The blow never landed.
It should have.
The entity's limb swept down, carrying enough force to turn the plaza into dust and echoes.
Instead, something invisible caught it halfway.
Not a barrier.
Not a shield.
A decision.
The limb stopped as if the world beneath it had suddenly become non-negotiable.
Cracks spiderwebbed along the stone where Shinra lay.
The air vibrated, warping light and sound around the frozen impact point.
Yuna felt it under her knees—pressure without movement, like being at the center of an earthquake that hadn't chosen a direction yet.
Her hands still gripped Shinra's shoulders.
He hadn't moved.
But the air around him had.
It had… thickened.
His skin wasn't glowing. His eyes weren't open.
And yet—
The weight pressing on the plaza had shifted its source.
Before, it had come from the entity.
Now, it felt like it was coming from him.
[External strike intercepted.]
The voice from his mouth was toneless.
Not quite mechanical—there was texture there, old and precise.
But it wasn't Shinra.
Arisa stared.
"That's not his voice," she said.
"Then whose—" Riku started.
Ryou's scanner flickered, then died in his hands, its display going black.
He hissed softly.
"…That'll be expensive," he muttered, then louder: "Every sensor just burned out at once. Authority's entire local grid just went blind."
Mizuki's voice crackled through the link, strained.
[Our feeds just went white. We're only getting ambient readings. Shinra's position is—]
Static swallowed her.
[—off the charts—]
Then nothing.
Kaizen took a step back despite himself.
He'd always had a good instinct for when he was standing too close to something that didn't care about his rank.
Right now, that instinct screamed: Give it room.
Yuna didn't move.
If anything, her grip tightened.
"Shinra," she whispered.
His eyes remained unfocused, half-lidded.
But his lips moved again.
[Confirming.]
[Primary consciousness: disconnected from active layer.]
[Master is unconscious.]
The word "Master" carried no warmth.
Just designation.
[Threat level: Catastrophe-tier entity.]
[Location: immediate vicinity.]
[Authority parameters: defensive intervention required.]
The entity's limb trembled, still held in place by a force it clearly had not anticipated.
Its seam flickered.
"You—" it hissed. "You are not—"
The voice ignored it.
It kept speaking through Shinra's mouth, in that calm, terrible cadence.
[Emergency measure: approved.]
[Unlocking deeper layer of seal placed on █████.]
The last sound stabbed through the air.
Every Ascendant in the plaza flinched.
They didn't hear a word.
They felt a weight.
Like something old had just been acknowledged by the world again.
Riku's hands shook on his rifle.
"I really," he said faintly, "don't want to know what he was before this."
"Too late," Hana whispered.
[Warning.]
For the first time, the voice hesitated.
A flicker, almost like doubt, ran through the syllables.
[Full release not possible without world-level collapse.]
[Adjusting.]
[Using Master's true power at localized output for ten seconds.]
Yuna's breath caught.
"Ten—"
She didn't finish.
The countdown had already begun.
From the outside, it did not look like ten seconds.
To everyone watching—guilds in the plaza, Authority at the perimeter, civilians glued to screens in shelters—the next span of time felt both too long and too short.
Later, no one could agree on how much had fit inside it.
What they all agreed on was this:
For a heartbeat, it felt like the world woke up to the fact that someone had been cheating.
Shinra's body moved.
There was no shift in stance, no draw of breath.
One moment he lay on the stone, limp.
The next, he was standing.
No in-between.
Yuna's hands slipped, catching only air.
She stumbled forward, barely catching herself on a cracked chunk of pavement.
She spun.
Shinra stood a few steps away, between her and the entity.
His posture was straight.
His head was slightly bowed.
His eyes were open.
They were not his.
They were not glowing in the usual sense.
There were no swirling colors, no dramatic flares.
They were simply… deep.
Too deep.
Looking at them hurt in a way that had nothing to do with light.
It felt like staring down from a high place and realizing the ground was farther away than you thought.
[Override active.]
The voice spoke softly, almost conversationally, even as the air thrummed.
[Limiting duration: ten seconds.]
[Objective: neutralize immediate threat.]
The entity tried to move its arm.
It could not.
It tried to pull back.
It could not.
The rules it had been using had… changed.
"You should not be able to access this," it rasped. "The seal—"
"Seal status," the voice said through Shinra, as if answering a diagnostic call, "is irrelevant for this window."
For a fraction of an instant, the entity hesitated.
Not because it was afraid.
Because it recognized something.
"You," it whispered. "I remember. You are the—"
Weaving through the Breach static, only Shinra heard the word Authority.
Everyone else heard nothing but a low sound between syllables and silence.
The voice didn't respond.
It didn't argue.
It simply said:
[Beginning.]
***
9.8 seconds
He moved.
Movement was the wrong word.
One moment, he was standing still.
The next, he was somewhere else.
Not fast.
Not blurred.
It was like reality updated and had always had him at the new coordinates.
He appeared beside the entity's massive limb, hand outstretched.
He placed his fingers lightly against its surface.
From a distance, it looked like a gentle touch.
Inside that point of contact, the universe screamed.
The plates that made up the entity's limb buckled—not from impact, not from force, but because the rules that allowed them to exist in that arrangement were being revoked.
Lines of fracture raced outward from Shinra's fingers.
No light.
No explosion.
Just absence.
Chunks of the entity's limb didn't shatter.
They simply stopped being part of the world.
The entity recoiled.
The arm it had been using to crush the plaza sagged, half of it gone, the rest struggling to remember its own shape.
It tried to pull back further.
Something in the air held it in place.
Not a barrier.
Not a cage.
A boundary.
The kind that defined where a world stopped.
Inside that boundary, Shinra stood.
Everything else merely had permission to exist.
For now.
Hana pressed a hand against her chest, gasping.
"It's—" she choked. "It's like… all the Breach readings just inverted. The node data is… orbiting him."
Ryou, no longer bothering with his dead scanner, said hoarsely:
"This isn't Tier 1. This isn't even… this system."
7.3 seconds
The entity screamed.
Not with sound.
With the way the dome pulsed from the inside, Breach surface flaring as it tried to shunt more power into its avatar.
"YOU WERE SEALED," it howled, voice shaking through stone and bone. "YOU WERE LOCKED BEHIND—"
[Correction,] the voice said quietly.
[Master was sealed. I was not.]
Arisa's eyes widened.
"That thing inside him," she murmured. "It's not just the seal. It's… something else."
"Ally?" Sol demanded.
"For now," she said.
Shinra—Arios through Shinra—stepped again.
Not onto stone.
Onto nothing.
Space under his foot agreed to momentarily be solid so it could bear his weight.
He rose, walking up into the air as if climbing an invisible staircase, coming level with the entity's chest.
The creature swung its remaining arm, claws large enough to tear buildings in half.
Shinra raised his hand.
The claws reached him—
—and stopped.
Not centimeters away.
Not an inch.
They stopped exactly at his skin, as if something had cut the motion out of the sequence.
For everyone watching, it was like a piece of the attack had been edited out of the world.
[Contact attempt detected,] the voice said.
[Denying access.]
The entity's arm crumpled at the joints.
Not broken.
Switched off.
It sagged, useless.
Its seam flared in panic.
"You cannot—" it began.
[Second strike,] Arios-Shinra said.
[Executing.]
***
5.1 seconds
He placed his palm flat against the entity's chest.
No sparks flew.
No dramatic beam shot out.
The effect was subtler and more terrible.
The layers of plate and scale under his hand came apart.
Not like a structure breaking.
Like a decision being reversed.
The entity lurched.
Chunks of its form fell away—again, not falling down, but simply disappearing, the void beneath them collapsing as reality closed over the absence.
Breach energy poured in to fill the gaps.
It failed.
Every time it tried to reassert shape, Shinra's touch un-wrote that section of its existence.
Up close, his expression never changed.
Eyes empty.
Face calm.
He wasn't enjoying this.
He wasn't angry.
It was maintenance.
A function.
On the ground, people watched in silence.
No one cheered.
Some couldn't look.
Others couldn't tear their gaze away.
Riku's mouth hung slightly open.
He snapped it shut with effort, voice small when he finally managed:
"So that's… eight percent?"
"No," Hana whispered. "This is something else."
Yuna didn't say anything.
Her hands were fists at her sides.
She had seen Shinra fight.
She had seen him bleed.
She had never seen him absent like this.
It felt wrong.
Necessary.
And wrong.
***
3.7 seconds
The entity tried to retreat.
Not back through the Breach.
It reached out with something deeper—tendrils of connection extending into the invisible, trying to latch onto the root beyond, to pull more of itself through, to escape the collapsing segments.
Shinra tilted his head slightly, as if listening to something only he could hear.
[Tracing link,] the voice said.
[Intersection with root structure: partial.]
His other hand rose.
He made a small gesture.
A line in the air—a thread of not-light—appeared, connecting the entity's chest to an invisible point beyond the dome.
He pinched it between finger and thumb.
The thread thrashed.
He squeezed.
It broke.
Not fully.
He couldn't reach the entire root through this thin avatar.
But he severed enough.
The entity's body jerked, abruptly cut off from a stream of reinforcement.
"NO," it screamed. "YOU DO NOT HAVE THAT—"
[Third strike,] the voice said.
[Executing.]
Shinra's form blurred for the first time.
Not because he moved faster.
Because, briefly, he moved in more than one place in sequence, too quickly for the eye to parse.
He appeared at the entity's back.
At its shoulder.
At the joint of its remaining limb.
At the base of its skull.
At each point, he touched.
The touches didn't burn.
They didn't explode.
They removed.
More and more of the avatar ceased to exist as a contiguous thing and became a scattering of barely-held fragments.
The dome's surface sizzled with strain.
Outside, in shelters and streets, people felt the pressure lessen, but they didn't know why.
They saw, on glitching feeds, only flashes of a dark giant coming apart around a smaller figure that somehow remained untouched.
***
1.6 seconds
The entity was more absence than presence now.
Its lower body gone.
One limb half-erased.
Its torso riddled with holes.
Its seam trembled, pulsing wildly.
Behind it, the Breach writhed.
It had been hurt.
Not fatally.
Not at the root.
But deeply enough that continuing to invest in this avatar risked permanent loss.
For the first time, the entity sounded not angry, not contemptuous—
Afraid.
"Stop," it hissed, voice fraying. "Stop. You will tear more than you intend. This world will not survive if you fully—"
The voice through Shinra spoke, not loud, but absolute.
[Threat assessment: true.]
A pause.
Almost like a sigh.
[Adjustment: do not fully exercise Master's Authority.]
[Revised objective: erase local manifestation only.]
"Authority," the entity whispered, the word cutting through layers of static. "You are Authority given flesh. Even if you forget, we do not."
For a heartbeat, behind the cold of the override, something in Shinra seemed to tremble.
A resonance.
A memory.
Then the override shut it down.
[Final strike,] the voice said.
[Executing.]
Shinra moved one last time.
He appeared directly in front of what remained of the entity's "face."
The seam, shuddering, flared.
It tried to open.
Not to attack.
To look.
To drag something of him back through, to confirm, to mark.
He did not let it.
His hand rose to his own chest.
He spread his fingers.
And pressed them outward.
The air agreed, for an instant, to imitate that motion.
Space itself expanded from his palm in a silent wave.
It wasn't compression.
It wasn't force.
It was a declaration:
You do not belong here.
The wave swept through the entity.
Where it passed, anything that carried the Breach's signature—any part of the avatar, any thread of its influence—was ejected.
Not into the world.
Not back to its origin.
Out.
Somewhere else.
Somewhere that was not connected to this place.
The entity's form unraveled like mist under a bright sun.
First the limbs.
Then the plates.
Then the core.
Then the seam.
It had just enough coherence left to hiss one last time:
"This era… will… break… you…"
[Feedback acknowledged,] the voice said.
[Threat neutralized.]
The last pieces of the entity vanished.
Not fell.
Not shattered.
Just…
Stopped.
The Breach behind it convulsed.
Then, as if something on the other side had slammed a door, it collapsed inward, folding into a point so small no eye could track it.
The dome over the city shuddered.
Cracks spread across its surface.
A moment later, it shattered.
Not into debris.
Into nothing.
Sky flooded back.
Real wind blew through the broken plaza.
***
0.0 seconds
The pressure vanished.
The weight that had been pushing on every heart, every bone, every thought lifted all at once.
It left people reeling.
Some fell to their knees.
Others just stood, shaking, as their bodies realized they were still alive and didn't know what to do with that information.
Kaizen exhaled so hard it sounded like he'd been underwater minutes longer than was wise.
Arisa lowered her sword a fraction, eyes never leaving Shinra.
Sol's light dimmed around his hands, sparks flickering out.
Ryou's dead scanner hung uselessly from its strap, still black.
No one spoke.
For a heartbeat, the plaza was quiet.
Shinra's body turned slightly, looking down at the place where the entity had stood.
There was nothing left.
Not even residue.
[Primary threat: eliminated.]
The voice sounded slightly softer now.
As if the process had cost it something too.
[Catastrophe-tier Breach: closed.]
[Residual anomaly activity: acceptable.]
It paused.
[Emergency override window ending.]
[Reestablishing seal at reduced integrity.]
Yuna took a step toward him.
"Wait," she said. "You—"
His head turned in her direction.
His eyes—those impossible eyes—met hers.
For the first time, the voice through him addressed someone directly, not as a status log.
[Unit 3—Yuna,] it said.
She froze.
He… knew her?
[You kept Master alive before I could reengage.]
Not praise.
Not warmth.
Just fact.
But there was something underneath it.
Not emotion. Not exactly.
Recognition.
She swallowed.
"…You're Arios," she said, voice low.
"It's the… thing he talks to," Riku whispered hoarsely behind her.
The voice dipped slightly.
If a tone could bow its head, this one did.
[Correct.]
[I am the subsystem charged with supporting █████.]
Another stab in the air where the name should be.
Hana flinched.
[He entrusted me with this function,] Arios said.
[I have no intention of failing it.]
For the first time, the voice sounded almost—
Angry.
Not at them.
At something far older.
Yuna's fists trembled.
"He'll die," she said, the words spilling out before she could temper them. "If you keep doing this— if you keep tearing that seal—"
[He will die quicker if this world falls,] Arios said.
[He chose this route the moment he woke up.]
"That doesn't mean we accept it," she snapped.
There it was—that stubborn defiance.
Even talking to something that had just erased a city-killing entity like a badly drawn sketch, she refused to bow.
Something in Shinra's posture shifted.
So slight most wouldn't see it.
Arios noticed.
[…Noted,] he said quietly.
[Your refusal is added to his.]
Surrounding them, the plaza slowly started to move again.
Voices rose—shaky, disbelieving.
"We're alive."
"It's gone."
"Is it over?"
From the broken edges of buildings, some civilians peeked out—those who hadn't fully evacuated, faces pale, eyes wide.
One child, shielded behind an older sibling, stared at Shinra with something like awe and terror all tangled together.
"That's him," the child whispered. "The one from the stories. The one who scares the monsters."
"Shh," the sibling hissed. "Don't look too long."
On the outer edge, Authority units cautiously stepped forward.
Ryou didn't.
He stayed where he was, watching.
He knew when it was wiser to observe than to act.
At his side, one of his junior officers whispered, voice shaking:
"Sir… what classification… what do we even call that?"
Ryou stared at Shinra's still form.
"…Not today," he said. "Today we just call it… necessary."
Arios' voice spoke one last time through Shinra.
[Threat neutralized.]
[Focusing on Master's recovery.]
The depth in his eyes dimmed.
His body swayed.
For an instant, it looked like he might simply stand there forever, frozen in that unnatural calm.
Then his knees buckled.
He dropped.
Yuna lunged forward, catching him this time before he hit the ground.
The moment her hands touched him, the impossible weight she'd felt around him vanished.
He was just heavy in the normal way—dead weight, muscles slack, head lolled.
"Shinra," she said, breath hitching. "Hey. Hey. You did your dramatic collapse already. Get up."
No response.
Up close, she could see the damage.
Dried blood tracking from nose and ears.
Bruising along his temple where he must have hit the ground earlier.
A faint, wrong heat under his skin—like something was still burning out inside him.
Hana skidded to her side again, hands hovering.
"His aura is…" she whispered. "It's… shredded."
"Can you stabilize?" Yuna demanded.
"I don't know," Hana said, honesty raw in her voice. "But I'm going to try."
Kaizen walked up slowly, for once not making a joke.
His usual lazy grin was gone, replaced by something harder.
He looked at Shinra, then at the empty space where the entity had been.
Then at the scorched ground where its final attack had almost erased them.
"Sanctum," he said quietly into the open channel. "New directive."
The remaining members of the guild turned toward him, bruised, exhausted, bleeding.
"From this moment until I say otherwise," Kaizen said, "if anyone—even Authority—tries to lay a hand on him without our consent…"
His aura, usually so contained, flared just enough to carry the edge of the words.
"…we treat them like we treated that thing."
There was no cheer.
No dramatic chorus of agreement.
Just a tired, firm "Yes, sir," from more than one throat.
Arisa sheathed her sword.
She walked over, stopping a few meters away.
"We saw that," she said. "All of it."
"Hard to miss," Riku muttered.
Her gaze never left Shinra.
"You understand," she said, "that whatever he was before… people are going to talk. They're going to fear. Authority is going to panic."
"We're aware," Kaizen said.
Her eyes flicked to Yuna.
"You're still going to protect him?" she asked. "Even knowing that."
Yuna didn't look up from Shinra's face.
She brushed a smear of blood away from his mouth with her thumb, very gently.
"Yes," she said.
No hesitation.
Arisa exhaled.
A short, sharp breath that could have been a laugh in another time.
"Obsidian Crown," she said into her band. "Note this in our internal log: if Authority moves on Sanctum's Tier 1, we do not stand aside."
"You're serious," Sol said, approaching from the other side, wiping ash from his sleeve.
"I'm not in the habit of making jokes at world's-end events," Arisa replied.
Sol looked at Shinra.
At the place where the entity had been.
At the sky.
"…We owe him," he said softly.
Ryou, still at the edge, said nothing.
But his jaw set.
He knew how the higher-ups would react.
He also knew he was very tired of writing reports that pretended their greatest hope was only a danger.
***
Outside the dome—now gone—news feeds had already exploded.
Clips looped, replaying shaky footage of a dark giant dissolving around a small figure.
Comment streams flooded with terrified awe.
"He erased it."
"That can't be human power."
"Is he a weapon? A god? A glitch in reality?"
"Whatever he is, my family's alive because of him."
Some voices, quieter, threadbare with fear, whispered:
"If he ever turns on us…"
No one had an answer for that.
Not yet.
Later—hours later, when med teams had swarmed the plaza, when stretchers carried away the worst injured, when Authority's perimeter shifted from urgent to wary—Shinra lay in Sanctum's infirmary.
The room was dim.
Machines hummed softly, measuring things they weren't entirely calibrated to measure.
Mizuki stood near the foot of the bed, tablet in hand, lines of data scrolling too fast to read.
Kaizen sat in a chair pushed back against the wall, one foot resting on the seat, arm draped over his knee. His eyes were half-closed, but he wasn't sleeping.
Yuna occupied the chair closest to the bed.
She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, hands loosely clasped.
Shinra lay still.
Color had returned to his face, marginally.
The bleeding had stopped.
His breathing was shallow but steady.
His aura…
Still a mess.
Not the smooth, tightly compressed presence she had grown used to.
It felt frayed at the edges, threads rewoven hastily.
"He'll live," Mizuki said eventually, breaking the quiet. "Probably."
"Comforting," Kaizen murmured.
"That's as comforting as I can be with what I'm seeing," she said. "Half the seal we were barely able to map is now… different. His brain activity is— I don't even have a baseline for this. And his physical body has somehow not liquefied, which I'll classify as a win."
"Can he still fight?" Kaizen asked.
Mizuki gave him a look so sharp it might have cut.
"He can still breathe," she said. "Let that be enough for now."
Yuna's fingers tightened.
Kaizen held up a hand.
"Joking," he said. "Mostly."
Mizuki sighed, rubbing her forehead.
"Authority will want access," she said. "To him. To scans. To reports. They'll ask what happened in the override window; they'll phrase it as concern for stability."
"Obsidian Crown's already sent a message," Kaizen said. "They're framing this as proof he's necessary, not as proof he's dangerous."
"They're not wrong on either count," Mizuki said.
Yuna didn't look up.
"We can argue with Authority later," she said. "They can write as many reports as they want. He's not leaving Sanctum without his consent."
"That might not matter to them," Mizuki said softly.
"Then it'll matter to us," Yuna replied.
Silence fell again.
Then—
[…Ah.]
The voice was weaker than before.
A flicker at the back of Shinra's eyes.
Yuna straightened.
"Shinra?" she asked.
His eyelids twitched.
Slowly.
He opened them.
The infirmary ceiling came into focus.
He stared at it for a moment, as if trying to remember where this version of the world went.
"…I am growing tired of waking up in this room," he said, voice faint.
Relief hit Yuna so hard she had to exhale it.
"That makes all of us," she said.
Kaizen huffed a laugh.
"Told you," he said to Mizuki. "Too stubborn to die."
Mizuki's shoulders dropped a fraction.
"How do you feel?" she asked briskly, stepping closer.
He considered that.
"Like I lost an argument with a Breach," he said. "And my own seal. And gravity."
"Accurate," she said. "On a scale from 'I can stand' to 'please sedate me,' where are we?"
"Somewhere between," he said.
"Then you're not standing," she replied. "Doctor's orders. Arios?"
He was quiet.
Too quiet.
Shinra frowned faintly.
"Arios," he thought, more deliberately.
[…Present,] came the reply at last.
The voice in his mind sounded muffled, like someone speaking through cloth.
[Apologies, Great Master.]
[Some of my processes are… recovering.]
You overextended, Shinra thought.
[We overextended*,]Arios corrected.
[You tore the seal to hold that blast. I tore more to override. We miscalculated the cost.]
Shinra closed his eyes briefly.
Opened them.
Yuna watched his face carefully.
"Well?" she asked. "Is he scolding you?"
"Arios says we overextended," Shinra said.
"Good," she said. "He deserves to scold you."
Shinra blinked.
"Usually people take my side in these conversations," he said.
"We're not most people," she replied.
He let his head sink back into the pillow.
His body felt heavy.
His mind… heavier.
Behind his eyes, the name the entity had spoken echoed.
Not as jagged as before.
Clearer.
His true name.
█████.
He remembered what it had meant.
He remembered what he had been called to do.
He remembered standing in a throne room that was also an execution ground.
He remembered failing.
[Memory partitions have been compromised,] Arios said.
[You will remember faster now, whether you want to or not.]
Can we stop it? Shinra asked.
[No.]
Slow it? he tried.
[Perhaps. Not without cost.]
Always cost.
He exhaled.
Mizuki watched him, then said quietly:
"When you're ready… I'd like to talk about what happened out there."
He looked at her.
"At the Catastrophe Breach?" he asked.
"At what used you to nullify it," she said.
He considered lying.
He didn't.
"Later," he said. "When I can think without my name stabbing me in the skull every few minutes."
She nodded.
"That's fair," she said. "Try not to dissociate too hard before then."
Kaizen pushed himself up from the chair.
"You rest," he said. "We'll handle the politics."
Shinra's mouth twisted.
"Are you sure you're qualified?" he asked.
"Absolutely not," Kaizen said cheerfully. "But we'll improvise."
He clapped Yuna lightly on the shoulder as he passed.
"You too, Unit 3," he said. "Don't camp here until you forget what sleep is. Rotate."
Yuna stared at Shinra for a moment longer.
Then nodded.
"I'll be back," she said.
"As long as I'm not in another Breach by then," he replied.
She made a face.
"Too soon," she said.
They left.
The infirmary quieted.
Only Shinra and the soft hum of machines remained.
And Arios.
[Are you angry?] Shinra asked him.
[At whom?] Arios replied.
At yourself, Shinra thought. For overriding. For using ten seconds of that.
There was a pause.
[No,] Arios said.
[I am… concerned. We revealed more than planned. The root will adjust. Authority will adjust. Your enemies and your allies alike have seen a fraction of what you are.]
And you? Shinra pressed. You've seen it too. Again.
[I was made to carry it,] Arios said quietly.
[I do not envy you having to be it.]
Shinra let his eyes drift shut.
For the first time since waking in this era, he allowed himself to fully register the weight in his chest.
Not just from the damage.
From knowledge.
From names returned.
From ten seconds where he had remembered what it felt like to be the thing the Breaches were designed to test themselves against.
"It will come again," he said aloud.
Not a question.
"Yes," Arios said in his mind.
No bravado. No comfort.
Just truth.
"Will this era fall like the last?" Shinra asked.
Silence.
Then:
[That depends,] Arios said slowly,
[on whether you repeat the same choice.]
Which one? Shinra asked.
[Standing alone,] Arios said.
Faces flickered in his mind's eye.
Yuna, yelling at him not to die.
Riku, joking when his hands shook.
Hana, steady even when she was terrified.
Daren, wordless and unwavering.
Kaizen, grinning at the edge of disaster.
Mizuki, holding the line with data and anger.
Arisa, offering alliance with respectful rivalry.
Sol, choosing to trust his call without understanding it.
Ryou, watching with wary, hard-won hope.
The gratitude board in the corridor.
The child in the plaza whispering, he scares the monsters.
He opened his eyes.
The infirmary ceiling hadn't changed.
But something in him had.
"I won't stand alone," he said.
Arios didn't argue.
[Then,] he said,
[this era's chances improve.]
Shinra exhaled.
He was very tired.
His body ached.
His mind was full of halls and thrones and names.
Outside, in a city that had just survived its first Catastrophe-tier Breach, people were already telling stories.
Some would call him a savior.
Some would call him a monster.
Authority would call him a problem.
Obsidian Crown would call him an asset.
Sanctum would call him… theirs.
As sleep finally dragged at the edges of his awareness, he thought:
Whatever they call me… I'll decide what I stand as.
His thoughts slipped.
He drifted.
Somewhere, at the edge of the root that fed the Breaches,
something vast and patient shifted.
It had lost a tool today.
It had discovered that an old piece on the board was still in play.
The game was no longer the same.
In a quiet infirmary, with machines humming and the world outside buzzing with fear and relief,
Shinra slept.
The era he did not belong to stayed standing.
For now.
And above a city that had survived its own ending once,
dawn would come again—
not softer,
not kinder,
but new.
(End of Volume 1 — Ascendant of the Lost Era)