Silence pressed in on the ruins.
Aiko still stood in the circle's fading glow, eyes fixed on the faint blue lines that had lit beneath her feet. The place felt… attentive. Like a breath held too long.
"You okay?" Kenji asked, voice low.
Aiko hesitated. How was she supposed to explain it? How do you describe something that spoke in light and numbers?
"I think so. Just… off," she murmured.
Pulsebun had already wandered to a wall, prying at a strip of exposed wiring with unabashed curiosity. "This metal carries charge in a weird way—like it prefers straight lines. If I can snag a sample, it could help with my converter project—"
"Aiko nearly blacked out and your first idea is to dismantle the ruin?" Kenji said, incredulous.
"Exactly," Pulsebun said, paws tapping excitedly. "Progress waits for no one. Remember the crystal-leaf generator I was testing?"
Before Kenji could finish his lecture, a deep thud rolled down the corridor to their right.
All three went still.
"Wind?" Kenji offered, stretching his neck to peer into the shadowed hall.
Another impact—closer, heavier. The floor trembled.
Aiko stepped back, palms suddenly damp. The air changed, dense and metallic. From the dark, two yellow points clicked on like eyes waking.
The thing stepped through with the weight of a falling tree.
A V-Monster, massive and man-shaped, armored like a beetle. Blue carapace scabbed with rust, streaked with moss. Blades hung from its forearms—pitted, but sharp enough to sing as they scraped the floor.
Kenji's voice came out in a whisper. "Rhinomega… They were supposed to be extinct."
Pulsebun's ears snapped upright. "Ah. That's… very not good."
The Rhinomega dragged one blade across the ground. Sparks flared where metal kissed metal, showering the dark in a cruel little sunrise.
Then it charged.
Aiko leapt aside on instinct. The blade tore a furrow through the wall where her shoulder had been, turning ancient metal into confetti. Kenji stumbled and fell, the lantern swinging wild arcs of light.
"This isn't a normal V-Monster!" he shouted, scrambling backward.
"Wow, thanks, genius!" Aiko snapped, yanking him clear as a second strike punched a crater where he'd been sitting.
The Rhinomega reset, its whole frame humming like a storm-bent wire. It lowered its head and readied to rush again.
Pulsebun planted himself between the two humans and the oncoming bulk. "I've got it!"
Charge built along his fur. Blue-white flicker threaded from ear to ear, pooling at his paws.
"STATIC SHOCK!"
The bolt cracked across the distance and hammered into the Rhinomega's chest. Electricity crawled over that armored surface, lighting rust seams and old scratches.
The monster didn't stop.
With a grinding bellow, it surged forward, a cannonball with knives. Pulsebun tried to juke—but the Rhinomega clipped him with a brutal lateral swipe.
He hit the far wall and slid down in a shower of dust.
"Pulsebun!" Aiko ran to him.
He rolled to his feet—wobbly, singed, fur bristling with leftover charge. "You have got to be kidding me. That didn't even tickle."
Kenji ducked behind a crooked pillar, eyes tracking the Rhinomega like a math problem with teeth. "Its shell is acting like a sink. Your current is traveling through the carapace and dumping straight into the floor."
"Translation?" Pulsebun barked, jaw set.
"You're shocking the room, not the target!"
The Rhinomega slammed both blades into the ground and pushed, the whole hall vibrating. Dust sifted from the ceiling in dry curtains.
Pulsebun squinted, forcing himself to watch instead of lunge. Joints. Always the joints. Rust filmed the pivot points. Gaps glimmered at the back of the knees and along a seam near the hip. Weakness wasn't always about force; sometimes it was about where time had been chewing.
"Okay," he muttered, breath steadying. "If I can't fry you… I'll do what I do best."
Aiko's eyes widened. "Pulsebun—what are you—"
But he was already moving.
He sprinted straight at the Rhinomega.
The monster met him head-on, blade lifting, stance set to cleave. At the last instant, Pulsebun dropped, sliding low across the dust-slick floor. Metal screamed overhead.
He shot between the Rhinomega's legs, ears flattened. In the same breath he twisted, coiling every fiber. He drove a punch—small, precise, mean—into the rust-softened seam at the back of the knee.
"Now."
The charge he'd been holding didn't spread; it detonated in that single point.
Light. Sound. A sharp, cracking boom that rang the hall like a bell.
The Rhinomega lurched. One yellow eye stuttered, went dim, flared again. Balance faltered. It took a step that wasn't a step, weight misjudged, and gravity did the rest.
It crashed down on its side with the finality of a felled tree. A long, hollow clang rolled away into the corridors.
Silence returned, broken only by Aiko's quick breaths and the soft tick-tick of cooling metal.
Pulsebun stood there panting, fur ruffled, whiskers singed. He shook out his paws, trying to look casual and failing because his knees were still wobbling.
"You… did it?" Aiko said, half question, half relief.
Pulsebun flashed a grin that was mostly teeth. "Improvisation. My specialty."
Kenji approached slowly, pushing his glasses up with a finger that wouldn't stop trembling. "You didn't just hit it. You found a structural flaw and exploited it."
"It was practically falling apart already," Pulsebun said, thumping dust off his chest with very small, very proud smacks. "I just… helped."
Aiko's gaze drifted to the fallen Rhinomega. She swallowed. The fight had ended fast, but the fear had not. The ruin had woken. And now something older—and angrier—had answered.
She knew it in her bones: this was a beginning, not a victory.
They drew closer to the body. The carapace, inert a heartbeat ago, began to shimmer under the lantern's light—as if something under the surface had finally remembered how to breathe.
Aiko reached for Kenji's sleeve. "Do you see that?"
He did. All three did.
The Rhinomega wasn't bleeding. It was coming apart.
Not crumbling—unraveling. Its edges pixelated into tiny, translucent cubes that lifted like dust motes in a shaft of sun. Green-gold light pulsed through the particles, gathering, spinning, listening to some command no one had spoken.
"Uh…" Pulsebun said eloquently.
Kenji's voice dropped into the space between awe and scientific hunger. "The cycle."
The motes spiraled for a breath, then another, then pulled together as if the room itself had drawn a circle and whispered come back.
When the light faded, something rested on the floor where the Rhinomega had fallen.
An egg.
Not stone, not shell. Smooth, glassy, green as a deep pond with a heartbeat. It pulsed—soft, steady, alive.
Pulsebun let out a low whistle. "And there it is. V-Monster life cycle—simple, elegant, and absolutely impossible."
Aiko went to her knees without meaning to. The glow painted her face in gentle emerald. "This happens when a V-Monster… dies?"
"Not always," Pulsebun said, then corrected himself. "Not that I've—look, I've never seen it in person, okay?"
Kenji knelt too, careful hands hovering before he dared touch. He lifted the egg with a reverence that didn't need explaining. Its light caught on his lenses and turned his eyes the color of old glass. "This isn't ordinary. A machine-type. A Rhinomega. If this line vanished centuries ago…"
Aiko's fingers tightened around the edge of her skirt. "Is that… bad?"
"It's a relic," Kenji said, weighing the word. "If the Guild hears about this—"
"They'll lock it up," Pulsebun said, arms crossed. "Maybe take it apart. 'For study.'"
"Or protect it," Kenji countered, but there wasn't much force in the objection. He was still looking at the egg like it was the answer and the question at once.
Aiko didn't say anything. Something in that quiet, green heartbeat made the room feel smaller. She wanted to be back in the bakery, where problems were solved by kneading and time and a hot oven. But the egg was here and warm, and it felt—she hated the word—fated.
"Can we… talk about this later?" she asked, pressing her fingers to her temples. Her head still hummed with that other voice, the one that had called her by a name that wasn't a name.
"Yeah," Pulsebun said gently. "Later."
The lantern burned low. Far away, the ruin settled—metal cooling, dust drifting, echoes finding their favorite corners again.
Kenji wrapped the egg in a spare cloth, hands steady now. "Let's get out of here before something else wakes up."
They moved carefully back through the hall, past the cracked plates and the maps etched into the walls, past the circle that no longer glowed but hadn't gone back to sleep. At the threshold, Aiko looked over her shoulder. For a heartbeat she imagined the blue lines pulsing once, like a blink.
Outside, afternoon had started to tilt toward evening. Birdsong had returned—too bright after the ruin's hush. Pulsebun squinted at the sky and stretched like a cat that had tasted thunder.
Kenji held the bundle close. Aiko walked beside him, one hand hovering as if to catch a drop of light that might fall.
Behind them, among rust and moss and patient roots, the past kept breathing.
The Rhinomega was gone.
But something else had just been born.