The battlefield groaned under the weight of silence.
Shattered promises and broken bodies lay strewn across the ice, where snow fell like ash. The storm had quieted—but not in peace. It was the stillness that follows catastrophe. Among the wreckage, he lay still.
Ishigo.
His body was a ruin—torn, bleeding, barely clinging to life. His vision had dulled, the world reduced to shapes and shadows. And then—a voice, slithering into his fractured mind.
"You are nothing, Ishigo. No one loves you."
It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It slid into the cracks of his soul, cold and clinical, sharper than any blade. Each word was a scalpel peeling away what little strength remained.
"You are weak."
Something in him cracked.
At first, there was nothing—only pain, only ruin. But then, from the depths of that abyss, a flicker stirred. A memory? A scream? A heartbeat?
No. A choice.
The trembling stopped.
His eyes snapped open—no longer clouded, but forged. Steel-hard. Alive with a fire that refused to die.
The battlefield felt it before anyone saw it.
The frozen earth beneath him fractured with a low rumble. Cracks spiraled outward like lightning across glass. His hand rose, slow and deliberate, fingers wrapping around the hilt of his blade.
Blue fire ignited.
Not flame. Not chakra. Something older. Something personal.
Energy. Raw. Untamed. Reborn.
Daigo turned, eyes widening. "Ishigo…?"
Yeaga froze mid-swing. "What the hell—?"
The entire battlefield shifted.
The flame at Ishigo's side didn't flicker. It pulsed—like a heartbeat syncing with his rage. The blue glow surged upward, wrapping around his body like armor. His glasses flashed with eerie reflection as he stood, every movement resonating like a drumbeat of fate.
He didn't yell.
He didn't roar.
He whispered:
"I hate that word… coward."
Silence slammed across the battlefield.
And then—he moved.
A blur of motion. A streak of blue fire slicing across the snow. The enemy leader raised his spear—but it shattered on contact, exploding into crystal dust.
BOOM.
A shockwave erupted. Ice cracked. Trees splintered. The sky itself rippled as Ishigo's blade tore through the enemy lines like divine retribution.
He wasn't fighting.
He was executing.
Each strike was surgical. Furious. A storm given shape. The enemy couldn't react—couldn't breathe—before another fell.
Their commander lunged in desperation, roaring, swinging wide—
Too slow.
Ishigo slid beneath the blow, blue fire tracing his arc like a comet. He rose with a reverse slash that cleaved through armor, through will, through hope.
The commander dropped to his knees.
"You… what are you…?"
Ishigo stared down at him, blade raised, eyes burning with something colder than ice.
"Your reign of darkness ends here."
One final cut.
The enemy leader hit the ground, his body reduced to ash and flame, dissolving into the wind.
The battlefield fell silent.
Weapons clattered. Soldiers fled or fell to their knees. The storm had passed—and Ishigo stood at its heart, the last ember flickering against the falling snow.
He exhaled.
His sword lowered.
Blue flames faded from the steel… but not from his soul.
Daigo and Yeaga approached slowly, speechless. Their comrade—the quiet one, the doubter, the forgotten—had just rewritten the story of the war.
Ishigo didn't look at them.
He stared at his hands—bloodied, shaking, glowing faintly with the echo of that power.
He hadn't just survived.
He had awakened.
He had torn free from the chains of doubt and carved himself into something new—not a soldier. Not a pawn.
A storm in human skin.
And no one—no one—would call him "nothing" again.