Payload

A busy tone.

Short, frantic, recoiling as sharply as if it had been burned, the busy tone left a faint tremor in my ear.

Effective.

He said... effective.

Not "adequate," not "pay attention to the details," not any kind of criticism or belittlement.

"Effective."

A dry, distorted acknowledgment, as though forcibly squeezed from between the gears of a machine on the verge of collapse.

I slowly lowered the arm holding my phone. My fingertips could feel the heavy, slow pounding of my heart in my chest, beat after beat, like a war drum struck against taut cowhide, its muffled thuds resonating between my bones.

Effective.

In the corner, Ryuk's enormous body still stood rigid, the shadows enveloping him seemingly denser than usual. His crimson eyes no longer watched the blood-red numbers and garbled text on the screen. Instead, they turned toward me without blinking. What churned within them was no longer mockery, curiosity, or wariness, but something... almost primal, an appraisal of an incomprehensible power. His rough, scaled claws rubbed unconsciously against one another, making faint rustling sounds, as though he were weighing something.

He said nothing. Nor did he take out another apple. An eerie silence settled over the room, broken only by the low hum of the computer fan and the distant, indistinct noise of the city outside.

Effective.

The word echoed through my mind, shattering and reassembling.

He couldn't verify it. He admitted he couldn't verify it. His rules, his database, the entire system that sustained his sense of superiority had failed in the face of this judgment.

This wasn't a flaw in the details. This was domination from a higher dimension.

He felt it. The dryness and distortion in his voice were proof.

Fear? No, not just fear. Bewilderment and helplessness as his understanding was forcibly torn apart.

But that wasn't enough.

Not nearly enough.

"Effective" was only a beginning. Only the first mouthful of poison he had been forced to swallow. I needed him to swallow more. Needed him to grow accustomed to this helplessness, needed the fear of being "unable to verify" to be branded deep into his instincts.

The next target. I had to take this "higher-dimensional domination" all the way. I had to choose a target he absolutely couldn't understand or even describe through any existing logic, any system, any "rules." I had to leave him utterly lost in the labyrinth of "judgment" I built, unable even to find a direction from which to question it.

The target had to... transcend good and evil.

My gaze returned to the screen. Panic was still spreading through the global financial markets. That string of garbled text flickered like a ghost in every corner of the internet, provoking endless speculation and terror. Yet amid the chaos, something older and more secret seemed to have been disturbed as well.

A name-or rather, a title-was repeatedly mentioned on several extremely closed-off dark web forums devoted to occultism and fringe science, only to be swiftly deleted by the administrators.

"The Gatekeeper." Supposedly, he was the last heir to an ancient family whose lineage had passed through a single successor in each generation. The family took no part in worldly affairs, yet had guarded a certain... "entrance" for generations. Accounts of what this "entrance" was varied wildly, from a communications channel to extraterrestrial civilizations to an interface with parallel universes, all utterly absurd. But every rumor pointed to one thing: this "Gatekeeper" possessed some scientifically inexplicable ability to "influence" reality, even to warp probability slightly and make extraordinarily unlikely events happen. He never used this ability of his own accord. He merely "guarded."

A... sorcerer living in modern society? Someone with supernatural powers?

Perfect.

His very existence was a complete negation of the Mentor's worldview, built on logic and technology.

His death should be a... mystical ritual. A farewell devoid of all logic, yet capable of leaving behind immense emptiness and fear.

I walked over to the desk, my fingertips brushing the Death Note's rough, yellowed pages. An unprecedented, almost blasphemous shudder ran down my spine.

["The Gatekeeper"] (His existence is deeply bound to the concept of the "Gate of the Void." True name: Eldritch Thorne.)

Cause of death: conceptual backlash. Time: midnight tomorrow, at the peak of the lunar eclipse. Cause of death: the concept of the "Gate of the Void" he guards will briefly spiral out of control, triggering random fluctuations in physical constants (gravity, the speed of light, electromagnetic force, etc.) within a hundred-meter radius around him, lasting thirteen seconds. Within those thirteen seconds, the form of his existence will be completely scrambled and reassembled, deconstructed at the molecular level and randomly dispersed throughout the hundred-meter radius, leaving no visible remains. Before his death, he must inscribe his sole last words into the ground where he stands in a nonhuman language (a variant of the oldest known Sumerian Cuneiform may be used): [The key is swallowed; disciples forever extinguished.]

No body, no scientific explanation. Only disrupted physical laws and a prophecy no one could understand.

This had long since exceeded the scope of "technological iteration."

Mentor, how... would you verify this?

The next day, at midnight.

The lunar eclipse arrived as expected, the pale moon gradually swallowed by shadow.

On the outskirts of the city stood the abandoned site of an astronomical observatory, a possible location of the "Gatekeeper" inferred from dark web information.

At the stroke of midnight, the lunar eclipse reached its peak, and darkness shrouded heaven and earth.

At the center of the old observatory site, an extraordinarily strange flash suddenly erupted, impossible to describe in terms of color!

Immediately afterward, the gravitational field within a hundred-meter radius fell into chaos! Loose stones floated into the air, then slammed into the ground at different rates of acceleration! Light visibly twisted and bent, as though seen through shattered glass! Every electronic device failed at once, bursting with blinding sparks!

This terrifying phenomenon, defying every law of physics, lasted a full thirteen seconds.

Then it abruptly vanished.

Everything returned to normal.

As though nothing had happened.

Only the solitary, cloaked figure who had stood at the center of the observatory ruins had vanished completely.

Without a trace, without a sound.

All that remained on the cold ground was a line of twisted, ancient cuneiform symbols carved deep into the rock-

[The key is swallowed; disciples forever extinguished.]

The first to arrive were a few bold occult enthusiasts, who photographed the inscription and the eerie surroundings. As the photos spread, they provoked panic that exceeded even the financial flash crash. This wasn't an economic blow. It was a fundamental destabilization of people's worldview.

In my room, the screen displayed a close-up of those ancient symbols and frantic attempts to interpret them in various languages.

Ryuk remained silent. But he crouched down, his enormous body curling into a ball, almost burrowing into the shadows along the wall. He no longer looked at me. His crimson eyes stared at the floor, as though the filthy carpet deserved more attention than the supernatural scenes on the screen.

The phone's ring.

I had waited an age in deathly silence.

Only when the horizon began to pale.

Did it finally ring.

The ringing no longer followed any known pattern. It barely even sounded like ringing. It was more like a sequence of... chaotic, arrhythmic... Morse code? Or noise emitted by some collapsing binary sequence.

Hiss... click... click-hiss...

I answered.

No sound.

No electronic voice.

No breathing.

No electrical hum.

Only absolute, empty silence.

As though there were nothing on the other end of the phone. Only an interface opening into the void.

That silence lasted a full three minutes.

Then.

Something extraordinarily faint, as though coming from unimaginably far away, yet also sounding right against my eardrum...

An almost inaudible breath... impossible to distinguish as a sigh or a sob.

Then.

The connection was severed.

There wasn't even a busy tone.

Only deathly silence.

I stood holding my phone in the room as dawn gradually brightened it.

Listening to that empty silence.

For a long time.

I slowly moved the phone away from my ear.

The screen was black.

Every sign of life was gone.

The payload...

Seemed,

To have overloaded things a little.

Mentor.

Are you still there?