The bullet didn't whistle.
In the absolute silence of the Archive's Cathedral, sound was a luxury the dead couldn't afford.
It was a Void-Slug—a projectile carved from the bone of a lower-tier Shinigami, designed to pierce through physical matter and spiritual shields alike.
I felt the air ripple.
Jisoo didn't blink. His finger on the trigger was steady, his black eyes devoid of the flicker of recognition that had defined our friendship for five years.
He wasn't Jisoo anymore.
He was a vessel. A blank page that the Archive had filled with their own twisted scripture.
I didn't try to dodge.
In this hallway of marble and silver, distance was an illusion controlled by the Grand Arbitrator. If I moved left, the bullet would simply find me there. If I moved right, the floor would stretch to meet the impact.
I raised the Obsidian Relic.
"Forget the trajectory," I whispered.
The stone hummed.
It wasn't a pulse this time; it was a scream. A high-pitched, tectonic vibration that traveled through my bones and threatened to shatter my teeth.
The Void-Slug entered the sphere of influence around the Relic.
It didn't stop. It didn't drop.
It simply ceased to be a threat.
The bullet turned into a swarm of black butterflies, their wings made of ash and forgotten memories. They fluttered harmlessly against my chest, dissolving into nothingness before they could touch my coat.
I lowered my hand, my breath coming in ragged gasps.
The seventh petal on my palm was bleeding. Actual, physical blood—thick and dark like motor oil—was seeping through my glove.
"Impressive," the Grand Arbitrator said.
He sat on his throne of bone, his silver cane resting against his knee. He looked like a grandfatherly figure if you ignored the fact that his shadow was currently eating the light around his feet.
"The Obsidian Relic has always been temperamental. It prefers to be used by those who have nothing left to lose. Tell me, Ren… what do you still have?"
I didn't answer.
I looked at Jisoo. He was reloading the rifle, his movements mechanical, precise, and horrifyingly efficient.
"Jisoo," I said, my voice cracking.
He didn't even pause.
"It's no use," the Arbitrator sighed, the sound echoing through the vaulted ceiling. "The boy you knew is gone. When you used the Relic in Sector 4, you created a vacuum. A beautiful, perfect void in his mind. Nature abhors a vacuum, Ren. And the Archive… we adore them."
He stood up, the bone throne groaning as the weight shifted.
"We didn't just give him new memories. We gave him a New Purpose. He is now the Script of the Archive. He doesn't act; he fulfills. He doesn't think; he executes."
The Arbitrator gestured to the walls around us.
Thousands of scrolls were shelved in the shadows, each one a contract signed in blood, sweat, and despair. This wasn't a church. It was a bank. The most powerful bank in the world, where the currency was human existence.
"You are a glitch, Ren. A Sovereign without a kingdom. You think you're free because you don't pay the price, but look at you."
He pointed his cane at me.
"You're rotting. Every time you command a Shinigami, every time you use that stone, you're not 'subjugating' anything. You're just accelerating the inevitable."
Behind me, Elena let out a sharp, pained cry.
I turned my head slightly.
She was on her knees, her hands clawing at her throat. The grey dust that had once been her blood needles was swirling around her, forming a suffocating shroud.
The Cathedral was rejecting her.
"The girl is a Hemomancer," the Arbitrator said, his eyes narrowing. "A creature of debt. She exists because she owes. In this house of Law, her debt is being called to account. She will be dust within the hour, Ren. Unless…"
"Unless what?" I spat.
"Unless you give me the stone. And yourself."
I felt the Requiem Authority stirring deep in my marrow. It wanted to lash out. It wanted to turn this entire cathedral into a graveyard.
But the eighth petal was waiting.
I could feel it pressing against the surface of my skin, a jagged, thorn-like growth that promised power but demanded my soul as collateral.
*"Don't… don't do it,"* Elena wheezed.
Her eyes were clouded with grey. She was disappearing, literally being erased by the logic of the room.
I looked back at Jisoo.
He had the rifle aimed at me again.
But this time, he wasn't alone.
Two other figures stepped out from the shadows of the pillars.
Executioners.
One carried a heavy, serrated blade that seemed to be made of frozen screams. The other held a vial of liquid starlight that pulsed with a lethal rhythm.
They were the Archive's elite. Men and women who had traded every ounce of their humanity for a fragment of divine authority.
"Ren," the Arbitrator said, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous hum. "You are tired. I can see it in the way you stand. The Watcher is getting closer, isn't he?"
I stiffened.
"How do you know about the Watcher?"
The Arbitrator laughed—a dry, rattling sound.
"The Pale Watcher isn't your guardian, you fool. He's the Auditor. He's the one who tallies the total at the end of the night. Every petal on your hand is a step he takes toward you. When the twelfth blooms, he won't just stand behind you. He will step into you."
He walked down the marble steps, his cane clicking rhythmically.
*Clack.*
*Clack.*
*Clack.*
"You think you're a Sovereign. But you're just a cocoon. And what's growing inside you isn't something this world is ready to meet."
I gripped the Obsidian Relic. My knuckles were white, the skin stretched so thin it looked transparent.
"I don't care what I am," I said.
I stepped forward, my boots echoing like gunshots.
"I don't care about the petals. I don't care about the Watcher."
I looked at Jisoo, and for a split second, I saw it.
A flicker.
Not in his eyes, but in the way his finger twitched on the trigger.
The black ink of the Archive was strong, but Jisoo had always been a stubborn bastard. Even with his dreams gone, something remained.
The muscle memory of a friend.
"I'm here to burn this place down," I said, the words feeling like shards of glass in my throat.
The Grand Arbitrator stopped. His smile vanished.
"Then you choose death. Not just yours, but the girl's. And your friend's."
"No," I said.
I raised the black lotus mark.
I didn't call upon a Shinigami.
I didn't call upon the Relic.
I called upon the void inside myself.
"I choose to rewrite the contract."
The seventh petal burst.
It didn't just bloom; it exploded into a spray of black, viscous ink that coated my entire arm. The pain was beyond anything I had ever felt. It was the sensation of my DNA being unspooled and re-threaded with cold iron.
The Eighth Petal opened.
The world turned grey.
The Grand Arbitrator's eyes widened. He raised his cane, but he was too slow.
Time didn't stop, but it became heavy. Every movement felt like wading through chest-deep molasses.
I moved.
I didn't walk; I glided across the marble, the Obsidian Relic acting as a beacon of anti-light.
I reached Jisoo in a heartbeat.
He tried to swing the rifle, but I grabbed the barrel with my blackened hand. The metal hissed and melted where I touched it.
I reached out with my other hand and pressed the Obsidian Relic against his forehead.
"Remember," I commanded.
The stone flared white.
*"RE-MEMBER!"*
I poured everything into that single word. Every memory of the rain in District 9. Every mission. Every shared cigarette. Every time we nearly died and laughed about it later.
I felt the Archive's script fighting back. It felt like trying to push a mountain with my bare palms. The black ink in Jisoo's eyes swirled violently, trying to drown out the sparks of light I was forcing in.
"Ren… stop…" the Arbitrator roared, his voice coming from a thousand miles away.
I felt a cold hand on my shoulder.
The Pale Watcher.
He was right there. His featureless face was inches from mine. I could feel the absolute nothingness radiating from him.
He wasn't stopping me.
He was watching the birth of something new.
Jisoo's mouth opened in a silent scream.
The black ink began to leak from his tear ducts, his nose, his ears. It fell to the floor, hissing like acid.
And then, the amber light returned.
It was dim. It was broken. But it was there.
Jisoo's eyes focused. He looked at me, his face contorted in agony.
"Ren?" he whispered.
"I've got you," I said, though I felt my own grip on reality slipping.
I turned to the Grand Arbitrator, who was now trembling with a mixture of rage and genuine fear.
"The Relic is empty," I told him, holding up the stone.
It was true. The Obsidian Relic was now a clear, colorless piece of glass. I had dumped every ounce of its conceptual power into Jisoo's mind to overwrite the Archive's script.
The Arbitrator snarled.
"You fool. You've sacrificed the only weapon you had to save a ghost. Now you have nothing. No Relic. No Authority left to spend."
He raised his cane, and the two Executioners lunged.
I stood my ground, my blackened arm smoking.
"I don't need the stone anymore," I said.
I looked at the eighth petal on my hand.
It wasn't black anymore.
It was a deep, terrifying crimson.
The color of a life that refuses to be erased.
"Jisoo," I said.
My friend, still bleeding black ink from his eyes, raised what was left of his rifle.
"Five seconds?" I asked.
Jisoo wiped his face, a grim, bloody smile touching his lips.
"No," he whispered. "For this… I'll give you ten."
His eyes flared a brilliant, blinding amber.
The Executioners froze mid-air.
The Grand Arbitrator's cane shattered into a thousand silver splinters.
And in the corner of my eye, the Pale Watcher did something he had never done before.
He stepped back.
The Cathedral began to shake. Not from an earthquake, but from a shift in the very laws of the world.
The Sovereign had finally stopped asking for permission to exist.
"Let's go," I told Elena, who was starting to breathe again as the grey shroud dissipated.
But as we turned to flee the heart of the Archive, a new sound echoed through the halls.
A deep, resonant bell toll.
*Gong.*
The Sound of the Ninth Petal.
And from the shadows behind the Grand Arbitrator's throne, something much larger than a Shinigami began to crawl out.
The Archive didn't just keep contracts.
They kept the things that wrote them.
The hunt was no longer just about survival.
It was about who would own the end of the world.
We ran into the dark, the amber light of Jisoo's eyes our only guide.
But I could still feel the eighth petal burning.
And I knew, with a terrible certainty, that by saving Jisoo, I had invited something much worse into my own head.
The Watcher wasn't just an Auditor.
He was an invitation.
And the door was already half-open.
"Ren," Jisoo gasped as we reached the outer gates. "The future… it's gone."
"What do you mean?"
"I can't see five seconds ahead anymore," he whispered, his eyes wide with terror.
"I can see forever. And we're not in it."
I didn't look back.
I just kept running, the cold, red light of the eighth petal leading us into a night that would never end.