The night was heavy with rain, the kind of downpour that blurred streets into rivers and swallowed sound into a low, endless roar. Raizen sprinted, feet hammering against wet pavement, lungs burning as though fire had taken root inside him. He didn't care. Not about the pain, not about the water soaking through his uniform, not about the stares of those he passed.
Miyako was out there. Taken. Again.
Not this time.
Not this cursed cycle.
Every step was fueled by rage and desperation. But then—he froze.
Ahead, beneath the arch of a narrow bridge, stood a woman. She shouldn't have been there, not in this world of concrete and headlights. She looked like she'd stepped out of a different plane entirely, something painted in a palette this world couldn't comprehend.
Her eyes were the first thing he saw. Violet eyes—but not ordinary. They swirled like galaxies, nebulae of endless stars. The dress she wore shimmered like woven amethyst, stitched with constellations of silver and violet sigils that pulsed faintly, as if alive. A long, scaled tail curled lazily behind her, glistening wet under the storm.
For a heartbeat Raizen thought—a cosplayer? Some strange game character?
But the aura. That suffocating aura.
His stomach twisted. It was too familiar.
"…Olivierr," Raizen whispered. The name slipped before he realized it, memory stabbing into him. The aura felt like that god he'd seen once, standing near Vaelith Umbryss in another life.
But no—this was different. Sharper. Hungrier.
The woman tilted her head, galaxy-eyes narrowing as they locked onto him. For a moment, the rain itself seemed to pause.
Raizen's instincts screamed. He attacked.
His body blurred forward in a burst of speed that cracked the bridge's cement, fist arcing toward her chest. But before his blow could connect, something slammed into him with bone-shaking force. A whip-crack. His vision spun—he staggered back, coughing blood.
It was her tail.
The woman didn't flinch. She didn't even shift her stance.
"You…" Raizen growled, wiping his mouth, golden sparks flickering in his eyes. "You're the Destroyer God, aren't you?"
The woman's lips curved into a small, mocking smile.
"Half right," she said lightly, her voice smooth but edged with venom. "But that's not my name, little half-dragon."
Raizen froze. Half-dragon? She knows.
"Sorry for the late introduction." She stepped forward, each motion rippling the air like gravity itself bent around her. "My name is Shizuoka Aurelisse."
The name hit him like a blade.
"Aizen Arcime… isn't that right?" she whispered, violet eyes gleaming. "You died to my clone. And now you're foolish enough to raise your hand against the main me?"
His blood ran cold. Her clone killed me… then this…
Shizuoka's smile widened. "Be happy. I'm here to take what was supposed to be mine." Her tail lashed the ground with a thunderclap. "See you, half-dragon."
Then pain. Unbearable, searing pain. Raizen's chest exploded with agony as her strike sent him hurtling through the bridge rail, concrete shattering like glass. He slammed into the riverbank below, coughing blood that mixed with rainwater.
His human body screamed with limits. He wasn't the full Black Lion here—not yet. He wasn't the storm-beast who could crush mountains. He was human skin wrapped around divine fury, too weak to contain it.
But he couldn't stop. Not with Miyako waiting.
Get up. Move. Find her.
He staggered to his feet, vision swimming. Shizuoka had vanished, leaving only the echo of her laughter in the rain. His hands shook, but he forced himself onward.
---
Raizen's mind burned.
The warehouse. She's there. Miyako's there.
But how to find it? This world didn't have magic. Yet… something surged in him, something deeper than reason. He raised his hand—and light bloomed.
A sigil burst alive in his palm, a glowing lattice of gold and black energy. Magic.
Impossible. This world had no mana, no ley lines. But Raizen was a ley line. He was the storm given flesh.
"Show me," he whispered, pouring everything into the spell.
The sigil pulsed, and his vision blurred. Like threads of light weaving through the darkness, trails stretched across the city. One burned brighter than all others, leading straight into the woods.
Miyako.
He ran, faster than ever. The trees blurred into streaks, branches whipping past, roots tearing under his steps. His heart pounded, each beat a drum of desperation.
He burst into a clearing.
There. The warehouse. Green paint peeling, broken windows glowing with faint light.
Inside—Miyako.
She was tied to a rusted pole, eyes wide with fear but defiance still burning. Her face was pale, her lips trembling, but when her gaze met Raizen's through the open doorway, something lit inside her.
"Raizen!" she cried, her voice breaking.
But then—the gangsters. Dozens of them. One lifted a bat, sneering as he approached her.
"You scream, girl, and this'll break your teeth first."
Raizen's vision went red.
The bat never fell.
The gangster's skull imploded with a wet crack, body collapsing before he even realized what hit him. Silence fell.
Then screams.
The others tried to run. But Raizen was already there. His hands were claws, tearing, crushing. Each step he took shattered bones, each strike painted the walls red. They weren't men—they were insects. And insects deserved no mercy.
By the time he reached Miyako, the warehouse floor was slick with blood.
"R-Raizen…" she whispered, eyes wide not just with fear, but awe.
He tore her bindings apart, pulling her into his arms. He hugged her tightly, too tightly, as if letting go would doom her again. His body shook with relief and fury both.
But then—bang.
The sound was sharp. Final.
Raizen stiffened.
Pain exploded in his chest. His vision blurred. He turned his head just in time to see six gangsters in the shadows, guns raised, smoke curling from their barrels.
Miyako gasped. Blood bloomed across her dress.
"No… no…" Raizen's voice cracked, his knees buckling.
Her hand trembled as it reached his face. Tears streaked down her cheeks.
"Raizen… I'm sorry… I wish we could be together again… in our next life."
His heart shattered.
He crushed the six shooters with a single blow before he even realized it, their skulls exploding like melons under his fists. But it didn't matter. Nothing mattered.
He sank to the ground, Miyako in his arms. Blood soaked them both, hot and heavy, dripping through his fingers.
"Miyako…" His voice was broken, raw. "In our next life… I'll love you more than ever."
Her lips curved weakly. "I love you… too."
Then her body went limp.
Raizen's vision dimmed. His mind burned with one thought, one endless promise:
Kill anyone who hurts Miyako. Kill anyone who hurts Lyra.
Darkness claimed him.
Raizen felt the cold of the world close in, a darkness so absolute it swallowed his last pulse of fury and left only the echo of a promise. The warehouse's iron smell and the metallic warmth of blood filled his lungs in ragged, shallow bursts. Miyako's weight in his arms grew impossibly light. He could feel her heartbeat slow, stutter, and then stop altogether beneath his palm.
The storm outside had not ceased when his vision thinned to a single point of light. In that slender moment between consciousness and oblivion, the city's noises became a distant thunder, a hollow echo far below where something older and louder stirred.
"Raizen," a voice whispered like a wind across dry grass—soft, ancestral, and impossible to ignore.
He tried to answer. His mouth tasted of iron and rain. The name on his tongue was both a prayer and a curse.
"Miyako…"
But the world folded like paper. The warehouse dissolved. The rain became a hush. The last thing he saw was Miyako's face—pale, stunned, loving—and the memory of his enormous, futile promise burning into him: kill anyone who hurts Miyako. Kill anyone who hurts Lyra.
Then the darkness took him.
---
Light slammed into Raizen as if the sun itself had struck him. He coughed, lungs burning, and for a dizzying second believed he was still in that warehouse—that the smell of blood remained. Instead, he felt linen against his cheek and the soft hand of a younger girl shaking him.
"Raizen! Wake up! You had a nightmare!" Her voice was all scolding and worry, familiar and horribly tender.
He blinked. The ceiling above his head was a normal plaster ceiling with a small crack near the corner, sunlight coming through the crack in straight lines. Mismatched posters clung to the wall. He was in his room. The bed beneath him was childish in its design, a little too small for someone who had once been a monstrous thing. Beside him, boots scuffed across the timber floor.
Sarah Hayashi—his sister—stood at his bedside, arms folded as if she'd been guarding him. She was older-looking by a year than the image he'd held as a ghost in battle, but she was still the same—stubborn, fierce, impossibly human. Her face showed worry like a bruise.
"You know," she said, pointing an accusing finger, "you shouldn't sleep with your girlfriend in the same bed. It's embarrassing for the rest of us." She tried to sound light, but her eyes were wet.
Raizen's fingers fumbled; the bed sheets smelled faintly of laundry soap. He sat up too quickly and saw the small, familiar bundle sleeping beside him. Miyako. Alive. Her hair fanned across the pillow in dull silver waves that caught the morning like a thousand tiny moons. Her breath came in soft, even rhythms—alive. Not a scratch. Not a wound.
"Sarah," Raizen croaked, his voice hoarse with a dry heat. "Where is—where's Miyako? Is she—?"
"She's fine," Sarah said, scolding again but clearly relieved. "You had us worried. You were tossing and shouting in your sleep. You kept saying… Aizen? Lyra? You kept calling names. What's wrong with you?" She softened then, concerned and affectionate. "Do you have a fever? Maybe you should… maybe you should stop training so hard."
Raizen's hands trembled. The memories—too sharp, too vivid—pushed through. Lyra's bright laugh at breakfast. The purple light spreading across the sky. The bridge, Shizuoka's tail, the warehouse—Miyako's scream—the six gunshots. The grotesque image of skulls—he forced himself to breathe. Not now, he thought. This is another life. Another loop.
But nothing in him was calm. Rage still flashed like lightning under skin. The need to protect, to break the wheel—this time, he had to be different. He had to take this second life and carve something else from it.
"Nightmare?" he repeated, and it came out raw. "I had a nightmare. Everything… it felt real." He swallowed, the words like stones. "I remember things. I remember dying."
Sarah frowned and tilted her head. "You always talk nonsense when you're half asleep, Raizen. Stop being dramatic. Go wash up. Grandmother will scold you if you show up at breakfast with that face."
He tried to laugh. The sound was brittle. He stood, legs weak, and reached for Miyako's hand. She stirred—just a whisper—and smiled in her sleep. The tiny peacefulness of that smile nearly strangled him with tenderness. He watched her for a long minute, memorizing the slope of her cheek, the freckle near her ear, the way the corners of her mouth lifted even in sleep.
I will not lose you here, he promised the sleeping girl as if prayers could steer fate.
He slid from the bed and padded to the window. The morning outside smelled of wet leaves and a city stirring to life. It looked harmless, indifferent, unaware of the wars fought in other skins and other skies. But the nightmares had ended the night before. He had bled. He had sworn a vow on a woman's lifeless lips.
Another life. Another chance.
He had no time to waste.
---
The day moved like molasses. He drifted through classes, the chatter and clatter of school life feeling as if it belonged to someone else. Gabriel's unfiltered cheerfulness was a jagged contrast to the iron in his chest. The students joked and shoved and tried to carve their small kingdoms out of adolescence; the world had not yet found a use for their cruelty beyond petty fights and dares.
Raizen sat with them in the courtyard, but his head throbbed with images. At lunch, he excused himself and walked through the older part of town, where the gray buildings crowded together and people sold curry from carts. He kept to the shadows, trying to hear anything—echoes, warnings—signs of the Destroyer's presence, though logic told him it was ridiculous. The Destroyer was a god, a thing of stars; here, in this small city, she had no business being present.
But the world was not a closed system. He had seen cracks—openings where the great teeth of other dimensions bit through the fabric of mundane life. He had felt the pull again last night, an odor like thunder under the rain. It had led him to the bridge, to Shizuoka. She had spoken his name—Aizen Arcime—and called him by what he had been in the other life. He knew then that the two worlds were not distant; they were braided through the same rope.
When he returned to his room at dusk, Miyako was there, slippers kicked off in a hurry, hair damp from the rain at the edges. She scolded him softly for looking so pale. "You should eat," she said, pressing a plate into his hands. "Your face looks awful."
He sat across from her and stared at the food like it was a piece of foreign machinery. He ate, mechanically, listening as she chattered about small things—her class, a terrible teacher, a bakery that began selling the flaky pastries she liked. The banal, everyday conversation was balm. For a few moments, the monstrous images faded enough to breathe.
But the banality could only cover so much. Late in the evening he walked alone to the river again because the bridge called to him as if it were an old wound.
Rain fell in a thin grating drizzle. The bridge's concrete railings were cold under his palms. The city lights refracted like pinpricks over the wet river. He felt haunted by the memory of Shizuoka's laughter.
"You found something, Raizen?" Gabriel's voice cut from behind him. He had been following—always a step behind like a beacon. "You're quieter than usual." He permitted himself a grin, trying to iron out the worry creasing his friend's brow.
"I saw someone," Raizen said. The words came out too low for the street to catch. "A woman. Violet eyes. Amethyst dress. She said my name."
Gabriel's smile trembled. "You're imagining things. You haven't had enough sleep." His voice had the practiced, soothing cadence of someone trying to be a tether to another man. "Come on. Let's go warm up. You need to sleep."
Raizen laughed then—a bark of nothing. "Not yet."
Gabriel flinched, as if recognizing something he'd seen. "You're not like this, master," he told him softly. "Weird since yesterday. You used to be… simpler. Why are you thinking so much?"
Raizen's jaw tightened. He should have explained. He should have told Gabriel that another world existed, that gods had bled and died within him, that Lyra and Aizen and the purple light were not fictions. But he kept that truth close. It was a blade better unsheathed only when necessary.
"You're right," he said instead. "I'll sleep early tonight."
He didn't. He would not sleep early; his nightmare had been a warning and a promise. He had seen the pattern. He would hunt the pattern until it broke.
---
Night found horror at its doorstep. The slight pulse of dread that had been herded into a neat corner all day exploded into something furious and raw. News of a disturbance near the east industrial area trickled through like a smear of smoke on a page. Raizen's stomach dropped.
Gabriel, strangely serious now, pulled him aside. "There are rumors—someone saw a cloaked figure entering the north warehouse district at dusk. We thought it was kids, a prank, but then there were shots. Miyako sometimes goes to the bakery on Fifth—maybe she's there."
The word shots was a lash to his face. He felt a familiar pulling, the same as the lure he'd once followed like a bloodhound to save the same girl. The world narrowed down to a single line: move.
They ran.
The city blurred into an assemblage of sounds, lights and broken glass. The north warehouse district smelled of oil and rust, and the narrow alleys made a labyrinth of fear. He ran without thinking, muscles moving on the autopilot of a body that had once been made for war.
At the old green warehouse, the doors were thrown open. Shouts, a half-dozen shadows running—then silence. Then the squeal of tires as motorbikes screeched away, leaving the alley to the wind.
Raizen darted inside.
There she was. Tied to a pole, eyes wide with terror but still brave enough to glare at them. Her skirt was torn, but she lifted her chin when she saw him, as if to say, I'm here. Remember me.
"Get away!" Raizen's voice was a blade. The gangsters—men too young to understand the gravity of playing with lives—turned, hands reaching for weapons. One moved forward with a crowbar.
Before the crowbar could swing, the first man's head exploded inward with a ruinous sound. Flesh, bone—there was no poetic way to dress it. The air filled with a hideous, wet silence. Several more fell in quick succession, each skull crushed like fruit beneath an ungodly force.
Raizen's hands moved as if guided by a machine older than his skin. He fought not as a man but as a tide—merciless, precise, inevitable. When it was over, the room smelled of iron and burned hair, the floor a slick of glistening red.
He tore Miyako free and held her like a thing of fragile glass. She smiled through blood and tears and whispered, "You came."
Then the shots. He didn't have time to be scared; he was already beyond fear. Six men in the back had raised guns—silenced weapons, aimed at them. In an instant, they fired.
Pain lanced through him. He felt a hole open in his chest and a bright white bloom of agony. Miyako's scream shredded the air. Blood pumped warm over his fingers as one round struck her side. She gasped, her ribs spasming.
"Raizen," she breathed. "I… I'm sorry… please, promise—"
He watched her hand reach for his face. Her fingers trembled as if in apology to the world, as if the universe had never been kind to them and she had to make peace with it. His fingers closed around hers.
He moved as if in a dream but every motion was murderous clarity. He grabbed the nearest shooter by the head, and the wet snap of bone was a sound like a thunderclap in his ears. One by one, he destroyed them—headshots, neck breaks—each movement a furious geometry of violence. He felt nothing of the gore, only a cold mechanical efficiency that had no place in the bright morning when he'd woken in his small room.
When the last man fell, silence fell like a curtain. Miyako slumped, his arms the only cradle in a world that had shown her cruelty twice.
"Miyako," he whispered through tears he didn't feel. "We'll meet again, in the next life. I swear it. I will be better. I will not fail you."
Her lips barely moved; the last light in her eyes was a small star going out. "I love you," she breathed. Then nothing.
Raizen's knees gave. The room spun. He wanted to scream until the stars fell and remade themselves, but his voice stayed in his throat like a shard.
He had failed. Again. He had killed the killers, but he had not saved her. The pattern held. He had come to believe that he could not change the wheel. The burden of that belief crushed him.
He thought of Lyra, of Aizen, of the island of burning light, of Vaelith, of the great beasts cut down by a single decisive strike. His promise returned again, like a brand: Kill anyone who hurts Miyako. Kill anyone who hurts Lyra.
And then—
A cold, quiet voice, not human but not wholly godlike, slid through his mind like a blade in the dark.
It is not enough to simply kill. Killing leaves echoes. Kill, yes—but learn how to change the song.
Someone was not just fighting in that warehouse. Something was testing him. Or perhaps mocking him. The hint was a poison and a promise.
He could not see faces then. He could not hear voices over the roaring blood in his ears. But in the periphery of his fading sight, he imagined shapes—constellations breaking, galaxies folding. The world that had bled into his chest was receding. The warehouse blurred. And as life slipped away, it felt—strangely—like falling backward into memory.
---
Lyra's awakening was nothing like Raizen's. She opened eyes to light that was clean, almost painfully bright. She lay on a straw pallet beneath rafters that spoke of aristocratic neglect—an orphan's attic rather than a goddess's cradle. The cedar beams were scarred with marks of childish fingers and spilled paints. She felt small in a way that had nothing to do with size—an image of a life compressed and folded into memory.
Her chest hurt. Not from violence now, but from the gnawing, weird sense that part of her had already lived more than this day allowed. A memory tried to press through like water through old wood: a hand, a spear, laughter in a galaxy; then a jagged pain—metal and betrayal. She saw herself, older somehow, sinking—stabbed by a figure named Loki.
She sat bolt upright, the pallet creaking beneath her. Panic fluttered like trapped birds in her ribs.
"Where—?" she whispered, throat raw.
A maid hovered in the doorway, half frightened of her sudden movement. "My lady? The Duke requests your presence. He says something about your cousin—" the maid's voice wavered. "You should go. He's been… he's been difficult since earlier."
Lyra's mouth formed the name she'd tried to remember—the flash of a face, the cruel amusement on it—Loki. Her heart hammered. That name meant treachery; she remembered a voice laughing as blades sang. Her fingers found the hem of her pallet as if it were a lifeline.
"She stabbed me," she realized aloud, voice small and incredulous. "She—no, someone stabbed me. I was there… I was with someone—Aizen. I was stabbed by Loki." The memory fit into place like a final shard closing a puzzle. She could see Aizen clearly—his swollen hands, the way fear had painted his face, his desperate attempt to catch her dying light. "I remember everything."
A chirp of voices rose from below—harsh, spoiled laughter. A maid's hurried footsteps cut through the attic door.
"My lady, the Duke calls! He wants to speak with you about how you look at your cousin in the hall!" the maid blurted, glancing nervously toward the window.
The mention of cousin brought another cascade—a face shrouded in the arrogance that comes from noble blood. She tasted bile. The memory slid: being mocked by cousins, edged out by entitlement that reeked of wine and old money. She had always been small in their eyes, the youngest of a line that measured worth in marriage dowries and spiced pies. She had been told to present and not to speak.
Lyra stood, limbs trembling. She could still sense the echo of being stabbed, the ghost of pain like a bitter aftertaste. She wanted to scream. Her mind flickered between the two lives like a poorly tuned lantern—each memory demanding recognition.
"I don't belong to them," she said suddenly—not a question but an axiom. She pictured the bright heavens she'd seen in her other life, a broadness that swallowed petty courts, a family of colossal, tender beings who had once taught her how to make a star. She remembered a hand—warm, large—guiding her fingers as she shaped a planet out of dust.
She clutched at her robes. "I must leave."
She left without waiting for formal permission. The maid's confused mouth opened as she tried to call after her, but Lyra had already slipped out a back passage. She moved faster than fear, propelled by a motion of reclamation. There was a wind on the moor that night, a pressure of future and past colliding. When Lyra burst into the outer courtyard, the sky flared ominously.
At first, the change in the weather was subtle: a breath of cold that set every candle to trembling. Then the clouds thickened with unnatural speed. Wind hammered against shutters. A low thrumming grew to a keening that felt like a chorus of whales under ice. People looked up, mouths open. Dogs ran. The smell of ozone tightened in Lyra's throat like a warning pulse.
A swirl of dust and torn banners exploded in an instant into a full-formed tornado—ribbons of wind that tore through the town square, ripping roofs away and upending carts. The sky bent like glass, the world tilting on an axis as if someone had thought to rearrange the map.
Lyra staggered, clutching at a post. Her heart hammered as the maelstrom circled above, huge and punitive. She watched children tumble and merchants howl. She felt a presence—beyond gust and cloud, a sharp, ivory outline that carved the sky—an energy that remembered stars and devoured lights.
Then, just as suddenly as it began, the storm stopped. The tornado died as if it had hit an invisible wall and been snuffed. Silence crashed down like a blank sheet. The town stood still, petrified.
Lyra blinked and wrapped both arms around herself, the sudden emptiness ringing in her ears. She had been in the teeth of a storm that had feasted on the town's life and ended in a breath. Her mind, half-broken by the memory of being stabbed and the impossible storm, was a thicket of confusion.
She tasted copper and rain and the metallic tang of fate. She did not know where the next breath would carry her. For once, the smallness of this life felt unbearable and yet precious. She could not let herself be a pawn who died at a god's whim. She would not.
And with that thought, she fled farther from the mansion, a girl running from the idea of marriage and cruelty and toward something that had no name yet but would swell into a cause.
---
Beyond the city, under an old, solitary tree that had seen better centuries, Aizen lay as if a man collapsed from too great a feast of battle. He had walked until the road erased itself beneath his boots. The rain's last drops clung to his lashes. He smelled like the battlefield—hot earth, singed flesh, ozone—and his breaths came in heavy, shallow waves.
He thought of the leviathan, of the Bakunawa, of Vaelith Umbryss's mane of stars. He thought of Lyra's last smile, the warmth that preceded the cold blade. Rage had been a living thing in his chest, and he had gone where rage took him: to the edge, to the final scream.
Now sleep seized him like a tidal hand.
He closed his eyes and saw not the warehouse but the beginning—memories not his in the present tense: a small room, a younger sister who would grow into a voice that could not be silenced, a Miyako who would become the warmth he could never really protect. The images were kaleidoscopic. Regression. The word sat in a corner of his mind like a fossil.
You have failed in one life, some part of him said in a cold whisper. So you have been given another.
He felt the unprecedented, impossible relief bristle through his exhausted bones. If the sky could break, if gods could be killed and rise, then perhaps loops could be broken. Perhaps a man could fail and then learn to be more than fate expected.
Aizen let the thought unwind, heavy and soft like a cloak. Lyra's face—the last thing he had seen in the burning world—rolled through his mind like a final prayer. He breathed her in as if it were air, as if he could keep her within like a small, secret sun.
Then he slept, next to the tree, the rain whispering itself dry across the leaves. In the stillness, the night held its breath and the world turned, patient and terrible, toward whatever would come next.
(End of Chapter 76)