---
-Melissa POV-
The warehouse was exactly as empty as I'd left it.
Forklift. Mini fridge. Folding chair. My footsteps echoing off the concrete like I was walking through a cathedral made of shipping pallets. After a whole day of Millennium, with its noise and screens and people who talked faster than I did, the quiet felt enormous.
I climbed the metal stairs to my little upstairs box of a room, pushed the door open, and stopped.
Bare floor. Bare walls. One window. A rectangle of slightly cleaner concrete where the bed used to be, and another where the desk used to be.
'Right. I put everything away this morning.'
Including, apparently, the bed. Which made sense at the time, because the bed was also the gun wall, and I wasn't going to leave an arsenal sitting in an empty warehouse for anybody to find. It made a lot less sense now, at the end of a very long day, standing in a room with nothing to fall onto.
I held my hand out over the clean rectangle and thought, 'Out.'
THUMP.
The bed dropped into place exactly where it had been, not an inch off, mattress bouncing once like it was happy to be home. Somewhere underneath it, the guns rattled in their racks.
'Desk too. I'm going to want the mirror.'
Thump. Desk, mirror and all, back in its corner.
I looked at the two of them for a second, then at my hand.
'I just pulled a bed out of thin air,' I thought. 'And my reaction was "good, now I can sit down." I've been in Kivotos for less than a week.'
I sat down on the edge of the bed, which was very comfortable for an arsenal, and pulled a can of peaches out of Storage. Then a fork. Then, after some thought, a second can of peaches.
'Dinner of champions.'
My phone buzzed. Kotori. A picture of a roller bearing, then another picture of a slightly different roller bearing, then a message that just said "THIS ONE IS MORE HONEST." Then, a minute later: "good night chris!! bring the barrier!!!"
I sent back a thumbs up. It was the first message I'd ever sent from this phone. I looked at it for a while.
Then I washed my face, peeled out the blue contacts and set them in their little case by the sink, and flopped backward onto the bed, still in Chris's shirt and skirt, too tired to bother changing.
'First day,' I thought. 'Survived Sumire. Survived Yuuka. Got into Engineering. Saw the Supernova. Sanded a bracket.'
'Not bad, Cardon.'
The ceiling was gray and plain and very far away. My eyelids got heavy.
I was asleep before I finished the next thought.
---
-3rd POV-
A white hallway.
It was long and clean and quiet, the kind of corridor that belonged in some grand official building, with tall windows down one side. Sunlight poured through them at a low angle, the light of late afternoon sliding toward evening, and it turned the pure white of the walls and floor into gold. Long shadows lay across the tiles like the bars of a gate.
At one end of the hallway stood a familiar figure.
Long golden hair, falling all the way down her back. A short, slight frame. Golden eyes.
Melissa.
But not the Melissa who had fallen asleep on a bed in a warehouse. This one stood straighter, and stiller, and her hair was long, so long it brushed the backs of her knees. And her eyes, those bright golden eyes that shone like coins at the bottom of a fountain, had no light in them at all. They were open, and they were looking down the hallway, and they were empty. Unfocused. Dead.
Click. Clack. Click. Clack.
Footsteps, from the other end of the hall.
A tall figure was walking toward her through the bars of gold light.
She wore white. A white jacket over a long, double-breasted white dress that fell to her boots, closed down the front with a row of gold buttons. Tall white boots. On the right side of her chest sat a wide, golden star-shaped badge; on the left, another badge hung from a strip of blue cloth scattered with small gold stars. More stars sat on either side of her collar. Her hair was long and sky blue, a soft pink on its inner side where the light caught it, with a loose braid on her left and long bangs that fell over her left eye. The one eye that showed was a bright, clear blue.
Above her head, tilted slightly to the right, floated a halo: a plain white ring with a single blue star inside it, sitting just off center.
The President of the General Student Council.
The two of them stood at opposite ends of the sunset hallway and looked at each other. Neither held a gun. Neither spoke. Melissa stared with her empty eyes. The President looked back with her bright one, steady and patient.
The silence went on for a long time.
"When will this farce end?"
Melissa's voice came out flat, and it echoed down the long white corridor. Nothing answered it.
"Not going to respond, 'President'?" Something finally showed in her voice, under all that emptiness: annoyance, dripping and bitter. "So what, nothing? If you're here for answers to your 'questions,' I'm not answering."
The President didn't say a word.
She started walking again.
Click. Clack.
"What? Going to force me?" Melissa clicked her tongue. "Tch..."
Her hand moved, and a pistol was in it. A plain, black Beretta M9, the most ordinary gun in the world. She brought it up in one smooth motion and aimed it straight down the hallway at the approaching girl, finger resting on the trigger.
The President kept walking, as if there were no gun at all.
And for the first time, Melissa's face moved. Her jaw clenched. Something shone in her empty eyes, a wet, bright glint.
"Come on, stop! I'm seriously warning you..."
Click.
The steps came closer.
Clack.
With each one, the gun shook a little more.
Tap.
The muzzle of the Beretta came to rest against the President's chest, right over the wide gold star.
The pistol was trembling in Melissa's grip. The President looked down at her, close enough now to touch, and after all that silence, she smiled. A small, warm, tired smile.
"Mel."
Melissa flinched as if she'd been struck. Her pupils shrank to points.
"Take care of this place for me, okay?"
Melissa blinked.
When her eyes opened, the white dress was stained red.
It was spreading across the President's front in a dark, blooming flower, under the gold star, under the gold buttons. She was still smiling.
The Beretta fell from Melissa's hand and clattered on the white tiles. She lunged forward, hands out, reaching...
...and the hallway was gone.
. . .
Wind.
Cold, high, clean wind, whipping her long hair around her face.
She stood alone at the very top of the Sanctum Tower, the highest point in all of Kivotos, on a narrow platform of white stone with nothing above it but sky.
The sun was gone. Night had fallen, and the stars were out, more stars than any city should have been able to see, a whole river of them across the dark. Below, the city answered them: millions of lights, spread out in every direction like someone had spilled the stars onto the ground.
She looked further.
To one side, past the edge of the city, a vast desert stretched away under the moon, pale and endless, dunes swallowing half-buried buildings. To another, a frozen tundra, white and glittering. To another, the broken skeleton of a ruined city, towers snapped like old teeth. There were forests, and mountains, and the dark shine of the sea. So many places, all of them part of this one strange, beautiful, impossible world.
It was beautiful. It hurt to look at.
'Take care of this place for me.'
She blinked again.
. . .
She was sitting down.
A desk. A chair. An office, quiet and a little cluttered, with a window behind her full of afternoon light. Papers stacked on the desk. A mug of something long gone cold.
In her hands was a tablet.
It looked like nothing special. Slim, plain, a little scuffed. But she knew, the way you know things in dreams, that it was so much more than it looked. That something lived inside it. That it was older than it had any right to be.
"The Shittim Chest..." she murmured.
And this office was Schale.
She stood up from the chair.
. . .
Sand.
Her feet sank into it. Hot, dry air hit her face. She was standing in a wasteland on the outskirts of somewhere, among the rusting bones of an enormous factory, conveyor belts and loading cranes half-buried in drifting sand.
In the center of it, a sphere.
It was huge, round and white, banded with black stripes, and between the plates of its armor a deep orange light glowed and pulsed like a slow heartbeat. A strange emblem was engraved on its surface, a geometric star surrounded by text she couldn't read. Above it floated not one halo but three, stacked one over another, turning slowly in different directions.
And under the orange, there was something else. A second light, threaded through the first like veins under skin: pink. A deep, humming, pulsing pink, beating out of rhythm with the orange, as if something else had climbed inside the machine and made a home there. The air around the sphere hummed with it. She could feel it in her teeth.
Around it, in perfect silent rows, stood robots. Dozens. Hundreds. Humanoid soldiers, rifles in their hands, their visors glowing the same orange as the sphere. More of them were still rolling out of the factory on the conveyor belts, assembled and armed and stepping into line one after another, endlessly. Every one of their visors had a faint pink flicker behind the orange.
She looked down at her hand. There was a gun in it. A heavy, oversized pistol: a Desert Eagle, Mark XIX, chambered in .50 AE. She knew its weight like she knew her own name.
Gunfire cracked from somewhere to her right.
Her head moved on instinct, a fraction of an inch, eyes shut, and something hot hissed past her ear.
When she opened her eyes...
. . .
...it was towering over her.
A serpent. A mechanical serpent so vast she couldn't see where its body ended, rising out of the desert sand like a white wall, coil after coil. Its armor was pale and smooth and banded with orange light, and through the orange, that same pink pulsed and hummed, crawling along its coils in slow waves, making the whole enormous body shudder like it was trying to hold in more power than it had ever been built for. On its great flat head, four yellow eyes burned down at her, and above them was carved that same strange emblem from the sphere, a ten-pointed design with a small symbol inside it, a circle and a cross like the old sign for Saturn, and lines of angular script beneath it. A yellow halo floated over its head, an orb hanging in its center.
The sky around it had gone dark, and the wind was screaming. Sand whipped against her skin like a storm of needles.
The serpent opened its jaws.
A scorching heat poured out of its throat. Light gathered inside it, white and orange and then pink, a howling, humming, blinding pink, and the wind roared toward its mouth like the whole desert was being inhaled.
Her pupils shrank.
The beam came.
She threw her arms up in front of her face and squeezed her eyes shut, and it hit her like the sun itself. She gasped and fell, hard, onto her forearms.
. . .
It was hard to breathe.
She opened her eyes. It didn't help. The light was gone, the heat was gone, and in their place was fog. Thick, damp, gray fog, swallowing everything more than a few steps away.
Shapes loomed out of it. A carousel, its painted horses frozen mid-gallop and peeling. The skeleton of a roller coaster. Ticket booths with their shutters pulled down. Strings of dead bulbs swaying between poles. A sign, half its letters fallen off, that had once said something cheerful.
An amusement park. Abandoned. Midnight.
Somewhere to her left, something was moving.
Through a gap in the fog, she caught a glimpse of a small white figure balanced on top of a giant circus ball, white with gray-blue stars. It looked like a mouse, a little white mouse in a gray-blue dress with white polka dots, and it was juggling. Juggling round, black bombs, each one painted with a grinning clown face.
It turned its pale blue eyes toward her and smiled.
Further away, on the roof of a crooked building, another shape stood against the fog: a tall, thin black bird. A crow. It wore a long top hat, a long white mane spilled from under it, and in one wing it held a purple wand topped with a crescent moon. Its purple eyes were fixed on her.
The fog rolled in over both of them.
It swallowed her, too. The world tipped and spun.
And it didn't stop spinning.
. . .
She fell through the fog, and the fog kept changing.
A stage, deep inside the same dead park, lit by a single spotlight. A tall cat in a black tailcoat and top hat stood in the center of it, a monocle glinting over one green eye, a white fur collar bristling around his neck like frost. He flourished a wand, and two spade cards spun between his white-gloved fingers. Then he bowed to her, the way a magician bows before the trick that makes the volunteer disappear.
She blinked, and the stage was gone.
. . .
Sparks.
She was sitting down again, but this time it wasn't an office chair. It was a cramped, battered cockpit seat, the cushion split open and leaking foam. Warning lights blinked red across every panel. Something in the walls groaned like a ship in a storm, and the whole room swayed under her, side to side, as if it were standing on two enormous legs.
Because it was.
All around her, crammed into a cockpit built for fewer people, were five figures in bright, color-coded ranger suits and full-face helmets: red, black, green, yellow, and one more she couldn't make out through the smoke. Their suits were scorched. One helmet was cracked. The red one was gripping a control stick with both hands and laughing like this was the best day of her life.
"The Infinite Sushi Squad never gives up!"
"Our left arm is gone!" the yellow one shouted back.
"Then we fight with the right one!"
Through the cracked front screen, past a robot arm shaped and painted like a giant piece of salmon sushi, Melissa saw a gray sea. Waves crashing against a seawall, with the towers of the city center behind it. And rising out of the water, taller than the buildings behind it, was a stuffed toy.
A huge, sodden white bird plush, with a long yellow beak, its tongue lolling out and its round, blank eyes staring at nothing. Seawater poured off it in sheets. It turned its head toward them, very slowly, and the whole seawall shook.
Perorodzilla.
"Hey! New one!" The red ranger twisted around in her seat and pointed at Melissa. "You're on the cannon!"
Melissa didn't remember climbing into a giant sushi robot. She didn't remember agreeing to any of this. But her hands were already on the firing controls, and they knew exactly what to do.
"KAITEN... FX!" all five of them shouted at once.
The robot lurched forward into the surf, sparking and smoking, one arm short, and Melissa pulled the trigger.
It was the most ridiculous thing she had ever been part of.
She'd never felt more alive.
Somewhere outside, somebody on the shore was screaming the word "Peroro."
. . .
Glass and steel. A server hall the size of a stadium, its lights flickering. Clinging to its ceiling was a vast white machine shaped like an octopus, six huge tentacles spread across the room, orange light running through them like veins. In the middle of its great head was a single eye, made of rings within rings, and it was looking at her. Towers rose out of the floor around it, one after another, humming with orange light gone sick with pink, far more of them than there should have been, and every one of them was aimed at her.
. . .
Darkness, and music.
An organ, playing somewhere underground. A temple, deep below the earth, its pillars carved with saints with no faces. At the organ sat a figure in a black-and-violet conductor's coat trimmed with gold. It had no head. Where its head should have been, a blue flame burned. Its hands were blue too, ghostly and glowing, tipped with golden nails, and as it played, pale blue shapes drifted around it like an audience of ghosts. It lifted a black baton, turned its flame toward her, and conducted the next movement.
The music was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. She knew, with complete certainty, that the end of the song would kill her.
. . .
Heat. Molten rock bubbling in a crater of black stone, under a red sky. Something like an old warship sat in the lava, rusted and patient, until it unfolded, plating sliding and splitting, into a towering monster with fire roaring in its chest and claws like cranes. Over its head hung a halo shaped like a warning sign.
. . .
Cold. Then colder. Black water under a sheet of ice, and something moving beneath it. Something huge and patient, made for a place where nothing was supposed to live.
. . .
Snow, and a vault in the snow. Rows upon rows of sealed seeds behind glass. At the center of it, a vast mechanical heart, beating, guarded by three spider-legged drones that skittered across the walls toward her with their guns raised.
. . .
A harbor. A crab the size of a ship, its shell dark purple, cannons and machine guns bolted into the containers on its back, an entire cargo ship wedged into its shell with its bow pointing at the sky. It raised its claws.
. . .
Thunder.
Lightning split the sky, again and again, until the whole world was white. Out of the storm, a mask formed. Ancient, enormous, carved from something that wasn't stone. Two great bracelets spun out of the clouds and became arms. And last of all, in the middle of the mask, an eye opened.
. . .
She lost count.
Desert, ocean, ice, fire. Gun after gun in her hands, a different one every time, and she knew all of them. She knew how to dodge the bombs and where the tentacles would strike, and the exact second the serpent would breathe. She knew because she had done it. Not once. Over and over and over again. Her arms knew the weight of every gun. Her legs knew how to run from every beam.
And she knew the pink.
The humming, pulsing pink that had crept into the worst of them. It didn't come with a face or a name or a voice. It was just power. Raw, endless, hungry power, poured into things that had already been monsters, until they were something far worse. Wherever it glowed, the fight that should have taken an afternoon took days. The beam that should have knocked her down tried to erase her. The boss that should have fallen got back up, and got back up, and got back up.
Somewhere in the middle of it all, someone was shouting her name. More than one voice. She couldn't make out who.
The fog came back, and swallowed all of it. Her stomach turned over. She wanted to throw up, and couldn't.
So she forced herself to stand.
. . .
And she was back in the hallway.
The same hallway. She knew it immediately: the tall windows, the long corridor. But now there was no sunset. There was no light at all, only darkness, thick and heavy and cold. The pillars were cracked and crumbling. The windows were shattered, glass scattered across the floor like frost. The far end of the hall had vanished into black.
There was nobody waiting there now.
Water dripped somewhere. She smelled salt.
She went to one of the shattered windows and looked out.
The city was gone. Not destroyed. Drowned. A dark sea had come up over Kivotos, black and still and wrong, and the towers stood up out of it like gravestones. The Sanctum Tower was still there, far away, but its white had gone gray, and something pale was growing up its sides like coral.
The water glowed. Faintly, everywhere, a sick blue shimmer drifting just under the surface, like plankton. Like something tiny and alive, in uncountable numbers.
And things were moving in it.
Shapes she didn't have names for. Some of them rooted to the drowned rooftops like flowers made of flesh, slowly opening and closing. Some of them crawled on too many legs. Some trailed tentacles. Some of them swam, and some of them, worst of all, walked upright along the flooded streets, almost like people. Almost.
They weren't fighting anyone. There was no one left to fight. They were just there, spreading, patient, filling every empty space.
From somewhere far out on the water, a sound came. Not a voice. A hum, low and endless, made of thousands of voices that had all agreed to be one.
She knew, the way you know things in dreams, that she had done this. Not all of it. But some of it. Enough of it.
She stepped back from the window.
She turned around.
Behind her, where the hallway should have continued, stood the inside of a church.
An old church. Ancient. The air smelled like stone and candle smoke and dust, and rows of broken pews stretched toward an altar at the far end, under high, dark arches. A crypt, maybe, deep under some grand old cathedral.
Clutching her churning stomach, she walked toward the altar.
She was halfway there when something rose up in front of it.
A cloak. A vast, royal-red hooded cloak, embroidered with stripes of gold, unfolding upward from the floor like smoke until it towered over the altar. Under the hood, there was no face she could see. From beneath the cloak came arms. Four of them. Long, thin, scrawny arms, far too long, ending in hands with golden nails. The inner pair were pressed together, palms joined in prayer. The outer pair spread wide, gripping weapons.
Around the figure hung golden staffs, each one crowned with a hooked sunburst. And behind its hooded head, a halo blazed to life, golden and shaped like a rising sun, with that same humming pink burning at its core, so bright that the whole crypt seemed to kneel under it. It looked holy.
It looked like the most frightening thing she had ever seen.
Melissa could only stare at it in silence.
The light grew. And grew. She shielded her eyes, and it wasn't enough. The light filled everything.
. . .
When it faded, she was standing on stars.
Not under them. On them. An endless ocean of stars stretched out in every direction beneath her feet, a dark, glittering sea of light, and the same stars stretched across the sky above, so that she was standing in the middle of a sphere made of nothing but stars. Faint lines connected some of them, drawing shapes: constellations she almost recognized, maps of something she had once known.
It was the most peaceful place she had ever been.
She was looking up at a constellation, trying to remember its name, when a voice spoke behind her.
"Hi~"
She turned.
A figure stood on the stars a few steps away. A woman, or the shape of one. She was made of soft pink light, glowing gently like a lantern behind paper, and long pink hair flowed down her back and floated around her as if she were underwater. The details of her face were blurred, like a picture taken out of focus, but Melissa could make out the hint of a smile. And, just for a moment, the delicate point of an ear.
Melissa's mouth opened. Nothing came out.
She tasted iron.
She didn't understand it at first. Then she did: there was blood in her mouth. She'd been bleeding, somewhere inside, for a long time. Since the hallway, maybe. Since the light. She hadn't noticed until now.
The pink figure stepped closer. Then, without Melissa ever seeing her move, she was right there, and a warm hand was lifting Melissa's chin, gently, the way you'd lift a flower to look at it.
Melissa found herself looking into what might have been eyes.
"You're quite the cutie, aren't you~ Fufu."
The voice was soft and sweet, like ice cream on a summer afternoon. The hand on her chin was warm and careful and kind.
Melissa couldn't answer.
"It's such a shame..." The figure tilted her head, and something like sadness entered that sweet voice. "In the state you're in, I'd say you're going to pass soon."
Melissa didn't argue. Somewhere deep inside, some part of her had already known. She just nodded, very slightly, as if she'd been told the time.
"What... do you mean...?" she asked anyway. Her own voice surprised her. It came out of her mouth, out loud, not inside her head. And with it came the tiredness, washing over her in a great slow wave, heavier than anything she had ever felt.
"Ara." The figure's voice softened even more. "It seems it's already here."
The pink hands guided her down, slowly, carefully, until she was lying on her back on the ocean of stars.
"But... I haven't..." Melissa fought to keep her eyes open. "...kept my promise..."
The stars were blurring.
"If only... I had more... time..."
The pink figure hovered over her, her long hair drifting down like a curtain of light.
"...Then," she said, "would you like that?"
"Yes..." The image of a girl in white, smiling, with red spreading under a golden star, flashed behind Melissa's eyes. "For her..."
Her eyes closed.
The last thing she heard, just before the dark, was that sweet voice, very close, speaking like a promise.
"Then... you have my blessing. Keep your promise, and fight for all that you can. I, #####, give my word."
The name was there. It was right there. She heard it.
And it was gone.
. . .
She fell asleep.
And just as quickly, she woke up.
---
-Melissa POV-
The ceiling.
Gray. Plain. Far away. The ceiling of my little room in the warehouse.
I was lying flat on my back on the bed, still in Chris's white shirt and long skirt, and I was soaked. Sweat had glued my hair to my forehead and my shirt to my back. My heart was slamming against my ribs so hard I could hear it.
I lay there and breathed for a while. In. Out. In.
There was no blood in my mouth. I checked twice.
'A dream. It was just a dream.'
Except it hadn't felt like one. Dreams went fuzzy the second you woke up. This one wasn't going anywhere. I could still feel the weight of the Beretta in my hand. The heat of that beam on my forearms. The warm fingers under my chin.
I sat up, slowly, and swung my legs off the bed.
. . .
I went to the mirror on the desk.
The girl in it had white hair, Chris's hair, plastered to her face with sweat. My contacts were still in their case by the sink, so the eyes looking back at me were my own.
Except they weren't gold.
They were green. A pale, confused green. And the pupils weren't round. They were two tiny question marks, exactly like the ones I'd seen on my very first morning and decided not to think about.
This time, I didn't look away. I stared right at them.
'Okay. Let's think.'
I made myself go through it, in order, the way I'd once gone through the archive cabinets at work.
The sphere in the factory, with its three halos and its endless robot army.
'Chesed.'
The serpent in the desert. White armor, orange light, four yellow eyes, that emblem on its head.
'Binah.'
The mouse on the circus ball, juggling clown bombs. The crow in the top hat on the roof.
'Shiro and Kuro. Slumpia.'
The red cloak. The four arms. The golden sun.
'Hieronymus.'
And all the others, flashing past so fast I'd barely had time to be afraid of them. A magician cat on a stage: Goz. Kaiten FX, of all things, the giant sushi robot, with me crammed inside it on the cannon, fighting a soggy, building-sized Peroro rising out of the sea. Perorodzilla. That one honestly should have been funny. Hod's eye. Gregorius at his organ. Chokmah in the volcano. Something under the ice that had to be Geburah. Tiphareth's heart in its vault. Drumbarka, that ship-sized crab. Set, coming out of the thunder.
Raid bosses. Every single one of them. I had fought all of them. I'd lost to all of them, too, more times than I wanted to count, on my phone, at two in the morning, in my old apartment, swearing at a screen.
So why had it felt like I'd fought them for real? Why had my arms remembered the heat? Why did the ghost of that beam still prickle across my skin?
And that pink. That humming pink light pulsing inside Binah, inside Chesed, inside Hieronymus's halo. In the game, none of them had glowed like that. I would have remembered. It made them look... sick. Swollen with something that wasn't theirs. Even thinking about it made my teeth ache.
And then there was the part that didn't fit at all.
The drowned city. The black sea, and the things in it. Those flesh-flowers on the rooftops, the shapes walking upright through the water. That hum.
That wasn't Blue Archive.
I'd played that game for years. I knew every raid, every event, every boss, every weird little side story. None of it looked like that. Whatever those things had been, they'd looked like they'd crawled in from a completely different game.
So what were they doing in Kivotos?
And why had the dream told me that it was my fault?
Then there was the girl in white.
I knew who she was. Every Blue Archive player knew who she was. The President of the General Student Council, the one who disappeared before Sensei ever arrived, the one whose absence started everything. She'd barely ever been on screen. A few scenes. A few lines. A shape at the edges of the story.
She'd smiled at me.
She'd called me Mel.
'Take care of this place for me, okay?'
My hand had come up to my chest without my noticing. Under it, something ached. The same small tug I'd felt the very first morning, looking at the Sanctum Tower through the window. Only now it wasn't small.
I looked at the girl in the mirror. Then past the white dye and the sweat, to the face underneath.
The girl in the dream had long golden hair, almost down to her knees. My hair was short. But that face. That height. Those eyes, gold when they weren't busy being confused.
It had been this body.
It had been her. The girl whose hands knew every gun, whose calm sat on my panic like a cat. The girl whose name I couldn't remember.
The one who'd made a promise she hadn't kept.
My eyes in the mirror stayed green. The little question marks didn't go away.
"Was that..." I whispered to the empty room.
"...me?"