While the world watched the fire, Sakura Miyamoto walked through the furnace's heart.
The chaos of the battle above was her shield. While every satellite, every drone, and every eye was focused on the smoldering ruins of the Alliance fortress, she had slipped into the newly exposed mine shaft, a ghost in a world of noise. The explosion had done more than just blow a hole in the ground; it had fundamentally wounded the area.
The air itself was scarred here.
She moved through a tunnel lined with pulsing, crimson crystals, the heat a constant, oppressive presence. Every few meters, she would encounter a fissure. It wasn't a crack in the rock, but a flaw in reality itself. It looked like heat haze, but it was cold to the touch, and the air around it shimmered, distorting the light. A faint, high-pitched sound, like tearing silk but with no source, emanated from these wounds in space. She knew instinctively that to touch one would be to be unmade.
She was not guessing her way through this labyrinth. The first scroll, tucked safely in her gear, was a lodestone, its ancient power humming with a low, steady vibration, pulling her deeper, guiding her towards its sibling.
The pull led her to a place that defied geology. The tunnel opened into a vast, cathedral-like cavern, a geode the size of an opera house. The walls were lined with colossal, perfectly formed stellar nucleus crystals, each the size of a bus, their internal light bathing the entire space in a soft, blood-red glow. The air hummed with a power so immense it felt like a physical pressure against her skin.
And in the very center of the cavern, resting on a natural altar of black obsidian, was a scroll.
It was identical to the first, a cylinder of what looked like woven shadow, bound with a clasp of some unknown, non-reflective metal. As she approached, the first scroll in her pack began to vibrate in harmony with it.
She reached out, her fingers touching the second scroll.
The world dissolved into pure geometry.
The knowledge did not come in words or images, but in a flood of pure, conceptual understanding that her mind struggled to contain. She saw the universe not as empty space with objects in it, but as a single, continuous fabric. And she saw the stellar nucleus deposits, these great mines, for what they truly were.
They were not just resources. They were anchors.
They were cosmic nails, stitches of condensed reality driven deep into the fabric of space-time to keep it stable, to stop it from fraying.
The explosion of the Titan hadn't just been a blast of energy. It had been like ripping a stitch from a tapestry. The instability, the fissures she had seen... they were the first signs of the fabric beginning to unravel.
She stood in the silent, glowing cathedral, the two scrolls now humming in perfect unison. A terrible, crushing weight of understanding settled upon her. Her mission, which she had thought was about reclaiming her family's power, was a fool's errand. Her quest, which she thought was about finding a weapon, was a child's dream.
She glanced at the simple digital watch on her wrist. 12:12 PM. Wednesday. Back in Japan, people were having lunch, oblivious to the fact that the very ground beneath their feet was being held together by these fragile, cosmic threads.
Her power was not meant to be a sword for this new war. It was meant to be the needle and thread to stop the universe itself from coming apart at the seams.