So It Wasn't Empty Words
"It has been a while. Looking up at someone."
Another One brushed the snow from his back.
"When I was at the bottom, this was a familiar view."
"There was a time like that?"
"I was never a being born strong, not like a god or one of the transcendent species. I was a lowly mortal. I scrambled and clawed just to stay alive, and this is what came of it."
"Ironically enough."
"Along the way, a great many illusions broke. The hidden histories of the universe, the true face of noble birth, the limit of talent granted by the stars, the heirs of the constellations, and all the rest."
"I verified every one of them with my own hands and put them to death. There was nothing to them. Less than nothing."
"They were romantic days. I was a child then, too."
"You talk like an old man halfway in the grave."
"Old is right. There is no being in this universe older than I am."
They had all died in the Great War.
"That so."
"It is."
Thud. The Phantom lashed a sideways kick into Another One's shin, and Another One spun.
"You're dressing up useless noise and calling it grand."
The Phantom's pale hand seized him by the collar.
"Let's take this elsewhere. I don't think I can hold back here."
"Just what I wanted."
Another One clamped the Phantom's wrist as if to grind it to powder. Only a faint pain came of it, and the Phantom's brow tightened.
"Tsk."
The Phantom kicked off hard. A snowstorm whirled up around them. He ignored the barrier of Life, and the glacial earth underfoot shrank to a point. A knife of wind clawed his cheek, and through the blur of passing vision a fighter jet showed like a pinprick.
He kept climbing for the sky. Somewhere along the rise the blue behind him turned black, and the ground became blue waves laid over green.
"Beautiful."
The Phantom came out into an outside that was far and yet near. The moon hung 384,400 kilometers off, and the sun that bestowed the grace of living burned at a distance of 150 million kilometers.
"If we've arrived, would you set me down? I believe I'm getting motion sick."
"Sure."
The Phantom hurled Another One at the space debris lingering in Earth's orbit. Another One flew as a streak of light and slammed into a broken shard of a satellite's solar panel.
"Some tour guide you are. Minus one million out of ten."
"Dear customer snuck on without a fare. Kindly don't pitch a shitfit."
The Phantom stole the physical distance between Another One and himself. He appeared with no windup at all, and Another One swung a fist on reflex.
Overwhelming force tore along the path of the fist. A straight shockwave crushed electrons and crushed atoms. Nothing on that diagonal escaped collapse.
A satellite that had been drifting along perfectly well lost its upper half and fell with only the lower half left.
"You dodged. Well. Take that, and you would not be a person."
Another One shook out his hand. The Phantom had slipped clear before the fist could so much as touch him.
To the Phantom, wherever he was hidden and listening, Another One spoke.
"You know something? I still have not used death. Aside from the first time, when I used it in a panic."
"And do not think that is all."
"Should you happen to survive, I would like you to teach it to the next user of the Book of Death."
"This is how death is used."
Within the range of recognition, kill the sense that cannot be recognized.
Another One's cognition was sheared away in a lump. Feeling the sense with which he looked down upon the world as it died hurt worse than carving out his own flesh. But death carried out its user's will, and so he could see what could not be seen.
"There you are."
The Phantom was not far off. He had wrapped the concept of stealth around himself as if it were his own.
I kill the distance between him and me.
Physical distance died and vanished. The Phantom appeared before Another One at a distance of zero.
"The hell?!"
Split in half and die.
"......!"
A white line drew itself from the crown of the Phantom's head down to his groin. As the two halves of his body began, slowly, to come apart, he crushed his own cheeks in his hands and clamped the halves together.
"How is it... what you're doing... so much like what I do?"
"Entirely different. Your ability ranks among the foremost in the universe, but it is not death."
"You leave something after you, do you not."
"Death does not. Die, and that is the end."
Eternal Termination.
"Where it has passed, there is nothing but nothingness. Even the Stone of Resurrection could not bring this death back to life."
As if to prove his words, the distance of the space he had killed began to warp.
Space died without so much as a discrepancy in time. A hole opened through the universe in a single instant, and the method nature chose to fill that emptiness—
"Oh, fuck."
The Phantom's collar yanked backward. The suction was monstrous, a vortex devouring everything nearby, and his shallow stock of science offered up a name for something like it.
A black hole.
A singularity contracting without end.
This was a slightly different thing, a phenomenon of restoration. But what did that matter? Something close enough had just been born on Earth's doorstep, and less than ten seconds remained until annihilation.
"You really do get up to everything."
Cold sweat broke on him. Stopping his left brain and his right from parting ways was already more than he could manage, and now he had to mind the Earth as well.
"There's nowhere I can fight in peace."
"For the likes of us, even a galaxy is narrow."
"One fight, and planetary systems burst apart."
Another One twirled a finger.
"Broaden your thinking. Is it not said that to know is to have power?"
Another One's shade went up in brilliant flame.
"Fail to answer even a thing this small, and you will never defeat the original me. Not if you died and woke again."
"Kh."
The Phantom had no retort. In their first fight, Another One's choice to split the battlefield off into a separate space had been a thoroughly calculated courtesy. If the Earth broke, the loss would have been his as well. Nothing guaranteed he would be so considerate a second time. Why would he refrain from aiming at a Phantom who came with a weakness called Earth attached? Win or not, the Phantom might be left clutching nothing but vacant void.
He had no choice but to take his eyes off Another One.
Another One, of course, did not miss the opening.
"Your back is wide open."
Kill free will.
"I know, you bastard."
The Phantom stole the death bearing down on him and handed it straight back to its owner.
"Ngh...!"
In the moment Another One swallowed the groan, the Phantom fitted the distance he had stolen, back when he closed the gap, into the contracting space.
Snap.
As if it had never been there, the black hole vanished like a ghost.
"Lucky."
I kill a radius of two hundred meters.
Before the Phantom could so much as press a hand to his chest in relief, space began to die again.
His eyes sank, cold and bleak.
"Haa."
If only he'd come for me and no one else.
"You really love giving me a headache."
The Phantom's left hand flashed. He stole the death that had been killing space.
I kill the light.
Sunlight withered. The light that had bathed the Earth went out with it.
The moon shone by itself, as if to take the sun's place.
The Phantom's right hand crumpled shut.
The light returned to what it had been.
"I kill ma—"
Both fists drove into the mouth that was singing death.
The fists slowly uncurled. The deaths sealed in his two hands seeped free and collided.
Boom.
Another One's head snapped back. Behind him, the color of death dyed the universe a deeper black.
"Kh."
The Phantom clenched his teeth against the death boring in through his skin.
Kill the breath.
Kill the blood.
Kill the heart.
Kill the bone.
Kill the brain.
The body's right of life and death is stripped away.
The Phantom was dying in real time.
"So this is as far as it goes."
Another One gathered up his half-dead shade and murmured, regretful.
"The limit of what you can steal seems to be those two hands, and nothing more."
"...With a two-character name, yeah."
"Are three characters different? I would like to be told. As things stand, you die."
The Phantom shook his head.
"No. You aren't qualified."
"Arrogant. I misjudged you."
Another One prepared a final courtesy.
"A great shame. But let us end it here. I enjoyed myself."
"I didn't."
"Neither did he."
A deep, dragging boom.
Shadow fell over Another One from above.
"What...?"
The moon was there.
The moon was right at his back.
"The moon should be over there."
The moon that orbited the Earth was grazing the southern hemisphere.
Then what was this?
"I didn't come here for nothing."
The Phantom drew a mask from inside his coat. It was not his usual mask. This one covered only half a face.
"There was something I wanted to test before I fight the real one."
He set the half-mask over his face.
In that instant, Another One realized that the death which had been eating the Phantom was gone. And he could no longer define what this man was.
Chaotic.
Grotesque.
Gloomy.
Ordinary.
He exists, and yet he does not.
Because he does not exist, he exists.
One, and yet three.
Three, and yet one.
A god?
A living thing?
A human?
Was my sight even sound to begin with?
"...Who are you?"
A question cast out. An answer came back.
For now.
The Phantom Thief.
Phantom.
I shall be Do Kyung."
The moon looked down. The outer corners of the mask's eyes curved, and Do Kyung brushed the edge of his mouth.
Another One let out a hollow laugh.
At this rate.
I can't tell which of us stands closer to death.