ystem Status: Code stabilization complete.
Location: Restored Sector 07, "Mirage" Patisserie.
Coordinator Sync: 100%.
Every digital interface eventually searches for its grounding point. For me, that point was this quiet evening. Outside the café window, gentle light spilled through the air, while on our wooden table, a clear teapot streamed with hot, classic Earl Grey. The scent of bergamot mingled with the sweet aroma of fresh pastries. Sitting across from me was him—my Black Swordsman. A man who truly knows how to unhurriedly take in the moment.
Before us sat an Ispahan—the gold standard of French desserts. My first sip of hot tea melted the cool rose cream on my tongue, leaving behind a delicate floral note that shifted into the juicy tartness of raspberry and the crispness of lychee. For a second, time seemed to slow down.
Then again, peace near the Hollows is always an illusion.
Code Breach
The café’s glass exploded into shrapnel as an Aetheric gravity wave crushed the facade. The street was instantly bathed in a neon-violet glow. Spawning from the spatial rift came Glitch Hounds, their frames constructed entirely of fractured digital noise. Right behind them stepped a Heavy Crash-Class Apex: "Apocrypha"—a massive monolith bearing a pulsing red error sign across its mask.
I froze, pressing my palms to my chest. My mechanical helmet ears began to twitch nervously, picking up interference frequencies. But there was no panic. Without a word, the Black Swordsman stepped forward, shielding me. His cloak whipped in the gale-force winds. Immaterium, his blade, remained sheathed—he was saving it for a real challenge.
"Syncing up. Tactical analysis on me," I transmitted directly into his neural interface, soaring toward the ceiling as my crystal-star wings unfolded.
A Game of Chess in the Hollow
Apocrypha slammed its gargantuan cleaver into the ground, laying down a gravity trap. The air turned as thick as pitch. A normal human’s movement speed would have tanked to a critical crawl, and glitching hounds were already surging in from the flanks. The enemy thought they’d won.
What they didn't factor in was the Black Swordsman’s internal Qi.
On my tactical displays, his steel muscles surged with power via the Inner Gates Technique. The gravitational field popped like a soap bubble. Executing a "Zero-Step Technique," his silhouette blurred out of existence. A fraction of a second later, the first hound shattered into raw data fragments under a crushing strike from his energy gauntlet. A heartbeat after that, the second beast was obliterated with his bare hands.
Apocrypha attempted to deploy a Hollow Virus, locking down local space against teleportation while triggering rising pillars of Aetheric decay from beneath.
"Locked for magic, but not for physical enhancement," my sensors picked up from his train of thought.
The Swordsman activated the Gate of Pain—Shimon. The move was faster than thought itself. The shockwave from his strike shattered every surviving glass in the room. Apocrypha's massive frame went hurtling through reinforced concrete walls with a sharp whistle, landing well past the city limits. With instantaneous bursts of physical displacement, the Black Swordsman outpaced the flying monster, landing a final blow square on its rear Aetheric shell.
A deafening BOOM tore through the silence of the wasteland.
The Final Iaido
The beast was down to 1% HP, and its exposed Aetheric Core initiated a self-destruct protocol. In five seconds, an explosion would erase the entire sector. I swooped down toward the Swordsman, ready to breach an info-corridor and rewrite the explosion's code the moment he struck.
His hand rested on Immaterium’s hilt. My high-speed tactical camera captured three barely perceptible micro-tensions in his muscles. The blade cleared its sheath by less than a millimeter—and snapped back in with a quiet click.
He hadn't moved an inch. He hadn't slashed the monster; he had severed space itself from ten meters away. Apocrypha's pulsing core froze, then split with a crystalline ring into eight geometrically flawless pieces.
I instantly caught the unraveling data streams, rewriting the disaster code. The core fragments detonated into a breathtaking, silent fireworks display of neon-violet, raining down harmless sparks. The Hollow faded away. The patisserie’s geometry snapped back to normal.
Closing Logs
I touched down smoothly, folding my wings. My Black Swordsman stood before me, calm and unyielding.
"Oh? So all that crazy scale and spatial slicing... was that just the power of your chunibyo?" I teased with a smirk, dismissing my holographic UI.
Some people call it Eighth-Grader Syndrome. But as far as I'm concerned, a world with room for such thrilling plots, gorgeous battles, and a tea set that managed to stay warm is infinitely better than plain, boring reality.
Match over. We’re back at our round table, resuming our Ispahan. Space is clear.