Chapter 251: A hidden Player

He did not find another corpse.

Not immediately.

As soon as he got in the range, Ghost Blade showed him the events happening almost 500 meter away from him.

’How did he go this far away?’

Shiro was still moving when Ishiki’s mind pictured the place, it was a plaza kind of — Shiro was bleeding, yes, and running out of options, but still he was fighting.

The fountain in the center had been long reduced to a cracked basin and a stump of rusted pipe.

The debris around it were in fractures, pushed up and over itself by whatever forces had ripped through this place. Two Superior Xenons were using the uneven ground as cover, circling Shiro on opposite sides, keeping just out of his immediate reach and pushing him toward the more broken terrain.

Shiro’s left shoulder was a mess of blood and torn cloth, his jacket soaked through on that side. His revolver was empty; he had thrown it already. Now he moved with nothing in his hands, weight shifted slightly to favor his good arm, breath controlled, eyes sharp.

The nearer Xenon lunged.

Shiro stepped in rather than away, catching the timing by half a beat — too close to be safe if you were wrong, perfect if you were right.

He planted one foot on the descending limb, used it as a ramp, and drove up the length of the Superior Xenon’s front, boots finding purchase on ridges of green plump skin until he was standing on what passed for its head.

He bent his knees once and stamped down with his full weight.

The cracking sound was blunt and ugly.

The Xenon’s cranial shell buckled inward; and its eyes bulged out with fowl liquid flowing out of it. The Superior Xenon was agitated and thrashed around in a frenzy.

It did not die! Ishiki increased his speed, but his eyes widened on Shiro’s next moment.

He did not jump off the frenzied beast and instead brought out a knife and thrashed it in the Xenon’s skull.

The beast sagged and dropped, hitting the shattered paving with enough force to send dust up in a thick ring.

Shiro rode the collapsing Superior Xenon down and pushed off its body at the last second, landing in a three-point crouch, right hand and both feet braced on the broken paving.

For a heartbeat, everything held.

He exhaled once, sharp.

Then something hit his leg.

It wasn’t a claw, or debris. It was too fast, too clean and too precise. A sharp impact with no warning in the air or no visible source — just a line of pain that tore through his right thigh from the side, hot and sudden, as if someone had taken a metal rod heated white and rammed it straight through muscle.

Shiro’s face went white.

His leg buckled.

He dropped to one knee. His right refused to bear even a fragment of his weight. Blood was already spreading quickly down his trouser leg, dark even against the shadowed ruins.

“What—” he hissed, looking around.

The second Xenon was already in motion.

Ishiki arrived on the edge of the plaza in time to see Shiro drop.

He saw the wound on the side of the thigh, bleeding hard. The second Xenon’s hand that looked like a hammer came down over Siro to crush him.

But it was slashed in half mid motion, its two pieces falling to the ground around Shiro’s body. They were soon consumed by bright purple flames and burned out of existence.

The xenon itself turned into nothing.

Shiro turned around and saw Ishiki standing behind him. “Sir,” his face lit up with recognition and hope.

Ishiki turned around and saw him trying to stand up. He put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him down.

“You’re hit,”

“Again, Its the second time,” Shiro agreed through his teeth. His face was pale, but his eyes were still clear. He looked at the ruined Superior Xenon, then past Ishiki at the street behind him. “Where is the other one?”

“Not our problem for now,” Ishiki said. “Stay down.”

He didn’t wait for an argument.

The attack came from an unknown place and suddenly hit Shiro. The person was not nearby, and it was not the Xenon at all. They were surrounded by debris that made looking too far impossible.

The attacker was not even in the range of [Ghost Blade], so Ishiki decided in an instant and summoned [Wind’s Embrace].

The Vestige formed around his neck from the motes of light. As soon as the necklace formed — a sudden, invisible current wrapped itself around his shoulders and back, coalescing into something with structure and intent.

For a moment it felt like hands pressing between his shoulder blades.

Then the wings formed.

They were thin, translucent arcs of compressed air, curving out and back from his shoulder blades like twin scythes. When he flexed his hands, they flexed with him, catching currents that weren’t visible, turning the weighted heaviness of his own body into lift.

Ishiki was not an expert at flying, nor had he experienced it enough times to make it natural, but he could now control them at bare functioning quality.

The ground dropped away beneath him.

The ruined plaza shrank quickly, the fountain and the fallen Xenon and Shiro’s kneeling figure becoming small, precise shapes in a field of broken stone. Wind roared suddenly in his ears, cold and clean and full of dust ripped from every surface he was passing over. His coat snapped hard against his back. The city opened up beneath him — a jagged ocean of rooftops and collapsed walls and narrow canyons where streets used to be.

’Height,’ he thought. ’Line of sight.’

He summoned Eye of Ruin.

The monocle materialized in his hand — a simple thing by shape: a round lens, a thin metal frame, a fine chain that trailed away into nothing rather than attaching to anything mundane.

The glass was opaque from this side and felt as though it was filled with fog… it made his head throb just by looking at it, a flat, dark surface that did not reflect the storm sky.

He raised it and placed it against his eye, the metal was cold against the skin around his eye as he set it in place.

The world did not change much.

It did not brighten or darken. But instead it deepened into outline. It was also nothing special if one didn’t know how to discern things through it.

Every structure, every piece of ground, every wrecked vehicle, all of them acquired a second layer. A second outline, not of color but of density, of Synth energy saturation and hostile intent. The city became a map of pressure points and absence, a diagram of where power was and was not.

He swept his gaze slowly across the ruins.

The eye drank everything it saw.

There, on Shiro’s position, there was a sharp flare of light red Synth energy, wounded but stable. Beyond him, to the east, the place where Black Suit’s body had been, a faint residue was already dispersing.

And then—

On the horizon of the ruins, near the boundary where the ground fell away into older collapse, stood a building that should not have been standing.

Five full floors, intact.

Its facade was cracked but still vertical, its windows mostly empty, its top floor opening out onto a wide terrace partially shielded by the remnants of a decorative metal frame. In any other view, it would have been just another piece of old-world architecture refusing to lie down.

Through the Eye of Ruin, it was an anomaly in the rather calm place.

The terrace was saturated with darkness.

A concentration of black synth energy, that looked like a knot of blackness that pulsed at the edge of his perception, feeding threads of influence out into the surrounding ruins.

His whole body reacted.

He tore the monocle off.

The lens left his skin with a soft, almost reluctant pull, as if it had settled into his flesh more than it should have in that short time.

The pain followed a heartbeat later.

The veins around his right eye bulged suddenly, thick and hot under the skin, as if something inside them had swelled to three times its proper size and was contemplating tearing its way free.

His vision blurred on that side, a red haze creeping in at the edge of the field. For a moment, he tasted metal in the back of his throat.

“Fuck this thing” he exhaled, short and sharp, dismissing the abyssal thing away.

He forced himself to breathe evenly.

The pressure subsided from unbearable to badly wrong.

He touched gently at the skin under his eye. It was hot. The Eye of Ruin was still not something he should be using.

’Goddamn thing,’ He focused on the thing at hand.

The building was already fixed in his memory. He did not need the Eye to see it again.

He folded his wings and dropped.

The air screamed past him as gravity reasserted itself, the ruins rushing up with alarming familiarity. Halfway down, he called Aether Blade.

The bladeless tachi formed in his hand from motes of light.

By the time his boots hit broken concrete, the wings had unfurled again just enough to turn what should have been a bone-breaking impact into a hard landing.

He straightened, Aether Blade in his right hand.

“Found you,” he said quietly.

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