Leon thought back to Sakolomeh's words.
A brutal certainty struck him, and his eyes widened.
It was true.
Despite the apparent madness of the entity, despite its violence and incoherence, it bore familiar traits.
Gestures.
Reactions.
Silences.
Leon recognized his father.
Certain behaviors of the entity recalled Azazel with troubling precision, as if something within it still acted out of habit, out of automatism, without even understanding why.
If his father was protecting the souls, it wasn't out of kindness.
It was a reflex of identity, a remnant of a being who had forgotten what he was, but not what he once did.
And if they could bring him back to himself...
Then everything might, perhaps, fall back into order.
Leon slowly turned his head toward Sakolomeh.
— So... please...
Then he turned toward Bakuzan and Erasa, his gaze filled with a plea he had never voiced before.
— You... the legendary trio of the Immortal Echoes.
You are the only Ineffables capable of destroying other Ineffables.
So... could you... save my father?
Bakuzan spoke without hesitation, in a firm voice.
— Basically, what we want is to save our loved ones that your father once dragged into death.
Saving Azazel will just be a consequence of our actions.
He paused.
— Not an objective.
Erasa then added, her gaze dark:
— In any case... saving your father is necessary.
If Azazel truly carries within him remnants of the thing that literally dominated the entire meta-reality by its mere presence...
Then what awaits us will be, no matter what... terrible.
A silence settled.
Ravena finally asked, almost in a whisper:
— Shall we go?
Erasa nodded, then immediately specified:
— You stay here.
Bakuzan, Sakolomeh, Leon, and I will go.
We don't know what can happen there... so monitor reality.
At the slightest sign that the situation truly degenerates, intervene.
Neru nodded silently.
Salomeh crossed her arms and sighed.
— If you can't neutralize the enemy... I sincerely wonder what we can do.
You are the Immortal Echoes.
Even the most transcendent gods—the primordial gods—are inferior to you, since you are the apostles of the original gods.
Then she turned her head toward Sakolomeh and sketched a singular smile.
— Except you.
You... are different.
Sakolomeh approached Salomeh and naturally placed a hand on her head.
— Tell me, Salomeh... what are you waiting for to get married?!
The word crossed the room like a shockwave.
A strange silence settled. Almost embarrassing.
Salomeh blushed instantly.
— Are you serious, big brother?
With everything happening right now, marriage is the first thing on your mind?!
Bakuzan didn't even bother to respond: he struck Sakolomeh on the back of the skull.
— Ow, damn it! Bakuzan, that hurts!!
Bakuzan replied, eyes closed, in an almost authoritative tone:
— That'll teach you to say nonsense in a situation like this.
Erasa immediately added, with a falsely neutral air:
— Besides, he's not married himself.
But it's his little sister's marriage that obsesses him...
Normally, you should set an example, right?
Sakolomeh felt something break within him, almost comically.
— Erasa... we didn't ask you, okay?!
The others burst into laughter.
Ravena, for her part, added coldly:
— In truth, Sakolomeh... you're a bit pitiful.
How is it that you've already passed forty and you're still not married?
The hilarity doubled.
Sakolomeh tried to defend himself as best he could, stammering excuses, absurd justifications, convincing no one.
Leon observed them in silence.
Despite the gravity of the situation, a sincere smile formed on his face.
Bakuzan finally sighed.
— Alright.
It's time to go.
To the vestiges of Galaad.
Leon nodded, then extended his hand.
A rift formed slowly in the air.
— Frankly... I hope I don't have to tangle with that entity again.
Especially if it really is... my father.
He entered first.
Sakolomeh followed, then Bakuzan, then Erasa.
The rift closed behind them.
Realities began to scroll by, unraveling one after another, like layers of meaning torn from the real.
Then, abruptly, the movement stopped.
They had arrived.
A place absolutely foreign.
Something that should not exist.
The corpse of Galaad.
Become... a world.
When a great mythic entity—and even more so a divinity—dies within a reality without being totally annihilated in its Chōshinku, that consciousness-void from the Madhurya, an absolute corruption occurs.
The transcendent consciousness withdraws, but the body-avatar remains.
And that body is not inert.
Deprived of its directing principle, the divine avatar infects the reality that bore it.
It does not disappear: it replaces.
In other words, the corpse of a divine avatar becomes reality itself.
A state of eternal sacred decomposition.
A world frozen in the last agony of a god.
A world so altered that it disconnects from the rest of existence.
Even the Monitors, who are above realities, can no longer administer it.
Why don't these avatars dissipate?
Because when the transcendent consciousness is destroyed or withdrawn, the entity does not truly die:
it collapses into the last dream of its true being.
And that dream... becomes a world.
Here, the ground was not earth.
It was fossilized divine density.
The mountains were not geological formations, but solidified intentions, frozen in a will that no longer existed.
The oceans, for their part, were only residues of diluted consciousness, layers of mental echoes stretched to infinity.
Physical laws were unstable there, sometimes contradictory...
and in certain regions, totally absent.
There were zones without causality.
Without linear time.
Places where the distinction between inside and outside had never been defined.
When Erasa raised her eyes to the sky, she had to look away almost immediately for a moment.
The sky was unbearable.
Its color was not human.
Impossible to fix on for long, even for transcendent beings of the super-mortal type.
It changed according to the observer, causing unease, vertigo, memory gaps.
For that sky...
had once been Galaad's thought.
Bakuzan advanced a few steps and turned his head.
He saw creatures.
Not really alive.
Not really dead.
They were born from residual divine reflexes, errors of laws, fragments of unfinished dreams.
Remnants of functions deprived of meaning.
In observing some of them, Bakuzan noticed something profoundly troubling.
They did not understand that they existed.
They imitated forms of life... without ever possessing their purpose.
As if the very idea of "being" had been copied,
but never understood.