The crowd had fallen silent.
It wasn't an ordinary silence, nor even a simple lull after the chaos. It was a deliberate silence, almost sacred, as if every spectator had instinctively understood that the slightest noise could shatter a unique moment. No one dared speak anymore. No one wanted to look away. All were hanging on what was to follow.
In the arena, three silhouettes faced each other.
Hinata.
Kert.
Zerath.
They weren't moving, but everything in them was in motion. Their gazes crossed, analyzed, sized each other up with an almost palpable intensity. It was no longer a simple physical confrontation, but a mutual, silent, deep reading. Each sought to understand the other before the fight even resumed.
Outside the arena, Sally watched attentively.
Her gaze, sharper than that of the other spectators, had naturally settled on Zerath. Something about him intrigued her. It wasn't a malevolent presence, nor a corrupted aura like she had felt before. No… it was something else. A colder power, more contained, but undeniably dangerous. Enough, in any case, to offer a fight truly worthy of the name to Hinata.
The serious things were finally about to begin.
The Class S were truly entering the scene.
But one question lingered in Sally's mind, heavier than all the others: Did Hinata really have the level to hold her own against them?
So far, what she had observed only reassured her halfway. Hinata hadn't truly kept up with Kert's pace. She hadn't surpassed him, nor even matched him in pure speed. What had saved her so far wasn't her… but her mana. A reactive, autonomous mana, capable of anticipating and compensating for what her body couldn't follow.
In reality, Kert and Zerath were probably too fast for her.
But her mana… wasn't.
It was even the opposite.
Her mana exceeded her own limits.
And that was precisely where the problem lay.
The more this mana acted beyond what Hinata could naturally accomplish, the higher the price it demanded. Her body, unable to keep up with this abnormal pace, was exhausting itself at an alarming speed. Worse still, she risked injuring herself simply by letting this power act freely.
Sally slowly brought her thumb to her mouth.
A nervous gesture.
Almost unconscious.
She began to chew her nail, her eyes still fixed on the arena.
She was probably the person best placed to understand the situation. After all, it was she who had largely supervised Hinata's training. She knew her strengths, but above all… her weaknesses.
And this mana she was using…
wasn't normal.
It carried something foreign within it.
Traces.
Residues.
Parasitic memories.
They came from Sakolomeh.
This mana hadn't only strengthened Hinata. It had also transmitted skills that weren't hers, reflexes, responses, movements she had never learned. For Hinata, all this seemed natural, as if it had always been part of her.
But in reality…
it might not be the case.
Yes, this power was useful.
Terribly effective, even.
But it was just as dangerous.
Hinata remained, despite everything, a mortal, even transcendent.
And no one really knew how far this mana could go.
Even Sally.
She had never seen it reach its true limits. In every training session, Hinata collapsed well before this power fully revealed itself. Her body gave out before her potential could fully express itself.
However, there was one thing of which Sally was absolutely certain.
This mana could allow Hinata to dodge attacks exceeding even her own comprehension.
Attacks she shouldn't even be capable of perceiving.
But this ability had a limit.
A brutal limit.
The mana itself seemed… infinite.
But Hinata—
wasn't.
She drew from a bottomless power…
with an infinitely fragile body.
But despite this persistent worry, Sally couldn't deny one thing: this fight, as dangerous as it was, could also be an opportunity. A brutal ordeal, certainly… but perhaps necessary. Facing two Class S, Hinata would be forced to go beyond everything she had shown so far. Sally watched her without looking away, as if seeking to capture the slightest sign, the slightest limit that would manifest. She hoped Hinata would hold on… but a question remained suspended in her mind, heavy and inevitable: for how long?
Her gaze clouded slightly.
A memory resurfaced.
A conversation.
Sakolomeh.
What he had revealed to her at that moment far exceeded the bounds of the comprehensible. At the time already, Sally had struggled to grasp the full scope of his words… but in hindsight, she was beginning to perceive their true weight.
Sakolomeh wasn't a simple "bug".
That word was too weak. Too reductive.
He was… an anomaly born from an impossible event.
According to his own account, he had emerged at the precise moment when the world had encountered its own absolute limit. An idea that, at first glance, might seem abstract, almost philosophical… but which, in reality, described something much deeper. It wasn't simply a physical or magical limit. It was an ontological boundary, a barrier that the world itself could neither cross nor comprehend.
And yet—
something had tried to do so.
Sakolomeh was born from that attempt.
As if the world had sought to interpret what could, by essence, never exist. To give form to something too absolute to be contained. And in that impossible effort, instead of producing a coherent reality…
it had generated an anomaly.
A "bug".
But a bug without cause.
Without origin.
Without logic.
Something that should never have appeared.
And yet… it was there.
Even if he had taken a human form, even if he seemed inscribed in a certain continuity of the world — notably through that strange link with the Father God's dream — Sakolomeh remained fundamentally other. He wasn't a normal existence. He was what one might call… the incarnate zero. A presence born in the world's own blind spot, where rules cease to make sense.
And what made this anomaly even more troubling…
was its relationship to the world.
If Sakolomeh existed because the world had reached its own limit in trying to conceive him, then anything belonging to that world, in confronting him, inevitably collided with that same limit. In other words, nothing could truly "reach" him without, in reality, confronting a boundary it couldn't surpass.
All hostility became relative.
All opposition lost its meaning.
Because what Sakolomeh embodied exceeded the very framework in which those notions could exist.
A dead end.
A living contradiction.
Sally's gaze slowly returned to the arena.
To Hinata.
And that's when her worry deepened even further.
Hinata possessed within her… a fragment of this anomaly.
A fragment of Sakolomeh.
And yet—
she still existed.
She hadn't collapsed.
She hadn't been destroyed.
Why?
Unlike Sakolomeh, Hinata belonged to the world. She was a normal existence, subject to the laws, limits, structures of reality. So how could she contain something that, by nature, escaped all that?
Was it truly a "coexistence"?
Or simply… an instability awaiting a breaking point?
Even Sakolomeh, from what he had hinted, didn't seem able to remove this phenomenon. As if, at a certain level, this fragment was already one with Hinata.
Not a graft.
Not a borrowed power.
But an integration.
Incomplete.
Dangerous.
Perhaps irreversible.
Sally clenched her teeth slightly.
Her gaze no longer left Hinata.
This fight against Kert and Zerath wasn't just a test of strength.
It might be—
the moment when something within her…
would finally reveal itself.
Or break.