Chapter 42 - For The One He Cannot Name [Part 3]

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Time fractured.

Gepard watched the ice spear punch through his commander's abdomen. Watched Bronya's hands rise slowly to touch the crystalline shaft now protruding from her body. Watched blood bloom across her uniform like a crimson flower opening to the sun.

Cocolia's smile widened into something that wore his former leader's face but belonged to something else entirely.

Seele moved.

The scythe-wielder blurred forward in a flash of purple light, quantum energy crackling around her as she closed the distance. Cocolia's eyes shifted—not her head, just her eyes—tracking the attack with unnatural precision.

The world turned to grayscale.

Chronosurge. The same ability Xander used, now wielded by the monster wearing Cocolia's skin.

Seele twisted mid-leap, her scythe already swinging in an arc that would have bisected the woman's neck. But Cocolia moved at the same impossible speed, raising an ice lance to intercept. The angle was wrong. Seele couldn't redirect in time. She'd impale herself on that frozen blade if she continued the attack as planned.

So she changed targets.

Her own leg.

The scythe bit through meat and bone just above her left knee. Blood sprayed in a wide arc. The severed limb tumbled away as Seele's momentum carried her forward, her scream of agony tearing through the frozen air even as her blade continued its path toward Cocolia's throat.

The scythe connected. Bit deep. Drew a line of gold-tinged ichor across the woman's neck that should have severed her head from her shoulders.

Ice totems erupted between them.

Two massive pillars of crystalline ice, each taller than a man, materialized directly in the scythe's path. Seele's blade sheared through the first. Carved halfway through the second. But the resistance was enough. Her attack lost momentum. Lost killing force.

Cocolia's neck sealed itself with a sound like cracking ice.

Seele hit the ground hard, her remaining leg buckling beneath her. She bit down on her lip so hard blood welled immediately, but the only sound that escaped was a guttural growl of pure fury.

"Bronya!" Her voice came out shredded. "Now!"

Bronya lay crumpled on the frozen ground, an ice spear through her stomach, blood pooling beneath her. But her hand moved. Trembling. Determined. She thumbed her rifle against the ground with a muffled thump.

Reality stuttered.

Seele's attack replayed itself like a recording being run back through time. One moment she was on the ground, bleeding and broken. The next she was mid-swing again, scythe arcing toward Cocolia's exposed throat with all the force it had carried the first time.

Cocolia raised an ice lance. Blocked the strike. But it bought precious seconds.

Gepard roared.

The sound tore from somewhere deep in his chest, bypassing his throat entirely. A primal thing. The cry of a brother watching his family being destroyed piece by piece. He crossed the distance in three strides, drawing his fist back as golden light blazed across his knuckles.

He punched Cocolia in the face.

The impact generated a shockwave that rippled outward in concentric circles of force. Bronya and Seele flew backward, tumbling across the ice like leaves caught in a gale. But Gepard's shield expanded before they hit the ground, a dome of shimmering amber that cushioned their fall and prevented further damage.

Cocolia's head snapped back. Her feet left the ground. She sailed backward twenty meters before crashing into a frozen pillar with enough force to spider-web the ancient ice.

"Bronya! Seele!" March's voice cracked with panic as she sprinted toward them, ice crystals already forming around her hands.

Natasha was right behind her, green healing light flickering across her palms as she dropped to her knees beside Bronya first. The spear still jutted from the girl's abdomen.

"Don't pull it out," Natasha commanded, her hands already glowing brighter as she pressed them against the wound. "March, I need you to create ice around the entry point. Seal the blood vessels. We need to stabilize her before we can move that thing."

March nodded, her usual chatter completely absent as she focused on creating a lattice of frost around the spear's shaft where it pierced Bronya's body.

Gepard didn't look back. Couldn't afford to. Cocolia was already rising from where she'd fallen, brushing frost from her shoulders like it was morning dew instead of evidence of the force that had just sent her flying.

"Well struck, Captain." The voice that came from her mouth sounded like a chorus. Multiple tones layered over each other in a harmony that made his teeth ache. "Perhaps there is some worth in the Landau bloodline after all."

Movement flickered at the edge of his vision. Serval, stepping up beside him. Her guitar hung from one hand, electricity already crackling along its strings.

"Together?" she asked quietly.

"Together," he confirmed.

They moved as one.

Gepard summoned his shield, the golden barrier expanding before him as he charged forward. Serval followed in his wake, using him as cover while she wound up a devastating electrical attack.

Cocolia laughed. The sound echoed across the frozen wastes like breaking glass.

"How touching. The Landau siblings, united at last." She raised both hands, and ice lances materialized in the air around her—dozens of them, all pointed directly at Gepard and Serval. "Tell me, Captain. Does this make you feel better about your failures?"

The lances launched.

Gepard's shield absorbed the first volley. The second. The third drove him back a step, his boots skidding across ice as the force mounted. Serval swung her guitar, sending a bolt of lightning through a gap in his defense that connected with Cocolia's shoulder.

The woman barely flinched. Just smiled that horrible smile and conjured more lances.

"So much sacrifice," she continued, her voice carrying easily over the sounds of combat. "So many years of dedication. The dutiful son. The loyal soldier. The guardian of the Landau legacy." Another volley slammed into Gepard's shield. "And when the moment came—when the Supreme Guardian stood before you on Everwinter Hill and revealed her true intentions—what did you do?"

Gepard gritted his teeth. Pushed forward another step. Serval sent another lightning bolt crackling past his shoulder.

"You did nothing." Cocolia's voice turned mocking. "The paragon of Preservation. The devoted follower of the Amber Lord. And you couldn't even raise your fist. How many died while you stood there, frozen by indecision? How many children were crushed beneath falling rubble because you lacked the courage to stop me when you had the chance?"

"Shut up!" Serval's guitar sang with fury as she channeled more power through its strings. "You don't get to talk about courage!"

"Oh, but I do." Cocolia dodged the lightning with ease, moving in that same terrible Chronosurge blur. "After all, I know everything about both of you. Every secret. Every shame. Every petty resentment and bitter jealousy."

She appeared directly in front of Gepard. Too close. Inside his guard. Her hand shot forward, fingers wrapping around the edge of his shield.

"All those years," she whispered, her face just inches from his. "All that effort to redeem your family name. To cover up your sister's failures. To erase the stain of your father's arrogant pride." She wrenched the shield aside. "For nothing."

Gepard stumbled. Off-balance. Exposed.

Cocolia's other hand came up, ice forming into a dagger between her fingers.

Serval's guitar caught her in the side of the head.

The amplified impact sent Cocolia reeling to the right. Serval pressed the advantage, playing a violent riff that sent waves of electrical energy cascading across the frozen ground.

"Failed daughter," Cocolia said, shaking off the blow like it was nothing. "Always second-best. Never quite measuring up to expectations, were you?" She gestured, and ice walls erupted between her and Serval's lightning. "Tell me, how did it feel? Knowing your own mentor looked at you with disappointment? Knowing your father saw you as the embarrassment that needed to be hidden away?"

Serval's jaw clenched so hard Gepard heard her teeth grind together.

"All that resentment," Cocolia continued, circling them slowly. "All that hate. And for what? They're gone now. Dead and buried beneath the rubble. Your father will never see you prove him wrong. Cocolia will never acknowledge your brilliance. All those people you wanted so desperately to impress—they'll all be ash within the hour."

"No." The word came out quiet. Controlled. Serval's fingers moved across her guitar strings with deliberate precision. "No, you're wrong."

"Am I?" Cocolia tilted her head. "About which part, I wonder?"

Gepard forced himself upright. His shield reformed in his hands, the amber light flickering but holding steady. Something burned in his chest—not just anger, but something fiercer. Something that refused to yield.

"You're wrong about all of it," he said, his voice carrying across the ice. "I failed. I know that. I'll carry the weight of that failure for whatever time I have left. But I refuse—" He slammed his shield into the ground, and cracks spider-webbed out from the impact point. "I refuse to accept your worldview."

Cocolia raised an eyebrow. "My worldview?"

"That suffering justifies annihilation." Gepard stepped forward, shield raised, every muscle in his body coiled and ready. "That because pain exists, the world should never have been. That's the philosophy of a coward hiding behind cosmic justification."

He punched forward. His fist connected with empty air as Cocolia blurred aside, but he expected that. Adjusted. Pivoted. Brought his shield around in a sweeping arc that forced her back.

"The Preservation doesn't promise a world without suffering," he continued, pressing the attack. "It promises guardians who stand against the suffering. Who shield the vulnerable. Who build walls not to hide behind, but to give others time to heal. Time to grow. Time to find their own strength."

Serval joined him, matching his rhythm. Guitar and shield working in concert, driving Cocolia back step by step.

"Suffering is real," Gepard said. "Loss is real. Failure is real. But so is the choice to keep standing. To keep fighting. To keep protecting what matters even when everything seems lost."

He dropped low, sweeping Cocolia's legs. She jumped, but Serval was ready. A lightning bolt caught her mid-air, sending her crashing down hard.

"That's the path we walk," Gepard finished, standing over her. "Not because we're worthy. Not because we'll succeed. But because someone has to try."

Cocolia lay there for a moment, almost peaceful. Then she laughed. Long and loud and horrible.

"Beautiful speech," she said, rising to her feet with unnatural grace. "Truly inspiring. Now let me show you the flaw in your philosophy."

She gestured. Ice erupted from the ground in a forest of spikes, forcing Gepard and Serval to leap back.

"You speak of protection," Cocolia said, her form beginning to shift and warp. "Of shielding the vulnerable. Of building walls. But walls can be broken. Shields can shatter. And the vulnerable?" Her smile stretched too wide. "They die screaming while their guardians watch helplessly."

More ice lances formed. Hundreds this time. Thousands. They filled the air like a blizzard made of blades.

Gepard raised his shield. It wouldn't be enough. He knew that. But he raised it anyway.

Serval stepped up beside him, guitar humming with barely contained power.

"One shot," she murmured. "You open, I'll finish."

He glanced at her. Saw his sister—not the rebellious black sheep, not the failed scientist, but the brilliant woman who'd always been willing to break the rules when breaking them meant protecting someone who needed it.

"On three?"

"On three."

They charged together.

Gepard's shield blazed with golden light as he poured everything he had into it. The preservation energy condensed, solidified, became something more than just a barrier. It became a statement. A refusal to yield written in light and will.

Cocolia met them head-on, ice streaming from her hands in torrents.

The shield held. Barely. Gepard felt his bones creak under the pressure. Felt blood vessels burst in his eyes from the strain. But he didn't lower it.

"Now!" he bellowed.

Serval vaulted over his shoulder, guitar already swinging. She brought it down on Cocolia's head with every ounce of strength she possessed.

The impact rang out like a thunderclap.

Cocolia staggered. Gepard pushed forward, driving her back. Serval hit her again. And again. Each strike punctuated with words.

"You—stupid—alien—thing!"

Gepard formed a dome of ice around Cocolia using what little energy he had left. Small. Confining. Just enough space for her body and nothing else.

Serval pressed both hands against her guitar. Poured her soul into the strings.

"You're missing the forest for the trees!" she screamed. "Yes, I'm resentful! Yes, I have grudges! But the reason I'm so mad is because you robbed me of the chance to talk things out!"

The guitar sang. Not a melody. A scream given sound. Electricity blazed inside the ice dome, turning it into a prison of light and fury.

"I made peace with never forgiving her!" Serval's voice cracked. "With never forgiving my father! But I had hope! Hope that one day I could look him in the eyes and hug him and move forward! That we could share one more family meal together—Gepard, Lynx, Mother, Father, and me! One more chance to be a family!"

The dome glowed white-hot. Steam rose where ice met electricity.

"You robbed me of that!" Tears streaked down Serval's face. "Robbed thousands of that chance! How many families have words they can't take back now? How many will carry regrets to their graves because you stole their time?"

She played harder. Faster. The dome began to crack from the internal pressure.

"I won't have it!" she finished. "I won't let you take anything else!"

The dome shattered.

Cocolia burst through, moving so fast she appeared as a blur. Her hand locked around Serval's throat. Wrenched the guitar from her grip.

Gepard lunged forward, but shapes materialized out of thin air. Ice Out of Space—dozens of them, their crystalline bodies reflecting the dim light as they surrounded the group.

"Gepard!" March's voice rang out as she conjured ice shields to protect Natasha and the wounded.

He had no choice. Had to deal with the immediate threats first. His fists flew, each punch sending an Ice Out of Space shattering into fragments. But there were too many. They kept coming. Kept pressing.

Behind him, he heard Bronya's rifle crack repeatedly as she fired from the ground, each shot precise despite her wounds. Heard Seele's guttural war cry as she used her one remaining leg to launch herself at any creature that got too close to Bronya.

But he couldn't reach Serval.

Cocolia lifted his sister by the throat, examining the guitar in her other hand with almost clinical interest.

"This isn't the guitar we built together," she noted. Her grip tightened, and Serval's face began turning purple.

"Sorry," Serval wheezed out with a ghost of her usual sarcasm. "Broke it. Fit of rage."

"Pity." Cocolia positioned her fingers on the strings. "I would have preferred to use our creation for this."

Gepard saw it happening. Saw what she intended. Saw and couldn't stop it.

"No!" The word tore from his throat as he destroyed two more Ice Out of Space and tried desperately to close the distance. "Don't—"

Cocolia strummed.

Electricity surged through Serval's body with devastating force. Her back arched. Her mouth opened in a scream that echoed across the tundra and into Gepard's soul.

He screamed with her. Roared her name as he fought through the enemies surrounding him, watching his sister convulse in Cocolia's grip.

The lights faded.

Serval hung limp, smoke rising from her clothing.

"You just won't stop being a nuisance," Cocolia said, but she wasn't looking at Serval anymore. "Abomination."

Gepard's gaze snapped to where she stared.

Xander knelt on the frozen ground twenty meters away. Blood covered his face, running from his nose and ears and eyes that had gone completely bloodshot. His remaining arm extended toward them, fingers spread wide, golden light pulsing between his fingertips.

Around Serval's body, barely visible until Gepard looked directly at it, shimmered a shield of pure preservation energy.

Serval wasn't moving. Wasn't breathing that Gepard could see.

Xander swayed where he knelt, his eyes wide and staring and utterly focused on maintaining that shield despite what it clearly cost him.

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The memory flickered into focus—a narrow street steeped in late sunlight.

A boy, maybe seven, pedaled down the uneven road on a bike a size too big. His legs pinwheeled, wobbling wildly as he tried to steady himself. Ten paces back, Napoleon watched, arms crossed, a small smile tugging at his mouth.

The front wheel caught a crack. The bike pitched sideways. Alexander hit the ground with a dull thud and a sharp scrape of skin.

Napoleon sighed, not out of frustration, but habit, and walked over. The boy was already blinking fast, tears threatening.

"You okay?"

Alexander nodded, though his lip trembled. "I messed it up."

"Looks like it." Napoleon crouched, flipping open a small tin. "Let's see."

He cleaned the scrape, gentle but methodical. Alexander hissed as the antiseptic touched raw skin.

"I'm sorry," the boy muttered.

Napoleon glanced up. "For what?"

"I fell."

Napoleon hummed, neither agreeing nor denying. "That's how you learn, isn't it?"

Alexander frowned, still blinking at the sting. "But it hurts."

"Yeah," Napoleon said quietly. "It does." He pressed the gauze down and smoothed it with his thumb. "But you'll try again. You want to learn how to ride the bike, after all."

"Yes, but… what if I fall again?"

"You probably will." Napoleon's tone was easy, almost teasing. "You'll keep falling until you stop thinking about it."

Alexander squinted. "That doesn't make sense. If it hurts, why would I stop thinking about it?"

Napoleon chuckled. "Doesn't have to. Just means you don't quit. You keep trying until it feels easy."

He tied the bandage off, sat back on his heels. The light caught on his face, softening the lines there.

Alexander looked up at him. "Dad… you never quit things, right?"

Napoleon blinked, caught off guard. "Me?"

"Yeah," Alexander said. "I've never seen you quit anything."

The older one smiled, small and wry. "That's because you didn't know me when I was your age. I used to quit all the time."

The boy frowned, suspicious. "You did?"

"Oh, sure. Homework. Piano lessons. I even quit football once."

That made Alexander pause, eyes narrowing. "Because you weren't good enough to go pro?"

Napoleon let out a short laugh, shaking his head as he cleaned the last bit of dirt from the scrape.

"Exactly. No team in their right mind wanted me. No matter what I wanted everyone else to believe, I was galaxies removed from ever being Messi material."

Alexander giggled, then quieted, thinking. "So… when did you stop quitting?"

Napoleon didn't answer right away. He packed up the first-aid tin, closed it with a soft click.

"Guess it started when I met your mom," he said finally. "She made everything matter a little more. And then, when I found out you were coming…" He looked at the boy and smiled faintly. "Well. After that, quitting stopped feeling like an option."

Alexander tilted his head. "Because of us?"

"Because of love," Napoleon said simply. "It makes you keep going, even when you don't want to. Even when it hurts."

He stood, offering a hand. "Come on. Let's get you back on the bike. Your mother won't let me live it down if we're late for church."

Alexander hesitated, then took it.

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Everything existed in fragments.

Bronya. Stomach punctured. Ice through flesh. Blood pooling beneath her.

Seele. One leg. One. Just one. The other—gone. Severed. She fought anyway. Always fought.

Gepard. Bruises blooming purple across skin that would take months to heal. Months. If they had months. If any of them had—

Natasha. Scars. Deep ones. The kind that would mark her for life. Every year. Every mirror. She'd remember this day.

March. Tears tracking through the grime on her face. Uniform torn. Blood. So much blood. But still conjuring shields. Still holding back the Ice Out of Space creatures. Still—

Survive.

The voice came from somewhere distant. Inside. Outside. Didn't matter.

His gaze locked on blonde hair streaked with blue.

Serval.

Not moving.

Her chest didn't rise. Didn't fall. Smoke curled from her clothing where electricity had—

Had he been too late?

Pain lanced through his skull. White-hot. Blinding. His body screamed. Every nerve ending. Every cell. It hurt. God, it hurt. It hurt.

The forehead. He'd kissed her forehead. Told her not to rush. Something important. Worth waiting for.

Clara's smile. Small hands holding his broken watch. "I'll fix it, Xander."

The clarity hit him like Gepard's fists.

Losing them hurt worse than dying.

Worse than this pain.

Worse than anything.

His remaining arm shook. Pressed against frozen ground. Pushed.

Stand.

His legs buckled. Corrected. Rose.

The phone. Where was—there. Pocket. Wet with blood but functional.

His fingers wouldn't cooperate. Slipped across the screen. Smeared red.

Survive.

Again. Focus. One finger. Just one.

Period. Send.

The world tilted.

Belobog's stellaron—Cocolia—grabbed Serval's limp form. Hurled it.

Gepard caught her. Cradled her against his chest. His face twisted into something broken.

The Ice Out of Space surged forward. Dozens. Hundreds. Crystalline bodies reflecting—

March's arrows. Natasha's grenades. Bronya firing from the ground, each shot precise despite the spear through her stomach.

They wouldn't hold.

"Father," Alexander whispered. Napoleon's face swam before him. Teaching him to box. To stand when standing meant pain. "Give me strength."

Cocolia opened her mouth. Prepared to speak. To say something awful. Something—

Alexander activated Chronosurge.

Launched himself forward.

Skull met crystalline face.

The impact split his head open. He felt it crack. Felt warm blood cascade down his face. Felt—

Didn't matter.

She shrieked.

He pushed. Moved her away from the others. Away from—

"I can help. Momentarily. Don't expect more."

The man with the skull mask.

The world slowed further. Became liquid. Became frames of a film playing at quarter speed.

Cocolia's movements telegraphed themselves. Her crystalline arm drawing back. Ice forming at her fingertips. The angle. The trajectory. The—

Alexander matched her.

Chronosurge against Chronosurge. Time manipulation against time manipulation.

He saw everything.

Dodged left. Her ice spear grazed his ribs instead of puncturing his heart.

Blocked right. Her follow-up strike shattered against golden flame.

"March, no!" He heard a voice. Distant. Someone else's. "Stay back!"

She'd seen the notification. The period. The—

"You don't really believe in your 'God', do you?" Cocolia's voice split into harmonics. Multiple tones speaking as one.

Desperate. Afraid.

"When your loved ones die, and ascend to your 'heaven'… You weep. You wail. Because deep down in your heart, you know there's no such thing!"

Light blazed above them.

Red. Burning.

A star descending.

Cocolia's golden eyes widened. She tried to twist. To flee. To—

Alexander's remaining arm locked around her waist. Pulled her close.

Ice spears erupted from her body. Drove through his stomach. His chest. His shoulder. His—

He held on.

"No." Blood filled his mouth. He smiled through it. "You're wrong."

Another spear. Through his lung. He couldn't breathe. Didn't need to.

"I weep…" The star grew brighter. Closer. "I wail…"

His vision blurred. Clara's face. Small. Trusting. Holding his father's watch.

"I'll wait for you, Xander."

"Because deep down, I suspect…" The heat reached them. Reality bent.

March screamed his name. The sound shattered something in his chest worse than any spear.

"I'm not worthy of His love…"

Cocolia shrieked. Struggled. Tried to tear herself free.

He closed his eyes.

Smiled wider.

"And heaven is out of my reach."

The Heavenly Flare struck.

March screamed despair.

Cocolia screamed agony.

Alexander didn't flinch.

Just smiled.

Finally.

Finally, the debt was paid.

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The monitor's shriek tore through the hospital corridor.

Room 426. Again.

Dr. Chen sprinted through the doorway, her team flooding in behind her. The child on the bed lay motionless, skin pale as fresh snow, that same impossible stillness they'd witnessed eleven times already today.

"Yaoshi be damned. Twelfth episode," Nurse Torvik announced, hands already moving to begin compressions. "Vitals crashed thirty seconds ago."

"Move aside." Dr. Chen positioned herself at the bedside, then stopped. Her breath caught.

The child's right arm had changed. Skin that had been a healthy tan color this morning now appeared translucent, almost crystalline. Veins showed through like dark rivers beneath ice. As she watched, the discoloration crept higher, spreading toward the shoulder in slow, inexorable progression.

"What in the name of—" Martinez stepped closer. "Doctor, the hair."

White. Not gray like age, but pure white like starlight. The patches they'd noted earlier had consumed nearly half the child's head now, platinum strands replacing dark brown in real time. Even as they stared, more color drained away.

"I don't understand." Dr. Chen's hands hovered over the small chest, medical training warring with mounting dread. "This isn't possible."

"BP still dropping. No pulse." Torvik's voice remained steady despite the wrongness unfolding before them.

Chen pulled power from the Path of Abundance, golden light blooming around her fingers. She pressed both hands against the child's chest, channeling healing energy with everything she had. Cellular regeneration. Cardiac stimulation. The full spectrum of techniques she'd mastered over fifteen years of practice.

The light flickered against the child's skin, then dissipated like mist.

Nothing. Not even a flutter of response.

"That's not—" She tried again, pouring more power into the effort. The glow intensified, bathing the room in warm radiance. "This should be working."

The monitor's flatline continued its merciless song.

Outside the sealed door, a figure stood motionless in the corridor's dim lighting. She wore civilian clothes—a plain coat, unremarkable features, nothing to draw attention. Her fingers dug into her own arms hard enough to bruise as raised voices filtered through the barrier.

"—never seen anything like this—"

"—Abundance techniques aren't taking—"

"—losing him—"

Her grip tightened. A tremor ran through her shoulders, quickly suppressed. She pressed herself against the wall beside the door frame, head bowed, platinum-blonde hair falling forward to hide her face.

Inside, the alarm continued to scream.

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The scream tore from March's throat, raw and animal, as the superheated shockwave slammed against the layered shields she and Gepard had thrown up at the last possible second. The crystalline barriers buckled under the force, hairline fractures spreading like spiderwebs across their surfaces. Heat seared through the gaps—enough to blister skin, to steal breath, to turn the frozen wasteland into a furnace.

The Heavenly Flare had answered.

March's fingers clawed at her phone, fumbling with the screen. The unsent message mocked her—three words she'd typed but never delivered: Stop the strike. She'd tried. She'd seen Xander wrap his arm around Cocolia. She'd understood what he was doing. Her thumb had moved toward the send button, but ice spears had erupted from the ground between them, forcing her back, and Gepard had grabbed her shoulder and screamed for shields, now, and—

And she'd been too slow.

The shields shattered outward, dissolving into sparkling motes. Smoke rolled across Everwinter Hill in thick, choking waves. March stumbled forward, boots crunching on glass-smooth ice that had melted and refrozen in seconds. The superheated blast had deleted everything in its radius—the Ice Out of Space creatures simply gone, not even ash remaining.

Through the clearing smoke, a figure stood.

Belobog's Stellaron wore Cocolia's corrupted shell like a grotesque puppet. Crystalline structures jutted from melted skin. Nebula patterns pulsed across cracked flesh. The creature clutched the Lance of Preservation in both hands, its tip dripping with something darker than blood.

March's gaze dropped to what the Lance had impaled.

Her brain stuttered. Refused to process. Tried to reject the image.

Xander's body hung suspended on the Lance, driven clean through his chest. The Heavenly Flare's heat had transformed him into something barely recognizable—skin charred obsidian-black, clothes burned away, flesh cracked and weeping golden ichor. Ice spears jutted from his stomach, his shoulder, his lung, buried so deep she could see the tips protruding from his back. His remaining arm hung limp at his side. His head tilted forward, platinum-white hair stirring in the wind.

But his face—

His face wore a smile.

"How dare you." The Stellaron's voice scraped like glass on bone, weak and mad and utterly defeated. Golden blood leaked from the corners of its mouth. "How dare you die smiling."

The creature raised the Lance. Xander's ragdolled body shifted with the movement, limbs swaying like a broken marionette.

"I will make sure," the Stellaron hissed through Cocolia's ruined throat, "to freeze everyone you hold dear. Every. Single. One."

It threw the Lance.

The weapon rocketed forward, carrying Xander's impaled body with it. March watched—couldn't look away, couldn't move, couldn't breathe—as the Lance slammed into a stone formation ten meters from where she stood. The impact shook the ground. Cracks spider-webbed through ancient rock.

Xander's body hung there, pinned like an insect in a collector's case.

March's legs moved without conscious thought. She stumbled forward, boots sliding on melted ice, until she stood directly beneath him. This close, she could see everything the smoke had hidden.

His golden eyes stared at nothing. The light behind them had gone out—not dimmed, not faded, but extinguished, like someone had flipped a switch and killed the connection between consciousness and flesh. Blood crusted his lips. His chest didn't rise. Didn't fall.

But that smile remained, frozen in place, gentle and certain and wrong because the dead shouldn't smile, shouldn't look peaceful, shouldn't—

Behind her, the Stellaron doubled over and vomited a torrent of golden blood. The sound of it hitting frozen ground was obscene—wet and thick and wrong. The creature screamed, a sound that belonged to dying stars and shattered worlds, agony compressed into vibration.

It collapsed to its knees. Convulsed. Screamed again.

They'd done it. They'd made the Stellaron consume itself, eat its own corruption from the inside out. It was dying. Cocolia was dying. The thing wearing her skin was experiencing every moment of its self-destruction.

Isn't it unfair?

The voice materialized in March's mind like frost creeping across glass—quiet, intimate, familiar in a way that made her skin crawl even as it soothed something raw inside her chest.

March stared at Xander's corpse. At the smile that shouldn't exist. At the Lance buried in his heart.

He'd been sweet to her. Given her ski goggles and a scarf for Belobog's cold. Checked on her after battles. Stopped treating her like an annoyance and started treating her like... like someone who mattered. Someone worth protecting. Someone worth dying for.

Movement pulled her attention sideways. Gepard dragged himself across scorched earth toward where Serval lay crumpled, her body twisted at angles that suggested broken bones. Natasha knelt between Serval and Bronya, both hands glowing with Abundance light, tears streaming down her face as she tried to heal two critical injuries simultaneously. Seele fashioned a tourniquet around her own severed leg, teeth gritted, refusing to make a sound.

March raised her hand. Ice crystallized in the air above Xander, forming a protective dome, a shield to shelter what remained.

He didn't move. Didn't breathe. Didn't open his eyes.

Why?

The question echoed through her skull, bouncing off the inside of her bones.

Why why why why why?

The Stellaron screamed again. Its voice had degraded to something inhuman, a chorus of dying frequencies that set March's teeth on edge. Golden blood poured from its eyes, its nose, its ears. The corruption that had sustained it was eating itself, cell by cell, molecule by molecule.

She deserves worse, the voice whispered, wrapping around March's thoughts like silk over a blade.

More screaming. The Stellaron clawed at its own face, tearing crystalline structures away, revealing raw meat beneath.

Don't you think she deserves worse?

March watched the creature writhe. Remembered Bronya's face when Cocolia had driven that ice spear through her stomach. Remembered Seele's leg separating from her body. Remembered Serval convulsing as her own guitar electrocuted her.

Remembered Xander wrapping his arm around Cocolia. Holding her in place. Smiling as the Heavenly Flare descended.

She hurt you, the voice continued, patient and terrible. She hurt someone you love.

The words landed like hammer blows. Someone she loved. Someone she—

Xander had saved her so many times. Pulled her from danger. Protected her with his body.

The Stellaron vomited more golden blood, drowning in its own corruption.

Why don't we hurt her back?

March's vision blurred. The world took on a crimson tinge, as if she were looking through stained glass. Heat built behind her eyes—not from tears, but from something older, something that had slept in ice for longer than memory could reach.

Her reflection caught in the frozen blood pooling beneath the dying Stellaron. For just a moment, she glimpsed eyes that weren't quite her own anymore.

Red eyes, burning with purpose.

————————

March blinked and the battlefield vanished.

Darkness stretched in every direction, not empty but thick, like velvet draped over an abyss. Near the floor, dozens of bell-shaped forms drifted in slow currents—jellyfish made of shadow and ember, their tendrils trailing ink and red light. Each pulse tinted the world the color of a dying coal.

None of it made sense. Her breath hitched. Her mouth tasted of metal and smoke. The cold in her bones had no wind behind it.

You don't have to understand.

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, quiet and certain, answering the thought before it finished forming. Sound caught on the jellyfish, rippled along their lights, and the whole sea near the floor breathed with it.

Across from her, a figure stepped out of the dark like a reflection that had learned new rules. Skin pale. Eyes black at the rim, fading to red at the centers as if embers lived behind the irises. Hair like hers but darker, cut to her jaw with two longer cords that fell to the thigh, threaded with faint silver. A black coatdress with a longer left hem, edges stitched in metal glimmer; a zipper down the front shaped like a mouth. A red gem dangled from a chain between metal buttons. On her right ear, an upside-down question mark caught the red light. A white knit collar framed a bare shoulder through a cutout. Web-work marked boots and sleeves. On her chest, a translucent scarf clung like the arms of a jellyfish, pinned with a single red flower.

Her fingers were sheathed in half gloves with silver nails. Three rings flashed as she lifted her hand.

"You look like me," March said. Her voice came out rough. "And not like me at all."

"I'm what you carry when you run out of light," the girl said. No smile. No threat. "I want the best for you."

"What is this place?"

"A room that opens when it needs to."

March's throat burned. "Xander—"

"I know," the girl said, and the jellyfish deepened to a blood-warm hue. "I can end it. I can take away the ache that chews through you. I can bring him back. All I need is your permission."

Her hand extended, palm open, steady. The jellyfish drifted closer, drawn to the offered choice. The floor felt nearer with each pulse.

"How?" March said. "What do you mean 'bring him back'?"

The answer slid between her questions. "You'll be safe. He will be safe. The rest will be handled."

"That's not an answer."

"It is the answer you can hold." The girl's gaze softened. "You want a world where the pain is less. So do I. Give me your hand."

"Can you truly save him?" March asked. The words scraped her throat raw on the way out.

The girl nodded. Not a predator's grin. Something quiet. Warmth swam in her eyes like dusk in a glass of red wine.

March lifted her hand. Her fingers trembled. The jellyfish brightened.

A smaller hand caught the girl's wrist.

White light flared between their skin. A child stood there—a small figure no higher than March's hip, white from hair to bare feet, as if carved from the first snowfall. The glow that poured off him wasn't harsh. It soaked into the dark and calmed it. The jellyfish snapped toward him like a school of knives—then slowed, tendrils easing, their reds fading to rose.

"Thank you," the child said to the dark twin. His voice carried like a bell held close. "But not yet. It isn't her time."

The girl tilted her head, eyes narrowing—not in malice, but in calculation. "Who are you?"

"A friend." He looked up with eyes that held stars, then back to March. "You can trust me."

Her chest loosened a fraction at the sound. Heat edged her ribs. The smell of lime drifted in, clean and sharp, cutting through iron and ash.

"He'll die," the girl said. No tremor in it. "That woman as well. If the host breaks, the chain goes off. The planet goes with it. I can't accept that. I can't have that." Her fingers flexed in the child's grip; the jellyfish bristled, lamps flaring red again at the words, sensing threat.

The boy didn't flinch. "I thought you'd seen enough through her memories," he said, and his eyes—so unafraid—found March's. "He doesn't quit."

A breath snagged in her throat. Images strobed: a crimson cape across a scorched back; a hand that always reached for hers in falling rooms; a smile nailed to a broken face beneath a sky that rained fire.

"Case in point," he said gently.

From the floor, sparks lifted—one, then dozens, then a hundred—embers shaken free from some hidden grate. They rose like fireflies through river water, and with them came a low, steady heat. Not the furnace of weapons. The warmth of a forge. It spread across her skin in a slow tide and pooled behind her sternum. Her fingers, half-lifted toward the dark twin, tingled as if blood had returned after a long freeze.

The jellyfish tilted to watch the glow. Their red softened to dusky gold, bell edges lighting like coals at the first breath.

Lime cut cleaner now, bright as the first slice through a rind. The scent reached up into her skull and told something wordless it would be all right.

"He's still fighting," the boy said, almost tender. "Keep your hand for later."

March swallowed. The urge to reach for the dark twin raged in her like a tide. The promise of no more ache. The line out of the maze.

The girl—herself, and not—held her gaze without blinking. "I want what you want. For you. For him."

The boy's hand stayed where it was, small and absolute on her wrist. Light flowed from his palm into the girl's skin, gentling even that unyielding poise.

The forge's warmth climbed her throat. The embers made constellations around her. Somewhere in the unseen dark, metal rang, deep and patient, as if an old hammer had fallen in time with her pulse.

————————

The world around Alexander wasn't quite real. Or perhaps it was the only real thing left.

He stood suspended in a vast expanse of cosmic void, breathing hard though there should have been no air. Stars wheeled in the distance—not the cold, distant points of light he knew from Earth's sky, but living things that pulsed with alien rhythms. An orange spiral nebula dominated the horizon, its gases forming a perfect mandala that breathed with ancient, patient light. Asteroids tumbled through the emptiness in slow, graceful arcs, their surfaces catching and throwing back colors that shouldn't exist.

Beneath his feet, something invisible held his weight. Not glass—he'd know the feel of glass. Not metal. Something that existed between states, solid enough to stand on but transparent enough that vertigo clawed at his stomach when he looked down into infinite depth.

He knew this place. Wasn't this were the Trailblazer spoke to the Guardian's Will?

His body felt... wrong. Intact in ways it shouldn't be. He flexed his right hand—the one Cocolia had severed with her ice lance not minutes ago—and watched flesh-and-blood fingers respond with perfect precision. No pain. No phantom sensations. Just his hand, whole and unmarked, as if the last hour hadn't happened.

But he remembered. God, he remembered everything. The weight of the ice piercing his chest. The taste of copper flooding his mouth. The cold spreading from his core outward, his heartbeat stuttering, stopping—

"Your heart stopped."

Alexander didn't startle. Some part of him had been expecting the voice, waiting for it. He turned slowly, his movements deliberate, controlled despite the unreality of this space.

A figure stood perhaps twenty feet away, silhouetted against the nebula's amber glow. Tall—Alexander's height, maybe an inch more. Shoulders set in a posture Alexander recognized from his own mirror, but carried differently. Heavier. Like they'd borne weight for so long it had become part of their structure.

The skull-faced mechanical mask stared back at him with hollow sockets. Weathered metal plates formed its grotesque architecture—part human cranium, part machine construct. Deep eye sockets housed dim mechanical lenses that caught the nebula's light and threw it back gold. The mouth was a jagged asymmetry, revealing glimpses of something that pulsed purple-black within.

The voice in his head. The presence that had guided him, commanded him, saved him more times than he could count. Against The Herta. The Doomsday Beast. Svarog.

Even against himself in the Simulated Universe.

"So it seems," Alexander said, surprised by how steady his voice came out. How normal it sounded in this impossible place. "Your help wasn't enough after all. I'm dead now."

The mask tilted slightly—a gesture so human it was unsettling. "Are you?" The voice was layered, harmonized, as if multiple versions of the same person spoke in perfect synchronization. "Cocolia's lance did a number on you, yes. That's also not counting being caught in the middle of Himeko's Heavenly Flare." A pause. "But calling it death would be... an exaggeration."

"An exaggeration." Alexander tested the words, found them bitter. "I felt my heart stop. I felt the blood leave my body. I felt—" He cut himself off, jaw tightening. "If that wasn't death, what was it?"

"A transition. Your body failed, yes. But you—" the figure gestured at Alexander with one gauntleted hand, "—are still here. Still thinking. Still questioning. Death is more permanent than this."

"This being what, exactly? Purgatory? A dying hallucination? The Stellaron's last joke?"

"Oh, its working overtime right now. Think of this as a crossroads." His tone carried something Alexander couldn't quite identify. Regret? Anticipation? "A place where decisions are made. Where paths diverge or converge. Where you get to choose what happens next."

Alexander absorbed this, his gaze drifting to the cosmic tableau surrounding them. The asteroids continued their eternal dance, indifferent to human drama. The nebula pulsed with its steady rhythm, marking time in geological epochs rather than heartbeats.

"I suppose," he said carefully, turning back to the skulled figure, "I can't just ask who you are? Your real name? Why you've been helping me?" He met the mask's empty gaze directly. "After everything, I think I've earned that much."

Silence stretched between them, thick with unspoken weight. The figure stood perfectly still—not the stillness of rest but of decision. Of calculation. Then, slowly, his armored hand rose to the side of his mask.

"Are you certain?" The harmonized voice carried warning now. "Some knowledge can't be unlearned."

Alexander laughed—short, bitter, exhausted. "After everything I've been through? The battles I've fought? The weight I've carried?" He spread his arms, encompassing the void around them. "I'm standing in space, talking to a voice from my head while my body bleeds out in Belobog. What's one more impossible truth?"

The person's fingers found hidden clasps. Metal scraped against metal with a sound like swords being drawn. "You asked for this," he said quietly. "Remember that."

The mask lifted away.

Alexander's knees hit the invisible floor before his mind fully processed what he was seeing. His hands splayed against nothing, keeping him from collapsing completely as his brain tried to reconcile the impossible with the undeniable.

The face looking back at him was his own.

Older—God, so much older. At least twenty years over him, but that calculation didn't even feel accurate. It wasn't just the years but the experience, the weight carried and prices paid. Gray threaded through dark hair cut military-short. A beard, precisely trimmed but unable to hide the scars that told stories Alexander couldn't read. The left side of the jaw, rebuilt. The cheekbone, fractured and healed wrong. A line that started at the temple and disappeared into the hairline, speaking of violence that had come within inches of ending everything.

But the eyes—those were the worst. His eyes. His exact shade of gold. But they'd seen too much. Done too much. They held the kind of exhaustion that sleep couldn't cure, the kind of weight that time couldn't lift.

"No." The word came out as a whisper. Then stronger: "No. That's not—you can't be—"

"Breathe." His own voice, speaking from that scarred face. Raw now without the mask's modulation. Damaged—vocal cords that had been torn and poorly repaired, giving it a ragged edge. "Take a moment. Process it."

"Process it?" Alexander's laugh edged toward hysteria. "Process that I'm looking at myself? That you're—that I'm—" He forced himself to breathe, deep and slow. "Sampo's story. The fight against the Jepella Brotherhood—"

"Was me. Us. I'm your past more than I am your future." Nemesis—the older Alexander—crouched down slowly, movements efficient despite what must be old injuries. This close, he could see more details. The way the left eye sat deeper, suggesting reconstruction. Burn scarring along the neck, mostly hidden by the high collar. Hands that had been broken and reset multiple times.

"How old?" Alexander's voice cracked on the question.

"That's a more complex question than you'd think. Do you consider yourself twenty-nine after that whole year in the Simulated Universe? Does subjective time count, or only objective?"

The implication hit like ice water. "You've been somewhere time moves differently."

"Multiple somewheres. Scepters. Memoria domains. Aha once thought it'd be funny to make me experience their own take of Groundhog Day, but I digress. To answer your question—I stopped counting after one hundred and four. "

Alexander's vision swam. More than a century. More than a human lifetime. More than a mind should be able to hold and stay intact. "That's not possible. The human brain can't—"

"The human brain is more adaptable than you'd think. Especially when it has help and its been modified." Nemesis touched one of his scars absently. "Necessity is a harsh teacher, but thorough."

"Why?" The questions tumbled out now, dam broken. "How? Where have you been? What happened to you—to us? These scars, this damage—why do you look like you've been through wars?"

Nemesis stood smoothly, offering his hand. After a moment's hesitation, Xander took it. The grip was callused, strong, pulling him upright with easy strength. "My name is Alexander Salvatore, son of Napoleon and Mary. Earthling. Pathstrider of the Finality."

Each word landed like a hammer blow. Alexander's mind raced, trying to piece together implications, possibilities, the sheer scope of what this meant.

"I'm the you that has lived in this universe for over a century, at the very least. The you that fought, survived, joined the Stellaron Hunters under the alias of Nemesis, helped write the scripts of fate itself. The you that was betrayed, had his memories erased, his body reconstructed to its original state, altered to be capable of housing a Stellaron, and thrown back into the timeline like a reset piece on a game board."

The words didn't make sense. Couldn't make sense. Alexander's mind tried to parse them, failed, tried again.

"Just like you, my last memories of Earth were that of being hit by a black SUV in the middle of an intersection," Nemesis continued, his tone shifting to something clinical, detached. "Eight-thirty in the morning." He paused, and something flickered across his features—a ghost of the confusion and terror that must have been. "I woke up alone on a planet I didn't recognize. No language I could understand. No frame of reference. Just... existence, stripped of everything familiar."

"The same as me…"

"No." The word was sharp. "Not the same. You woke with purpose. With people who could help, even if they didn't understand. With a role to play in a story you recognized. I woke with nothing. No script. No guidebook. No cosmic role waiting for me to step into it. Just survival in a universe that didn't know or care that I existed."

"Why don't I remember any of this?"

"You remember what they allowed you to remember." Nemesis's scarred face was inches from his own now. "Everything between that motorcycle accident and waking on the station? Gone. Erased. Lifetimes of experiences in this universe, wiped clean so you could play your role in Elio's script with fresh eyes."

"But if my memories were erased, how are you—"

"Here?" A ghost of a smile touched those damaged lips. "Because I realized what was going on before it was too late, and made a gamble against fate."

"What could you have possibly done?"

"Path Interplay. Finality and Remembrance. I created a memosprite of myself—a pattern of thought and memory so deeply embedded in our subconscious that even complete neural reconstruction couldn't destroy it. A ghost in the machine. A backup of who we really are, hidden, only to be activated and intervene under dire circumstances to ensure your survival."

Alexander's breathing was shallow. "Does that mean I'm some kind of construct? Am I not real…?"

"No." Nemesis gripped Alexander's shoulders, firm but not painful. "You're absolutely real. You're me, reset to the beginning. Given a second chance to walk a different path. But I'm here to make sure you don't walk it blind."

The bitterness in that damaged voice made Alexander's chest tight. This was him—speaking of decades of isolation, of fighting to survive in an impossible reality with no anchor, no hope of home.

"The scars," Alexander said quietly. "They're not from one battle."

"No. They're from hundreds. Thousands, maybe. From every time I had to prove I deserved to exist in this universe. From every lesson learned in blood about how this reality actually works versus how the game portrayed it." Nemesis touched his jaw, where the scarring was worst.

"But you survived."

"Part of me survived." Nemesis gestured at himself. "This conversation, this moment—I'm not fully here. I'm an imprint, the backup plan of a backup plan, insurance against betrayal I saw coming but couldn't prevent."

"Why?" Alexander's hands clenched. "Why would they—"

"Because I learned something I shouldn't have. Because I refused to accept a future that required a specific sacrifice. Because—" He cut himself off, shaking his head. "We're getting ahead of ourselves. You asked who I am, and I've told you. But that's not really why we're here."

"Then why?"

Nemesis smiled—a broken thing on that scarred face. "To give you what I never had. A choice. A real choice, made with full knowledge of what's at stake." He stepped back, arms spreading to encompass the cosmic void around them.

The gray void shifted. The nebula's orange light dimmed, replaced by something softer, more neutral. Alexander felt the invisible floor beneath him solidify into something resembling ground, though it still had no texture, no substance beyond the concept of surface.

"Just like you, my memories didn't survive the process unscathed. I've been remembering. Slowly, piece by piece, while you've been busy playing hero in Belobog. The Stellaron's influence weakens certain barriers when it's pushed. All those times you used Chronosurge, all that damage you did to yourself—it created cracks. I've been slipping through them."

Alexander should have felt fear at that admission. Or anger, violation at having his body used without full consent. Instead, he just felt... tired. The bone-deep exhaustion of someone who'd pushed too far for too long. He sank to the ground—or what passed for ground in this liminal space—and sat cross-legged, looking up at his other self.

"You've been watching everything?"

"Every triumph." Nemesis's voice was flat, neutral. "Every failure. Every breakdown. Every moment you thought you were alone—I was there. Seeing through your eyes. Feeling what you felt."

The invasion of privacy should have sparked rage. Instead, Alexander found himself nodding slowly. It made sense, in a twisted way. The moments where his body moved on pure instinct. Where he knew things he shouldn't. Where muscle memory kicked in for skills he'd never formally learned.

Silence settled between them. Heavy. Weighted with the pressure of unspoken truths accumulating like snow before an avalanche. Alexander drew his knees up, wrapping his arms around them. Small. Vulnerable. A posture he hadn't allowed himself in years.

"I need to ask you something." His voice came out quieter than he intended. "And I need you to be honest with me. Completely honest, not evasive, not cryptic. Can you do that?"

Nemesis studied him for a long moment. Then, slowly, deliberately, he moved to sit as well, mirroring Alexander's posture. Two versions of the same person. Facing each other across a gap measured in years and choices and suffering.

"Ask."

Alexander took a breath. The question had been building in him since the Herta Space Station. Growing with each impossibility he witnessed, each moment that confirmed this wasn't a dream or a coma fantasy. It was the question that kept him awake between missions, that gnawed at the edges of his sanity even as he fought to save lives.

"Why?" The word came out raw, stripped of pretense. "Why was I transported here? To this world, this story, this... everything. How do I make sense of it? Is there a purpose? Was there a reason? Or am I just..." He gestured helplessly at the nothing around them. "A cosmic accident? A glitch in reality? What am I supposed to do with this?"

Nemesis regarded him with something that might have been sympathy. When he spoke, his voice was gentler than Alexander had ever heard it.

"I don't know."

The simple honesty struck Alexander silent.

"I've had longer to think about this than you," Nemesis continued. "I've had access to resources you can't imagine. I've walked paths you haven't discovered yet. And I'm telling you, Xander—I don't know. None of us know."

"Kafka—"

"Doesn't know." The shake of his head was definitive. "I asked her. Multiple times, in multiple ways. She has theories, same as anyone. But knowledge? No."

Alexander's jaw tightened. "Elio. His scripts—"

"His scripts predicted your arrival to an extent, but not your origin. He knows the what of your presence here, not the why or the how. It's a blind spot in his sight, a variable he works around rather than through."

The denial hit harder than expected. Alexander had been clinging to the hope that someone, somewhere, had answers. That this displacement had meaning beyond random chance.

"The Stellaron Hunters are collecting information from across the galaxy," he pressed. "Surely someone—"

"We searched." Something flickered in Nemesis's voice. Frustration. Regret. The ghosts of failed attempts. "Silver Wolf hacked into databases you can't conceive of. Blade followed leads through countless worlds. I spent months digging through archives of the Intelligentsia Guild. We found nothing. Less than nothing. We found the absence of answers, which is somehow worse than ignorance."

"Then Nous." Alexander leaned forward, desperation creeping into his tone. "Herta calls me the Unanswerable Question, most surely implied we met the Aeon. An entity that calculates the very fabric of reality… did they not provide us with an answer?"

"I did meet Nous." Nemesis's expression went distant, remembering something vast and incomprehensible. "Or rather, Nous summoned me. Do you know what it's like to stand before an Aeon of pure calculation? To be regarded by an intelligence that processes every quantum state of the universe simultaneously?"

The question hung unanswered.

"I asked your question," Nemesis said. "How did I come to be in this universe? Why? Through what mechanism?"

"And?"

"Nous couldn't answer." The words landed like a death sentence. "An Aeon whose entire existence revolves around knowledge, calculation, understanding the fundamental equations of reality—and they looked at me, at the question of my presence here, and found only unknowable variables. That's why they called me the Unanswerable Question. Not because I'm special or chosen or important, but because I represent a problem that breaks their calculations. An X they can't solve for."

Alexander felt something crack inside him. Not breaking, exactly, but shifting. The desperate need for answers that had driven him since waking on the Herta Space Station began to... loosen. Release its grip, just slightly.

"So there's just... nothing?" His voice barely rose above a whisper. "No explanation?"

"I didn't say that." Nemesis's eyes sharpened, focusing. "I said we don't know. Those are different things."

"How?"

"Consider our original world. Earth. Science at its peak still couldn't answer everything. We had Gödel's incompleteness theorems proving that no logical system can prove all truths. We had the hard problem of consciousness—no explanation for how subjective experience arises from objective matter. We had quantum mechanics showing us that reality itself might be fundamentally probabilistic rather than deterministic."

"That's different," Alexander argued. "Those were thought experiments, philosophical exercises—"

"Were they?" Nemesis challenged. "How do you know, right now, that you're not a brain in a vat? That everything you remember—Earth, your family, your entire life before this moment—wasn't programmed into you five minutes ago? What evidence could you present that would definitively prove your past existence?"

Alexander opened his mouth. Closed it. The argument was sound, philosophically unassailable, and deeply unsettling.

"You can't," Nemesis said. "You accept your memories, your experiences, your sense of continuity as real because the alternative is madness. You take it on faith—yes, faith—that reality is roughly what it appears to be. But you can't prove it. No one can. It's an epistemological limit built into the nature of consciousness itself."

"But I was on Earth." Alexander's hands clenched into fists. "I had a life there. I remember—"

"Do you?" The question wasn't cruel. Just direct. Probing. "Or do you remember remembering? Do you recall the actual sensation of your first kiss, or do you recall the last time you thought about remembering it? Memory is reconstruction, not playback. Every time you access a memory, you're rebuilding it from fragments, potentially altering it in the process. Neurologically speaking, we're all living in reconstructed approximations of the past."

Alexander rubbed his face with both hands. This philosophical rabbit hole was making his head ache, even in a space where physical pain shouldn't exist. "Fine. I accept that level of certainty is impossible. But something clearly happened. I was there, and now I'm here. That transition occurred, whether I can prove the metaphysics of it or not."

"Agreed." Nemesis nodded. "Something supernatural—or at least outside the scope of our previous understanding of natural law—occurred. But that's been true throughout human history. Lightning was supernatural until we understood electricity. Disease was divine punishment until we discovered germs. The motion of the planets was the music of the spheres until Newton reduced it to equations."

"This is different. This is—"

"Transportation between realities? Consciousness moving between worlds? The collapse of the boundary between fiction and reality?" Nemesis spread his hands. "Yes, it's unprecedented in scale. But the principle remains. We've hit the limit of our understanding. The question is what we do about it."

"You said you didn't know—"

"I said I don't have the answer. But I've had time to consider possibilities." Nemesis held up a hand, counting off on scarred fingers. "Option one: simulation theory. We're in an advanced simulation, and someone with access to the underlying code moved our consciousness from one running program to another. The 'rules' of this universe are simply different parameters in the same vast computational substrate."

"That doesn't explain the specificity," Alexander countered. "Why a game I played? Why Honkai Star Rail?"

"Maybe it's not about the game itself. Maybe the game in our world was somehow bleeding information from this universe. A window rather than a creation. Or maybe whoever runs the simulation gave you context you could understand—familiar faces, known scenarios—as a kindness." Nemesis paused. "Or a cruelty."

Alexander's stomach churned. "Option two?"

"Brain in a vat, as mentioned. Your entire existence—both Earth and here—is sensory input fed to a consciousness that has never experienced true physical reality. The question of transportation becomes meaningless because you never transported anywhere. You've always been in the vat. The change was just new programming."

"That's even worse than the first option."

"Truth often is." Nemesis's mouth quirked. "Option three: actual divine intervention. A God—not necessarily the one we were taught about, not necessarily anything matching our theological frameworks—moved you between realities for purposes we can't fathom. If such an entity exists and operates on a scale beyond our comprehension, trying to understand its methods is like an ant attempting to grasp quantum mechanics. We couldn't even fully grasp the concept of the Trinity or the Incarnation back home, and you think we're going to comprehend whatever it was that happened to us?"

The silence stretched. Alexander processed, turned the options over in his mind. None of them felt right. All of them felt simultaneously plausible and impossible.

"You don't sound convinced by any of them," he said finally.

"I'm not. They're all logically possible but ultimately unfalsifiable. We could debate their merits forever and never reach a conclusion because we lack the tools to investigate claims about the fundamental nature of reality." Nemesis leaned back on his palms, looking up at the gray nothing above them. "But here's what I do know: I exist. You exist. We're here, experiencing this, making choices, affecting outcomes. Whatever the mechanism, whatever the purpose or lack thereof, the fact of our existence in this universe is undeniable."

"Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am.'"

"Precisely. Everything else might be illusion or simulation or divine joke, but the experience of existence itself is the one thing we can't doubt. We might be wrong about the nature of that existence, but we can't be wrong that existence is happening."

Alexander drew patterns in the non-existent ground with his finger, watching the gray ripple and reset. His mind worked through the implications, following logical chains to their conclusions.

"You've really thought about this," he murmured.

"I've had years. Literal years, not the days you've been conscious in this universe. Time moves strangely when you're jumping between worlds with the Stellaron Hunters." Something shifted in Nemesis's voice, a quality Alexander couldn't quite identify. Longing, maybe. Or loss. "I've stood on the edge of black holes, walked through civilizations that existed before species crawled out of the primordial soup of newborn planets, witnessed the death of stars. And through it all, the question haunted me: why am I here? What does it mean?"

"Did you ever find peace with it?"

"No." The answer was immediate, honest.

Alexander absorbed this, turning it over in his mind. Something about it resonated, echoing thoughts he'd been having lately but hadn't fully formed. The constant quest for control, for understanding, for answers—it had exhausted him. Driven him to the brink of madness and beyond.

But lately, especially after his last conversation with Serval, after everything in Belobog...

He'd started to feel differently. Lighter, somehow.

"I think," Alexander said slowly, feeling his way through the thought, "I've come to a similar conclusion." He paused, gathering his thoughts. "I've spent my whole life trying to control things. Trying to understand, to manage, to make sense of the senseless. I needed answers. I needed to know why my father was shot, why God allowed it, why I did what I did to Joaquín, why it all went so wrong. And here, in this impossible situation, I've been doing the same thing. Desperate for explanations, for meaning, for some grand purpose to justify the insanity of being here."

"And now?"

Alexander breathed out slowly. "Now I'm just... tired of it. Tired of needing to know. Maybe it's everything I've been through in Belobog. The battles, the near-deaths, the time in the Simulated Universe breaking me down. Or maybe it's just finally reaching the point where the human mind says 'enough, I can't carry this anymore.'"

He looked at Nemesis directly. "I don't know why I'm here. I don't know how I got here. I don't know if there's a purpose or if I'm a cosmic accident or if some entity is watching and laughing. And I think... I think I'm okay with that. With just not knowing."

Nemesis's expression shifted, something like surprise crossing his features. "You're serious."

"I am." Alexander felt a strange calm settling over him as he said it. "I can't control this. It's so far beyond my understanding, beyond anyone's understanding apparently, that trying to grasp it is just... futile. Maybe that's giving up. Maybe that's growth. I don't know. But I'm choosing to be okay with the mystery. To accept 'I don't know' as a complete answer, not a temporary state while I search for better."

The silence that followed was different from before. Contemplative. Almost peaceful.

Then Alexander frowned slightly. "But there's something that doesn't quite fit yet."

"What?"

Alexander reached into his pocket—did this place even have pockets? did it matter?—and pulled out a single object. A cross pendant, the simple geomarrow chain that Serval had gifted him to hold the crucifix that had belonged to his mother.

He held it up, watching the way they caught light that shouldn't exist. "This came with me. From Earth to here. It was in my pockets when I had the accident, and when I woke up in the Herta Space Station, together with father's watch." He looked at Nemesis. "You've kept them too, haven't you? Through everything. Years of being a Stellaron Hunter, jumping between worlds, facing death—you kept them."

Nemesis's expression became carefully neutral. "They're just objects. Emotionally significant, sure, but ultimately just metal and gears."

"Are they?" Alexander turned the cross over in his palm, feeling its weight. "You're telling me that in a universe where Stellarons can warp reality, where Aeons reshape the fundamental nature of existence, where people can travel between stars on a magical train, these specific items traveling with me from another universe is just... coincidence?"

"You're looking for meaning again."

"Maybe. Or maybe I'm observing a pattern." Alexander met Nemesis's eyes. "The watch and the cross. Father's legacy and Mother's faith. The two things that defined our parents and how they raised us. They came with us through whatever impossible transition occurred. Doesn't that seem significant to you?"

"It could just as easily be random. Items we had physical contact with at the moment of displacement. There is no deeper meaning required."

"But that's my question." Alexander leaned forward. "If that's what you believe—if these are just random objects that happened to come along, if they're emotionally significant but not cosmically important—then why keep them?"

Nemesis went very still.

"With everything you've undergone… you must have made peace with potentially never seeing our family again," Alexander pressed, his tone gentle but insistent. "They're like a blurry memory to you now, aren't they? Wouldn't it be easier to let them go?"

A long silence. When Nemesis spoke, his voice carried something Alexander hadn't heard before—uncertainty. Vulnerability.

"Have you ever really thought about what Jacob wrestling with God means?"

Alexander blinked at the shift. "I—what?"

"It's one of the strangest stories in scripture. Jacob is alone at night, and a man appears—sometimes translated as angel, sometimes as God himself—and they wrestle until dawn. Jacob refuses to let go until he receives a blessing. He's injured in the struggle, his hip displaced, marked forever by the encounter. But he doesn't surrender."

"I know the story—"

"Do you know what it means?" Nemesis's intensity was palpable now. "Really means? What it represents about the nature of faith itself?"

Alexander was quiet, listening.

"We're taught that faith is submission. Acceptance. 'Thy will be done.' And sometimes it is. But Jacob shows us something else—that sometimes faith is struggle. Sometimes it's grabbing hold of the divine and refusing to let go, even when it wounds you, even when you're fighting something infinitely beyond your strength."

"You're saying faith can be combat?"

"I'm saying faith can be wrestling. And that's different from combat. Combat aims to defeat, to destroy or dominate. Wrestling is about engagement. Contact. Two forces in dynamic tension, each testing the other." Nemesis touched his own pendant. "When Jacob wrestled the angel, was he trying to defeat God? Of course not. That would be absurd. He was trying to... to touch the divine. To engage with it directly, honestly, with his whole being."

"And you think that's what we're doing? Wrestling with God?"

"I think that's what everyone who genuinely engages with these questions is doing." Nemesis's voice grew more animated, more alive than Alexander had heard it. "I've come to the conclusion that religious belief isn't a statement about facts in many cases. It's not a scientific hypothesis you can test. When someone says 'I believe in God,' many are not actually making a claim about particle physics or cosmology. They're making a statement about meaning, moral reality, and the fundamental nature of existence."

"But people do make factual claims."

"Yes, but hear me out: even those aren't really about the facts themselves. They're about what the facts mean. Take the resurrection. Whether you believe it literally happened or not, what matters is what it represents—that death isn't final, that sacrifice has meaning, that love transcends mortality. The wrestling isn't about proving or disproving the historical event. It's about what you do with the possibility it represents."

"… Do you still believe in something, Nemesis?"

A long pause. Then: "I don't know if I believe. I don't know if I can believe, not after everything I've seen and done. The universe here is vast and strange and filled with entities that mock our simple notions of divinity. Aeons that reshape reality according to their whims, powers beyond comprehension, civilizations that rise and fall like waves. Where's God in all that? Where's the personal, loving Creator we were taught about?"

"That's not an answer to my question."

"Belief isn't binary, Alexander. At least that's the conclusion I've come to. It's not a switch you flip on or off. It's more like..." Nemesis searched for words. "It's like a spectrum of engagement. On one end, you have blind faith that never questions. On the other, blind rejection that never considers. But most of us live in the middle, in the wrestling."

"For so many years, I couldn't reconcile my conception of God with my experience of reality. I looked at suffering, at evil, at the apparent randomness of existence in this place, and I couldn't square it with the idea of a loving, omnipotent deity. But that's the wrestling. I was engaging with the divine concept. I took the idea seriously enough to struggle with it."

"Carl Jung," Alexander said slowly, remembering. "He said 'Called or not called, God is there.'"

"Exactly. You may not consciously invoke the divine, but when you make moral judgments—when you say something is truly wrong or truly right—you're implicitly acknowledging a standard beyond mere preference or social construction. When you look at evil and recognize it as evil, not just as 'behavior I dislike,' you're touching one pole of the divine concept."

"The malevolent one."

"Right. And if you can recognize true malevolence—not just harm or pain, but genuine evil—then you're implicitly acknowledging its opposite. You can't have a shadow without light. You can't have down without up. You can't have evil without good."

"But that's just philosophy. It doesn't mean—"

"Doesn't it?" Nemesis challenged. "When you saw what happened to Father, when you beat Joaquín in that alley, what did you feel? Just neurochemical reactions? Just evolutionary psychology playing out? Or did you touch something deeper—a moral reality that exists independent of your perception of it?"

Alexander was silent, remembering the weight of that moment, the sense of having crossed a line that existed not just in law or culture, but in the fabric of reality itself.

"That's the wrestling," Nemesis continued softly. "You grabbed hold of something in that moment—call it justice, call it wrath, call it moral law—and you've been wrestling with it ever since. Not trying to defeat it, not trying to escape it, but engaged with it. In contact with it."

"And it's wounded me. Like Jacob's hip."

"Of course it has. Any genuine encounter with ultimate reality leaves marks. If you could wrestle with the fundamental nature of good and evil and walk away unchanged, it wouldn't be real. The wound is proof of contact. The struggle is evidence of engagement."

Alexander looked down at the cross. "So when you keep this—"

"I keep it as a reminder that I'm still wrestling. Not winning, not losing, but engaged. Every time I want to dismiss the whole question as meaningless, it reminds me that I'm still in the ring. Still fighting to understand, to reconcile, to make sense of things that might be beyond sense."

"Even though you know you might never get answers?"

"The wrestling isn't about getting answers. Jacob didn't wrestle the angel to get information. He wrestled to get a blessing. And the blessing wasn't the answer to his problems—it was a new name. Israel. 'He who struggles with God.' His identity became the struggle itself."

Alexander picked up the pendant, examining it.

"I guess I kept it because it was my admission that I'm still wrestling. That I haven't walked away from the match. That even in my doubt, my skepticism, my inability to reconcile what I've learned with what I was taught—I'm still here. Still engaged. Still refusing to let go until I receive... something. Maybe not a blessing. Maybe just understanding. Maybe just the honesty of admitting I don't know but can't stop seeking."

Alexander nodded slowly. He understood. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he truly understood.

He closed his fingers around the cross, feeling the metal warm against his palm. Then, deliberately, he lifted the chain and placed it around his neck. The familiar weight settled against his chest, the crucifix resting just over his heart.

"What are you doing?" Nemesis asked.

"Taking it back." Alexander tucked the cross under his shirt, feeling it against his skin.

He met Nemesis's eyes. "I can't be fully certain there's a God in the way I want Him to be. I don't know if my prayers mean anything. I don't know if this cross has any power beyond the meaning I give it. But I'm choosing to carry it anyway."

"It's a start," Nemesis said quietly. "Maybe it's more honest than the certainty I used to claim."

Alexander felt something loosening in his chest, a tension he'd carried for so long he'd forgotten it was there. The desperate need for answers, for control, for understanding—it wasn't gone entirely.

But it had shifted into something else. Something he could live with.

"So what do I do now?" he asked.

Nemesis looked at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, he stood. He reached down, offering Alexander his hand. "Go ahead. Pick up your cross."

Alexander stared at the offered hand.

"You pick up your cross and walk up the hill." Nemesis said it simply, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "You've got a heavy load of suffering to bear. That's not in question. A fair bit of it's going to be unjust—things that happened to you that you didn't deserve, consequences that fell on you without your choosing. So what are you going to do about it? Rage? Collapse? Declare yourself a victim and demand the universe apologize?"

"Those seem like reasonable responses to injustice."

"They're understandable responses. But are they the right response?" Nemesis's hand remained steady, waiting. "You can't control what happened to you. You can't undo the past, can't wish away your displacement, can't make the suffering disappear. But you can choose how you carry it. You can accept it voluntarily and try to transform yourself as a consequence."

Slowly, Alexander reached out. His fingers touched Nemesis's, and he felt the solidity of the grip, the warmth of contact. Then he clasped the hand fully, and Nemesis pulled him upright.

They stood face to face, two versions of the same person, separated by years and choices but united in this moment.

Alexander turned. The gray void shifted, and where nebula and space had been, a distant, blazing light now pulsed, like a star born within the emptiness. He walked toward it, and with each step, the connection between his Stellaron and Belobog's flooded his senses. The space around him rippled with ghostly mirages, Cocolia's memories bleeding through the void.

He saw her, younger, facing a furious Serval.

"You're destroying my life's work!"

The sting of betrayal, the hardening of a heart for what she believed was the greater good.

The image shifted. A child-like Bronya, her face a mask of conflicted duty.

"Mother... the people in the Underworld..."

The weight of a terrible command settling on a daughter's shoulders.

Then Gepard, his stoic facade cracking as he delivered a report.

"Supreme Guardian... we lost so many of our own..."

The unbearable cost of a leader's choices, counted in the bodies of loyal soldiers.

The light grew brighter, and the visions dissolved. As he reached the source, the glare coalesced into a single point of light, a single object. The Lance of the Preservation, its red geomarrow cooled but still radiating a faint, desperate heat. It was plunged into the invisible floor, an immovable pillar against the encroaching dark.

And kneeling before it was a young Cocolia, not the corrupted Guardian but a desperate woman praying, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs as she begged a Stellaron to save her city from the Eternal Freeze.

How ironic the sight became an echo of a boy kneeling in a different kind of darkness thirteen years ago, consumed by guilt and praying for an answer that never came.

"You too, huh..." Alexander whispered to the memory, the words catching in his throat.

He looked at the ghost of the woman who had made a deal with damnation to save her people, and he saw himself. He saw the same fear, the same impossible burden, the same fracturing of a soul under a weight it was never meant to bear.

"I know," he said, his voice a quiet promise to the kneeling figure, to himself, to the very space around them. "I know you're scared. That you think you're damned, that you're too broken to be fixed. I know how heavy this burden is..."

He stepped forward, his resolve hardening into something solid, something real. "So I'll take it. The guilt. The cost. The struggle. I will walk this hill for you. For me. For everyone. We will make it."

His hand closed around the shaft of the Lance of the Preservation. It was cold, heavy, an anchor of hundreds of years of suffering. He planted his feet, his muscles screaming as he pulled against the weight of history. For a moment, it didn't budge.

Then, with a defiant roar that tore through the silence of the void—a cry of defiance against impossible burdens and the loneliness of sacrifice—he ripped the Lance free.

The space exploded in warmth and brightness, a cleansing fire that banished the gray nothingness, the very antithesis of the Eternal Freeze.