(Arc 2 — Final Romance Moment, Return to World-Building)
The rain had stopped, but the world still felt drenched in a quiet heaviness.
Aster stood alone at the edge of the Academy's Outer Observatory, looking down at the sprawling city of Veyloria. The towers glowed with silver runes, the mana-lanterns flickering like stars trapped beneath the earth. The world looked peaceful—yet every thread he saw hummed with an unnatural tension.
As if reality itself was holding its breath.
Footsteps approached behind him. Soft, barely audible, yet familiar.
Lyra.
"Aster," she said quietly, stopping a few paces away.
Her voice held something she rarely showed—hesitation.
He didn't turn around.
"You felt the distortion too," he said. "Didn't you?"
She exhaled. "Everyone felt it. But only you saw where it came from… right?"
Aster finally faced her. The thin wind tugged at her silver hair, and for a moment she looked less like the Academy's prodigy and more like a girl trying her best to understand a boy wrapped in too many secrets.
Aster wished—just for a second—that he could be simpler.
But he wasn't.
He would never be.
"The distortion originated from the deeper layer beneath the Academy," Aster said. "Something is waking up."
"Or someone," Lyra whispered. "Someone connected to you."
Their eyes met.
Not romantically—just filled with the weight of everything they'd been through these past days.
And everything they could no longer avoid.
"Aster… before everything becomes more dangerous…"
Lyra bit her lip.
"There's something I want to say."
He knew.
He knew what she was trying to express—those unspoken feelings that occasionally slipped through her tone, her glances, the way mana always resonated differently when she stood too close.
But the path before him was narrowing.
He did not know if he would even remain himself in the coming weeks.
Aster raised a hand, stopping her gently.
"Lyra," he said, his voice softer than the wind, "don't say it."
Her breath trembled.
"…Why?"
"Because I can't give you anything right now."
He looked away.
"Not when I don't even know what I am."
Silence settled between them—soft, almost fragile.
Not the silence of rejection.
But the silence of two people standing on paths that might one day cross… but not now.
Lyra stepped forward and placed a single sealed scroll in his hand.
"Then take this," she said. "It's not a confession. It's a record—my findings about your anomaly, the Whispering Crown, and the shadow that follows you."
She turned around before he could respond.
"But Aster…"
She glanced over her shoulder, her voice gentler—almost sad.
"Don't disappear on me. Not again."
Then she left.
Aster stood there long after she vanished, the scroll warm in his hand, the city lights reflecting off the wet stone floor.
He closed his eyes.
The threads of causality shimmered—fractured, tangled, accelerating.
Something massive was approaching.
Something older than the Academy.
Older than the Hypostasis fragments.
Older even than the Whispering Crown.
Aster opened the scroll.
Three words were written at the top in Lyra's neat, sharp handwriting:
"THE SECOND FOUNDATION."
Aster's heartbeat slowed.
He had heard that name before—
not in this timeline, but in a broken memory from a world that never existed, whispered by a dying version of himself:
"When you reach the Second Foundation… you will learn why you were erased."
The world around him shifted.
Threads vibrated.
A distant rumble echoed through the earth.
Arc 2 was ending.
A new door was opening.
And whatever waited inside the depths of the Academy…
was already aware of him.