The different forms of "death" in Type-Moon

You may have seen several characters in the verse being labeled as a master or wielder of “death.” As you might have guessed, these “deaths” are not exactly the same and have different meanings and scopes of influence. So this blog will briefly go over the various forms of destruction wielded by different characters.

Starting off, Kouma Kishima in Tsukihime wields death as an innate property of his being, placing him fundamentally apart from all conventional beings, as Kiri Nanaya noted. We know that he was fundamentally different since birth, able to resist his bloodline’s urges better than adults did, and preserving the desired “purity” of his clan, who interbred with pure demons: Ogres. This directly ties to his ability to wield hellfire and his Crimson Red Vermillion state, which is indicative of possession by a “transcendental” self.

Crucially, Kiri said that if the Nanayas specialized in killing, the Kishimas were masters of destroying. This is the main contrast between Kouma and the Shikis: Kouma’s Destruction is a chaotic, demonic force that operates by breaking down matter and dismantling structure but leaves the essence of the target intact, allowing for its recycling. It is easier to enact and operates at a larger scale, but it lacks the metaphysical precision and finality of the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception.

This explains why Kouma’s Melty Blood moveset is symbolically tied to Yama, the god of death, and Buddhist balance: his hellfire represents the “natural” way of dying within the cycle of reincarnation, where something ceases to function and is then reborn through a different shape in a new age.

So, Kouma Kishima’s Hellfire is capable of obliterating any functioning object or being in the fabric of reality. Even intangible or spiritual beings are not safe from his purification. However, Kouma requires his target to have a defined function or presence within reality. Otherwise, he won’t be able to destroy it: he cannot target the underlying concepts governing his targets and reality. This means that while his Destruction is powerful against conventional beings, it is subject to the abstract laws that govern reality. Abstract rules that cannot be located or interacted with, only thought about, are beyond his reach, because Destruction is the erasure of the old to make space for the new, only erasing manifestations and not the essence of something. Nor can it affect the laws governing the cycle of reincarnation, which is part of the system of reality.

Nanaya Shiki and Ryougi Shiki (in her base state), in contrast, operate through Death. This is distinct from Destruction and far more terrifying: the MEoDP doesn’t simply kill a manifestation or the physical composition of something: it targets the very concept defining the target and its interaction with reality. This makes it extremely powerful, as it directly removes the idea that the target exists, reducing it to pure potential, back into Nothingness. Such a target cannot even reincarnate or be brought back, as they are removed from the possibility of being real again.

The Shikis are capable of killing anything in existence without exception. Tohno has killed raw data/information making up a Tatari replica and is stated to “crack open” Reality Marbles, which are entire realities governed by the user. Meanwhile, Ryougi Shiki has killed Araya’s Bounded Fields, which are abstract laws governing the space around him, and resisted the Unified Language, which can interact with the records of the world and rewrite the entry for any entity in creation. Most notably, God’s Word stated Shiki operated on the same level of connection to the Fount, showing how MEoDP also works on that deep level. Void Shiki further confirms this, stating that when using the MEoDP, Ryougi gazes upon the “floor plan” of reality, which is the map of how all concepts interact with each other and work.

Both Tohno and Ryougi also have even more insane showings. The former has killed Maiko Yamase, who embodies True Chaos: an undefined flux of possibilities containing all potential forms that reality can take. Not even Arcueid or Ciel could kill her, as doing so would require destroying the entire world. Yet Tohno killed her easily, as he kills the concept of “you,” meaning no matter how abstract your existence, if you exist at all, you can be killed.

Similarly, Ryougi killed Mugen, an infinite void of Nothingness restructured by Araya Souren to loop infinitely on itself, turning its infinity into a recursive trap. There was nothing defined to perceive, yet Ryougi still killed it. Why? Because the void was defined by being infinite. It was an existing reality, and as long as something exists, it can die. No matter how complex or powerful, infinity itself still relies on contrast with the finite to be recognized, so it has a “cause” that she could cut and kill.

Essentially, the Shikis are capable of “reading” the abstract definitions making up an entity or object, including the laws governing space itself, and then erasing them from the world’s records, with the target ceasing to be instantly as a direct consequence of reality being unable to interpret it coherently anymore. They target anything that “moves,” anything that experiences change and has a defining principle or law that allows its existence, the opposite of Kouma, who only targets the manifestation but leaves its defining principle intact for reincarnation.

Ryougi is listed as a superior user of the MEoDP because her Origin of Nothingness inherently leads her to see everything as meaningless. This natural perspective allows her eyes to evolve to higher, more abstract levels much more quickly and with far less mental strain than Tohno. However, Tohno’s glasses have stopped working by the time of Tsukihime 2, which suggests his perception of death has become so intrinsic that he now sees it as the default state of reality. This indicates that he has generally reached Ryougi’s level and would struggle far less against complex entities, which he was already able to target more easily by the time of Melty Blood.

In practical terms:

Kouma erases existence and function, while Nanaya and Ryougi erase the idea that something exists and functions. Kouma removes things within the system of reality, whereas Nanaya and Ryougi kill the dictionary reality needs to operate.

For example, imagine a formula used in magecraft:

• Kouma destroys the formula’s effects as they manifest, rendering the mage powerless. But the formula still exists as an idea, and others can still use it elsewhere.
• Nanaya and Ryougi, however, erase the very idea of the formula. For reality, the formula ceases to exist, and no one can ever use it again because its meaning is gone from the system.

Or, for an easier example: imagine they have to “kill” a truck:

• Kouma would directly consume the truck with his hellfire, erasing its physical existence. However, the world would still retain the “record” of the truck in its system: its concept, function, and information remain stored in the fabric of reality. This means the truck can be recycled or repurposed into a different object or even reborn as something else. It also means that if the world has been manipulated by a reality warper to prevent the truck’s destruction, Kouma’s hellfire would become completely ineffective. The manifestation he targets (the truck) is now protected by an abstract rule, a defining principle of reality that says, “this cannot be destroyed.”
• By contrast, the Shikis with the MEoDP wouldn’t merely perceive the truck’s “death” in a general sense. They would perceive the very “code” that defines the truck’s existence: a line of death saying “this is a functioning object,” another saying “this is called a truck,” another for “this transports people,” “this is red,” “this is a solid object,” and so on. They can trace each of these definitions individually and remove reality’s ability to define the truck at all, causing it to fall apart, vanish, or lose certain attributes without needing to be fully destroyed in the conventional sense. Even if a reality warper tries to protect the truck with an abstract law, that law simply becomes another line in the definitions the MEoDP already perceive by default, making it irrelevant. This is why the Shikis are so terrifying: even the fact that you have abstract powers, immortality, or conceptual protections is itself a definition that reality records the moment it becomes actualized. So as long as you “exist” at all, you cannot escape the MEoDP, unless you’re facing an earlier, less masterful version of the Shikis, when their perception of death was still limited.

Kouma’s hellfire symbolizes balance: purifying the old to make way for the new. This means he can only destroy the form and structure of things, not their conceptual foundations. Those foundations remain intact and are ultimately judged by Yama, the god of death, whom Kishima serves as an agent. In contrast, Nanaya and Ryougi embody true gods of death themselves, able to sever existence at its very root.

The only true limit to the MEoDP is when a concept exists in its purest state of potential, before it has taken any defined form in reality. For example, this is why Wallachia’s true form is immune: Wallachia, or Tatari, is fundamentally a phenomenon: an idea that actualizes whenever the right conditions are met. Until those conditions arise, Tatari remains in a state of pure potential where it cannot change or “exist” in any concrete sense that the eyes could perceive. And since the MEoDP work by severing the defining lines of things that exist within the world’s “records,” there is nothing to sever when the target has not yet been shaped by reality.

However, the moment Tatari manifests in any capacity, as a phantom city, an illusion, or a physical form, the Shikis can erase that specific actualization. By doing so, they prevent the world from ever interpreting Tatari in that form again, forcing it to appear differently next time or in a new location.

Essentially, the Shikis’ power functions by returning things to the spiral of Origin: the primordial void where the purest forms of concepts reside: eternal, immutable, and without shape. When reality is shaped, it does not draw directly on these pure concepts themselves but on interpretations and manifestations of them. In other words, the Shikis can kill all possible ways a concept like “fire” can manifest within existence, but they cannot kill the pure idea of “fire” that exists in the primordial void. These pure forms do not “exist” in the way the world defines existence: they simply are. The MEoDP reinforce this inert state of potential, erasing every concrete use or expression of an idea back into the void so that it can never be interpreted in that way again.

-Aoko Aozaki’s Fifth Magic, based on Entropy, is also recognized as a form of “destruction” that could lead to the end of the universe if used carelessly. This is because Entropy, in scientific terms, is the measure of how much energy within a closed system is no longer available to do useful work, or more broadly, how energy disperses and transforms over time.

In cosmic terms, the “closed system” is the world itself, with its energy representing the potential for abstract concepts, laws, and phenomena to manifest and interact with the material plane. It is the underlying “fuel” that allows for phenomena and possibilities to unfold. Entropy dictates that energy cannot be destroyed once created: it can only be fundamentally transformed or repurposed. This means there is a limit to how much the universe’s “fuel” can be used for new phenomena: the more change that occurs, the more energy is spread out and diluted, eventually leading to a state where all possibilities are exhausted. This marks the end of that cycle of reincarnation, the so-called “heat death” or perfect equilibrium where nothing more can change.

The Fifth Magic essentially makes Aoko the one who governs how change itself unfolds: the metaphysical flow of energy that sustains every possibility, transformation, and eventual decay. This is why Aoko, by merely accessing the Fifth, could  overpower the entire universe and impose her own order on it: she wields the very principle that controls causality within the system, allowing her to dictate how outcomes, events, and phenomena emerge and interact over the fabric of existence.

However, this overwhelming authority comes with a severe cost. Every alteration she makes incurs a “price” that she must pay back to the universe by ensuring an equal outcome elsewhere, otherwise, she accelerates the world’s drift toward heat death and stillness. Because of this, Aoko prefers to avoid using the Fifth unless absolutely necessary, often choosing to retreat rather than risk unbalancing the cycle of change and energy.

In short: while the MEoDP directly erase the blueprints of reality, the very definitions that allow things to exist, Aoko’s Entropy governs how those blueprints function, interact, and decay over time. Both powers can lead to the same inert state of potentiality, but they do so through different mechanisms. This makes the Fifth Magic vastly superior to Kouma’s Destruction, as Aoko can control the entire system’s causal logic, but still fundamentally below the MEoDP, which severs the blueprints themselves at their root.

-Araya Souren is another master of death, but one even more powerful and terrifying than anything we have talked about so far. Stillness is the complete lack of change, the state where nothing moves and everything simply remains in potential. It is the primordial void from which all things emerge and to which all things return. It is essentially the same state the MEoDP sends things back to: the unchanging void where abstract forms exist in their purest state, untouched by interpretation. Ryougi Shiki herself accessed Stillness during her coma, and that experience unlocked her MEoDP, which allows her to kill any “interpretations” of those still ideas from reality, sending them back to pure potential.

So what is the difference between Araya and the Shikis exactly? Well, the Shikis still bring death to existence, they actively return things to Stillness. But Araya doesn’t even need to do that: he IS Death itself. It’s as if he passively exerts the effect of death perception onto the reality around him: everything “dies,” being stripped of power and motion, leaving him free to completely redefine its existence to his liking. If the Shikis are gods of death, Araya is literally the god of the void acting as the end-point of that death: his mere presence ends existence and reverts it to inert potential, to the point that there is no longer any need for the process of “killing”, existence is simply suspended by default. In that sense, the MEoDP is merely the “gateway” for Araya’s domain and power, which shows just how overpowered he really is. He is the reason MEoDP can even work.

Araya’s own essence is immune to MEoDP because he is “already dead”: his very existence is defined by the primordial void that holds all abstract forms and from which existence draws its foundation. You cannot sever Stillness with a tool that works by returning things to Stillness: it is already there.

Because of this, Araya is a master of reality who can dictate the boundaries of existence with absolute authority. Everything that exists came from the void and is bound to return to it, with no exceptions, this makes his power absolute. This is why Stillness is conceptualized as a Möbius Ring: an endless loop that, no matter what, always reinforces the same ending. By working from the ending of that loop, Araya has the power to not simply “kill” things but to completely define every aspect of their existence by deciding which potential can be actualized and which stays locked in stasis. In this way, his power does not merely destroy or kill: it locks existence within an absolute, self-fulfilling cage, the ultimate state of control over birth, change, and death. He enacts the death of possibility itself, suppressing any undesired change.

If you want an easier comparison between Destruction and Death/Stillness, consider this:
Destruction is the “natural” death and decay of all living things. It reduces objects and beings to formlessness so they may be reborn at another time. Their essence and significance remain imprinted within the deepest records of creation, meaning they can be manipulated or even brought back by reality-warping entities.

Death, instead, is the overarching force that governs even causality and destiny to ensure that all things ultimately fall with no escape, even should they defy the conventional rules of Destruction. It enforces Finality; the complete cessation of not only physical form but also the essence and informational structure of a being. In contrast to Destruction, which allows recycling, Death ensures actual non-existence.

Stillness is the complete representation of this cosmic force. MEoDP users are simply carriers of a unique function that originates from Stillness, granting them the power to enforce finality onto individual targets. But this is far from the full scope of Stillness, which encompasses reality definition and control at the foundational level.

Melty Blood: Act Cadenza makes a particularly compelling point in this context. In it, Kishima Kouma hints at having met Araya Souren, saying he once knew a man who “embodied Hell”, which perfectly matches how Araya is described in Kara no Kyoukai:

“... Hellish. What I mean by saying that, Kokuto, is that if the idea of Hell were to gain a will and take the form of a man, my hypothesis is that it would be something like him. To the degree that he couldn't accept others, he was just absorbing misery. His ability as a mage was full of flaws, but his strong ego surpassed everything. [...] It was a coarse guy like that who I fell for.”
— Kara no Kyoukai, Chapter 5

Yet Kishima’s own Destruction-based power directly invokes Yama, the god of death and ruler of Hell:

Kishima Kouma’s Last Arc
Triggered by an aerial counter. After it starts, Kouma flies to the edge of the screen, then hits the opponent with a powerful jumping kick. He shouts one of two things, one of which is extremely rare:

“In Buddhism, Yama is the name of the very first human to die, who then became the king of Hell. He is also called Enma Dai-Ō.”
— Melty Blood: Act Cadenza PS2 Manual – Judgment of Yama

So why does Kishima still recognize Araya as the true embodiment of Hell, despite wielding a power derived from the King of Hell himself?

Because Araya is Hell at its most fundamental level, and the story even explicitly compares him to Yama:

“Hmph. Do you like things that are one that much, Araya? Light and darkness weren’t divided because they had to oppose each other, but because that had the potential for containing the greatest number of things. Everything is lonely if it’s by itself. That is why everything tries to multiply. You were never able to forgive that. Investigating the various deaths of humans and making that your own by researching those lives. You would probably take even my death and make it into a piece of knowledge about the life and death of a human called Aozaki Touko to be stored away in the corner of your brain. You mean to figure out the value of a human that way, but doing that is the role of Yanma. As a human yourself, all you can do is to continue existing in a hell that keeps sucking in deaths.”
— Kara no Kyoukai, Chapter 5

The key nuance here is that Kishima serves Yama and enforces his will by destroying forms within reality; but he has no authority over the cosmic laws of creation, which Yama (and by extension, Araya) governs. Hell is a place of eternal separation, disconnected from the flow of time and natural law, just like Araya’s apartment complex, which exists in a causally sealed loop after achieving the equivalent of True Magic.

Both Araya and Yama do not merely bring about death: they represent the final state of all forms of existence, manipulating the metaphysical structure of the world to ensure that all things ultimately reach Stillness. In this sense, they are not merely enforcers, but cosmic regulators, rulers of creation itself.

The main difference, however,  and ironically the opposite of what Touko claims, is that Araya is not just a man. He is the embodiment of Stillness, which is precisely why he’s so powerful. He manifests the concept of separation and cessation so completely that he can create his own sealed cosmos, a space from which nothing can escape.

Yama, by contrast, is the first human to die. He is a mythological filter, a personified interface created by human belief to interpret the unknowable reality of non-existence. Stillness is not a personification. It is the underlying truth Yama points toward. Touko, in trying to fit Araya into a humanist framework, completely misinterprets the nature of what he is. This is why her character often feels like a distortion of the story’s deeper metaphysics. Perhaps she was trying to remind Araya of his human origin, of the possibility of resisting his fate, but her logic feels more pretentious than insightful. She gets the essence wrong.

That said, Touko does seem to correct herself later:

“You’ve forgotten your reason? Your hopes are empty, and even your beginning point is zero. So then, what exactly are you?”
— Kara no Kyoukai, Chapter 5

This line is much closer to the truth. Araya’s origin is Zero, and this is fitting. Zero is the point from which all numbers arise, and the point into which all numbers collapse. It is the true metaphor for Stillness: the foundational void where creation and destruction converge in an endless loop of contradiction. It is the silent regulator that defines the edges of all that exists. 

• Stillness is the cosmic void where the Akashic Records reside, the blueprint of all reality. 
• It defines all laws of creation and destruction. These laws are absolute, because existence comes from and returns to Stillness. 
• Araya is the full embodiment of this Stillness, not merely a user of death, but its cosmic source and regulator. 
• MEoDP is the main active tool of Stillness, used to remove phenomena from reality, but it is still just a facet of Stillness’s larger regulatory power. 
• Normally, Stillness does not “act”,  all things naturally return to it in time. It merely decides what is retained and what is erased forever.
•  Yama and Araya serve as judges. Kishima recycles what remains in the world. Nanaya enforces death prematurely, unaware of the deeper mechanisms. 
• Only Stillness itself, and Araya as its embodiment, has the authority to override or affirm those deaths.
• Aoko's Entropy in this context, is essentially the managing system that tries to make Destruction unfold in a balanced way, until all recycling is "burned up" and the world returns to actual Stillness. MEoDP can override Entropy's changes and authority by enforcing Stillness immediately.

Yet, there is another form of death that surpasses even Stillness:

–Ryougi Shiki in her self-hypnosis state, or more generally, Void Shiki. She brings about the death of meaning itself. Even Stillness requires definitions and structure to act upon,  but Ryougi, in her higher iterations, enacts the erasure of even structured logic.

This is because her power and perspective come directly from the Fount: the unified core that holds all possibilities in perfect harmony. In that place, everything already is, and so, there is no point in thinking, choosing, or defining anything. Any thought or interpretation is just a fragmented expression of that greater whole.

This is why Void finds creation meaningless; and why Self-Hypnosis Ryougi could overpower even Araya by “ignoring” any definable limit through her perfect swordsmanship. Everything that can be named is inherently flawed and thus can never grasp the divine perfection of the Fount.

In this sense, Void enacts the death of thought and meaning; something even Araya fears, because it reveals that the source of all things lies beyond comprehension, including his own.

-Finally, Roa in SHIKI’s body represents the weakest notion of death, one tied solely to the end of biological life. He can only affect living organisms. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that he doesn’t even truly perceive death, but rather life itself: he sees the fuel that living beings use to operate, and he reduces it to zero, causing death as a consequence. But that’s all he does.

So, to summarize and rank them based on the conceptual depth of their “death”:

• Void Shiki (which Ryougi can access in her self-hypnosis state through swordsmanship): death of meaning and thought, confronting the perfection beyond all definitions.
• Araya Souren: death of change and possibility, collapsing the boundaries of reality into predetermined cessation.
• Nanaya Shiki and normal Ryougi Shiki: death as cessation, returning concepts and beings to inert potential.
• Aoko Aozaki (Fifth Magic): the gradual decay and disorder of reality, controlling how the flow of events and phenomena unfolds until the inevitable end.
• Kishima Kouma: reduces things to formlessness, death as transformation.
• Roa: simply exhausts life-force; perceives life, not death.