"You did it again," Cerulea Prismheart said, folding her arms across her chest, glass mirrors folding into her outfit like wings retreating. Her voice trembled somewhere between annoyance and fatigue. "You always barge in on our battles. You fight like you're the final act. And then the story becomes yours."
They stood in a loose semicircle now, dust still settling in golden plumes around them. Their magical costumes flickered at the edges, the residual energy of their mantras still humming faintly. But it was their expressions—frustration tinged with something like betrayal—that cut deeper than any wound Shotaro had taken that day.
Carmine dropped her transformation first. A girl barely older than thirteen, skin still blotched from adrenaline, eyes sharp from holding back tears. "The Prism Hexagram is supposed to be sacred. We train in it to infiltrate domains, to end their kings before they infect the city. That's what the name meant before... before you turned it into a mask we wear for your shadow."
"You save everyone," Rosalia said, more quietly. "We know. But you also use us."
"Every one of our wins…" Viridia added, stepping forward, her chlorophyll-green mantle retreating into streetwear, "...every time we fight, people just assume it was you. And they're right. We're just the excuse. We're the faces on the merch. You're the soul behind the strike."
She hesitated, then glanced downward, voice small but honest. "When I was Wakana Aoki just tommorow morning, I overheard two men call us frauds. Not because we didn't it was wrong But because someone like you made it true."
"We want to be more than that," Cerulea said. "We need to be more than just proxies for your invisibility. If you want to vanish from the world, that's your right. But don't do it by making us fakes in your name."
Shotaro stood still.
He didn't reply at first. His eyes shifted across their faces—anger, exhaustion, yearning, rawness. Realness. He had never wanted to hurt them. That was the paradox of it all. He saw them as younger siblings, kids who were brave in ways even gods couldn't be. He had only meant to protect. To preserve. But perhaps preservation had become a form of quiet erasure.
"I thought I gave you the choice," he said finally, his voice flat—not defensive, just… tired. "Every time I asked you to evacuate, I didn't demand it. I thought if you disagreed, you'd stay. Push back. Tell me to go to hell."
"You think we can just rebel?" Rosalia snapped. "Revolt against a God?"
"I'm not a god," he growled—this time with anger, and something messier beneath it. "If I were a god, I would've never bothered showing up. I wouldn't be running on coffee and trauma and five hours of sleep from last week."
The air shifted. The mood, unsettled by his sudden ferocity, paused like a held breath.
He turned away from them briefly, raking a hand through his hair. His silhouette, framed against the flickering neon, looked less like a savior and more like someone being buried alive beneath invisible expectations.
"I didn't want a shrine," he said, quieter now. "I didn't want worship. I didn't want people writing books about me. I didn't want to be some name you couldn't speak without awe. I just wanted… I don't know. To be the man they call. Not the myth they whisper about."
He let that hang.
His eyes found Cerulea's again. "You say you want to be more than just faces. Then be more. Don't wait for me to leave a gap. Don't wait for me to say go or stay. I'm not your god. I'm not your leash. I'm your fuck-up of an older brother who keeps jumping in front of trains because he thinks he's the one built to take it."
"Then stop shielding us," Lumine said, her voice barely above a whisper. "Stop making that decision for us."
He looked at her—really looked. The smallest one. The quietest. The one who always stood a little behind the others, like she didn't quite belong in the same technicolor myth as the rest.
His face softened.
"Maybe," he said, "I will."
A long moment passed between them all.
The kind of moment that doesn't end with a hug. Or a clean answer. Or a final battle. Just an uncomfortable, necessary crack in the wall between people. The kind you could maybe build something honest out of.
ChatGPT said:
Shotaro slid his hand into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a rumpled stick of chewing gum. It was probably months old. He didn't care. He peeled the wrapper with a flick, popped it into his mouth with the swagger of someone who thought he looked ten percent cooler when chewing something. He began to chew—loudly.
"...But just for the record," he said, glancing around the circle of powered-up middle schoolers with a look of unbothered arrogance, "I do look cooler than all of you when I fight."
A chorus of groans rose like a tragic choir. Rosalia didn't even hesitate—she picked up a half-empty can of orange soda someone had dropped during the earlier chaos and hurled it at him with startling speed.
He caught it one-handed, fingers closing around the aluminum like it had always belonged in his grip.
"We were chosen too, remember?" she snapped, still breathless from battle. "The Hexaria Crystals chose us. Not you. We were chosen to defend the manifold. You're not the only name in the stars."
"We are chosen," Cerulea said, stepping up beside her. "Same as you. We just want that to mean something."
Shotaro didn't respond right away. He shifted the gum to the other side of his mouth, eyes narrowing slightly in thought. Then he tilted his head and raised a single finger like a lecturer preparing for a TED talk no one asked for.
"Well," he began, voice annoyingly casual, "you all are chosen ones. Plural. Good for you. Shiny crystals, glowing destiny, matching uniforms—very cool."
He paused, then stabbed a thumb toward his chest.
"But I," he said, dragging the syllable out with exaggerated weight, "am the Chosen One. You see the difference? The. One. Singular. There's a much heavier burden to carry when the title comes with that particular adjective."
There was a long, confused silence.
"Is... is 'the' even an adjective?" Lumine asked, frowning as she looked between the others. "Isn't it like, a noun? Maybe?"
"No way it's a noun," Viridia said with the certainty of someone who had once failed a pop quiz on parts of speech and never recovered. "I think it's... a pronoun? Wait. No. That's not right."
"I thought it was an article," Rosalia muttered, arms crossed now, more annoyed about the grammatical chaos than the monster they had just fought.
"It is an article," Shotaro said, pointing at her approvingly like she was the least-wrong child in a school play. "Definite article, if you're curious. But you know what? Suppose I shouldn't expect much grammatical prowess from a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who spend their weekends barging into conceptual warzones instead of, oh, I don't know—studying."
His sass was unbearable. So thick you could pour it over pancakes. His words had that frustrating older brother tone, the one that made you want to simultaneously punch him and live up to his opinion.
"You're impossible," Cerulea grumbled.
"Thank. You." Shotaro said at last, drawing out the syllables like a slow curtain call, arms spread wide as if he were inviting applause for his entire existence. The kind of gesture only someone deeply aware of how ridiculous they were could pull off without flinching.
The girls stared in silence. Not because they were stunned—this was textbook Shotaro—but because it was exhausting to argue with someone who weaponized self-awareness like a charm spell.
He gave them a wink, teeth flashing in that boyish, insufferably smug way of his, and turned on his heel. Dust crunched beneath his boots as he started walking toward the shattered remains of a nearby building, still licking the taste of battle from the air like steam after rain.
Then, almost as an afterthought, he called back over his shoulder, voice light but edged with something curious, something… serious.
"Also—been meaning to ask," he said. "Did the crystals… do something to you all?"
He stopped, not turning around yet. Just letting the question linger.
"Like," he continued, shifting the gum in his mouth with a pop of his jaw, "you're all about a year younger than me, right? Middle school, pushing high school. But why do your bodies look like that?"
This time, he did turn, just a little. Not leer, not linger—just an honest, puzzled glance. No malice. No perversion. Just concern dressed in his usual offhand sarcasm.
There was a silence. Not the awkward kind, but the thoughtful kind. Like a question being processed across several teenage minds at once. Cerulea looked down at herself, then exchanged glances with Rosalia, with Lumine, with the others.
"You're not the first to notice," Cerulea muttered finally, voice tight. "And yeah. We've wondered too."
"It's part of the transformation," Viridia added. "Like a compression of potential. The Haxaria crystal doesn't just unlock power. It rewrites the body to suit it. Some of it's... aesthetic. Some of it's projection."
"It wants us to look like ideals," Umbra said quietly. "Icons. Characters. Not girls."
There was a shared weight in the air now. One that didn't come from magic, but from the kind of invisible baggage you carried when people treated you like a symbol before they let you be a child.
Shotaro scratched the back of his neck, his expression dimming.
"I figured," he muttered. "It always looked... designed. Like some producer's dream, not nature's."
His tone was still casual, but there was something in his eyes now. That flicker of protectiveness. The kind that said he wasn't just noticing—he was cataloguing. Remembering. Not because he didn't trust them, but because he didn't trust the world around them.
"I'll dig into it," he added, turning away again. "Not that I'm your dad or your team leader or your press agent or anything. But... you know. Someone should."
Cerulea blinked. "That almost sounded responsible."
Shotaro paused at the ruin's edge, glancing back over his shoulder with a half-grin that never reached his eyes. "Also," he drawled, voice slipping into its old trap of casual revelation, "the Draceel isn't dead."
No one had a chance to respond before a bone-shattering roar split the air. Their eyes snapped to the Drake's corpse—only to see it stirring, scales knitting themselves together in grotesque, wet ripples. The broken outer shell peeled back like cracked armor, revealing a dripping, gelatinous core that writhed and bulged. In mere seconds, the horror regrew into a form far more immense and terrible than before: twice the wingspan, claws like honed scythes, spines extending from its back in a ragged crown of nightmares.
The new Drake's head lifted, eyes glowing with an ancient wrath. Where the old version had solidified around the concept of memory's fragility, this one embodied memory's vengeance—each scar on its flesh a wound inflicted by forgotten horrors, now bleeding into apex predator form.
"What—!" Cerulea gasped, stumbling backward as the earth shuddered beneath its roar.
"His conceptual ability is memory manipulation," Shotaro said, stepping forward to stand between the girls and the towering horror. Even chewing gum felt weighty in his jaw now. "His breath doesn't just scorch flesh—it scrambles minds. He rewrites your past so you don't know who you fight—or why."
He drew in a steadying breath, the residue of battle clinging to his lungs like smoke. "This isn't a 'punch and go.' It's a puzzle." He took a slow step forward, all swagger dropping away, replaced by the quiet fervor of a scholar unveiling a dark tome. "Every domain sprouts from a seed—a piece of fiction, a sliver of will that filtered into the Collective Consciousness. Imagine that Collective beyond all dimensions, a place where thoughts gather like rainfall. Some thought, some person's desperate will to be heard, becomes a reader there. That reader descends, chooses a layer of reality—any world-floor—and shapes a domain out of that will."
He paused, letting the Drake's wings beat thunder into the sky. "Each domain has its own language—axioms, spatial quirks, archetypes. People stumble in, like moths to an injury. And at its heart stands the Domain King: the purest expression of that will. To defeat it, you don't just cut. You understand. Locate the seed. Decode the riddles woven into the walls, the patterns hidden in its chaos. Then, you strip away the fiction. You dismantle the domain's logic from the inside out."
....
The Draceel Drake's roar shook the air itself—wings slicing through neon haze as it fixed the assembled fighters with abyssal eyes. Shotaro held his ground, the weight of the city beneath his boots, the blade at his side humming faintly with promise. He closed a brief distance, just enough that his voice carried over the thunder of the Drake's approach.
"The will to make people forget," he began, breath steady, "means someone—some reader—wanted you to forget something they did. A sin. An embarrassment. A secret." He tapped the haft of Tokioni Muramasa against his palm. "There can be any number of inputs here. Maybe it's the kid who peed his pants in homeroom. Maybe it's the man who mugged an old lady behind a convenience store. Maybe it's a war criminal who thinks no one will hold him accountable if you can't remember his face."
He turned, eyes burning blue in the Drake's reflected glow, then looked back to the girls arrayed behind him. Their fatigue lingered in the lines of their faces, but their stances had steeled again. They were ready.
"You want to be more than my proxies, right?" he asked. "Go ahead."
At his signal, Carmine lunged forward, sword held high as she tore into the Drake's flank, each strike carving bright arcs of liberated memory from its flesh. Cerulea unfurled a cascade of azure mirrors that caught fragments of the Drake's hallucinations and flung them back into the air like shattered promises. Lumine's royal decree bent gravity under their feet, sending the beast stumbling into a crater it couldn't stand. Viridia's chainsaw bloomed flowers of living metal, halting the Drake's regenerative carnage in its tracks. Rosalia's laughter grenades erupted around them, each blast peeling away another layer of recursive fear. Umbra hovered at the edges, her mirror staff reflecting the Drake's eyes back at itself until it recoiled in self-loathing. Alba stood atop a shattered streetlamp, hands raised, weaving the broken rules of the domain back into the lattice of reality—stitch by stitch.
Shotaro Mugyiwara wandered through the fractured streets of Musashi no Yamato like a detective combing through a dream after waking. His long coat brushed against twisted rails and upturned bricks. Fires still flickered in the corners of the domain's broken logic, casting shadows that moved a beat too late. He wasn't rushing. He never rushed when it mattered. His gaze swept rooftops, vending machines, old CRT billboards flickering with forgotten advertisements. His hands remained in his pockets. But his eyes—his eyes were chasing something.
"Damn..." he muttered, halting beneath an underpass where the graffiti told stories the concrete never meant to keep.
The city was starting to confess.
There, above him, symbols spiraled across brick and broken tile in ways the human hand wouldn't draw—sequences of stars, crossed-out eyes, stick figures holding hands with monsters, dates that meant nothing unless you'd lived them. A child's scribble, then another. A pair of shoes hanging from telephone wires—too small for anyone grown. A name scrawled over and over in different colors, always crossed out by a heavier hand. A crude depiction of a classroom, and beside it, in crimson chalk, a word etched like a wound: Forget.
The pattern was too clear now. The seed wasn't an object. It was a truth, disguised in a riddle of repetition. The domain itself was a shrine built to not remember.
Shotaro's jaw tightened as he stared at the last mural, a broken rainbow over a dark, looming shape that now matched the curvature of the Drake's final form. His eyes widened with realization. His breath stilled.
The seed wasn't near the Drake.
It was on him.
Then his eyes locked onto it.
The soft meat at the Drake's lower abdomen—the groin, to be crude—had unfurled, revealing a gem. Not crystalline. Not forged. Something raw, like an open sore turned solid. It pulsed with corrupted mantra, not singing but hissing. As if it didn't want to be remembered at all.
Shotaro grit his teeth. The story it told made his stomach turn.
That's the wound they want to forget.
He snapped upright and turned to the girls mid-battle, wind and wreckage whipping their hair, their coats, their resolve. His voice cut through the air like a siren.
"Target the gem—lower abdomen!" he shouted. "Crotch area!"
They blinked, thrown off for a beat. A few groaned. Carmine yelled something about phrasing. But they understood. This wasn't about grace.
This was about hitting the truth where it hurt most.
Shotaro's boot scuffed against a scrap of paper fluttering in the breeze of collapsing reality. He squatted and picked it up, eyes narrowing as he read the childlike scrawl: "Don't tell anyone what happened here." He tore it in half, letting the wind carry the fragments into the neon-lit night.
But he wasn't done. His gaze flicked to a smudged page caught in the girders of a shattered signboard—a fragment of a story, words torn from some discarded journal: "I wanted them to forget me." He plucked it free, crumpled it, and cast it aside.
"This is the seed," he said aloud, voice low enough that only those close could hear. The rubble-quaked earth beneath them answered with a shudder.
Without another word, the ground split into a vast, checkered plane—black and white squares stretching beyond sight, lit by the sick glow of fractured streetlights. The girls stumbled back, faces pale, as their own forms flickered, becoming gleaming figurines on this living board. Carmine in red armor, Cerulea in glistening blue, and so on down the line, each transformed into a chess piece shaped by their essence.
Shotaro stood at the board's edge, blade sheathed now, shoulders squared. He pointed to the far side, where a figure flickered between shapes: at once a scholar's silhouette, a child's outline, an empty throne.
"There," he said, voice echoing unnaturally across the squares. "The Reader. The architect of this domain."
The giant chessboard shuddered beneath their feet as Shotaro's words echoed around them. The girls, awkwardly perched on their pedestals, exchanged glances that flickered from determination to uncertainty. Tiny voices drifted across the living squares, crisp as porcelain:
"Explain whatever meta-ogga-bogga you just said," Cerulea called, hands planted on her hips. "Not everyone's as book-smart as you, Mugyiwara."
Rosalia's lips quirked into a half-smile. "Yeah, spell it out in middle-school terms, please."
Shotaro paused in the center square, gum still in his cheek and the crumpled seed-pages clutched in one hand, Tokioni Muramasa glinting in the other. He knelt, gently unfolding the torn story fragments and laying them on the black-and-white tiles. The paper rustled like dry leaves.
"All right," he said, voice steady as a metronome. "Think of the Collective Consciousness like an AI image genrator—but endless, and louder. A Reader is someone who is born out of that AI as a result of someone uploading a draft that is so will to them they accend the computer itself & the ai send the reader as virus in the computer to create folders called 'domain' ."
He stood, sword now held low, seed-pages splayed at his feet. "Every domain is one of those worlds. The Reader puts a piece of themselves at its center—often the part they wish to hide. Their guilt, their shame. And anyone who stumbles in gets caught in that echo. To beat them, we have to remember that shame. Grab the pieces of their story they tried to bury, and lay them out like these pages. Then we play chess with their narrative, one honest move at a time."
He pointed to the far side of the board, where the Reader's avatar—shifting robes and no face—hovered above a pool of swirling words. "That's our opponent. Not just a monster, but the author of this whole mess."
The avatar raised a hand, ink-black letters seeping up from the squares, turning them into sentences that writhed like living script. The city's neon skyline bent and rippled through the haze of half-formed stories.
Shotaro took a slow breath, sunlight-bright determination igniting behind his eyes. "Let's begin."
He raised his blade, and the closest knight—Carmine's crimson figure—lunged forward, the edge of its carved steel cleaving the first sentence in two. With that strike, Musashi no Yamato held its breath—and then exhaled, ready to reclaim every fragment of forgotten truth.