.
Stalin had cut through the goddamn dimension.
Not a wall. Not an illusion. Reality itself.
And now they were just supposed to move on? Pretend like the world hadn't just screamed in protest? Like the air hadn't fractured, like existence itself hadn't glitched out and tried to drag them into whatever the hell that frozen hellscape was?
No.
No, fuck that.
She clenched her fists, body still trembling.
"Alright, Stalin. You're gonna—"
Her stomach twisted.
A presence.
Behind her.
Her body moved on instinct, twisting into a defensive stance as her eyes darted back—
Nothing.
No mana signature. No shift in the air. No flicker of distortion. Just a void where presence should be.
Then—
"Fascinating," a voice murmured.
Airi's breath hitched.
Ofcourse it was him. Shiro stood there, golden eyes glinting in the dim light, his hands buried in his pockets. He looked amused. No, not just amused—delighted. Like he had just witnessed the most interesting thing in the world and was thrilled to be a spectator..
She hadn't felt him at all.
Shiro had no weight in reality. No presence. No mana. No nothing.
Like he wasn't really here.
"You son of a—!" Airi's fist shot out, fast, a hook straight for his jaw—
The air shattered.
Not literally, but in the time it took for her to blink, Shiro wasn't there anymore.
A blur. A flicker.
Her fist hit nothing.
Airi's heart stopped.
Shiro chuckled, now standing a few feet away, watching her with a lazy grin. His movements had been too fast, too inhuman—not teleportation, not a trick, just raw speed, like he had moved before she had even thrown the punch.
"Oh?" he mused. "Were you trying to hit me?"
Her stomach lurched.
"My apologies," he continued, tilting his head slightly. "I was simply too entertained watching that spectacle."
He gestured lazily towards Stalin. Towards the remnants of whatever cosmic violation he had just pulled.
"Truly magnificent," Shiro mused. "A reality fracture of that scale? No wonder the world tried to pull us apart. You even caught the attention of that lovely little Stray."
Airi's skin went cold.
The Stray.
Her mind convulsed at the memory, like something in her brain was actively trying to reject it—
A frozen landscape that shouldn't have existed.
Spears of ice piercing Stalin's heart.
A voice that spoke in corrections and contradictions.
A presence that had no right to be here.
Airi's legs nearly gave out.
What the fuck was that place?
What the hell had just happened?!
Her head throbbed, her vision tilting—no, no, don't lose it now—
Her voice came out hoarse. "That place. That… thing—the world fucking broke out, Stalin! You got impaled! I saw it—spears through your heart! The ground was cracking apart, and you—what the hell happened?!"
Stalin exhaled.
"You want answers?" His voice cut through the chaos in her mind like a blade. "Then listen."
Airi's breath hitched.
Her body screamed at her to demand an explanation, to refuse to move until she got a proper answer—but Stalin's tone was final.
He wasn't going to explain anything here.
And if she wanted the truth, she had to follow.
Her teeth clenched.
Fine.
Without another word, Stalin raised his hand.
A shimmer.
The vial materialized between his fingers once more—the same vial that had demanded her blood to open the last door.
Airi's stomach twisted.
Again.
Again with the goddamn blood price.
She gritted her teeth. "You better start talking, Stalin. And I mean now."
Stalin didn't answer immediately. Instead, he tilted the vial slightly, watching the way the dim dungeon light refracted against the glass. Then, with the same calm indifference, he turned and began walking toward the next passage.
Airi hesitated.
Her entire body was still screaming in protest, but she forced herself to follow.
Behind her, Shiro trailed along, humming absently to himself—like he wasn't standing in the aftermath of existence breaking in half.
The corridor stretched out before them, long and empty, like the dungeon itself was holding its breath.
Then—
"The magic system you know," Stalin finally said, his voice quiet but absolute, "is a lie."
Airi's heart stopped.
"...What."
Stalin's gaze remained forward. "Manifold Arcana—the system everyone relies on. It's a false construct. A diluted, sanitized trick meant to keep people from grasping the true fabric of existence."
Airi stared at him. "You're fucking with me."
Stalin ignored her.
"What we used back there? What I used?" His fingers curled slightly. "That was the Hollowing. The real system. The one beneath the surface. The one that doesn't play by rules, because it was never meant to be wielded."
Airi's breath hitched.
That thing he did when he summoned that sword.
It hadn't been magic.
It hadn't been normal.
It was wrong.
"You're telling me…" She swallowed hard. "There's a whole other system hidden under Manifold Arcana?"
Stalin nodded.
Shiro laughed softly.
"Oh, it's much worse than that, Airi."
Her hands curled into fists again.
"Explain." Her voice was sharp, demanding. "Now."
Stalin glanced at her.
And—for the first time since she had met him—she saw something in his eyes that almost resembled pity.
"The Hollowing isn't a gift," he said. "It's a bargain. Every time you use it, it takes."
Airi's blood ran cold.
Her mind flashed back to the echoes—the other Stalins appearing when he summoned that sword.
The way he had dismissed them.
The way his expression had been utterly blank afterward.
Her voice came out small. "What… does it take?"
Stalin exhaled.
"…Pieces of you."
Airi's breath caught.
"You're fucking joking."
Stalin's fingers flexed slightly. "I forgot my own birth."
Airi froze.
No.
No, that—that wasn't—
Her eyes locked onto him.
His expression was calm.
But his eyes—
There was something missing in them.
A void. A hollow space where something should have been.
Her stomach twisted.
"…That's the price?" she whispered.
Shiro's golden eyes gleamed behind her.
"No, Airi," he murmured. "That's just the beginning."
The corridor stretched ahead, long and lifeless. Every footstep echoed, swallowed by the eerie emptiness.
Airi walked in silence, her breathing shallow, her mind fracturing at the edges. She wasn't okay.
She wasn't fucking okay.
Her hands clenched at her sides, nails pressing into her palms. She barely felt it. The dull sting was nothing compared to the spiraling chaos clawing at her thoughts.
The magic system you know is a lie.
Stalin's words replayed in her head, over and over, like a cruel joke that refused to end.
A lie.
Her grandfather's voice surfaced in her memories, distant but firm.
"The world follows a code, Airi. Magic is woven into existence, shaped by mana, bound by the ancient laws. To master it is to understand order itself."
She could still picture him—his old yet steady hands guiding hers as she traced a spell in the air. The soft glow of magic forming beneath her fingertips. The pride in his tired eyes when she cast her first spell without faltering.
It had always been real. It had to be real.
But Stalin had carved through reality.
He had called forth something that wasn't magic—something that shouldn't exist. And it had worked.
What happened in that winter place?
Her mind snapped back to the impossible scene: Stalin standing after taking spears through the heart. The way the world had glitched, flickering, rejecting what had just happened. The Frost Stray's haunting presence, the way it had tried to correct him—and failed.
And that sword. The one Stalin had summoned through something called Shattergrasp.
He cut through the dimension.
The thought sent a sickening chill through her. What kind of system allowed for that? No, not even that—what kind of system actively tried to erase its own user?
She shook her head violently, biting the inside of her cheek.
No. No, this is insane. Manifold Arcana is real. It's real.
She felt like she was drowning in her own thoughts, struggling to breathe under the weight of the truth she didn't want to face.
She wanted to scream.
Stalin exhaled softly, breaking the silence.
"This is probably the part where you start denying it," he said, voice neutral.
Airi snapped her head toward him, rage surging. "You're telling me the only magic system I've ever known— the one that my grandfather taught me, the one that runs through every part of the world—is fake?!"
Stalin met her eyes, unfazed. "Yes."
Something in her snapped.
"Then explain it! Explain why it works! Explain why I can cast spells just fine if it's all some fabricated joke!"
Her voice echoed through the corridor. Even Shiro, who had been trailing behind them with his usual amused silence, tilted his head slightly, watching her break down with an almost clinical curiosity.
Stalin didn't stop walking.
"You can use it because it was built that way," he said, as if that was supposed to make sense. "It's a framework. A constructed layer placed over reality to keep people from tearing themselves apart."
Airi's pulse pounded in her ears.
"That doesn't make sense." Her breath was coming out too fast. "That doesn't fucking make sense—"
Stalin glanced at her. "Doesn't it?"
And the worst part?
It did.
She thought of the way reality had cracked, how the Stray itself had seemed to override the world around it.
She thought of the wrongness of Stalin's existence—the fact that he shouldn't be standing here after everything that had happened.
She thought of how every magic lesson she had ever been taught followed a pattern, a structure, something that always felt too clean.
And then she thought about that sword.
Her breathing hitched.
"…What was that sword?" she forced out.
Stalin looked down at his own hand, as if he could still feel its weight. His fingers twitched slightly.
"Shattergrasp," he murmured. "I don't fully understand it myself."
Airi's stomach twisted.
"The echoes." She swallowed. "When you summoned it—those other versions of you. What the fuck were they?"
"…Hunger echoes." Stalin's voice was quieter this time, like the words themselves carried weight. "Other versions of me. Ones that wanted it too."
Airi's skin crawled.
That wasn't normal. That wasn't fucking normal.
And then Stalin frowned, as if something had just clicked in his own mind.
"…The tongue."
Airi stiffened. "What?"
"The words I spoke when I summoned it." Stalin's brows furrowed. "That wasn't a language I know."
A heavy silence settled over them.
Shiro chuckled softly. "Ah. So you've begun to notice."
Airi turned sharply toward him. "Notice what?"
Shiro's golden eyes gleamed, his smirk widening.
"That something else is speaking through him."
Airi felt her entire body go cold.
Stalin said nothing.
His gaze flickered, shadows shifting in his expression. And in that moment, Airi knew.
He didn't remember speaking in another tongue.
The words had come from something else.
They kept walking. The dungeon stretched ahead, silent. Empty.
She felt it—the slow, nauseating unraveling of her own mind.
Manifold Arcana is fake.
The magic system I was raised on is fake.
Her grandfather's voice echoed in her thoughts, the gentle patience in his tone as he guided her through the first lessons of spellcraft. The warmth of his hand on her shoulder when she succeeded. The certainty in his eyes when he told her that magic was the very fabric of reality, the force that bound the world together.
She wanted to reject it. To scream that Stalin was wrong, that this was all some elaborate trick. But the evidence had already slammed into her like a runaway carriage, shattering every foundation she stood on.
She had seen it.
The Stray, the spears that should have killed Stalin, the glitching world that bent around him like it was trying to erase him from existence.
The sword.
The echoes.
The fucking words he had spoken without even realizing it.
Airi's breath hitched.
And then—his memory.
"I forgot my own birth."
A chill crawled down her spine.
That wasn't normal. That wasn't something you just—just said like it was an everyday occurrence. It wasn't something you just lost.
She glanced at him from the corner of her eye.
Stalin was walking ahead, his expression unreadable as ever, but now she saw the cracks beneath the surface. The slight tension in his shoulders. The way his fingers curled and uncurled, as if grasping at something unseen.
How much had he already lost?
A sick, uneasy feeling curled in her stomach.
Was he even aware of it? Did he wake up one day and realize there were gaps in his own existence, or did they just disappear, seamlessly erased like they had never been?
What if one day he forgot himself entirely?
Airi's throat tightened.
No. No, that wasn't her problem. She wasn't about to start—start worrying about this reckless, impossible idiot who had singlehandedly broken everything she thought she knew.
Her face burned.
She quickly shoved the feeling deep, deep down where it couldn't reach her.
Instead, she latched onto the question that had been clawing at her since he said it.
She inhaled sharply. "What did you mean?"
Stalin barely glanced at her. "What?"
"When you said you forgot your birth." Her voice was too tight. "What did you mean by that?"
A pause.
Then—too casually, too empty:
"I mean exactly what I said."
Airi stopped walking.
He didn't turn around, didn't acknowledge the way she was staring at him like he had just told her the sky wasn't real.
"That doesn't make any fucking sense, Stalin." Her voice was shaking. "People don't just forget something like that."
Another pause. Then, finally, he turned to face her.
His expression was calm. Too calm.
"I did."
Her blood turned to ice.
He said it like it was fact.
Like it was just another part of his existence—something lost, something taken, something hollowed.
She wanted to call him a liar.
But then she thought about the price.
The Hollowing isn't a gift. It's a bargain. Every time you use it, it takes.
She felt sick.
How much more had been taken?
And then, as if the weight of the moment wasn't enough, her mind lurched back to something else—something she had almost forgotten in the chaos.
That crow.
It had landed on Stalin's shoulder in the winter place. Right after the Stray vanished, after the world tried to correct him and failed.
It had looked wrong.
Not just because it had come out of nowhere, not just because there had been no sound, no flapping of wings—
But because when it landed, Stalin had hesitated.
Just for a second.
Like he recognized it.
Like it wasn't supposed to be there.
Airi's pulse pounded in her ears.
"What," she whispered, "was that crow?"
Airi's words hung in the air, an unspoken demand trembling on the edge of something vast—something she wasn't sure she wanted to understand.
What was the crow?
Why had it appeared right after the Stray failed to erase Stalin?
Why had he hesitated when it landed on him?
For a long, stretching moment, Stalin said nothing.
Then—
"Maybe because it was watching."
Airi flinched.
Shiro.
He had spoken so casually, so effortlessly, as if the answer was the most obvious thing in the world. But there was something off about his voice this time—something quieter, almost… entertained.
Airi turned sharply toward him, heart pounding.
Shiro's golden eyes gleamed in the dim dungeon light, a glimmer of something knowing flickering behind his smirk.
"Watching?" Airi repeated, wary.
Shiro tilted his head slightly, as if considering his own words. Then, in a tone almost amused, he said—
"Maybe because of the crow watching, he was able to use the Tongue to come back to life."
Airi's breath hitched.
Her mind reeled, crashing back into the nightmare of the winter place.
The spears. The ones that should have killed him. The ones that had pierced straight through his heart, through his body—
—except they hadn't.
No, they had never hit him at all.
Because he had spoken.
Those words. Those twisted, wrong syllables that made the world glitch around him—
That Tongue.
Airi's hands clenched into fists.
The evidence was all there, wasn't it? Stalin had used the Tongue to make it so the spears had never touched him in the first place. He hadn't survived the attack. He had rewritten it.
And that crow—
It had been watching.
Her stomach twisted.
Stalin exhaled, the sound barely audible. Then, finally—
"…That's correct."
Airi swallowed.
He wasn't denying it.
The reality of it settled over her like a lead weight, suffocating. Stalin should have died. That was an absolute fact. The Stray wasn't just some minor threat—it was a fundamental force meant to correct him. A monster that bent causality itself.
And yet, Stalin was still here.
Because of the Tongue.
Because of the crow.
Airi's nails dug into her palms.
But that didn't explain the bigger question.
"How?" she asked, voice tight. "How the hell did you even know how to use that Tongue?"
Stalin didn't answer immediately. His fingers twitched slightly at his sides, as if recalling something—something distant, something frayed.
Then—
"…I don't know."
Airi's blood ran cold.
He didn't know?
She stared at him, trying to process that. "What do you mean you don't know? You just—what, spoke a forbidden language without even realizing it? That's not—That's not something you just do, Stalin!"
A beat of silence.
Then, finally—
"It was instinct."
Airi nearly laughed.
Instinct.
He had spoken a reality-breaking, existence-warping, eldritch language on instinct?!
Oh, fuck this.
Her thoughts were spiraling. Her heartbeat was erratic, her breathing sharp. None of this made sense. None of this should be possible. The crow. The Tongue. Stalin rewriting his own death like it was a badly written mistake—
The Hollowing.
She felt like she was standing on the edge of a chasm, staring into something that didn't have a bottom.
And then, amidst the chaos in her mind, one last lingering question surfaced—
The one she had been ignoring.
The one that had been clawing at the back of her thoughts since she first noticed it.
She turned, eyes locking onto Shiro.
Her voice was shaking when she finally asked—
"…And what the hell is up with you?"
Shiro raised an eyebrow, smirking. "Oh? Do elaborate."
Airi clenched her fists, glaring.
"No mana," she hissed. "No presence. Nothing. How?"
She exhaled sharply, the frustration spilling out. "How the hell are you even standing here if you don't have a single trace of magic? How do you move like that? How do you—"
She gritted her teeth.
What the hell are you, Shiro?
A boy with no mana. No presence. No weight in reality.
Yet somehow, he moved with inhuman speed. He existed—despite every rule saying he shouldn't.
And Shiro… Shiro was smirking.
"Now that," he mused, golden eyes glinting with something unreadable, "is a very interesting question."
Airi's jaw clenched. "Answer me."
"I could," he said, tilting his head. "But would you really—"
The walls screamed.
Airi didn't hear it, not in the way she had ever heard anything before. It was deeper than sound, deeper than words—it was raw, fractured noise rupturing through the air, twisting into a shape that should not be.
The dungeon breathed.
No.
No, the walls were moving.
They pulsed—slithering, convulsing, knotting into something that broke every fundamental law of space. The stone twisted, folding in on itself like organic paper, contorting into a shape that should not have fit within the corridor's dimensions.
Then—
It peeled itself free.
Airi's stomach lurched.
It wasn't one thing. It was many.
A mass of crawling geometry, its limbs jagged, its body made of folded, writhing material—as if someone had taken the concept of space itself and crumpled it up like discarded parchment. Its face was not a face, but a horizon folded in half, a maw that stretched in every direction at once.
A Fathomless Coil.
A creature that did not belong to here, to now, or to any other place that should have existed.
And it was looking at them.
The air fractured.
Airi moved.
Instinct screamed, and she didn't question. Her body snapped into motion, throwing herself back as the thing lunged.
Too fast.
The corridor collapsed behind it, space shredding in its wake. Its limbs—if they could be called that—bent through perspectives that Airi couldn't even process.
And then—