Chapter Text
The world has never been a track running straight ahead.
It is more like a set of colossal gears buried in the deepest dark.
Countless worldlines mesh there, slip out of alignment, branch apart, and grind slowly down in the unseen interstices between dimensions. Every death. Every faith. Every fate rewritten by force. Every wish that should have ended, yet still trails the last of its warmth behind it. All of them flake away from their own worlds and sink into something deeper.
Those things do not vanish.
They accumulate.
Excess cursed energy. Fanatical belief. Unfulfilled vows. Extreme deaths. Along with the names a world has remembered, called upon, and cursed again and again, they settle like rusted iron filings into the cracks between one world and the next.
Layer after layer.
Until one day, the gears begin to drag.
Causality tilts. Fate loses its balance. Certain worldlines that should have flowed forward begin to curl backward in unnatural reversals. Death can no longer be metabolized. Curses can no longer sink and settle. The weight of a handful of souls is forced too high, like iron wedges driven into the bones of the universe, compelling entire dimensions to lean toward them.
Such souls usually belong to only a very few.
They may be the absolute guardians of an age, the core of a calamity, the last ember at the end of a civilization.
Or they may simply be monsters raised onto an altar by countless deaths, prayers, and curses within a single worldline.
Good and evil mean nothing.
Allegiance means nothing.
Whether they ever wanted to become the center of anything means nothing, either.
So long as they exist, the world is forced to acknowledge their weight.
In the eyes of that cold, distant higher-dimensional will, such beings share a single name —
Worldbound.
And another, crueler translation —
Prey.
To cleanse those excessively heavy souls, to return the worldlines to orbits where they can still function, the higher-dimensional will derived an almost merciless immune mechanism after countless collapses and reboots.
It has no divine compassion.
No justice of judgment.
No kindness that human beings could ever understand.
It only calculates weight.
Invisible ancient texts call it —
the World Chalice.
But it is not a chalice.
Its true form is a vast set of scales suspended above causality, spanning countless parallel worlds —
the World-Balancing Scales.
Approximately once every hundred years, the Scales awaken from their slumber.
They cast an unseen shadow across countless worldlines, marking those who have become too heavy, too powerful, too close to "the rules themselves." Then they open a metabolic ritual that lasts one year.
The ancient records call it —
the World-Balancing Hunt.
The rules are simple to the point of savagery.
The Scales mark the "strongest" in twelve worlds: the most dangerous, the heaviest, the ones least meant to remain where they are.
They know nothing of one another.
They remain in their own worlds, protecting, destroying, ruling, struggling, or simply living in peace — until a Hunter from outside their world crosses a dimensional rift and brings them a death without warning.
The souls of the hunted do not enter reincarnation.
They are not returned to their worlds.
Nor can mourning ever truly lay them to rest.
Their power, their fate, their causal weight are stripped away, compressed, and finally poured into the Scales as fuel to mend the fractures between worlds.
And in this Hunt, only an exceedingly small number of individuals — those who likewise bear the fate of "the strongest" and possess the ability to cross between worlds — are granted another identity by the Scales.
Worldwalker.
In other words —
Hunter.
When the Scales choose them, a brand known as a Worldmark is driven into the deepest part of their souls. Strip away the hypocritical illusion of words like "blessing" or "contract," and it is nothing more than a cold iron nail clinging to the bone, brutally pinning the Hunter's coordinates of existence into the gears of higher-dimensional law.
From that moment on, they hear the summons of the Scales.
They see the hidden doors between worlds.
They cross ruins, thrones, divine realms, battlefields, mountains of corpses, and flourishing cities to hunt down Worldbound who know nothing of the Hunt.
There is no pardon. No withdrawal. No alliance in any true sense.
Because what drives them into this slaughter is a promise that surpasses physics, causality, and common sense itself.
— The first Worldwalker to gather twelve strongest souls will receive the absolute fulfillment of one wish.
It strips away the fluke of miracles.
It severs the cowardice of begging gods for mercy.
It is fulfillment placed above every law of physics and every measure of common sense.
Even if that wish is to reverse a death already fixed in place.
Even if that wish is to tear open time that has already sealed shut.
Even if that wish destroys the Hunter's own world of origin.
Even if that wish itself is a catastrophe another world must pay for.
The Scales will not stop it.
They will only weigh.
This is the World-Balancing Hunt.
Arrogant. Precise. Cold. Utterly without mercy.
Like an accounting carried out in the name of the world.
And like a slaughter permitted to grant wishes.
Rain struck the broken torii gate.
Again.
And again.
Dull. Sluggish. As if the sound had climbed up from somewhere deep beneath the earth.
The mountain forest sagged beneath the weight of night. Severed shimenawa ropes hung in the muddy water. The shide had long since been soaked through with blood, plastered among shattered stones and dead leaves. Beyond the torii, the place where a god should have been enshrined had half collapsed. The shrine altar had split open. Wooden beams had fallen. The vermilion lacquer, blackened by fire, was left for rainwater to crawl inch by inch down its scorched marks.
A battle had just ended here.
No — it looked more like a massacre.
The miasma of slaughtered curses blanketed the shrine's approach.
A thick, bloody stench mingled with the sweet rot left behind by ancient cursed spirits, sinking heavily through the air.
The rain was cold.
Cold enough that even the air seemed frozen solid.
A pair of black leather boots stepped over the fragments scattered across the ground.
The sole of his boot brought down upon the fractured skull of a curse—gray matter still clinging to the bone—with a sharp, muted crunch. The sound vanished almost at once beneath the rain, as though it had never happened.
The man did not look down.
Rainwater slid along the line of his shoulders, darkening the fabric further. A mask covered half his face, leaving only a pair of long, narrow eyes exposed.
Those eyes were black.
And still.
Too still for someone who had just walked out of slaughter.
He looked less like a survivor of violence than violence itself, pausing briefly in its tracks.
Behind him, the fading silhouettes of several cursed spirits were slowly dissolving.
Some had had their heads torn off. Some had been crushed into malformed lumps of flesh. Others looked as though some higher power had hollowed out their cores directly, leaving only shells to collapse little by little in the rain. The air retained the signature chill of Cursed Spirit Manipulation—thick, oppressive, like an invisible hand that had not yet lifted from this blood-washed sacred ground.
The man stopped beneath the torii.
And in that instant, he felt something.
There was no killing intent to trace. No surge of cursed energy. No physical omen that preceded the activation of a cursed technique.
What pressed against his nerves was a cold, absolutely rational gaze from beyond the dimensions.
As if someone had lowered their eyes from outside the world, looking past countless layers of dimension, causality, and death to fix unerringly upon the coordinates of his soul.
The next second, pain needled up from deep inside his chest.
Faint.
But bitterly cold.
As though a steel needle too fine to see had dragged itself slowly across the deepest part of his soul. The pain had nothing to do with flesh. Reverse Cursed Technique could not heal it. Cursed energy defenses meant nothing against it. It did not need to pierce skin, blood, muscle, or bone, because it had never been aimed at the body in the first place.
It struck existence itself.
The fingers hanging at the man's side paused almost imperceptibly.
The sound of rain suddenly receded.
The mountain forest, the shrine, the corpses, the blood, the cursed spirit residuals — all of it seemed sealed behind a transparent membrane. In its place, a cold, vast, emotionless body of rules pressed directly into the depths of his consciousness.
The World-Balancing Scales.
Worldbound.
Worldwalker.
Twelve strongest souls.
One year.
Wish fulfillment.
The information was not language.
Yet it was clearer than language.
The higher-dimensional will had never bothered to ask permission. It brutally hammered the iron laws of the Hunt into his consciousness, thrusting a blade into a hand already slick with blood, and delivering its decree:
Keep killing.
And this time, the slaughter would yield a prize monumental enough to match its toll.
The man listened in silence until the end.
Rainwater slid along the edge of the mask covering half his face, gathered for a moment into a cold glint beneath his jaw, then fell into the mud.
He lifted his head slightly.
Beyond the ruined torii, the night stretched deep as an endless rift. Somewhere unseen, worldlines were slowly slipping out of alignment. A colossal set of scales suspended above causality had already turned its gaze toward this place.
And in those long, narrow eyes, dark and bottomless, there was no fear of unknown rules.
Nor any humiliation at being reduced to a higher-dimensional hound.
There was only a deathly silence compressed to its furthest limit.
Beneath that silence lay something that had burned for far too long — no longer bright, and yet still refusing to go out.
Obsession.
Precision.
A desperate, absolute wager.
Like an ember buried in ash, waiting only for permission to burn through the entire world.
"Twelve... is it?"
The man murmured the number.
The endless rain had worn his voice hoarse, but it held not the slightest tremor of doubt.
Twelve strongest beings.
Twelve souls.
Twelve hunts across worlds.
To others, those were the rules of a madman.
To gods, a blasphemous ritual.
To the world, another necessary metabolism.
And to him —
It was simply a price.
A price finally placed before his eyes.
The man slowly raised his hand, as if to confirm that the invisible Worldmark had already been wedged into the depths of his soul. The cold pain was still spreading, yet his expression only grew calmer.
After a long while, he laughed softly.
The smile was so faint it could hardly be called a smile.
It was more like a blade shifting soundlessly by an inch inside its sheath.
"Wait for me just a little longer, Satoru."
He said it quietly.
Rain fell into pools of blood.
The torii leaned in silence beneath the night.
In the distance, a rift that did not belong to this world slowly opened, like an eye blinking awake in the dark.
The World-Balancing Scales had awakened.
The first Worldmark had fallen.
And with that, a new Worldwalker set out.