KamiKowa: That Time I Got Transmigrated With A Broken Goddess

[FEVER MODE: ACTIVATED]

The world exploded into focus.

Every snowflake hung suspended in crystal clarity. Every crack in the frozen stones beneath his feet mapped itself in his mind. The Bonemarch Knight's massive form—fifteen feet of fused bone and corrupted steel—became a constellation of weak points and attack vectors.

Xavier moved.

His body became liquid lightning. The pink-purple energy cascading around him wasn't just power—it was perfection. Every muscle fiber fired in harmony. Every nerve ending sang with purpose.

He crossed the twenty-foot gap between himself and the Knight in a heartbeat. His fist drove toward the creature's center mass with enough force to shatter mountains.

The Knight didn't dodge.

Xavier's punch connected.

The sound was like reality tearing. A shockwave of displaced air and energy erupted outward, shattering every remaining ice sculpture in the plaza. The blast crater beneath them spider-webbed across half the marketplace.

Xavier landed in a perfect crouch, energy still crackling around his form.

He straightened, allowing himself a moment of satisfaction. The old Xavier would have been calculating his next move, but this Xavier—this evolved version of himself—felt something warmer. Pride. He'd protected Naomi and Ashley. He'd avenged his fallen companions.

He'd won.

The dust began to settle.

The Bonemarch Knight stood exactly where it had before.

Not a single scratch marred its bone-white armor. Not one rivet had shifted in its ancient plates. The creature's burning eye sockets regarded Xavier with the same detached interest as before, as if his ultimate attack—the perfect expression of his Essentia, the culmination of all his training—had been nothing more than a gentle summer breeze against a mountain.

"What?" The word escaped Xavier's lips as a whisper, his cockiness evaporating like morning dew under a merciless sun.

The Knight raised one massive hand. Between its thumb and forefinger, it held something impossibly small. A speck. A mote of dust. With deliberate, almost ceremonial slowness, it flicked the particle away.

That was it. That was all that remained of Xavier's attack—the culmination of everything he'd learned since his Awakening, every point of power he'd accumulated through countless battles, every ounce of fury and despair he'd channeled into that single moment of transcendence. His perfect execution, his flawless technique, his soul-deep conviction that he could overcome any obstacle.

Reduced to a speck of dust.

"You misunderstand the nature of power." The Knight's voice carried no mockery. No anger. Not even satisfaction. Just the vast indifference of geological time speaking to a mayfly. "What you wield is borrowed. Temporary. A candle flame believing itself the sun."

Xavier's Fever Mode flickered. The stellar energy around him guttered like a dying flame caught in a winter gale. The pink-purple light that had seemed so brilliant moments ago now seemed pathetically dim against the ancient darkness emanating from the Bonemarch Knight.

"No." He shook his head, desperation creeping into his voice. "No, that's not—I hit you with everything. That should have—"

"Should have what?" The Knight took a single step forward. The ground cracked beneath its weight, but not from force—from the simple reality that matter itself could not support what the creature truly was. "Harmed me? A Servant of the Crown of Winter? A Knight who has walked between the stars?"

Another step. Xavier found himself backing away, his legendary confidence crumbling like sand castles before an incoming tide.

"I have witnessed the birth and death of stars, little king. Seen galaxies spiral into darkness. Watched reality itself bend and break under the weight of true power." The Knight's voice grew softer, more personal, and somehow that made it infinitely more terrifying. "You are... an echo of a forgotten song. A shadow cast by a greater light that once burned bright."

Each syllable stripped away another layer of who he thought he was. The assassin who'd never failed a mark. The student who'd impressed S-rank hunters. The Thornslayer who'd carved his legend across Frostfall.

All of it—nothing.

"And the performance is over."

Xavier's legs gave out. He collapsed to his knees, the last of his Fever Mode energy dissipating into wisps of light. His Input Buffer read 0/250, but the numbers felt meaningless now.

Everything felt meaningless, a hollow void swallowing Xavier's very sense of self.

He'd thrown absolutely everything at this monstrous entity. His peak power, honed through countless hours of training. His perfect technique, executed with the precision that had once made him believe he was special. The very core of his identity as a fighter—as someone who could stand between danger and the people he cared about—had been peeled away layer by layer, revealing nothing but insignificance beneath.

Behind him, he could hear Naomi's voice growing increasingly frantic, her shadow-chanting taking on a desperate, almost hysterical edge. Ashley's breathing came in ragged, labored gasps, each exhalation carrying the weight of her failing strength. The sound of reality itself beginning to fray at the edges where her unstable protective energy clashed with the dimensional rift's chaotic power sent shivers down his spine.

But it didn't matter. None of it mattered anymore.

The Bonemarch Knight regarded him for another long, terrible moment, its empty eye sockets somehow conveying more contempt than any human expression ever could. "You carry his scent. His essence. Yet you are not him. A pale reflection, perhaps. A might-have-been from some distant probability."

Xavier looked up through the haze of his shattered ego, a single question escaping his lips. "Who?"

The Knight's burning blue gaze seemed to pierce through flesh and bone, seeing something within Xavier that he himself couldn't understand or access. "In another turning of the wheel, you might have been magnificent. In this one..."

It didn't finish the sentence. It didn't need to. The unspoken truth hung in the air between them like an executioner's axe.

"Zantei: Nigrum esse"

The Knight raised its massive hand again, but not in preparation for an attack. Xavier could feel something far worse building in the air—a fundamental wrongness that made his teeth ache and his vision blur.

The ground beneath their feet began to change.

Not cracking. Not breaking. Unmaking.

The cobblestones started to fray into impossible geometric patterns. Lines that shouldn't exist in three-dimensional space. Angles that hurt to look at directly. The very concept of "ground" was being systematically deleted from reality.

The effect spread outward in a perfect circle, consuming ice sculptures and ruined buildings alike. Where it passed, existence simply... stopped. Not darkness. Not emptiness. The absence of the possibility of anything ever having been there.

Xavier scrambled backward, but the expanding zone of unreality followed him. His hands passed through space that had forgotten how to support matter. His knees found purchase on stones that flickered between existing and never having existed at all.

The Knights voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. "Let me show you what true power accomplishes. Not destruction—that implies something was there to destroy. Unmaking. The revision of reality itself."

Xavier's vision swam. The dimensional rift behind them pulsed with chaotic energy as Naomi's shadow-step preparation reached critical mass, but the expanding zone of nothingness was moving faster.

He looked back at his companions. Naomi, her hands deep in writhing shadow-stuff, purple eyes wide with terror as she realized what was happening. Ashley, golden fractures still spreading across her skin, trying to crawl toward them despite the pain wracking her body.

They were going to die. All of them. And it would be his fault for believing he could stand against something this vast.

The unreality was three feet away. Two feet. One.

Xavier felt his boot sole begin to dissolve as the concept of "boot" became uncertain.

"Naomi!" The scream tore from his throat, carrying all the despair of absolute failure. "NOW!"