Crestfall Isle — Western Region
The wind barely moved. Thick vines clung to fallen ruins, and animal bones scattered the mossy stone path like forgotten warnings.
Kaito Shiranui knelt beside an ancient pedestal, wiping away grime with his glove.
"Here," he muttered. "Look at this."
Derrick approached quietly. His golden eyes, unnervingly sharp even in the dark, locked on the engraved mark etched into the stone: Aetherion's golden crest—or at least, part of it.
The symbol shimmered faintly as if reacting to their presence.
Kaito stood. "We found the first clue."
Derrick frowned. "Or a trigger."
Just as he said it, the ground trembled beneath their boots.
Not violently—just a low, crawling vibration. Like something was waking up.
A long, distant roar followed. Not nearby… but not far enough to ignore either.
Derrick's hand hovered near his side, claws just beneath the surface of his skin. "We should move."
"No." Kaito stared at the pedestal, where a second inscription had revealed itself:
'Crowned not by head nor throne, but by what remains after loss.'
A riddle.
Kaito smirked. "Looks like this mission just got fun."
Then, something cracked in the distance—followed by a shriek.
Switch POV: Rika & Renji – Eastern Ridge
Fog.
It wrapped the trees, the rocks, even the sound around them. Renji's boots barely crunched on the dirt path, like the ground was muffled too.
Rika narrowed her eyes. "Something just shifted."
"Yeah," Renji whispered. "Felt it too."
Then, like a mirage peeling open, something appeared just ahead—a rippling distortion, not quite solid, not quite air.
Rika's heartbeat ticked faster.
And then the Phantom-Class Kaiju emerged.
It had no shape. It shimmered and twisted, reforming each second—a mass of translucent limbs, eyes that blinked in patterns, mouths that didn't speak but echoed memories.
Renji's knees buckled. She clutched her temple.
"Rika—it's—it's showing me things—people I—"
Rika's illusion defenses flickered. For a second, she saw her mother standing in the fog. Then the face changed. Then again. Then again.
"You left us," a thousand voices whispered from the creature's shifting form. "You broke it."
Rika screamed—and the world fractured.
"You broke it."
"You left us."
"You're not real. None of this is."
The voices twisted around them like wind—cutting and cold.
Renji stumbled again, her fists clenched, breathing ragged. "I can't… I can't shut it out, Rika. It's in my head."
Rika reached for her, but her hand passed through something else entirely. Renji's image flickered—just for a second—as if the world was rewriting itself.
No.
Not the world.
Her mind.
The Phantom was inside.
A dozen glowing eyes blinked across the trees, sliding in and out of view. Shapes whispered from behind bark, from the shadows, even from the reflection in Renji's own eyes.
"They'll never accept you, Renji. They'll always choose someone stronger."
Rika's fists tightened.
"You're not even the best in your own team. Why do you pretend?"
"No—shut up!" Renji roared, throwing a dagger into the fog. It passed through nothing and clattered into silence.
More laughter. Human voices. A scream—her own, from a memory long buried.
Rika could feel it too—her thoughts unraveling like threads. The Phantom Kaiju wasn't attacking their bodies.
It was unraveling their minds.
Rika dropped to her knees, pressing her palms to the ground. She reached inward, calling on her power.
Her eyes turned violet.
Neuroverse. The space between reality and perception.
"I've had enough," she whispered. "You want into my mind? Then let's see how you handle mine."
The fog around her split.
Sound cracked like thunder inside a dream. The world warped—just for an instant—and Rika stood inside a collapsing cathedral of glass and thought.
Her domain.
The Kaiju's illusion tried to fight her—waves of false images, whispers of pain and betrayal—but Rika didn't falter.
"You made one mistake," she said, stepping through its twisted mental realm.
"You entered my world."
With a sweep of her hand, the mental space bent violently—sharp violet shards of thought slicing through the fog. The false voices screamed and shattered like broken windows.
The Phantom faltered—its form blinking, flickering, now visible for real in the world.
"Renji!" Rika shouted.
The other girl, still breathing hard, looked up through tear-streaked eyes.
"It's real now," Rika said. "And I'm going to end it."
The Phantom screeched as Rika rose to her feet, her silhouette haloed by glowing fragments of broken illusions. In her hand, a weapon materialized—Mindpiercer—a blade that shimmered like a living thought, its edges flickering in and out of reality.
The weapon pulsed with a low, psychic hum. Crafted from memory-forged alloy and embedded with resonance cores tuned to her Neuroverse signature, it wasn't just a sword.
It was a scalpel for the mind.
Rika's voice was ice. "You don't belong in my head."
She dashed forward, the blade phasing slightly as she moved—passing through lingering fog, through false terrain, striking toward the true core of the Kaiju, now briefly exposed in her mental domain.
The Phantom recoiled—first with confusion, then with raw pain—as Mindpiercer sank into its center.
It wailed, its illusions unraveling like smoke under pressure.
A final pulse of feedback rippled through the air as the creature crumbled—not into flesh, but into fragmented echoes of thought and shadow, torn apart by Rika's will and the edge of her weapon.
The forest went still.
Renji dropped to one knee, catching her breath. "What… what the hell was that thing?"
Rika stood above the fading ashes of the Phantom, her blade still humming quietly in her grip.
"I don't know," she murmured.