Shelved in Starlight

Act V — Inside My Dimension

Snap.

The world convulsed. Shadows screamed.

Twenty Silent Phantoms landed on obsidian that pulsed with violet veins, each beat synced with my heart.

Above us sprawled infinity — galaxies spiraling like knives, nebulae bleeding wrong colors, black holes drumming war.

This place was mine.

The squad captain broke the silence first.
His voice cracked under his mask.

“Not a Prince… something more than a god.”

I smirked.

“Finally. Someone gets the headline.”

They surged forward in perfect formation. Blades sang in harmony.
I lifted my hand lazily. The void laughed with me.

Pixels bled into being, frames desyncing as color re-compiled into matter.

Meme Constructs bloomed — neon fists, grotesque hammers, beasts with cartoon eyes.

One slammed down, scattering their unity. Above them, text burned bright:

Achievement Unlocked: Bad Career Choice.

“Welcome to comedy night,” I drawled. “The only joke here is you.”

They pressed on.
I yawned, stretching lazily. The sound reverberated across the void.

Weaponized Mockery.

“That swing? My grandmother did better. She’s dead. Twice.”

“You’re not assassins. You’re practice dummies with delusions.”

Their perfect silence fractured into hesitation.
Blades slashed. Predictable.

Every strike dragged before my eyes, slowed by the Spark.

I sidestepped like I’d choreographed their failure.

“Try harder. Or don’t. Same ending.”

One cut low. I strolled upward along the wall.

Gravity folded like paper. I waved down at them from the ceiling, smirking upside-down.

“Nice try. Forgot ceilings exist?”

Another lunged, blade flashing for my throat.

Time hiccuped. His strike crawled forward in syrup.

I tapped his mask twice like a clock.

“Tick-tock.”

Time resumed. He crumpled.
The squad tightened ranks. Too slow.

Space cracked like glass. I vanished — reappeared behind one.

“Check your blind spot.”

He unraveled mid-step.
The survivors spun — only to face dozens of me.

Afterimages stalked forward, smirking, yawning, striking back when struck.

One ghost fractured ribs before vanishing into static.

“Which one’s real?” I asked from ten places at once. “Doesn’t matter. They all hurt.”

Fear seeped into their silence.
The void cracked wider.

Galaxies stacked like mirrors, corridors splitting endlessly.

Their reflections lunged back with grotesque distortions.

Every step echoed into ten thousand false ones.

One swung wildly — his strike rebounded into his ally’s throat.
Erased before he could fall.

“Even your shadows betray you.”

Their silence broke into ragged breaths.
The captain gestured them forward. I tilted my head.

“Oops. Almost forgot something.”

Gravity tilted sideways. Half the squad slammed into walls, blades torn from their hands.

“Oops,” I mocked. “Physics tripped you.”

The battlefield shuddered.

Flames froze midair, glowing like crystal.
Blades bent backward in the hands that swung them.
Sound stuttered — each fracture hummed like a broken hymn, notes skipping mid-verse as if Heaven itself forgot the tune.
Light dimmed into unnatural shadows.

I stepped through casually.

“Welcome to beta reality. No patch notes.”

Their discipline finally cracked.

Snap.

One Phantom blinked out.
Snap. Another gone.

“Save file corrupted,” I smirked. “Game over.”

Each erased Phantom decomposed into static; outlines lagged half a heartbeat behind deletion.
Hopelessness spread like ink.

Only the captain still stood — steel steady, oath unbroken.

He charged.
Our clash tore constellations overhead.

His steel met paradox — Axis Distortion tilted momentum, but he corrected mid-air.
Sparks carved galaxies.

I smirked, teleporting with Starphase into his blind spot, fractals bursting.

“Close.”

Steel grazed my throat. Blood welled.
I licked it, grinning.

“Closer.”

Where the drops fell, stars dimmed, like the sky itself recoiled from tasting me.

He cut through Parallax Ghosts, who struck back before vanishing.

He slashed through Infinity Parallax, shattering reflections.
He fought against bent laws, refusing to break.

I shaped weapons mid-strike with Creation Kata — spear, shield, fist — each one flowing into the next.
Sparks collided into novas.

“Strong,” I admitted, stepping into his rhythm. “But wrong battlefield.”

Then — he roared words. His first. His last.

“Tell my son… Hikaru Kenzaki… I kept my oath.”

For a heartbeat, something bled through him —a boy’s laughter, small hands gripping a father’s shoulders…a promise made beneath sunlit clouds.A home. A life. A reason to fight.

And then the memory flickered out — devoured by the void trying to take him with it.

The words pierced deeper than steel.
Ray’s grin in the rain. Sunset. Wrong face.

My Spark trembled.
For a heartbeat, I faltered.

Then my smirk sharpened.

“Wrong script.”

Snap.

But erasure didn’t come.
The captain glitched — violet-gold static tearing him apart.
His roar muted, swallowed by silence.

Then — thud.

His last words looped through the void, distorted — “Tell my son… my son…” — until even the echo broke.

A book lay where he had stood, bound in light, his name carved across the cover.

It drifted upward. A cosmic bookshelf unfurled across the horizon, infinite, eternal.

The tome slid into place. The shelf rippled once — then vanished into stars.

The squad captain was gone. Not erased. Not slain.

Shelved.

Nineteen erased. One sealed.

The void pulsed, satisfied. Ghosts flickered out. Infinity collapsed into one sky.
Constructs peeled into static.

Somewhere in the static, his name glitched again — “ Kenzaki… Kenzaki…” — like the universe stuttering on its own grief.

I stood alone. Spark burned violet-gold through my veins. My grin fractured.

“I didn’t want this.”

The nebula twisted above. Whispers bled in tongues no god should hear.
And I didn’t know if I’d erased them… or erased myself.

Act VI — Aftermath

Snap.

The galaxy folded. My dominion collapsed.

I stood in ruins.
Bed shredded. Walls cracked. Floor scorched black.

My vision stuttered with the lingering light, pixels bleeding at the edge of my sight — and with every snap before this one, hairline cracks had laced beneath my skin, leaking light like broken glass.

Now the glow bled dull and cold, pain humming in the bones that pretended to be divine.

I could smell ozone and burnt stone; every breath tasted like static.

A low ringing crawled behind my ears — the echo of collapsing space, a leftover hum where silence forgot to fade.

My knees nearly buckled; divine bones protested the weight they weren’t built to bear.
For one breath, I almost let the light flicker out instead of fixing it.

“Lex Aetheris.”

Reality buffered, flickering between ruin and perfection before locking the new frame.

Glitches smoothed. Ruins disguised. To outsiders, just backlash. To me, a cover-up.

The door burst. Guards stormed in, spears raised.
I turned, veins faintly glowing.

“Training accident,” I said.

The air still tasted of burnt light; pixels of heat drifted like lazy fireflies.
They faltered, muttered excuses, and left.

Silence returned.

I laughed once. Hollow.

“Cheap furniture anyway.”

But in my mind, a shelf whispered. Pages turned.

Interlude — The One Who Ran

Far away, the lookout Phantom froze.
Twenty threads vanished. Not slain. Not fallen. Erased.

His chest seized. His mind screamed.
He ran. Shadows swallowed him.
Alive. Terrified. Gone.

Interlude — Arval

Beneath stone and secrecy, a Phantom knelt.

“My squad… gone. Not killed. Erased. I escaped.”

Arval’s lips curved slow, venomous.

“Good,” he whispered. “The cracks are widening.”

The cursed fire bent inward. The chamber shrank.

Act VII — Balcony

Moonlight spilled across the balcony, pale against cracks in the stone.

My hand trembled on the railing, blood dripping through violet-gold veins that burned like fire.

The Spark pulsed, bending the night — stars tilted, the moon warped sideways, reality stuttered as if it feared me.

Below, the city slept. Countless lives carried on, untouched by what I’d done.

But the silence.
Their masks, their blades, their oaths — gone.
I had killed them all.

The captain’s voice lingered, carved into my skull:

“Tell my son… Hikaru Kenzaki… I kept my oath.”

My grip crushed the railing into shards.
I wasn’t killing soldiers. I was erasing fathers, brothers, sons.

The Spark flared again, demanding I accept it — demanding I be the weapon they wanted.
The balcony cracked beneath my feet.

I bared my teeth in something like a grin. Sharp. Brittle. Hollow.

The sky pixelated for half a breath, then smoothed — pretending it hadn’t glitched.

“If they want a weapon…”
“…then I’ll show them one.”

The stars bent, the flame flared brighter than daylight, and silence swallowed the arena.

From the shadows of the stands, a voice whispered — low, terrified:

“Even divine heirs aren’t supposed to burn like that…”

I lowered my hand, breath ragged.

“…I regret it.”

The words burned more than the veins of light crawling through me.

The Spark flickered once — confused, resisting me — as if it no longer knew whose will it served.

The Spark convulsed, twisting the night further, but something inside resisted.
For the first time, I felt it hesitate.

A page turned in the dark. The shelf stirred.
Maybe that was why the captain wasn’t erased.
Maybe my regret had written him into the Chronicle instead.

✦ Epilogue Fragment — The One Who Watched

Far above the broken sky — beyond Heaven’s borders, past even the Aether’s reach —
something leaned forward.

Galaxies dimmed around its presence, like light refusing to touch it.

The stars themselves flickered, frames skipping in quiet terror.

It had no face. No shape.
Only the outline of a man where space forgot to render.
And in that outline — a grin.
Not cruel. Not kind. Just inevitable.

The being watched the flicker of violet-gold far below — the chaos still trembling where Haise had stood.

The grin deepened, fracturing the void like a crack across glass.

The universe blinked once.

And by the time it reopened its eyes,
the figure was gone — as if it had never existed at all.