The barrier closed like a quiet sigh, and the world on the other side felt wrong the moment their feet touched it. The air was heavier, thick with the residue of countless techniques colliding and fading. Streets that should have carried noise and life instead held only wind drifting through broken glass. Yuji and Megumi landed apart—just far enough that the silence between them felt endless. For a moment, each thought the other had vanished into the chaos of the Game.

They found each other before fear could settle in. No words were needed, only a brief glance of relief quickly buried beneath urgency. Two days passed in fragments of motion—running across shattered rooftops, clashing with incarnated sorcerers whose eyes carried centuries of cruelty, resting only when exhaustion forced them to. Every victory felt hollow. Every defeated opponent wasn’t the one they were searching for.

You had two hundred points. And that meant you were still alive.

By the second night, the city grew quieter, as if even violence had grown tired. Smoke curled between collapsed buildings, and the moonlight revealed shapes scattered across the streets—bodies left where they fell, unmoving witnesses to the Game’s cruelty. Megumi slowed first. Yuji followed his gaze.

At the center of the ruin, you stood alone.

The ground around you was torn open in jagged spirals, concrete peeled back like paper. The silence near you felt deeper than anywhere else, heavy with something neither of them could name. For the first time since entering the barrier, hesitation crept into their steps. Not fear of you—never that—but fear of what surviving here had turned you into.

Yuji swallowed it down and stepped forward anyway. Megumi stayed beside him, steady as ever.

“We… need your help,” Yuji said, voice rough from two days of fighting and shouting and surviving.

The words felt small in a place filled with so much death. But they were honest. And in the stillness that followed, the Game itself seemed to wait for your answer.