June 3rd, 2032.
Japan — Tokyo — 13:52 The entity had reached the fifth block.
The last eight active heroes were in a defensive position along a line that everyone knew, without saying it, was not a battle line.
It was a time line — trying to buy enough time for the evacuation to be more complete, for more civilians to reach safe zones, for something to happen that none of them could name but all of them were silently waiting for.
Takeshi Mori had his Celestial Fire Ghoj at twenty percent capacity.
He had used the rest in a sequence of attacks that, combined, had produced less effect than the very first strike alone.
The entity lowered one of its wings.
The impact on the ground produced a pressure wave that sent the eight heroes in eight different directions.
Not all into buildings — some into the ground, some into the air, some simply rolling through the streets at speeds the human body was never designed to handle comfortably.
Takeshi remained on the ground.
Ghoj depleted.
Ribs communicating something he preferred not to confirm.
Eyes on the Tokyo sky — June blue, with smoke rising in three columns from affected areas — and the specific thought of someone who had reached the end of what they had available and was calculating what came next.
And then he heard it.
Low at first.
Almost inaudible over the noise of a damaged city — alarms, distant rumbling, emergency systems still functioning.
A voice.
Singing.
“Oh, how blind I was and lost I wandered…” In Portuguese.
With the careless cadence of someone walking down a familiar street, not approaching the greatest disaster event Tokyo had seen in decades.
“…far, far from my Savior…” Takeshi turned his head.
A man descended from the rooftop of a seven-story building with the same effort one uses to step down a stair.
He did not fly — he jumped, with the naturalness of someone who calculates vertical distances as easily as horizontal ones, landing on asphalt with an impact the ground registered but the body absorbed without visible strain.
184 centimeters.
A combat-built physique, optimized rather than excessive.
The kind of build designed for function the way a tool is designed for purpose.
The outfit was a warrior monk’s robe — black, with red flowing through seams and details too precise to be decorative.
Yellow accents placed too deliberately to be aesthetic.
Boots and gloves made of material that reflected light in a way steel did not, in a way standard dungeon materials did not — something belonging to a different category entirely.
The wooden hat.
Wide-brimmed, casting half the face in shadow — not for concealment, but as something worn as naturally as a limb is part of a body.
In his right hand: a bowl of ramen.
With chopsticks.
Still hot.
“From glory He descended, and His blood was shed…” He continued singing while walking — not toward the entity directly, but generally in its direction, at the pace of someone who has time not to run.
He passed Takeshi Mori on the ground.
Looked at him.
Stopped singing for a moment.
“Are you alright?” he said in Japanese, with the accent of someone who learned the language through necessity rather than immersion, but well enough to be understood.
Takeshi looked at him.
At the outfit.
At the hat.
At the ramen.
“Who—” Takeshi began.
“Rest,” the man said simply.
No drama.
The tone of someone giving a reasonable instruction in an unreasonable situation.
“That’s enough for today.” He resumed singing.
“…to save such a poor sinner…” And walked toward the entity.
The entity saw him.
Multiple eyes distributed across its body registered the figure approaching.
A small being.
Bipedal.
No detectable Don signature.
The entity tilted its head.
A motion of curiosity before classification.
The man stopped.
At a distance of roughly thirty meters — almost close enough, given the entity’s scale, to be considered inside its space.
He ate a bite of ramen.
Looked at the entity with black eyes.
The entity looked back.
For two seconds, that was all there was — two beings looking at each other across completely incompatible scales in a burning Tokyo.
The man placed the bowl on the ground carefully.
Chopsticks resting on the rim.
He straightened.
And the expression changed.
Not visibly to most.
But to those who knew what to look for — to those who had seen him before and after — something else emerged.
The playful tone disappeared.
Not covered.
Not controlled.
Gone, like a light switching off.
What remained was something else entirely.
Same face.
Same body.
Same wooden hat.
But with a presence that differed the way the surface of the ocean differs from its depths.
Don sensors across the battlefield spiked into a flat, continuous tone.
Out of range.
The entity launched a tentacle.
Direct strike.
A mass of forty meters of destructive force.
The man moved.
And what Takeshi saw was this: The tentacle reached where the man had been.
The man was not there.
He was beside it.
Two meters from the entity’s flank.
Two fingers extended.
Touching a precise point between two scales.
The entity emitted a sound.
Not pain alone — something closer to a system receiving an input it could not classify.
It recoiled.
An SR-class entity that had not retreated from Celestial Fire Ghoj, from high-level curse techniques, from dozens of elite Japanese heroes — Retreated.
Two steps.
The man stood still.
“Interesting,” he said quietly in Portuguese.
And attacked.
What followed lasted eleven minutes.
Eleven minutes of impossible adaptation — not reacting, but anticipating.
Reading structures inside structures.
Moving inside logic rather than against it.
At the tenth minute, the entity stopped.
Not defeated.
Not destroyed.
Paused.
Observing.
Reclassifying.
The man stood three meters away.
Looked at it.
“I know,” he said in Portuguese.
A pause.
“Go back where you came from.” The entity remained still for three seconds.
Then turned.
And returned to the Great Dungeon.
Tokyo stayed silent afterward.
The man walked back to his ramen.
Picked it up.
Ate calmly.
Takeshi Mori sat up.
“Who are you?” he asked.
The man smiled.
“Someone passing by.” And walked away.