Chapter 77: The Winning Formula of Beyond Absolute Zero

Chapter 77: The Winning Formula of Beyond Absolute Zero

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“The autumn wind rustles through the cosmic reeds, and the Lord of Fate washes his hair in the pool of the stars. Let the celestial bureaucracy look at the empty Gate of Orion and tremble—for the sovereign they sought to bind now walks unchained.”

A Mythical Zone was never just an energy aura.

To the apex entities who walked the Ethereal Spectrum, it was the ultimate externalization of the soul—a supreme domain that functioned like an athlete entering the absolute, hyper-focused state of the 'Zone,' completely overriding the universal laws of physics within its boundary. It was the ultimate trump card. A personal bankai that forced reality to conform to the user's psychological and spiritual parameters.

And right now, two absolute zones were grinding against one another in the stratosphere above Shinjuku.

The ascent of the Heavenly Wolf was not a leap; it was an act of brutal, gravitational defiance. When Daishimei launched himself from the pulverized asphalt, he didn't just break the sound barrier. The sheer kinetic force of his takeoff, amplified by the staggering density of his obsidian armor, shattered the very concept of silence that Tsukuyomi had forced upon the ward. A booming, concussive wave of indigo plasma and raw ozone tore upward, spiraling like a dark drill aimed directly at the heart of the false moon.

High above, at the epicenter of the violet corona, Tsukuyomi floated with his hands hanging loosely at his sides. His face was a mask of cold, pale indifference. His posture was completely devoid of human panic, radiating the exact, chilling arrogance of an absolute predator looking down at an annoying insect.

“You are loud, Kagechi,” Tsukuyomi murmured, his voice flat, frictionless, and empty of all emotion. “But noise does not alter a mathematical certainty.”

With a casual, almost lazy flick of his index finger, Tsukuyomi commanded his Flawless Zone.

The ambient violet light of the Total Lunar Eclipse instantly condensed into a barrage of hyper-dense, zero-entropy spears. Each projectile was a localized manifestation of absolute stasis—designed to freeze and shatter the atomic structure of whatever it touched. They fell like a torrential, apocalyptic rain, moving at terminal velocity toward the ascending Daishimei.

Below, through his shattered blue visor, Kazuaki’s bloodshot eye tracked the descending barrage. His internal systems screamed with hazard warnings. “The mass of those projectiles... it’s going to flatten Shinjuku into a crater!”

But Daishimei didn't evade. He didn't even raise a shield.

The legendary Kusanagi hummed with a violent, bloodthirsty eagerness in his grip. The ancient steel pulsed with dark, storm-infused lightning. As the first volley of zero-entropy spears reached him, Daishimei swung the blade in a wide, horizontal arc.

SHRIIIK!

It was a sound that defied description—like a thousand thunderclaps compressed into a single, razor-thin frequency. A massive crescent of dark indigo plasma erupted from the Kusanagi, instantly cleaving through the descending spears. But the blade didn't just break the ice; it devoured the energy. The legendary sword of Susanoo was forged in the belly of the Eight-Headed Serpent to cut down divine arrogance, and in Daishimei’s hands, it was doing exactly what it was made for.

The spears of absolute zero shattered into harmless, glittering dust that was immediately sucked into the flaming indigo tail trailing behind Daishimei’s helm.

Tsukuyomi’s pale eyebrows twitched slightly, but his expression remained hollow. He raised a single hand, attempting to manually command the space around Daishimei to freeze completely. “Zone Liberation: Absolute Cessation. Return to zero.”

The violet domain pulsed, attempting to force the temperature around Daishimei down to 0 Kelvin—the absolute limit of classical thermodynamics, where all atomic movement dies.

But as the freezing violet energy clashed against the dark, bleeding crimson aura of Daishimei’s obsidian armor, something impossible happened. The violet light didn't freeze him. Instead, Tsukuyomi’s energy began to violently crack, fracture, and crystalize, before shattering backward.

Down on the ground, Kazuaki’s tactical computer flooded his remaining retinal display with blinding red error codes.

“Warning. Thermodynamic laws violated,” Kazuaki muttered, staring up in absolute disbelief. “That’s not absolute zero... it’s lower.”

Daishimei let out a dark, metallic laugh that vibrated from behind his constellation-mapped visor. It was a wild, predatory sound, completely contrasting Tsukuyomi's eerie quiet. He crashed through the atmosphere, stopping mid-air just a hundred meters below Tsukuyomi’s throne.

“Absolute zero is the limit of your little sky, Tsukuyomi,” Daishimei purred, the indigo wolf-ears on his helm flaring violently as his fighting spirit burned hotter. “Zero Kelvin is merely the cessation of movement. It is the death of heat. But my domain was forged in the void between dead stars. It is the cold of the abyss before creation.”

The pitch-black and deep crimson sphere expanding from Daishimei’s armor suddenly warped, taking on the ethereal, shifting hues of a ghostly, hyper-boreal aurora.

“Zone Liberation: Eyes of Auriga.”

The effect was instantaneous and terrifying. Daishimei’s zone completely bypassed the absolute limits of thermodynamics. The temperature plummeted into the negative Kelvins—an impossible, inverted state of physics where energy did not simply stop moving; it was violently, aggressively consumed by the environment itself. The Zone Liberation of Northern-Light Condensate was a temperature so low, so utterly alien, that it began to freeze the concept of heat out of existence.

Tsukuyomi felt the ethereal, aurora-like ribbons of Daishimei’s zone brush against his violet corona. For the first time, a flicker of something dark passed through the moon god's empty eyes. His flawless, pale skin actually began to burn—not from fire, but from the sheer, unnatural friction of his divine energy being violently ripped away by the negative temperature.

“Impertinent ghost,” Tsukuyomi said softly, his tone remaining terrifyingly calm even as his power was pushed back. He raised both arms above his head, drawing directly from the celestial body of the eclipse. “You fight with the desperation of a mortal beast. Allow me to show you the despair of a true, unmoving heaven. Lunar Cataclysm: Hollow Meteor.”

The space above Tsukuyomi warped dramatically. The violet light compacted, forming a colossal, hyper-dense meteor of pure gravity and lunar rock, easily the size of a city block. The gravitational pull alone began to rip chunks of skyscrapers out of Shinjuku's foundations below.

“Hold the perimeter!” Captain B roared on the ground, his orange alloy plating straining as he and the Night Guard defenders—Sagume, Inugami, and the Yaorozu—anchored themselves against the sudden anti-gravity geyser.

Daishimei looked up at the descending celestial body, his posture shifting into something feral. He didn't flinch. He didn't calculate. He was entirely locked in his 'Zone,' driven by an instinctive, overwhelming urge to tear the sky apart.

Across his dark, star-forged armor, the silver constellations of the Seikai began to pulse violently. Every time Tsukuyomi exerted pressure, every time the moon god tried to crush him, the kinetic and divine energy was violently absorbed by Daishimei’s Zone Liberation. This energy didn't disappear—it fed directly into the Arbiter’s internal ledger.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

Like a celestial mechanism winding up, the nodes of the constellations on his chest and arms ignited one by one. This was his Divine Forte—the karmic accumulation of his status as the Arbiter. He was weighing the sins of the false moon, gathering the raw, offensive potential needed to balance the cosmic scales.

The hollow meteor descended, screaming through the atmosphere, threatening to obliterate everything below.

The final star on Daishimei’s chest piece flared with blinding, absolute brilliance. The Divine Forte was full. The scale was tipped. The ultimate output was unlocked.

Daishimei gripped the hilt of the Kusanagi with both hands, lowering his stance until he looked like a wild wolf about to spring. The indigo flames of his wolf-tail expanded, wrapping around the blade of the ancient sword until it looked like a pillar of pure, cosmic plasma.

“You think you own the night, fake moon?” Daishimei whispered, his voice resonating with the combined weight of a thousand past lives.

He looked up, his eyes burning with golden enlightenment from behind his dark helm.

“Zone Resonance: Spiral of the Greater!”

Daishimei swung the Kusanagi directly upward into the path of the colossal meteor.

“DEVOURING WOLF OF THE NORTHERN HEAVENS!”

The resulting attack was not a mere energy of spiralling wave. It was an apocalyptic, mythological manifestation. The dark lightning and indigo plasma erupting from the Kusanagi expanded exponentially, taking the shape of a colossal, ethereal wolf head made entirely of negative-Kelvin starlight and deep-space crimson.

The wolf opened its massive jaws and simply... swallowed the meteor.

There was no explosion. There was no shower of debris. The Northern-Light Condensate instantly dragged the hyper-dense lunar rock into the negative thermodynamic void, erasing its mass and energy from the physical plane entirely.

But the attack didn't stop there.

The colossal indigo wolf, propelled by the fully unleashed power of the Zone Resonance, continued its upward trajectory, tearing straight through the center of Tsukuyomi’s violet corona.

Tsukuyomi didn't move. He didn't even have time to raise a hand.

The jaws of the Heavenly Wolf clamped down on the absolute center of the eclipse, sinking its fangs of primordial, ancient storm-steel directly into the false moon itself.

KRRAAACK!

A sound like the breaking of the world's spine echoed across the entire Japanese archipelago. The flawless, unassailable violet sky of Shinjuku splintered. Massive, jagged cracks of golden and indigo light spiderwebbed across the stratosphere as the Kusanagi's strike forced the heavens to remember the weight of the earth.

Down below, Kazuaki and the people stared up in absolute awe as the oppressive, suffocating darkness of the eclipse began to physically shatter, piece by piece, raining down like glowing glass.

Daishimei floated amidst the falling shards of the broken sky, the Kusanagi resting casually on his shoulder, his obsidian armor radiating the impossible, freezing heat of a dead star brought back to life. The Arbiter had not just defended the city; he had executed the sky.

The sky rained glass, but the god did not fall.

As the colossal indigo jaws of the Mythic Resonance faded into the freezing stratosphere, the shattered remnants of Tsukuyomi’s violet corona drifted downward like burning tinsel. Yet, floating precisely where the center of the eclipse had been, Tsukuyomi remained.

His immaculate white robes were frayed, edges blackened by the sub-atomic frost of the Northern-Light Condensate. A thin line of golden, glowing blood trickled from the corner of his lips, dripping into the void. His expression, however, had not changed. It was still that same hollow, pale void of emotion—the chilling, unbothered mask of an absolute predator who felt no pain, only a mild, clinical curiosity.

Then, he laughed.

It wasn't a roar of anger or a villainous cackle. It was a low, dry, whispery chuckle that echoed directly into the minds of everyone standing in the ruins of Tokyo. It sounded like winter wind dragging over dry bones.

“Splendid, Daishimei,” Tsukuyomi murmured, his pitch-black eyes locking onto the Arbiter floating before him. “You broke the outer mathematical ceiling. You dragged the temperature below the threshold of life. But did you truly believe a conceptual deity could be executed by cold? I am the dark. I am the absence of warmth. You have merely given me a home.”

Even as he spoke, the horrifying reality of Daishimei’s zone slammed into the physical plane.

The Northern-Light Condensate was an absolute domain that defied classical physics, dropping temperatures into the negative Kelvins. In a localized bubble, it was an unstoppable weapon. But as the residue of that reality-bending output leaked outward, the environmental feedback loop hit the Japanese archipelago like a tectonic shockwave.

The air across Tokyo and the entire Japan didn't just freeze; it turned into a solid, opaque crystalline fog. The moisture in the atmosphere instantly underwent desublimation, forming massive, jagged glaciers that sprouted from the asphalt of Shinjuku like glass teeth. The sea in Tokyo Bay groaned as its surface froze meters deep within seconds. The temperature across the entire nation plummeted at a catastrophic rate, threatening to kill every living civilian through pure thermal shock despite Shimei Zaojun's protective Hearth-Fire protocols.

“The baseline temperature is dropping too fast!” Kazuaki’s helmet computer warned, his single exposed eye widening as frost began to coat his cracked blue visor. “The zone... it’s overcoming the thermal capacity of the human survivors! Enji, if you keep this output up, you’ll save them from Tsukuyomi just to freeze their hearts solid!”

Tsukuyomi raised his hands, his pale fingers twitching as he prepared to manipulate the newly amplified cold. “Let the archipelago freeze, Arbiter. It is the only logical conclusion for a flawed script.”

But suddenly, Tsukuyomi froze.

His right hand jerked violently, his fingers clawing at the air as if fighting his own nervous system. The pale, flawless skin of his forehead began to ripple with a brilliant, subcutaneous golden light. Deep within his pupils, the absolute pitch-black was suddenly pierced by an aggressive, blinding solar flare.

“Give it back, Tsukuyomi.”

A second voice, layered, radiant, and heavy with maternal authority, echoed from within Tsukuyomi’s own vocal cords. It was Amaterasu. The sun goddess, whose solar engine had been forcibly extracted and integrated into his crown, was actively staging a coup from inside his spiritual core.

“You have closed the loop to create a perfect, dead world,” Amaterasu’s voice raged within his mind, forcing Tsukuyomi to clutch his head as his balance faltered in mid-air. “But a world without entropy is not a kingdom—it is a tomb. Yield the crown. Let the morning come.”

“Silence!” Tsukuyomi hissed at his own reflection, his posture finally breaking into a chaotic, uncoordinated stumble. “The sun is a variable of decay! I am saving them from the heat of their own choices!”

Daishimei watched the god fracture, the Kusanagi humming tightly in his hand. He didn't waste a single millisecond of the opening.

“You’re wrong about one thing, fake moon,” Daishimei’s voice boomed from behind his constellation-mapped visor, layered with an ancient, celestial resonance that belonged to a pantheon far older than Takamagahara. “You think you’re the only one who can dictate the temperature of the script? Remember: the sun is part of a star, and stars are pebbles in every constellation I hold.”

KRA-KRA-KRAK!

“So... let me introduce you to Sol, the talon of Columba and the spearhead of Canis Major!”

The silver constellations on the dark star-armor of the Seikai suddenly inverted. The silver lines turned into a blinding, hyper-dense solar gold. From an perspective outside the Milky Way, the local sun—Sol—was no longer a dominant, solitary centerpiece, but a microscopic spark anchored directly to the celestial coordinates of the Columba constellation, acting as a minor celestial weight beneath the towering grandeur of Canis Major. To look at Sol through Daishimei's eyes was to see it stripped of its local godhood, reduced to a functional, cosmic node woven into his vast stellar ledger.

The aggressive indigo aura of the Heavenly Wolf dissipated, replaced by a roaring, incandescent plumage of ten phantom suns manifesting behind his silhouette. As son of the primordial Lord of Heaven, Daishimei’s true, unmitigated divine lineage was that of the Golden Crow—the literal embodiment of the Tenth Sun of the ancient eastern sky.

“Zone Liberation: Planck Singularity - First Phase.”

Daishimei didn't use fire; he used pure, unadulterated cosmic radiation, but that’s only the first phase, which means there’s still something more dangerous. Then, the negative-Kelvin freeze of the Northern-Light Condensate was instantly met by its perfect, internal counterbalance. Waves of soft, golden atmospheric warmth rippled outward from his armor, systematically neutralizing the extreme frostbite gripping the city. The glaciers of Shinjuku dissolved back into warm mist within a single breath. He was regulating the climate of an entire nation by sheer force of his dual nature—the wolf that swallowed the moon, and the crow that brought the dawn.

On the horizon, the dark, indigo-rimmed sky began to pale. A thin, fragile line of natural orange light cracked against the edge of the world. The morning was fighting its way back.

“Insolent monster!” Tsukuyomi roared, the golden light of Amaterasu within him causing his left arm to temporarily paralyze, but his right arm surged with a desperate, hyper-condensed gravity wave. “I will tear your constellations from your spine!”

Tsukuyomi launched himself forward, a streak of jagged violet lightning cutting through the golden dawn.

But he never reached Daishimei.

TWANG.

A sound like the snapping of a massive iron cable reverberated through the upper atmosphere. It wasn't a sound of technology, nor was it the elegant mathematics of the Author. It was the raw, terrifying acoustic of a primitive, colossal war-bow.

From the high cloud layer, an iron arrow the size of a ballista bolt, wrapped in a raging, howling hurricane of gray storm-clouds, shot downward at relativistic speed.

THOOM!

The arrow struck Tsukuyomi squarely in his right shoulder, the sheer kinetic and divine momentum driving him out of the sky like a broken bird. The projectile carried the unmistakable, unrefined stench of sea-foam, thunder, and spilled blood.

Tsukuyomi crashed into the center of the ruined JAA plaza, creating a thirty-meter crater. He struggled to rise, coughing up a torrent of golden blood, his right arm pinned completely to the fractured asphalt by the massive iron shaft. He was forced onto his knees, his regal, divine status dragged into the dirt.

“Who…” Tsukuyomi wheezed, his pitch-black eyes staring up into the storm clouds that were suddenly rolling into Shinjuku, blotting out his false eclipse.

Descending through the gray gale, stepping heavily onto the concrete with bare, mud-stained feet, was a massive, imposing figure. He wore tattered, traditional robes of dark sea-blue, his wild, unkempt black hair blowing in the wind. On his back was a colossal quiver of iron bolts, and in his calloused hands was a longbow made from the spine of an abyssal sea serpent.

The wild, boisterous exile of Takamagahara had finally returned.

“You’ve grown soft sitting on that high throne, brother,” Susanoo growled, his voice a rolling thunderclap that shook the remaining foundations of the ward. He didn't look at Tsukuyomi with pity; he looked at him with the raw disgust of a warrior. “You locked up our sister, stole her engine, and turned my land into a sterile playground for your ego. I left the high heaven because it was boring, but this... this is pathetic.”

“Susanoo…” Tsukuyomi gritted his teeth, the iron arrow in his shoulder humming with a storm-frequency that systematically disrupted his access to the Flawless Zone. “You are an exile... you have no right...”

“I have the right of the storm,” Susanoo snapped, stepping forward and planting his heavy foot directly onto Tsukuyomi’s pinned chest, forcing the moon god further into the crater. “And right now, the sky is clear.”

CRACK!

With a violent, spatial rupture above the crater, the reality-bending domain cage that Tsukuyomi had woven to imprison his sister completely imploded.

The golden, solar engine of Amaterasu didn't just escape; it broke through the spatial coordinates with the force of a supernova. As the pocket dimension collapsed entirely, the blinding, radiant form of Amagai Terasumi was violently thrown out of the shattering rift, hurtling across the plaza.

“Chinatsu!” Captain B shouted, his internal sensors tracking the high-speed descent.

Before she could strike the pulverized concrete, the brilliant solar frequency re-entered her flesh with absolute authority. The sheer grace and clinical perfection that once defined her on the SANA summit stage returned in an explosive wave of golden light. Her hair ignited into a magnificent, sun-bleached gold, and the crushing exhaustion of her long captivity vanished instantly as the true Sun Goddess reasserted her anchor.

Terasumi landed perfectly on her feet, her boots skimming the frost-dusted asphalt as her eyes snapped open, glowing with the pure, unyielding light of a restored morning.

Up in the air, the Lord of Fate slowly drifted downward, the Kusanagi lowering as the storm-clouds of Susanoo and the natural dawn of Amaterasu began to wash away the last remnants of the zero-entropy nightmare.

Daishimei looked down at his rival pinned in the dirt, then at the wild god of storms standing over him. The ledger of Japan was no longer rewritten. The actors had changed, the true sun had broken her cage, and the script was finally running out of pages.