Rangers Endgame

Chapter 108: A Silent Judge

The musty air clung to Kagami's lungs for the past hour, though by then he was already used to it. He leaned against the wall, examining his katana to preoccupy himself as he was left to wait patiently for something to happen. Many of his comrades—or fodder, he'd find out soon enough—sat around on the ground, conversing in idle conversations.

"How long are we going to sit here?" Asenshi, a brolic man with a scar over his closed right eye, complained.

"You were never a man of patience." Karima, a man who was a head shorter than him with red hair, responded as he absently rolled a platinum coin between his fingers with effortless dexterity.

"This doesn't bother you?"

Karima huffed in amusement. "The road to fortune is a marathon, not a sprint. However, our fortunate circumstances will make it easier."

"Forget money. With his gift, we can practically attain reverence at will. Waiting for the money to roll in will waste time unnecessarily. But instead, we're just waiting around doing nothing."

It was times like these that Kagami questioned the Savior's choice of lackeys. In the olden days, rangers were hailed as heroes for driving away monsters towards the outer rim. Now, rangers had lost their way, valuing materialism and vanity.

Even as former rangers themselves, his allies shamelessly announced their selfish desires. When Kagami left the guild in favor of an upcoming cause, he was under the impression that there were others like him, others who held real values. But to his dismay, his new "comrades" were just as entitled.

"Occupy yourself," Soro, a brown-haired man who was in the middle of sharpening his sickle, shook his head. "Or would you like to be the one to explain to him why you disobeyed orders?"

Asenshi snarled in warning.

"Besides, you say you wish for a good fight, but you'll eventually find your demise if you keep seeking them out."

Asenshi's face twisted in irritation at his words. Kagami silently agreed with this. The upcoming battle wouldn't be an opportunity to flex one's power and abilities.

The giant lifted himself off the stone he'd been sitting on and cracked his knuckles. "Perhaps I should show you why that is an unlikely outcome."

Before Soro could respond, Asenshi's fist was hurling towards his face. Whipping his sickle outward, the blade snapped straight, resembling a wand, while he pushed radiance into it to conjure a thick barrier in front of him. The fist crashed into the radiant wall with a harsh, distorted crack, and Kagami was certain that if the brawny man weren't wearing gauntlets, the bones in his fist would've been dust.

"You should be more concerned about your survival," Soro continued calmly through the cracked barrier. "Otherwise, you won't live long in the new world."

"You forget his gift's intended purpose." Kagami said, fed up with their nonsense.

Everyone in the area, not just the two men who were arguing, looked his way, clearly not expecting the "quiet one" to speak. Kagami didn't bother to look up from his sword as he lay against the wall, completely at ease with every curious eye on him.

"This isn't just about survival—he made that very clear—this is about extinguishing a threat. But to do so, you need more than just sheer power. What is power without the hand of conviction to guide its course?"

Most listened intently, but the brute huffed in annoyance. Kagami used his dark cloak to wipe a speck from his sword, his reflection staring back at him. His short dark hair hung over his right eye, while a runic headband covered his left, scarred flesh disfiguring the top left side of his head.

Even with the inhibitor, he could still feel the unhinged power squirming to free itself behind his eye. He placed a hand over where his left eye would be, and the ache soothed some. "Remember why you're here."

Soro clicked his tongue. "Who do you think we are, idiots? Well, perhaps this lump of meat is." He jutted his thumb at the brute. The brute fired another blurred punch at his face, only to collide with another barrier as the man with the sickle remained indifferent. "Our objective is to eliminate potential reinforcements."

"???? objective," Kagami emphasized. "My gaze is set elsewhere."

His obnoxiously smug brow rose an inch. "And here you were lecturing us about his gift's intended purpose and whatnot. How hypocritical."

"My mission aligns with his grand design." Kagami's cool gaze finally lifted to sweep around the men. "You pervert the elixir's purpose with childish goals."

Their faces turned threatening as the tension grew palpable. The brolic man began to approach Kagami warningly, balling his fist. Kagami's hand moved to remove his headband covering his eye in preparation for a fight.

Killing one of his own would make no difference, as the man only had surface-level conviction anyway. They stared each other down for a moment, and the brute raised his hand to strike him, but stopped when they heard something nearby.

The old communication artifacts spaced evenly throughout the dozens of men crackled to life, turning every head in their vicinity. The barbarians practically trampled each other, their leaking radiance tangling, to listen in. The voice cut in and out, gradually becoming clearer with each crackle.

["This is Yuurei. The Sentinels are disoriented. Commence the counterattack."]

The brute looked back at Kagami with a smug grin, then back at his comrades. "Now, conjurers!"

Two conjurers stepped up. One of them cast a dome over everyone in their respective area, including Kagami, leaving a small hole at the top, while the other prepared to fire upward.

Jagged tendrils of radiance formed around the conjurer's staff and congregated at the top. Kagami glanced around the dome. His comrades allowed the elixir's effects to display on their faces as they all wore looks of feral anticipation. Perhaps it was his laser focus that lessened the elixir's effects on him, but he couldn't be certain. 

After a few seconds of charging their staff, they unleash a torrent of darkened amber through the hole and into the tunnel's ceiling. The ground trembled, and the walls threatened to topple on top of them, but they didn't care as the dome would protect them.

Several other conjurers down the hall blasted through the ceiling in quick succession, drilling countless exits that led to the surface. Satisfied with their crudely made exit, the conjurers warped the domes, folding them into themselves to form a ramp.

"Charge!" The brolic man cried as his fists ignited with raging amber.

Everyone drew their weapons as they poured out of the tunnel they'd been hiding in. Kagami rushed up the ramp into the blinding daylight. Crossing the threshold, his skin welcomed the crisp morning air as he hungrily breathed in the fresh, earthy scent of the outside. The sun bathed him in its warmth as his eye adjusted to the light.

As the world around him came into focus, so did the bloodshed. The battle had already claimed the lives of many rangers. Taking in the scene around the tunnel they'd ambushed from, rangers were left unrecognizable in scattered heaps of viscera. The poor fools had likely gotten caught in the blasts without having time to react.

'How unfortunate.' Kagami thought, lacking real regret.

Turning his attention to his right, he locked eyes with a young ranger, around his mid-twenties, with blonde hair. He pulled his spear from a body and pointed its head at him with a flourish. The confidence exuding from his smirk clashed with Kagami's indifference.

Kagami had seen the blonde-haired man's kind before, so he waited. It didn't take long for the ranger to inevitably charge forward. But Kagami stood in silence, waiting.

The man twirled his spear both in a poor attempt to hide the head's location and to proudly display his mastery. Even so, Kagami didn't need to see it anyway. The power behind his headband writhed, eager to guide this fool to the grave he'd generously dug for himself.

Kagami's hand came up and lifted the headband. The once calm energy grew feral as the inhibitor shackling it was finally removed. His left eye blazed with harsh, darkened amber that consumed half of his head. His eye shone with a nightmarish ferocity as he felt the raging pulse of its blood vessels.

The chaotic mesh of combat surrounding him appeared to slow as he gained insight into the movements around him. The input of thousands of micro movements the brain would usually tune out was now pushed to the forefront of his mind, and he could track every little motion. The sudden flood of information made the network of optic nerves behind his eye jolt painfully.

Though this allowed him to counter his enemies more easily, that wasn't his ability's primary purpose...

The spearman's charge wavered as he stared directly into Kagami's eye. The man's expression, once oozing with assurance, now gave way to fear. The quivering of his lip seemed to infect the rest of his body as his arms and legs began to tremble.

Kagami casually walked up to him, katana drawn. "In my years, I've learned that hesitation stems from a lack of conviction."

Kagami stopped just before the spearhead, the blade pressing over his heart. All the man needed to do was simply push it forward. Yet he stood there, quaking. Though Kagami never knew what his enemies saw when looking into his eye, their look of pure terror reflected their shallow will.

"If you cannot find your resolve, you aren't fit to fight in the new world."

Stepping around the spear, he pressed his katana against the ranger's throat and dragged it across. The man's flesh opened, and a fountain of red poured out. Kagami didn't bother to look back at the man's final moments, more preoccupied with searching for his next ranger to test.

His surroundings were a blur of chaos, and the terrain was already drenched in crimson. Nearby, Asenshi was battling three rangers at once and had already accumulated several gashes and bruises from his reckless assault. The rangers were clearly taking advantage of the simpleminded brute's attacks, weaving and countering, but Asenshi's passion for battle blinded him to their tactics.

Soro stood on the back lines, conjuring thick barriers above to catch hostile projectiles raining from the sky. The barriers barely rippled under the collective onslaught of several ranger conjurers. The Second Grades around him perished beneath the volley of spells, but Soro never batted an eye.

Kagami vented an angry breath through his nose, not for his fallen allies, but because the man refused to lend his impenetrable defenses. Men like him were a hindrance. What good was a soldier more concerned with surviving the battle than winning it?

Unfortunately, it wasn't the time or place to dispose of him. There were more urgent matters to attend to.

Kagami strode toward a ranger with the Saberclaw emblem branded on his right shoulder plate, unbothered by the blur of chaos around him. The Saberclaw member spun low with his imbued sword, evading a slash meant for his neck and cleanly sliced through a Second Grade's ankle. He followed up with a quick stab to his stomach, and his opponent went limp.

His eyes then found Kagami, and he let the body slide free of his blade as it dropped. He flicked his blade, drawing an arc of red on the ground before settling into a defensive stance as Kagami continued his approach. He'd heard how fearsome the Saberclaw Clan was, how it consisted of some of the best rangers in the guild.

However, as Kagami came closer to lock eyes, the ranger's determination dissolved to reveal the fear hidden beneath his facade. Terror twisted the man's features as his sword slipped from his hands.

"How easy it is to wipe away the mask you all cling to," Kagami said as he whipped his blade across the man's neck. His head tumbled from his shoulders, and his body followed. "You won't do either."

As the battle raged, Kagami meandered through the fray, his blade delivering silent judgment for those his gaze marked for death. There was no flourish, no unnecessary movement—just a swift strike that ended each confrontation in a heartbeat.

As bodies trailed in his wake, his eye grew more agitated. Tendrils of dull pain expanded from his eye and began to push against the left side of his skull.

But he couldn't withdraw. He refused. There was still a frightening number of false soldiers he needed to weed out.

He slid the headband back over his eye, and the jagged flames of radiance flickered out with a hiss. The surge of power flooding his eye weakened to a slight pressure that tangled with the nerves. He pulled out a health elixir and drank its contents to relieve the lingering pain. The pain receded, and he tossed the vial aside.

Scanning the bloodshed, he found another young ranger, around his late teens by the look of it, slicing through a conjurer. How he managed to slip past the Second Grade warrior protecting the conjurer, he didn't know. Even the warrior seemed puzzled, his eyes lingering where the boy wasn't, and his halted swing implying the boy had somehow sped past him.

The boy whipped around, his dark hair arcing and obsidian armor catching the light, to deflect the warrior's longsword. The ranger's features hardened as he took advantage of the warrior's overextension and countered with an upward slash across his torso.

The warrior stumbled back, and a stray projectile struck him in the ribs, bringing the boy's fight to an anticlimactic end. But Kagami's interest had already sparked, and before making the conscious decision to, his legs were already taking him towards the ranger.

The boy noticed him coming with a glance but didn't react right away, his cool gaze tracking his approach. A chilling uncertainty formed in Kagami's chest under the weight of the boy's cold, detached eyes, but he didn't let it spill into his confident stride.

Throughout his years, he'd rarely come across eyes such as those, eyes that reflected an unforgiving past. Usually, they were attributed with the strong-willed, but he knew better not to let his intuition be the deciding factor. Not when he had a more reliable tool at his disposal.

His hand came up to his headband. "Let's see if your will is as true as your actions imply." Kagami said, but the boy didn't respond.

Upon lifting the headband, his eye once again roared with unbridled power. Until that point, the boy had watched him in silent warning. It was only when his gaze went to Kagami's left eye that he finally reacted, a slight lift of his brows and tightening of his grip around his katana.

Kagami shook his head in disappointment.

"I'd hoped that look in your eyes wasn't just for show." He strode up to the still kid and raised his sword. "But alas, you're just like the rest of them."

He came close, preparing to drag his blade across the boy's neck and move on to the next ranger. Then suddenly, just before his blade could make contact, Kagami jerked his head back reflexively as a silver gleam whipped across where his throat was.

He slid back, his startled, wide eyes searching for the one responsible, only no one else was there but the two of them in the middle of the raging battle around them. Then he saw the boy's katana, now angled away from him with a thin trickle of red sliding down his blade's edge. Kagami's hand went to his neck, where a sharp pain radiated from, and then looked at his palm.

Blood.

His eyes went to the boy, then back to his hand. As the initial shock wore off, he realized his heart was racing, not from nearly being decapitated, but because he'd finally found someone worthy of life.

His wide eyes began to curl, and he grinned before a delighted laugh tumbled out from his lips.

Again, he looked back at the boy, who whipped the blood off his blade. "Tell me, who are you?"

The boy seemed to consider his words, but after a few seconds, he had decided to honor Kagami's request with a single response.

"Yakeru."