Salomeh gently touched the ground again, Hinata held tightly against her.
Warm blood flowed between her fingers.
Melokosa approached, stumbling, pale, eyes wide open.
"Hinata!!!"
His voice broke.
Salomeh tried to remain calm.
"Melokosa, breathe... I will try to heal her!"
She activated her violet mana.
A soft, dense light enveloped Hinata's torn body…
But the wound remained gaping, as if reality refused to respond.
Salomeh insisted, her light becoming more precise, deeper.
Then, frustrated, she commanded with a sharp gesture her meta-conceptual manipulation: she tried to tear the very identity of the wound from Hinata's concept, so that it would cease to exist.
The world vibrated slightly around her.
But... nothing.
Nothing.
The wound did not move an inch.
Melokosa burst into tears.
"Her wound... that creature reopened it! It was already there, it was already too serious and now... now...!"
He began shaking Hinata as if his touch alone could bring her back.
"Hinata... Hinata, please... don't leave me, please... Hinata!!"
Salomeh, her expression fixed, whispered:
"This isn't normal... not a physical wound... not a conceptual wound either… it refuses to heal even when I erase its identity... It's impossible..."
Her hands trembled.
Behind them, Bakuzan did not move.
He simply kept his face raised towards the darkened sky filled with abominables.
He had not turned his head since the attack.
He didn't need to see: he heard.
He heard Melokosa's muffled cries.
He heard sobs, gasps.
He heard Salomeh's strangled voice trying to stay strong.
He heard the drip of blood on the shattered earth.
All this chaos, all this despair, settled within him like lead.
And he said nothing.
Because if he spoke now, the earth itself would begin to tremble.
Melokosa tightened his hold on Hinata, unable to accept the emerging truth.
"Hinata... please... open your eyes... say something to me... I beg you..."
But Hinata remained motionless.
Salomeh felt panic rising.
She tried again and again, varying mana frequencies, angles of meta-conceptual manipulation, even attempting to restore the identity of vitality and existence in Hinata.
Each attempt failed.
As if the wound... did not belong to this world.
As if it came from a place where concepts themselves had no reach.
As if it had been inflicted by something that existed even before the notions of "healing," "life," or "being."
Bakuzan finally closed his eyes.
Not to shut himself from the world.
But because he knew if he opened them now, his reality would burn with rage.
He remained motionless.
A silent Ineffable.
A brother... listening to the cries of a dying child.
A giant... holding back a storm.
Around them, the howls of the Abominables filled the sky like a black swarm.
And on the ground, three beings—Salomeh, Melokosa, and Bakuzan—tried to save a little girl whose wound defied all logic, all laws, all concepts.
And time, cruel, kept moving forward.
***
In the sky torn by the cries of the Abominables, a humanoid silhouette suddenly materialized.
Its black wings—vast, silent, made of shadows thicker than night—unfolded for a moment before folding back.
Then it descended.
Erasa landed near Bakuzan with an almost imperceptible breath.
Her black, smooth mask, without any features, reflected only the desolation surrounding them. She emitted no emotion... and yet her entire being exuded the icy sensation of judgment.
The wings vanished as if they had never existed.
Her voice resonated, muffled, distorted by the mask:
"That human... is the one the goddess Mü Thanatos forced into existence."
Bakuzan remained still.
No reaction. No words.
Erasa stepped forward.
"I sense something… bad. He cannot remain in this state. I must bring him back to : a story, a narrative, a conceptualization. It is safer this way."
She reached out a hand to approach Melokosa.
But a powerful arm rested on her shoulder.
Erasa slowly turned around.
Bakuzan's gaze—yellow, incandescent—pierced her.
"I forbid you to touch my brother."
A cold shiver ran down Erasa's spine.
An instinctive, primal warning, as if this gaze was not that of an Ineffable... but that of a catastrophe waiting to happen.
She could not bear the feeling.
Anger rose, fierce, dry, immediate.
She grabbed Bakuzan's arm and violently pushed him off her shoulder.
So violently that the ground beneath their feet cracked.
"Don't ever speak to me in that tone again. Never, do you hear me?"
Her voice cold as a sentence.
Bakuzan did not blink.
"If you touch a single hair of my brother's... I will no longer just speak to you."
A heavy silence fell.
An invisible breath passed between them, as if the air held its own existence.
A strange tension... something belonging neither to the world, nor to the Father God's dream, nor to the Delzluhud.
The two Ineffables turned simultaneously.
And saw the horror.
A shadow—dense, oily, alive—slowly escaped from Hinata's wound.
Like a fluid trying to squeeze out of too narrow a container.
Erasa and Bakuzan approached instinctively.
"What is that?" Bakuzan asked, his voice suddenly grave.
Salomeh shook her head negatively, confused, almost trembling.
"I... I don't know. It started coming out by itself. The wound... it... it's expelling it."
A brutal shiver ran up Salomeh's spine.
Then Morlük roared in her mind:
"GET AWAY FROM THAT GIRL IMMEDIATELY!!"
Panicked by the divine cry's violence, Salomeh dropped Hinata without thinking.
A second later—
BOOM!
Shadow lightning burst from the wound, exploding like geysers of darkness.
The air, the earth, the carcasses of Abominables around... everything was swept away.
Bakuzan and Erasa leapt back, their ineffable reflexes reacting even before they were aware.
Melokosa, however...
He did not move.
He remained motionless, frozen like a statue.
His gaze was empty, glassy.
And the shadow—that foreign thing, that living absence—was already infiltrating him, replacing his breath, reshaping his thoughts.
Salomeh screamed, horrified:
"SAKOLOMEH!!!"
She wanted to run.
Wanted to protect him.
Wanted to rush to him as she had hundreds of times in their childhood.
But something violently held her back by the arm.
Bakuzan.
"NO. Stay here."
His voice was not an order.
It was a barrier.
A wall.
An abyss between her and the danger taking shape.