My youth story cannot be a knight war

As he ran, the faint light rapidly expanded in his field of vision, and Kousaka could even see several snowflakes falling in the light.

Arrived.

As this thought flashed through his mind, Kousaka suddenly stepped over a staircase covered with white fallen snow and walked out of the hole above the staircase.

"Cough cough cough!!!"

The first thing that came was the endless and violent snowstorm. The cold air below zero degrees rushed into the nasal cavity through the respiratory system without warning. The lungs, which were already so hot that they were almost burning, were hit by this cold air, and immediately produced a strong pain.

Takasaka immediately covered his chest, lowered his head and coughed violently, as if he wanted to cough out his burning lungs as well. The conflict between the extreme cold and the extreme heat made his brain dizzy.

"—"

However, while coughing, Kousaka inadvertently looked up at the front, and his eyes suddenly froze.

Ahead was snow falling like rain. The densely packed university had covered the top floor of the tower with a thick layer of snow, making this world, which should have been dark and depressing, become pure white.

And in this pure white that stretches as far as the sight, there is a touch of color that is out of tune with this monotonous white. It is a bright red that stings the eyes. Even the blizzard that keeps pouring down cannot cover up that color.

And above that color, a person already covered by snow was lying silently. The snow had clearly covered his body, but it was still dyed red from the inside out.

That figure had the face that Kousaka Kyosuke was most familiar with.

"...Zamokuza?"

The hands that were covering his chest dropped unconsciously, his pupils trembled slightly because of the reflected figure, and Kousaka murmured in a soft voice that was almost like a dream.

Wow~

The wind suddenly blew stronger, and several snowflakes hit Kousaka's face. The cold touch woke him up from his trance.

When Kousaka regained consciousness, he looked at the bright blood carpet and the man. His open lips trembled silently, and his feet, heavy as lead, mechanically took steps forward.

The surging emotions in his chest due to this scene, along with the burning heat in his lungs, turned into a high-pitched roar that rang out from his throat and was heard far away on the top of the tower.

"——Taimu Seat!!!!!!!!!!!!"

……

"Finally... I defeated that guy..."

In his scarred right hand, he held the wreckage of the book "Thousands of Living Beings" which was completely overloaded due to the power beyond his limit and shattered after the explosion. Xu Guoliang, who was lying on the book, raised his head with difficulty, and golden light flickered in his pupils.

But compared to its former brilliance, this light is now pitifully weak, and it flickers and could go out at any moment. Even the scenes seen in the eyes are blurry with a mosaic texture.

But this is the limit of what Xu Guoliang can do now. With the control book almost destroyed, he not only lost the ability to transform, but the injuries on his body also continued to reduce his physical strength, making it possible for him to lose consciousness and fall into a coma at any time.

This was a battle that required everyone's full strength. Everyone tried their best both on and off the field, and it also required several rare and precious miracles and luck to achieve this extremely tragic victory.

Even if any of the above factors is missing, the world today can only wait in vain for the end to come.

But when he saw the timber base covered with snow through his blurred vision, Xu Guoliang couldn't help but feel a sinking feeling in his heart. What made him feel even heavier was that the darkness hovering above him and the earth showed no signs of dissipating, and the huge sense of oppression had not dissipated at all.

"—Damn it! It turns out that just defeating Daguba is meaningless!"

He angrily pounded the glowing pages of the book beneath him, and the wound on his palm that was holding the book broke due to excessive force, and blood flowed out again.

But Xu Guoliang no longer cared about his injuries. He was racking his brains to think about what conditions needed to be met in order to change the fact that the "ultimate darkness" was coming?

Now that all the cards have been played, Xu Guoliang really can't think of what else to do to change everything.

--boom.

"Ok?"

Just as he was thinking, the books under him suddenly shook. Xu Guoliang looked at the beating hand in surprise and doubt. Did he still have this level of strength now?

“…Wait! What’s this—huh!???”

The next second, Xu Guoliang reacted and suddenly opened his eyes wide, looking up immediately.

Above him, the boundless and thick darkness that had been still began to shake.

And the next moment, the whole world began to shake.

Everything he saw began to shake, whether it was this mental space that was about to break, the blue planet below, or even all the planets in the entire solar system, all of them were shaking at the same time.

The gravitational balance between the planets was disrupted by this shaking, and unprecedented abnormal phenomena broke out on all the planets in the solar system. This fluctuation was also radiating to planets outside the solar system and even the entire Milky Way...

-

A sound that cannot be described in words rang out from the darkness. It was not a "sound" that could be understood by living beings. It was more like the wailing of the entire world at this moment. A violent attraction erupted from the surging darkness, and this suction force was causing the balance of the entire galaxy.

A powerful suction force acted on his body. Xu Guoliang immediately used his other hand to grab the edge of the page, trying his best to resist the attraction acting on his body to prevent himself from being sucked into the sky.

“W-What the hell is going on!?”

……

"Well--!"

For the first time, the expression on Hikigaya Hachiman's face, which was as cold as ice, changed, and a hint of solemnity flashed across his eyes.

He reached out and grasped the broken wall of the classroom beside him, then looked up.

The ring of fire at the end of the sky began to shake, and the burning flames began to flicker extremely unstably. Uncontrolled gravity erupted from the darkness in the center, attracting things below to rise upwards.

The trees planted on the campus were uprooted one by one and began to float upwards. At the same time, screams of many people were heard in the city, and some vague human figures rose from all over the city and rose towards the sky.

"Komachi."

Seeing this, Hikigaya immediately turned around and saw that the people in the classroom were also slowly floating up, including his sleeping sister.

He decisively stretched out his palm, and golden ripples spread out from the palm of his hand. Everyone covered by the ripples sank again, and the suction on their bodies was offset by another different force.

After doing this, Hikigaya turned around and continued to look at the sky.

Looking at the darkness that was gradually sucking everything away, his eyes narrowed.

"This is……"

"'Ultimate Darkness' is collapsing?"

38. The First and the Last

The entire planet was shaking at this moment, and an indescribable surging power erupted in the deep darkness at the center of the ring of fire. Under the sweep of this power originating from a higher dimension, the world known to humans was as fragile as a house built of Lego bricks.

The scope of this force is not limited to the Earth, the small third planet in the solar system. The entire solar system and even the entire Milky Way trembled at the same moment. The balance between the planets was like a cat's rope that was being plucked at will, connecting and flipping.

But all this is unimportant and meaningless to humans, a group whose cognitive scope cannot even break through the atmosphere without the help of tools.

People could only feel the ground beneath their feet rising and falling like waves, and everything they could see was constantly rising upwards, whether it was high-rise buildings, houses, rivers, trees... even human beings themselves, all rising towards the sky under this pulling force from the sky.

Therefore, what occupies the sky all over the world at this moment is no longer the whistling wind and the roar of helicopters, but the high-pitched screams of human beings. Many people hug each other or hold the cracked wreckage of buildings around them, and more people swing their limbs helplessly in this treatment comparable to the weightless environment in the universe. This strange scene is quite similar to the world-famous "Starry Night" by Van Gogh.

In a world without gravity, everything in the past is turned upside down. Driven by overwhelming external forces, the world itself is extremely compressed from billions of years of destruction.

"ah!"

"W-What's going on!? Houtarou!"

Mayaka Ihara, who was about to scream and float into the air, was quickly pulled into Fukube Rishi's arms. The latter now held the girl in one hand and held the crack in the wall beside him with the other hand, while asking his friend on the other side with sweat on his forehead.

Oreki Houtarou was now also hugging the frightened Chitanda Eru. Huddled in the corner, he listened to the dangerous cracking sounds coming from the ceiling and spoke through gritted teeth.

"This is probably because No. 0 was defeated!"

"what!?"

"—That's right! This is because the Unidentified Lifeform Zero was defeated!"

Hearing the question raised by Yoshii Akihisa next to the ceiling, Sakamoto Yuji, with his limbs spread out and pressed against the ceiling, twitched his face and roared loudly.

At the moment when gravity was unbalanced, all the students in Class F were completely affected. They were pulled to the ceiling by this force and were suppressed so tightly that they could not move.

There was no way. The equipment in Class F was too shabby. From the construction to the items used, it was completely shoddy. There was not even a solid object in the entire classroom that could hold on to the body.

Among them, many unlucky students were even pressed against the ceiling by the old tatami mats and plastic box desks that were lifted up, and they were sobbing and screaming for help.

Listening to the sound of the ceiling gradually cracking behind him, Sakamoto, his forehead soaked with sweat, swallowed his saliva and said with an effort to remain rational:

"Summoning the Ultimate Darkness is a ritual, and Number Zero is undoubtedly the mastermind of this ritual! While it's unclear what went wrong during the ritual to lead to the current situation, this doesn't change the fact that it was Number Zero who initiated and presided over it!"

“…So that means!?”

When Hideyoshi Kinoshita, who was standing right in front of Sakamoto, heard these words, his beautiful eyes suddenly widened. He tried his best to raise his head and said "forward".

"That's right! The moment Zero died, the ceremony was interrupted. The result is just like now, after losing the host—"

"'Ultimate Darkness' has completely gone berserk!"

——Click.

Just after Sakamoto finished speaking, the already fragile ceiling of Class F finally couldn't bear the increasing weight from below and the increasingly huge pulling force from above. The roof that had been eaten away by termites for years finally made a crisp cracking sound that was different from before.

When they heard this voice, the expressions of everyone present changed instantly, and bone-white fear emerged in their eyes.

Then, the multi-story building began to be torn apart layer by layer from top to bottom by the unbalanced gravity. People were forcibly "pulled up" on the spot among the stamen-like splattering building debris, and flew into the sky while screaming.

“Ahhhh!!!!!!”

"Stop yelling, you pink cow!"

"Kaguya-san, you're going too far! I'm not the one shouting! Wuuwuwu..."

"???"

"S-Sorry! I was the one yelling! Help! Horikita-san!"

"Uh, well, I'm the current student council president of Shuchiin, my name is Shirogane—"

"...My classmate from Shuchiin, I don't think now is the time to introduce myself."

……

The earth was shaking, the sky was roaring, and a surging and boundless suction force erupted from the darkness that spread across the sky, swallowing up everything that existed in this world.

"Well……"

Kyosuke Kousaka fell to the ground, the powerful attraction made his hair stand up. He tried to open his eyes wide in the messy snow and wind, trying to see everything in front of him clearly.

Pulled by this force, everything began to rise upwards, even the dark tower made from the remains of the ultimate life form was not spared. In the face of this power of the same origin but even greater and vaster magnitude, the entire tower was trembling slightly, and countless bricks and stones that made up the tower began to be pulled up one by one.

The black bricks and stones danced and rose in the swirling blizzard, and the snow all over the top of the tower was torn apart violently. The shape of the entire tower fell into a state of violent disintegration at this moment, and the broken pieces rose up along with the force descending from the sky.

Looking down from above, more than half of this giant tower, which had been in its original structure, had been torn apart, becoming a dark crescent shape. Moreover, the scope of the tear was still expanding, and soon it spread to more than half.

"—!"

Kousaka's pupils suddenly contracted, and he stared straight ahead, at the area where Zaimokuza Yoshiki was.

The range of the tower's collapse just covered that area at this moment. The black stone bricks were lifted up one after another like a carpet, and the fallen snow rose up backwards. In the snow was black blood that had solidified and turned black into solid crystals. Everything was sucked upwards.

——Including the wooden base that fell there.

He was lying quietly on the ground, and at this moment his left hand was pulled up, and then his whole body lost its strength and floated in the air, and finally his feet left the ground and flew towards the sky, while boundless darkness was swirling in the sky with his back to him.

He rose toward the sky like a Christian being led by an angel, but seemed to be falling into an endless abyss.

"Zaimu seat!!!"

No longer caring about anything, Kousaka stood up with a suppressed cry in his throat, no longer resisting the force on his body, and jumped up with all his strength, floating upwards along with the fragments of the tower and the falling snow.

In a world of weightlessness, everything seemed to be drifting. In such a stunning scene, Takasaka vigorously waved his limbs as if swimming, speeding up his flight upwards.

Today, the physical laws of the Earth and even the entire Milky Way galaxy have been disrupted by the interference of even greater forces. Even though he has already passed the scorching thermosphere, Kousaka still doesn't feel anything unusual in his body.

His eyes were fixed on the ground nearly a hundred meters above where the unconscious Zaimokuza was suspended, still rising upwards at an increasing speed.

Not long after, there was a faint flow of electromagnetic light in the surrounding area, and at the same time, a blurry laser screen repeatedly appeared and flashed. Now the height at which the two people rose had reached the magnetosphere.

This is already the outermost layer of the Earth's atmosphere, the area where the atmosphere transitions to interstellar space. The concept of "boundary" has lost its sense of existence at this moment. All you can see is the winding blue and the boundary between deep blue and azure.

The purple ring of fire was burning in the darkness behind the deep blue. Only at this moment could one understand how vast and magnificent the existence of this thing was. The huge unbalanced force collided with the earth's atmosphere to produce a strong electromagnetic storm. It was like an inverted funnel appeared in the universe, and the earth was located below this funnel, with the ring of fire above it.

Countless invisible tiny objects were sucked from the earth and rose towards the ring of fire, and at the forefront of these objects was the location of Kousaka and Zaimokuza.

This altitude is an absolute forbidden zone that no life born on this planet can reach with the physical body. Kousaka felt as if his respiratory system was failing. No matter how hard he tried, he could not inhale enough oxygen. His brain was gradually shutting down due to lack of oxygen.

In a world where vision was gradually becoming blurred, only that figure remained firmly locked in sight, and as time passed, it began to become clearer.

In a world where consciousness was beginning to blur, the distance between the two sides was closing, so close that Kousaka could begin to see Zaimokuza's bruised body, his bloodstained face, and that waving hand.

Timber seat...

Gathering his last shred of sanity and strength, Kousaka stretched out his right hand towards that hand before completely losing consciousness, the distance between the two palms getting closer...