"OKAY!! OKAY!" Mugyiwara Shotaro said, pulling Tokioni Muramasa out of his bag.
Shotaro inhaled deeply through his nose and stepped out from the alley.
He stood still for a moment. Still enough to hear the wind. Still enough that the nearby birds didn't fly away. Then, slowly, he began a simple warm-up: hopping one leg at a time in place, his long limbs folding and unfolding with quiet control.
Jump. Land. Switch. Jump. Land. Switch.
"You, dollar store Madoka Magica," he said, "take the civilians & go home," and then proceeded to call them all by their real names.
Yes, he once found out their names are just monikers for this magical girl stuff for Prism Hexaria, because who the fuck names their daughter 'Carmine Aetheria' in Japan?.
& he is still casual about it; not only that, his sass & sarcasm cause even the most robotic of them to get frustrated.
Too Much Sass.
And with the street cracking beneath his footstep—just a hairline fracture spidering through asphalt—and the domain itself recoiling, like a story that realized it had a new protagonist, every one of them knew what was coming next.
But being middle school girls, cloaked in ribbons and prophecy, didn't mean they had to take that lying down.
"Hey! Why do you always show up last minute and take all the credit!?" shouted Cerulea, hands still on her hips like she was scolding a misbehaving senpai instead of addressing a boy who could bench-press the planet.
Shotaro didn't miss a beat. "Motherfucker," he said with a grin, turning halfway to wink at her. "I'm not Dhoni."
That made Rosalia choke. "Since when did he start taking credit?"
"For a while," Shotaro replied, his tone somewhere between lazy and lethal. "You all don't watch the post-match interviews."
Behind him, the Draceel Drake growled—a sound like an orchestra of collapsing buildings—but Shotaro just held up a hand, like, Hold on, I'm in the middle of something. His thumb slid along the edge of Tokioni Muramasa like he was petting a beast no one else could see.
"Now get the civilians out," he added, his voice lower this time. Less teasing. More serious. The kind of tone that sliced through chaos and landed somewhere beneath your skin, soft but unarguable.
"Why?" asked Lumine, a little defensively, her staff still glowing faint blue in the fading gleam of the fractured domain. "We can fight too!"
Her voice cracked just a little—not out of fear, but frustration. That feeling you get when someone older than you, stronger than you, and braver than you still insists on standing in front instead of beside you.
Shotaro turned to her—not mocking, not smug, but calm, that tired kind of patience that came from spending too much time protecting things that didn't ask to be protected. His tone dropped, soft and brotherly, the kind that didn't ask for obedience, just trust.
"Because," he said, looking straight into her eyes like he wasn't talking to a magical girl in glitter but a child—brilliant, strong, and still just a child—"it's my job."
Then, with that familiar crookedness tugging at his mouth, he added with the kind of deadpan that only comes from years of pretending you're not bleeding, "I'm the chosen one, remember?"
But there was no pride in it. No weight of destiny or flair of ego. Just a bitter little joke tucked inside a deeper ache. They didn't hear it—but he masked the tremor, masked the fear, and masked the quiet desperation that lived inside him every time he watched kids like them walk into battles meant for devils. He never called himself that. Chosen one"—it was a joke other people told about him, and sometimes he had to repeat it just to keep them from looking closer.
He wanted them to believe he had this.
Because if they believed it, they'd run.
Because if they ran, they'd live.
And he could take it—he had to take it—even if, deep down, he was the most breakable person in the whole damn domain.
The sarcasm on his tongue was thick, sticky, and bitter, like molasses spilled in a burning kitchen.
Behind him, the Draceel Drake began to exhale its mantra-like venom, a looping chant of dread—the air itself thickened, swirled with images not of claws or flames, but of memory. Its conceptual field curved inward: a recursive storm that took the deepest, most painful thoughts from any mind within reach and wove them into living, weaponized illusions. It did not kill with tooth or talon, but with truths you couldn't escape.
Shotaro's hair caught in the mantra wind. His coat flared just slightly. But his face didn't move.
His smile—slanted, crooked, dry—remained.
His eyes—glassy calm—watched the beast like it was an old friend he'd long since outgrown.
Then he blinked. A ringtone cut through the tension. A simple, shitty ringtone. A jingle from some knock-off anime game he'd never even played. He blinked again.
His hand shot up—not to punch, not to blast, but to stop the Drake's paw in mid-air like it was a lazy swing from a toddler. The shockwave hissed up his arm, but he didn't flinch. With the other hand, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone.
"Hello?" he answered, casually, like he wasn't holding back a concept-tier hallucination dragon with his bare hand.
A voice came through, tight and shaky.
"Sorry," Fatiba said on the other end, clearly rushed, "I forgot to ask for your number when we were skipping school… but I need to talk with you."
He blinked again, stepping lightly to the left as the Drake's claw tore down from above, splitting the concrete where he'd just stood. Shotaro didn't look up. He didn't need to. His thumb was still pressed against the side of his phone. He adjusted it slightly, then spoke into the receiver, his voice unshaken, even kind.
"Fatiba?" he said again, with a smile that touched only one side of his mouth, the way it always did when someone reached out without hurting. "Yeah. I'm kind of in the middle of a work thing, but go on."
He ducked. The tail came spinning like a whip crack. His knees bent, and his whole frame dipped just enough for it to whistle past the collar of his uniform jacket. A puff of air lifted his silver hair—but he didn't flinch, not even when the tip of the tail clipped a lamppost, twisting it like a crushed soda can.
The domain rumbled, shrieked, and came undone around him like a paper world caught in a fire.
But he stayed centered. Talking on the phone.
It looked absurd. Like watching someone take a call during the end of the world. But for him, it wasn't absurd—it was sacred.
The Draceel Drake, a manifestation of trauma turned recursive—a creature built on feedback loops of fear and self-doubt—screeched again and lunged. Its maw opened like a collapsing fractal. Its mantra bled through the air in static echoes and spirals of light that bent space into knots.
Shotaro hopped to one side, his foot landing in a perfect crescent arc, and then jumped backward with casual grace, sliding on the heel of his boot to dodge a barrage of hallucinated chains. His other hand reached up to tighten his ponytail, not out of vanity, but because the wind was getting strong and annoying.
To anyone watching—if they could watch—he was just a blur. A flicker between impacts. A glitch dancing between real and impossible.
It wasn't fair. Not to the other magical girls. Not to the civilians. Not to the city.
He made it look like a game.
Like dodgeball.
But there were no breaks. No pauses. No rules.
Only Shotaro, the battlefield, and his ringtone's echo in the air.
That was the thing: most people never saw him. Not really. Civilians could barely register what was happening when domain phenomena exploded into their reality. And even if they could, by the time the dust cleared, he was gone.
And so were the records.
Funny, really. The police scrubbed his name from the reports every single time. Always replacing him with some proxy name, some placeholder hero. "Prism Hexaria." "The Omega Syndicate." "Crimson Force."
Never, Shotaro.
They never said his name in press conferences. Never gave him medals. Never carved his initials into the "thank you" walls downtown.
It wasn't because they hated him.
It was because they feared him.
Feared what it meant when someone could do this and walk away like it was routine.
He could've been a symbol.
He could've been a god.
But that's the part no one got.
He didn't want to be a symbol.
He hated being worshipped.
He didn't want crowds or statues or prayers.
The phone crackled softly in his ear, just under the screech of collapsing reality. Somewhere beneath the boiling skyline, glass was shattering from pressure distortions alone, storefronts distorting like dreams being crushed under weight. The Drake's body spiraled outward, its scales glinting with recursive glyphs—each scale a flickering trauma, each movement a memory weaponized.
But Shotaro's face remained still, lit faintly by the dying neon of Musashi no Yamato's midsector.
"…They didn't even look mad," Fatiba's voice said, quiet but trembling.
He exhaled through his nose as he slid between two illusion-born claws. The tips were impossibly sharp, but their strike zones were large—he could read the rhythm. It wasn't the first Drake he'd fought. It wouldn't be the last.
"They looked like they were negotiating my malfunction," she went on, "like I was a deal gone bad, like I was some quarterly report that came in red. Not a daughter. Not a kid who skipped class for a rooftop. Just... their fucking prototype going off-script."
His jaw tightened, but his body stayed loose. Calm. A twisted piece of rebar flew toward him—he slapped it aside with the flat of his katana, sheathing the blade just as fast, the motion fluid, almost tired.
She kept talking. Maybe she needed to.
"I thought they'd at least yell," Fatiba said. "Get mad, ground me, scream something. Something human. But they didn't even flinch. Just told me my teacher called. And logged it like a glitch."
He didn't respond yet. There was no space to offer comfort when your job was to be the wall between the world and this thing's fangs. But even as he pivoted, even as his boots scraped over broken pavement and his back arched away from the heat of a mantra explosion, his mind stayed fixed on her voice. Steady as steel cables under pressure.
"They didn't ask why. Didn't care that I left. Didn't notice that I came back."
Shotaro moved like something half-remembered from myth—muscles too fluid, too precise, too intentional to be anything but born of burden. The Draceel Drake let out a guttural shriek, and its illusion skin rippled again—this time forming the faces of terrified children, burning cities, silhouettes running from things too big to fight. But he didn't flinch.
He planted his hand flat against its chest, and something deep inside the creature buckled. A soundless pulse. An unspoken mantra that didn't tear it apart but reminded it that it could be torn apart. That it had no monopoly on fear.
The Drake stumbled backward, howling like a memory being denied entry into a dream.
And in the soft buzz of his phone, Fatiba's voice broke gently through.
"They never call me just Fatiba," she said again, quieter now. "Always my full name. Like I'm a student. A client. Never... their kid."
Shotaro paused, standing in the eye of this conceptual storm, his sword at his side like an afterthought. His gaze narrowed a little, not in frustration—but in that way one listens when every word on the line might be a stone dislodged from a dam.
There was a beat of silence. A breath. Then she whispered it, like someone admitting they'd opened a scar.
"I want someone to talk to about it. Like, actually talk."
His brows furrowed faintly, expression softened beneath the crimson lighting and domain distortions. "Your grandfather?" he offered, gently.
"I need someone who doesn't adore me," she said. "Someone who doesn't look at me like I'm fragile, or gifted, or damned. Just someone who can see the person. Not the projection. You're the most honest non-robotic person I've ever met."
Shotaro blinked once. No smirk. No deflection. Just the faintest nod, even if she couldn't see it.
"So, where—?"
Shotaro's eyes flicked up toward the skyline, scanning rooftops like a tactician laying out a war board. The city shimmered in the bruised neon light of the fading domain, and the Drake—desperate, damaged—let out a last tremor-growl that vibrated through the bones of the high-rises. His hand tightened around the hilt of Tokioni Muramasa, and a grin pulled lazily at one side of his mouth. Not the smile of a hero. The smile of someone who knew the steps of the dance before the music started.
"Now let's set your fielding," he muttered, more to himself than to Fatiba still listening faintly on the line. His tone was dry, almost bored, like a coach setting players across a cricket field—but underneath was that hum of hunger, the low voltage thrill he never admitted to.
The Drake surged forward with a roar that twisted the color of the sky, talons like fractured realities slamming toward him.
He met it head-on.
He didn't dash—he moved, like poetry in real time, kicking off the ground with such force the cracked asphalt beneath him split into spirals. His momentum bent physics sideways. One step took him up the front of a vending machine, the next launched him onto the side of a convenience store window, the next onto a speeding truck's roof. The world didn't know how to stop him because it had never designed rules to contain him.
Tokioni was already unsheathed. A whisper of steel. A red flash.
A building to his left groaned as he sliced a support beam mid-air, turning the structure into a controlled collapse. Not random. Not reckless. Intentional. Shotaro didn't just cut—it was like he choreographed every falling brick to form an impromptu gauntlet. A cage for the Drake. A stadium for him.
The Drake lunged, thinking him distracted.
Wrong move.
Shotaro landed on the tipping edge of the crumbling building, ran along its collapsing length as gravity gave way, kicked off the falling top floor with a spin that sent shockwaves down the still-falling debris—and struck.
He didn't roar. He didn't pose. He didn't even shout a catchphrase.
He just moved with the terrifying clarity of someone who knew how fragile monsters were.
The slash wasn't wide or flashy—it was a flick of the blade so clean it left no wound. But the Drake buckled. Collapsed on itself like a memory too painful to relive. Reality began to stitch itself back together—traffic lights flickering to normal, sound returning in waves, neon signs turning back on with a confused hum.
Shotaro landed amid the settling dust, stepping down off a broken pillar like it was a curb. He adjusted his collar with one hand, slipped Tokioni back into its sheath with the other.
His phone buzzed faintly.
"I'll be there in five," he said, as if he hadn't just sliced a skyscraper mid-air and turned a mythical beast into mist.
A beat.
"And remember—window."