Raizen stood at the edge of the gate again.
His expression calm. His eyes steady.
The world around him was silent—not empty, but breathless. As though it too remembered what lived behind that door.
And yet, Raizen believed.
He believed in his growth. In the months of brutal training. In the layers of power he had forged through pain, death, and survival. In the strategies, the dimensions he mastered, the scars he embraced.
He believed in the void.
And more than anything, he believed that if he didn't fight, if he simply tried to flee the moment things turned, he'd escape. He just wanted to look. To see what had hurt him before.
No arrogance. Just faith.
The same kind of faith he once had in the Supreme One.
He took a step.
The gate did not open.
It received him.
Reality folded without permission, and Raizen fell forward. Not walked. Not teleported. Fell.
And the gate welcomed him.
---
There was no ground.
No space.
Just cold.
Not temperature.
The absence of existence. The kind of cold that made your mind forget what warmth meant.
And there it stood.
The Reaper.
No grand form. No dramatic reveal.
Just a tall thing made of bone and absence. No face. No eyes.
A smile that didn't stretch lips—but thoughts.
Raizen's body trembled.
Not fear. Not pain.
Confusion.
His void didn't answer.
His space laws didn't respond.
His thoughts didn't echo.
He was alone inside himself.
He stepped back.
The Reaper didn't move.
Raizen moved again.
Still no pursuit.
Then he spoke.
"I came to see you. Not to fight. I just want to understand."
The Reaper didn't reply.
It only looked at him.
And that was enough.
---
The first layer fell.
Not his body.
But the idea of his body.
Gone.
Then his name.
Not erased. Not stolen. Just—never written in the first place.
He opened his mouth.
There was no sound.
He looked down.
No arms.
No legs.
No time.
He didn't fall. Falling needed a direction. This place had none.
His memories? They flickered like wet paper.
Faces burned.
Names rotted.
The Supreme One?
Who?
The void?
What?
He tried to remember the reason he came.
But what was a reason to a thing that no longer knew itself?
The Reaper tilted its head.
Not curiosity.
Amusement.
It leaned closer.
And spoke.
"Ripe."
That was all.
The sound hit nothing, yet it echoed through the husks of Raizen's thoughts.
The Reaper lifted its hand. A finger.
Pointed.
A gesture.
A direction.
Raizen felt himself pulled.
No resistance.
No fight.
He wanted to scream.
He didn't know how.
The void had betrayed him.
Space had forgotten him.
Existence no longer made room for him.
The Reaper turned away.
And with a slow, careful lick across its jawless grin, whispered,
"Let this world rot sweetly."
---
Raizen was gone.
Not dead.
Not destroyed.
Not scattered.
He had never been.
And the world outside the gate continued breathing—quietly unaware that it had just lost something it would never remember.
There was no warning carved into the earth.
No message left behind.
No promise of return.
Just wind.
Blowing across a gate that waited silently—
hungry.