The card cracked.
There was no flash, no triumphant surge of light. No swelling music or sense of ascension. Just a sharp, dry fracture that ran through the blank surface like a fault line splitting stone.
Reo froze with it half-lifted from the table.
A second crack followed, branching outward, spiderwebbing across the card's face. The sound was quiet but absolute, the kind that cut cleanly through silence rather than adding to it. The glowing cards beside it flickered in response, their colors dimming as if instinctively withdrawing.
From the fractures, darkness spilled.
Not lightless emptiness. Not shadow cast by something else. This darkness had weight. It poured slowly, thick and deliberate, like ink sinking into water or smoke that refused to rise. It did not explode outward. It settled.
The black glass table beneath the card began to lose its reflection. The perfect mirror dulled, then softened, as if the surface itself were being absorbed. The darkness spread in a shallow pool, creeping outward, swallowing the edges of the other cards first.
The red glow vanished.
Then blue.
Then green, gold, violet—each extinguished in turn, not violently erased, but quietly smothered. The five cards did not crack. They did not resist. They simply went inert, their light gone, their purpose seemingly revoked.
Reo's fingers tightened reflexively around the blank card's edge. It was vibrating now—not trembling, but resonating, like something vast moving far below the surface.
"What is this?" he asked.
Ophelia did not answer.
She was standing.
Reo noticed it a heartbeat later, struck not by the movement itself, but by its rarity. She had risen too quickly, the motion uncharacteristically abrupt. Her chair had vanished behind her, unremarked and irrelevant.
For the first time since he had met her, Ophelia looked unsettled.
Not frightened—fear would have been too human—but disrupted. Her posture was rigid, her hands no longer folded but slightly apart, fingers tense as though bracing against an unseen pressure. Her eyes were fixed on the card, wide with something like disbelief.
"That shouldn't—" she began, then stopped.
The darkness continued to pour from the fractures, flowing down Reo's hand without touching it. Where it passed, the void itself seemed to deepen, layers of black folding inward like collapsing depth.
Letters surfaced within the darkness.
They did not glow. They did not shine. They asserted themselves by contrast, pale shapes carved into the dark as if absence itself had taken form.
SSS-RANK
The words hung in the air between them, immense and precise.
Then more followed.
DARK DRAGON LEGACY
The pressure intensified.
Reo felt it in a way he hadn't felt anything since dying—not pain, not cold, but gravity. As if the concept of weight had been reintroduced, not to his body, but to his existence. His thoughts slowed under it. His awareness compressed.
"Legacy?" he said, the word rough in his throat. "What does that mean?"
Ophelia did not look at him.
"That designation," she said slowly, "is not a gift."
The darkness surged, pulsing once, as though reacting to being named.
"It is an inheritance."
Reo swallowed. "Inherited from who?"
Ophelia hesitated.
Not the brief, almost theoretical pauses from before. This hesitation was longer. Charged. The kind that came from deciding whether truth was more dangerous than ignorance.
"Only one human consciousness has ever borne that rank," she said.
Reo felt his pulse quicken, though he had no heart to beat. "And?"
"And the result was erased."
The word landed hard.
"Erased how?" he asked. "Died?"
"No."
"Failed?"
"No."
"Then what?"
Ophelia finally turned to him.
Her eyes were sharp now, focused with an intensity he hadn't seen before. Not observational. Evaluative.
"There is no record," she said. "No outcome. No reincarnation thread. No termination event. The system does not contain an end state."
Reo stared at her. "That doesn't make sense."
"No," she agreed. "It doesn't."
The darkness around the card thickened further, rising now, curling upward in slow, heavy plumes. It did not consume Reo's hand, but it framed it, like a crown of shadow forming around a central point.
"What is a Dark Dragon?" he asked.
Ophelia's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
"A corrective force," she said. "Or a destabilizing one. The distinction is… contested."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one that exists."
The void shuddered.
It was subtle, but unmistakable—a tremor that rippled across the infinite black, distorting reflections that had already begun to fail. Hairline fractures appeared in the distance, not in the card, but in space itself, like cracks spreading through glass too large to comprehend.
Reo felt the pressure increase again, bearing down on him from every direction at once.
"You said survival wasn't guaranteed," he said. "You didn't say reality might break."
Ophelia's gaze snapped back to the card. "I did not anticipate activation."
"Activation," he echoed. "So it really did choose me."
Her lips parted slightly.
"Yes."
The admission was barely audible.
The darkness surged higher, swallowing the space between them. The table disintegrated silently, its black glass dissolving into the spreading mass. The other five cards vanished with it, not destroyed so much as rendered irrelevant.
The fractures in the void widened.
Chunks of reflection peeled away, drifting off like shards of a broken mirror, each one containing distorted images of Reo—standing, falling, dissolving—possibilities shedding themselves as the space failed to hold them.
"Ophelia," he said, raising his voice for the first time. "What happens now?"
For a fraction of a moment, she looked almost… human.
Not compassionate. Not gentle. But strained, as if the role she inhabited no longer quite fit the situation unfolding.
"The interval is collapsing," she said. "This state cannot contain what you have accepted."
"Accepted what?" he demanded.
She took a step toward him.
The darkness recoiled slightly at her approach, as though recognizing her authority—and then pressed back harder, testing it.
"A legacy does not grant power," she said quickly. "It imposes continuity. You will carry something forward that predates you and does not require your consent."
"Carry it where?"
"I don't know."
The honesty struck him harder than any threat.
The void convulsed.
A deep, soundless rupture tore through the space behind Reo, a vertical seam of absolute nothingness opening like a wound. Beyond it, there was no black glass, no reflection—only a depth so profound it erased the idea of distance.
Reo staggered, barely keeping his footing as the ground beneath him lost coherence.
"Wait," he said. "You said this conversation wasn't supposed to happen."
"It isn't," Ophelia replied.
The darkness surged again, pulling at him now, a slow, inexorable draw toward the rupture. Not a yank. Not a fall. A claim.
"What about memory?" he asked. "Do I forget this too?"
Ophelia's eyes flicked to the widening seam, then back to him.
"I don't know," she said.
That, more than anything else, told him how far beyond expectation this had gone.
The space began to fold inward, reflections collapsing into themselves, layers of black stacking and compressing as if reality were being packed away. The pressure was immense now, suffocating in its density.
Reo felt himself being pulled free of the moment—of the void, of Ophelia, of the fragile stability that had allowed him to ask questions at all.
"Ophelia!" he called.
She moved closer, close enough now that he could see the fine cracks of strain in her composure. She raised one hand, not to stop what was happening—only to reach toward him, fingers hovering just short of contact.
Her voice dropped, stripped of formality.
"So it chose you," she whispered.
The darkness closed in.
And the interval broke.