Shibuya had already been carved into something unrecognizable.

Buildings did not collapse in chaos — they separated. Clean lines traced through concrete and steel, dividing structures into neat, impossible sections. Entire facades slid apart as though an unseen blade had measured them first. Glass fell in sheets. Streetlights split down the middle. The asphalt fractured into precise grids.

There was no visible barrier enclosing the destruction. No dome. No warning.

Only absence — and the sound of relentless cutting.

At the epicenter stood a towering, inhuman figure: a colossal shikigami with a rotating wheel suspended above its head. Each rotation produced a low, grinding resonance, as though the air itself were being analyzed. Its body reformed even as it was severed, adapting to the invisible slashes that rained down upon it.

Opposite it, elevated amid the ruin, was a single figure.

Unharmed.

Untouched.

His expression remained composed, almost idle, as the domain spread across a radius of devastation. Within that space, everything was subject to dissection. The slashes were not wild; they were deliberate, systematic. Structures were reduced to geometry. Anything caught within range was rendered into fragments too symmetrical to be accidental.

The city was being diagrammed.

And erased.

The shikigami lunged. The wheel turned again. Its flesh shifted in response to each invisible cut, resisting what had moments before torn it apart. Adaptation met annihilation in cycles measured only by the rotation overhead.

Then, abruptly, the cutting ceased.

Dust and powdered concrete drifted downward in unnatural quiet.

The shikigami stood once more, body reshaped by survival. The air trembled — not with motion this time, but with gathering heat.

The man raised his hand slightly.

Cursed energy condensed into a single point before him, dense and concentrated. The temperature surged without flame. Oxygen thinned. The surrounding air warped, bending toward that growing nucleus of light.

It did not spread outward immediately. It compressed.

A star forming at street level.

The glow deepened from ember to white-hot brilliance. Shadows snapped sharply against the ruins. Metal softened at the edges. Windows in distant buildings shattered from the pressure alone.

For a suspended instant, the city was illuminated in stark clarity — every crack, every severed beam, every suspended particle of dust.

Then the flame was released.

A roaring eruption consumed the designated space, expanding in a violent bloom. Fire swallowed debris, asphalt, and steel alike, reducing what the slashes had spared. The blast rolled outward with overwhelming force, flattening what still stood and igniting what could burn.

When the light receded, nothing within the domain remained intact.

Concrete had liquefied and hardened again into warped formations. Towers were reduced to skeletal remnants. Streets were gouged into craters of blackened ruin.

The shikigami’s massive form was obliterated at last, its adaptation overwhelmed by sheer output.

At the center of the devastation, amid lingering heat distortion and drifting ash, the man remained standing.

Shibuya burned around him.