I accepted the Destroyer’s Descent Scenario and found myself standing beside a massive tower of… dirt? There was a door leading into the tower and the massive structure seemed to stretch into space, yet there were no windows to be seen. I might have gone on to investigate the tower if the constant earth tremors and distant explosions weren’t currently occupying most of my attention.

It was well into the night, probably closer to the start of a new day than to the end of the previous one. Still, off in the distance at what seemed like dozens of miles up and away into the sky I could see a massive suspended complex lit up by what I presumed were flame-lit torches. The light cast off from these torches illuminated what looked like a hundred or thousand-mile-long chrome worm. It also provided enough contrast between the monstrosity and a rapidly shifting speck that darted around while fighting it.

The worm moved fast enough to match my base speed, which for its size was terrifying. It tried to devour the speck that flew around or maybe just ram into it while orbs that spawned off its body contributed to the chaos by shooting the speck with hypersonic energy beams. As I took in this scene, the speck made a terrible judgment call and dodged into a position where it could not avoid the worm as it suddenly pulled into itself and was presumably crushed to death.

“Damn it! Better luck next— Wait a minute, you there! You’re one of us aren’t you?” A voice that was not Katayoki’s appeared in my head.

“Not really sure what you’re talking about. Sorry, I’d talk more if that worm thing wasn’t currently heading right for me,” I said as I flew up to meet the abomination halfway instead of waiting for it to come any closer to the dirt tower.

“That proves it! You are one of us. Now you just have to survive for thirty minutes and I’ll be right back to finish the Destroyer tonight,” the voice said.

“Survive?” I repeated, not really liking the idea. “I think I’ll just get rid of it myself.”

As the impossibly long, flying worm approached I could make out that the chrome of its body was some sort of metallic armor. Or maybe it was just a mechanized being entirely? The closer it got, the easier it was to see that it was segmented into identical modular pieces.

‘Ooh, that’s rough,’ I thought to myself as the worm crashed against my fist and found itself recoiling from the force. Even with my full base strength it barely moved out of the way.

Moreover, it was only once the monster was within reaching distance that I found out its body was ever-so-slightly designed with countless serrated edges on each of its segments. Getting crushed to death by this thing would probably be a mercy to anyone who got caught by the sharp edges.

I brought out Katayoki’s Knife and began to cut into the mechanized worm. Miraculously, even when I completely cut through the monster’s body, the bisected pieces remained telekinetically connected as the worm continued to maneuver around in an effort to entrap or crush me. The worm spawned more orbs as the ones from its previous battle caught up and made my job of dodging considerably more challenging.

I aimed to get rid of all the orbs with pinpoint accurate throws and recalled my knife back to me. But, it proved to be a futile endeavor as the mechanized worm just continued ramping up production without any signs of slowing down. Just before I decided to escalate as well with Hollowfication, the voice from before chimed in.

“Holy shit dude, at this rate it’ll kill itself in less than five minutes!”

“Really? How can you tell?” I asked as I continued to throw and recall my knife. Theoretically, I could see how it would be taking damage by dragging its enormously long body through the cutting rifts, but despite the cuts, the mechanized worm wasn’t slowing down at all.

“Oh, you can’t see it’s health pool? Then you probably can’t even begin to imagine what I’m talking about,” the voice’s enthusiasm stilled.

“You mean like a video game?”

“I knew you were like us! Though, it’s weird how you can’t see the boss’ health pool if you understand what I’m talking about.”

“We’re probably playing two different games, buddy. My shit’s running on Gacha, not RPG mechanics.”

“What?”

How ironic for him to not understand me. Although, maybe he just wasn’t cultured enough? Gacha is a rather niche subgenre of games. It was also possible for him to come from a world where the concept of Gacha had yet to be developed; like how my favorite music didn’t exist on Remnant.

[Congratulations! For killing a Probe x851, you have earned a (851) Locked Rare Gacha Coin(s)!]

[Congratulations! For killing 100 Probes x8, you have earned a (8) Locked Unique Gacha Coin(s)!]

[Congratulations! For killing the Destroyer, you have earned a Locked Epic Gacha Coin!]

[Congratulations! For resolving “The Destroyer’s Descent” single-handedly, you have earned a Locked Epic Gacha Coin!]

One moment I’d been fighting the mechanized worm as I had been with not a single clue as to how much longer I’d need to keep going to kill it and in the next I was back at my apartment. With such little warning, I’d had to activate my Sandevistan just to react in time and stop myself from throwing my knife through the building.

I hesitated for a second before shrugging my shoulders and using up the new Gachas I’d just gotten. The Rare Gachas dropped materials, some useful for my alchemy, but mostly not as over half the haul was something called Hallowed Bars, which were refined otherworldly magical ingots.

The Unique Gachas were identical Summons for a “Mini Destroyer.” These summons were a 1/1000 replica of the thing I killed and were just as weak. They were, however, supposedly just as fast as the original Destroyer and could produce their own Probes twice as fast, so pretty much a great point defense guard.

As for the Epic Gachas… Well, one of them gave me a copy of the full-sized Destroyer as a Companion. Unlike Summons, which only lasted a day, Companions lasted until they were dismissed. So, if I wanted to bring that eldritch mechanical horror over to Remnant for whatever reason, I could do that.

The other Epic Gacha was a new Perk called “Directives.” It would make every Scenario or Mission I got much easier to resolve as I would preternaturally be able to tell what it was that I was expected to do. Basically, it told me what I needed to do to end the Scenario. Or more importantly, it would also tell me what not to do to prolong my time in the now-confirmed simulations that were my Scenarios or Missions.

With Directives, I now knew that every world I’d been in or would enter to resolve a Mission or Scenario was based on a real-world somewhere out in the Multiverse. But that it was altered to accommodate my presence. So, like a separate timeline to the world’s main space-time continuum or something to that effect. I liked to think of it as “What ifs” that “could have been” but “weren’t actually,” something that was either set to happen or had happened in the simulated world's timeline.

This would be immediately useful as I decided to take a new Scenario. I accepted the “From Earth Without Sam” Scenario and immediately felt the need to rescind my previous flawed understanding of how Directives worked. It was much more useful than I thought before experiencing the effect for myself.

For example, instead of just knowing that I was now supposed to make my way over to a distant portal and destroy it to cut off an alien invasion, I now had a basic level of context for what was going on in the Scenario.

I knew this “Sam” from the name of the Scenario was missing out of the picture in this simulated world and he was supposed to be the one who staunched the alien invasion. I knew I should expect an unending tide of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of hostile “servants of Mental” to get in my way of the portal and focus their undivided attention on killing me.

I also knew that the alien menace attacking the world was susceptible to relatively conventional weapons. There were supposedly crazy gadgets hidden around from alien artifacts to experimental weapons that Sam was renowned for being able to expertly use, but I wasn’t going to go out of my way to hunt for them. Mostly, this was because I didn’t have to, but I probably would have done it if Directives made it easier for me.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Instead, I decided to have a “little fun” and make use of the countless Common through Rare weapons I’d stockpiled over the last couple months. From the Cartel Firearms all the way up to the Cyberpunk weapons, I made my journey through the Siberian Tundra toward the portal an arcade-shooter-like experience.

I shot down or blew up all the aliens that dared to show their unhinged faces and grotesque bodies. My Firearm Skill combined with my current reaction time gave me borderline aim-hacks in real life while my physical strength eliminated the concept of recoil; or well, it would have if I didn’t quickly figure out that some amount of give was needed else the guns would break themselves in short order. It was a bit of a hassle materializing guns only to offload them, drop them and move on to the next one several times a minute, but that didn’t add much to the challenge.

About an hour into my rampage, I made it to a cliff overlooking a massive tundra plain. Off in the distance, I could see the massive portal I was supposed to destroy. The thing was several dozen stories tall and just as wide as it cast a circular connection between this god-forsaken version of Earth and the conquered military-based worlds of Mental.

Before the portal, I also saw tens of thousands of soldiers fighting off against just as many aliens that spawned from the portal on the ground. In the air above the battlefield, there were alien airships raining down artillery on the soldiers.

How one regular man was supposed to make a difference in this situation was beyond me, considering there weren’t any superpowers to give humanity a fighting chance in this world. But that was beside the point. Since I was here, I would do everything I possibly could to turn the tides of the war and probably come out of this whole ordeal with over a million Uncommon or below Gachas by the end of it.

I tossed away the DS1 Pulsar submachine gun I’d been using and assumed my Vasto Lorde Form. I raised a finger and pointed it at one of the airships before firing off a meter-thick Cero that crossed the distance in the blink of an eye. I sustained the beam and flicked my finger through a path to make contact with all the other airships. A half second later, the skies lit up as the airships exploded in the most over-the-top manner possible before raining down debris, mostly over the aliens, but unfortunately, there were probably a few soldier casualties as well.

I didn’t dwell on that as I charged Katayoki’s Knife with Spiritual and Ki energies and threw it deep into the enemy lines. Wherever the knife landed at least a hundred aliens would get obliterated by the explosion that would come from the energies rapidly transfering through the knife. Immediately afterward, I would recall the knife and do it all over again.

I was making good progress eliminating large swaths of aliens when a massive shadow began to pull out of the portal. The largest alien I’d ever seen — nearly as tall as the portal itself — slowly appeared out of the portal, but didn’t make it more than a full step out before I aimed an explosive knife at him. My thrown knife struck true even from a couple miles away and took a massive chunk of the alien’s right shoulder, but just as quickly it started regenerating the mass back at a visible rate.

When it recovered from being staggered by the explosion, it looked right at me before casting two laser beams at me from its eyes. I used Sonido to dodge and after a couple seconds, the lasers dissipated. In their place, massive ten-meter-wide fireballs began homing in on me from around the alien.

Unfortunately, homing or not, they were way too slow to do anything against me when I cast another Cero to destroy them and melt through the alien’s tough body. It took a few seconds to cut completely through the alien’s massive neck and would require a couple dozen more to carve the path that would decapitate it.

The alien tried to retaliate with more eye beams and by redirecting all the lesser alien’s forces against me, but I dodged the former while ignoring the latter as it harmlessly bounced off my Hierro. When I finally managed to decapitate the massive alien, its head and body fell with the force of a thousand tons, kicking up a giant plume of dust and smoke.

The next thing I did was continue blowing up aliens while concentrating my explosive knife throws at the portal. After about a dozen of them, I managed to resolve the Scenario.

[Congratulations! For killing a Mental’s Minions x79,821, you have earned a (79,821) Locked Rare Gacha Coin(s)!]

[Congratulations! For destroying a Mothership x9, you have earned a (9) Locked Unique Gacha Coin(s)!]

[Congratulations! For killing Ugh-Zan VI, you have earned a Locked Epic Gacha Coin!]

[Congratulations! For single-handedly destroying the portal to one of Mental’s conquered army worlds, you have earned a Locked Legendary Gacha Coin!]

I rolled for all the acquired Gacha from the Scenario and frowned as the overwhelming majority of it was ammunition from the Rare and Lesser Grade Gacha Coins. It was useful in the fact that it was undefined ammunition for just about any kind of conventional weapon I could think of, but I didn’t really use projectile-based weaponry behind my knife unless it was on a whim.

The Unique rolls were marginally better as they were different gadgets that even I could stand to benefit from in a pinch. I’m talking pocket-sized bombs that would generate a temporary black hole or an artifact that generated a time-bubble for me to experience time twice as fast while everyone and everything else didn’t. Crazy things like that which were only useful once.

Killing the massive alien had given me an Epic Magic Enhancement which raised my Magicka pool to ten times its previous size. As for the Legendary Gacha Coin… It was actually a Fast Travel Point to Mental’s Dominion; the world where the big bad himself was headquartered. Not a Scenario or Mission, but the actual place in whatever universe that alternate Earth had been a simulation of.

Maybe after I finished with all my other Scenarios and Missions, I’d take the chance to go there or the Ever After. But for now, I was kind of feeling pumped up for a better fight. The Destroyer and Ugh-Zan VI had been pretty intimidating foes, but honestly, they couldn’t hold a candle to what it felt like fighting Grimmjow or Katayoki.

My luck didn’t seem to be doing all that well today, so I decided to reserve my remaining Scenarios and Missions for tomorrow and promptly got ready to go to bed. Katayoki was eagerly awaiting me and we quickly began a battle that would probably leave half the continent of Sanus in shambles. I specified “probably” because there wasn’t any way for me to keep track of all the horrific amounts of collateral damage sustained by my void of a Soul. Every part of my Inner World looked like every other part, so even if we crossed hundreds of miles over the course of fighting each other throughout the night, I wouldn’t be able to tell.

Eventually, though, I managed to get the drop on Katayoki and stab him right through where his heart would have been if he were a flesh and blood human. It was the first time I landed a hit that would have certainly killed him had he been a flesh and blood human instead of a Zanpakuto Spirit.

[Congratulations! For subjugating your own Zanpakuto Spirit, you have earned a Locked Legendary Gacha Coin!]

Katayoki’s silhouette of a body collapsed into the void surrounding me. His nonexistent mouth had been grinning from ear to ear just before it happened.

Alarmed but not overly concerned, I used the Locked Legendary Gacha Coin and immediately understood what had happened.

[Results: Rarity — Legendary 100,000 (Locked) | Bankai Release Command (Ability)]

Katayoki reformed out of the void but this time his silhouette had taken on even more of my physical features. He was still far from a monochrome copy of me as he lacked minute details like the imperfections on my skin or the kaleidoscopic gradient of my pupils, but now he passed more as a person than a mannequin.

“You are going to just love what my new ability is in your Bankai state,” he said— and oh my god, he sounded like a slightly deeper-pitched version of me! Not annoying, disorienting or with any other funky effects. Hallelujah!

“Let me guess, better teleportation? Infinite copies of your bullshit knives? Infinite copies of your bullshit knives that I can teleport to without cost?”

“Those would be fun, but unfortunately none of those are even remotely close. Well, maybe the better teleportation aspect, but no! Instead you get to bring me out to the real world. Great, right?”

“No offense, but that sounds awful. Sort of understandable for a Legendary Gacha considering what happens to my Soul when we’re fighting, but pretty underwhelming, not gonna lie.”

“I don’t think you understand what I’m saying, you’re bringing me into the real world. What is my name?”

“…No,” my eyes widened as I took in the many possible interpretations of his name. The most direct translation for each of the characters making up his full name meant “Perfect Heaven Empty Vessel.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? Are you capable of containing something?”

“Yes! Pretty much anything, in fact. But, most importantly, if you bring me out to play in the real world, any nonliving object that I personally cut with my knife can be sealed inside me. If I cut a living being, however, then I — and you by extension — get to steal one aspect of their character for ourselves. I can hold one stolen aspect indefinitely but you need to drop it if you want to steal a different aspect, in which case whatever we dropped will return to its original source.”

“That’s so fucking broken,” I said before the full implication of what he just said hit me. “Wait, when you say one aspect, how ambiguous or defined are we talking about? Like, if I were to go confront Salem right now could I steal her Curse which encompasses her immortality and absolute regeneration or do I have to choose one.”

“That’s the best part,” he laughed. “You can either take the Curse or surgically take only one effect without removing the other.”

“Ok, but if I take the curse and then find something better in the future, will dropping it after killing Salem bring her back?”

Katayoki shrugged, “Hell if I know. Probably not since she’ll be well and truly dead by that point, but who knows how her curse actually works. If it works by rejecting the concept of the cursed person’s death, then discarding the curse could bring her back. Maybe I’d be able to tell if stealing an aspect gave me a complete understanding of how it works, but unfortunately, I’m not that broken.”

“Great, so… I should probably go deal with her now.”

“I mean, you could, but do you even want to? I get the feeling that you were looking forward that being able to take it easy for the next two or three hours you have before it’s time to get started on a training day. I know it’s literally only been two days since the threat of Salem even registered as a possible thorn in your life, but you’ve been stressing over it for nearly the entire time. You can get rid of her at any point going forward, so maybe just set that aside for after—”

“PARTNER, BEACON IS UNDER ATTACK. THE BAD PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO SNEAK IN,” the voice of my current summon, Nohemon — a “Digimon,” digital construct given corporeal form and sentience — guarding Beacon Academy resounded from every part of my Soul at once.

“Wow, they literally couldn’t have picked a worse time—”

I didn’t hear the rest of what Katayoki had to say as I willed myself to regain consciousness in the waking world and was momentarily disorientated by the transition. I got out of bed, quickly changed into decent clothes through the use of my Equipment Slots and flew out of my apartment.

It only took a couple minutes while flying at full speed to get a line of sight on the academy, but when I did, my blood ran cold at the sight of a few buildings somehow having gone up in flames. One of the buildings that was currently in the middle of burning down was the dormitory where I knew Velvet lived.

Dread and anger the likes of which I’d never experienced before gave way to a coldness that was equally as intense. I reached for my face and stopped. I didn’t need to undergo Hollowfication to use my Hollow techniques. Going through the transformation would be overkill on a level unheard of for Remnant save for an act of the Gods.

I wanted to go a level higher.

Fortunately, in the process of subjugating Katayoki and attaining Bankai, I’d managed to get a handle on masterfully controlling my spiritual energies. It was one of the most rudimentary requirements to be even remotely close to him skill-wise. The fact that I surpassed him put my spiritual control far and above what was required to contain the killing pressure I would have exerted on every living thing for miles the moment I turned Vasto Lorde.

My worst fear had seemingly manifested just a moment too late and right after I’d gotten the power to stop it. It was especially infuriating because I knew in my heart that I would have followed Katayoki’s advice in lazing until maybe the end of the next day to go deal with Salem had my summon not been around to warn me of what was happening.

In my most powerful state, I used Pesquisa and felt my blood boil by what I felt. Hundreds had already been killed or were in the middle of dying; I could feel it from the trace quantities of spiritual energies dissipating. One person was in the middle of assassinating as many of the sleeping students as possible, while two others — and Team CEM? — were being chased by Ozpin and Glynda. A final person was standing over the fading signature of Nohemon.

Four unknown people had caused all this chaos?

No. I was also picking up a few dozen oddities among most of the active people within the school’s campus. It felt like their souls were suppressed, yet at the same time, these individuals were ignoring the chaos at best, or actively contributing towards it at worst.

Whatever was going on, I was about to resolve it.

Violently.