A heavy silence hung over the ominous cathedral of the Witch Cult, so suffocating that even the smallest sound seemed forbidden. The towering black stone pillars rose like sentinels, their surfaces scarred and worn as if they bore witness to countless confessions of despair. Between them sat Pandora, her presence commanding the cavernous hall. The vacant emptiness that once lingered in her eyes had shifted—now they shimmered with deep irritation and a restrained, dangerous fury. Her features remained cold, her posture graceful, but beneath that mask of serenity burned a wrath so consuming it seemed capable of reducing the very air to ash.
"So, you're telling me… Lucas never returned from the forest. All that remained of him was a headless corpse. Petelgeuse, overwhelmed by his own emotions, struck again—and yet nothing of him remains. Capella and Lye were pushed back like frightened animals… and the massive army, one formed from three different races, was utterly repelled, broken as though they were children playing at war."
Her voice carried no need to rise in pitch; every syllable reverberated like thunder, filling the cathedral with dread. Her words weighed down upon those who knelt before her—Capella and Lye—forcing their eyes downward, unable to even glance at her face. Their breaths shook in shallow, ragged pulls, each inhale a struggle, each exhale a trembling plea for survival. The unyielding chill of the stone floor bit through their knees and seeped into their bones, yet even that discomfort was nothing compared to the knife-edge tension of knowing that one misplaced word could mean immediate annihilation.
Then it came—a crushing wave of Pandora's miasma. Like an invisible tide, it poured down over them, wrapping around their shoulders and throats, pressing upon their lungs until their chests screamed for air. The pressure coiled around their bones, threatening to grind them into powder. Lye clenched his teeth, fighting to inhale through the suffocating weight, while Capella's thoughts spiraled into frenzy. We're going to die. We're going to die… if she doesn't calm down, if we fail to appease her now, both of us will die here, forgotten.
"Four Archbishops unleashed upon the battlefield, and yet all you bring me are tales of defeat," Pandora intoned, her voice low and venomous. "Every one of you cast down. Not a single lasting wound inflicted upon the enemy. Not even the dignity of returning with a hostage. Pathetic. Laughably pathetic."
Capella's body shook as she dared to raise her head. The sharpness of Pandora's gaze cut into her like blades, but she forced words from her trembling lips. "P-Pandora-sama! Our foe was no ordinary adversary! We gave everything, but that boy… that boy was a monster! A monster with Lucas's authority burning inside him! He—he can absorb authorities! Even the remnants of the dead bend to him!"
For a moment, Pandora remained motionless. Then, slowly, her brows furrowed, and the faint light of interest flickered in her otherwise icy gaze. "So you claim the hollowness of Lucas's corpse was not mere mutilation, but the void left behind from his stolen authority. And further still…" Her eyes gleamed in the dim glow of the cathedral's torches, catching the gold like molten metal. "…the so-called 'Archbishop of Envy' possesses the ability to devour and assimilate other authorities. Hmph. A trait so perfectly aligned with envy itself that it almost feels poetic."
Her words slithered into the air, carrying with them the promise of ruin. The miasma intensified, rolling outward in thicker waves until even the mighty pillars groaned, their stone seeming to shudder beneath the pressure. Capella's thoughts dulled as if her mind were submerged in fog, while beads of cold sweat poured relentlessly down Lye's face, dripping into the cracks of the stone floor. The specter of death encircled them, closer and closer, like the brush of a blade against the skin.
"He can even steal the authorities I hold in my hands, can he…?" she mused, almost as if to herself, yet the weight of the words drove deeper than any blade.
She exhaled slowly, a sigh devoid of relief, her gaze colder than frostbitten steel. She shifted her posture ever so slightly, tilting her head as she studied the two Archbishops. "You are utterly worthless. Four Archbishops, yet you failed to erase a single pretender. Instead, two of your brethren are dead, and now Petelgeuse's authority likely rests within our enemy's hands. This is what you call devotion? This is the result of your faith?"
Lye's lips parted, desperation compelling him to speak, to defend himself in even the smallest way. But the moment his eyes brushed against Pandora's, the vision of his head being severed from his shoulders slammed into his mind with horrifying clarity. The phantom pain was so real he nearly gagged. His blood iced over, his lungs seized, and in trembling silence he lowered his gaze once more. Not a word. If I say one more word, I'll be dead. Quiet. Be quiet. Survive.
The silence stretched. Time itself seemed to hesitate in the cathedral, waiting for Pandora's judgment. Finally, she raised a pale hand and flicked it as though brushing away a speck of dust. "Begone. I will find use for you later, but until then, do not let your faces darken my sight again."
Relief struck like lightning, yet it did not loosen their terror. Capella and Lye scrambled backward on their knees, their movements clumsy in their haste to obey. The massive doors of the cathedral groaned open, their iron hinges shrieking as the two Archbishops stumbled into the world beyond. The doors closed with a thunderous echo, cutting them off from Pandora's piercing gaze.
Even outside the cathedral, with the cold night air rushing against their skin, the weight of her presence clung to them like chains. The fear refused to fade. No stone wall, no distance, no silence could loosen it. The knowledge of her wrath had seeped into their blood, and it would haunt them long after the cathedral was out of sight.
Pandora remained alone within the silent cathedral, its vast emptiness pressing against her ears like a suffocating echo. Her slow, deliberate steps rang out against the cold stone floor as she moved toward a chair that resembled a throne carved from shadow itself. Lowering herself into it with measured grace, she tilted her head back, eyes fixing on the dark dome that loomed above. A whisper colder than the still air slipped past her lips.
"I thought only Flugel carried that trait..."
She froze, her mind sharpening, fragments of knowledge assembling like broken shards forming a mirror. The realization gnawed at her: the boy was no accident. His existence could not be dismissed as chance. Perhaps he was something far more profound—an embodiment of a bond that stretched beyond this fragile world's boundaries, a thread woven into the tapestry of countless realities.
"Wait..." she breathed, almost reverently. "Could it be present in every variant of him? In every world?"
Her eyes glimmered with a sudden, fevered light. Rising from the throne, she extended her hand, fingers curling in a subtle gesture. A hushed incantation spilled from her tongue, words ancient enough to make the air itself tremble. From the void, a massive tome of shadow and malice manifested, its cover bound in shapes that seemed to writhe as though alive. The pages unfurled on their own, turning with an unseen will, each shift producing a low resonance that seemed to vibrate through the very bones of the cathedral. With every page that opened, the darkness beneath the dome thickened, as though the night itself were answering her summons.
"It makes sense," Pandora murmured, her voice a low hymn to her own discovery. "Every world is nothing more than a distorted reflection of another. If that is true, then within every version of Natsuki Subaru lies the same anomaly... the seed of convergence, the factor capable of absorbing all Authorities." Her eyes widened further, her expression stretching into something monstrous, and a smile both beautiful and terrible spread across her face. "Hahaha... yes. This will be... exquisite."
With that, she allowed her Authority to unfurl fully, its invisible threads piercing through the veil of existence. She pushed her sight across the unseen boundaries of worlds, probing, watching, listening. Reality after reality bent open like paper before her, spilling their hidden truths into her waiting grasp.
Her power permitted such trespasses. Where the Authorities of Envy and Vainglory were constrained, bound by invisible chains, hers soared freely. For her, unraveling space-time itself was no act of desperation or sacrifice—it was as effortless as breathing. For an ordinary Archbishop, even envisioning such a feat would be a descent into madness. No matter how deeply one aligned with their Authority, the truth was merciless: Authorities consumed their bearers. They drained, eroded, devoured. Every gift came with a price. Every use demanded a toll. And in time, the host was always left hollow.
But Pandora stood apart.
She was no mere bearer of Vainglory Authority. She was Vainglory incarnate. The Authority was not something she held, nor a flame she carried within—it was her very being. Flesh, will, and essence fused with the Authority until no distinction could be made. To Pandora, the rules of Authorities, the limits that crushed others, were meaningless shackles. Her existence was the rule. Her Authority lived through her, breathed when she did, and grew ever more insatiable with every heartbeat.
So she wandered through realities. For days, for weeks—though time itself lost meaning as she drifted—Pandora peered into the flowing rivers of infinite worlds. Sitting beneath the cathedral's oppressive dome, she would close her eyes and cast her mind outward into endless seas of possibility. What she beheld there strained even her own vast comprehension. Entire realms fractured, rebuilt, and collapsed under the weight of one boy's choices. Futures were rewritten in the space of a single decision, entire peoples spared or condemned because of the tilt of his will.
It fascinated her. Natsuki Subaru was no ordinary piece in the great game of fate. He was not merely a pawn shuffled across a board of gods and demons. No... he was something much more. He was a hinge upon which worlds turned, a keystone around which destinies bent. Every universe she glimpsed—no matter how divergent, no matter how twisted—was warped by his presence. The worlds did not simply host him; they yielded to him. They bent, shifted, decayed, or flourished in direct response to his existence.
And as Pandora absorbed this truth, her smile grew sharper, curling like a blade. The cathedral's shadows thickened, the air trembling with her rising anticipation. "How marvelous," she whispered to no one but the void. "A key hidden within the boy... a key that might unlock everything."
Scenes unraveled before his eyes in dreadful procession, each vision blooming and collapsing like a grotesque theater of blood, each act more unbearable than the last:
—A Natsuki Subaru who turned the royal capital into a sea of flame, his grandest and final spectacle. With ash falling like snow, he took his own life in front of the girl he cherished, forcing her to inherit the laurels of victory. His smile in that moment was not triumph, but a quiet surrender, leaving behind only confusion and grief.
—A Natsuki Subaru whose heart was carved hollow by ridicule and rejection. Madness took root in the wounds left behind, and from those wounds he forged an organization born of venom and bitterness. He directed his hatred not at a single person but at all of mankind, his wrath burning so violently that entire nations quaked at the thought of his existence.
—A Natsuki Subaru who awoke one day without memories, left only with instincts sharpened to cruelty. He struck down his own allies, one after another, searching desperately for something he could no longer name. Even as the ground was soaked in blood, he felt no horror, no remorse—only an empty determination to keep moving forward while ignoring the carnage in his wake.
—A Natsuki Subaru who succumbed to the insidious whispers of the Witch of Greed. One by one, his feelings, hopes, and frailties were stripped away, leaving behind a cold figure obsessed with "results." To him, death was reduced to a meaningless tool, and the lives around him were nothing more than counters in a ledger for a better outcome that never arrived.
—A Natsuki Subaru who broke beneath the suffocating weight of his burdens, unable to carry them any longer. He cast everything aside, turning his back on responsibility and despair alike, vanishing into distant lands with the only person he could cling to—a blue‑haired woman whose quiet presence became his final sanctuary. Together they faded into obscurity, a forgotten life in forgotten places.
—A Natsuki Subaru who, in a bizarre and almost mocking twist of fate… gathered companions not out of loyalty or love, but out of shallow conquest, surrounding himself with a harem as though to mask the emptiness gnawing within. (???)
—A Natsuki Subaru who grew weary of betrayal after betrayal. His trust turned to dust, his heart to stone. With cold resolve he subjugated every being within reach, chaining their wills to his own until he stood as sovereign of a kingdom where freedom no longer existed. A tyrant born not of ambition, but of exhaustion.
—A Natsuki Subaru who died so many times that his soul rotted, festering until he welcomed the curse of immortality. No longer man, no longer mortal, he became something caught between corpse and god, an undying figure who carried despair like a crown.
Pandora's lips curled into a chilling smile as she beheld the visions. These were not mere hypothetical futures; they were rivers of blood flowing through the veins of countless universes. Every variant was a fragment of a greater whole, shadows interweaving, all pointing to a singular truth: Subaru himself. His choices, his deaths, his despair—these were the threads that bent and rewove the fabric of existence.
Her consciousness sank deeper still. Through her Authority, she reached outward, seeking. In another universe she touched herself, another Pandora, another smile. Then another, and another, until the echoes multiplied into infinity. Each reflection mirrored her perfectly, each voice spoke the same words, though each carried the weight of different worlds.
The Authority of Vainglory was like a hive. And in such a hive, the queens were never truly alone. A wielder of Vainglory could always find another, and when they did, the contact was no mere exchange of words. It was reflection bleeding into reflection, thought folding into thought. Consciousness spilled into consciousness, a tide of shared knowledge, fury, longing, ecstasy—all pooling together into one boundless reservoir.
Her eyes shone with a light so sharp it seemed to cut through the cathedral itself. The ancient stones trembled as if afraid to witness her revelation. Infinite variations, infinite roads untaken, yet at the heart of all of them stood one figure: Natsuki Subaru.
And in that instant, she understood—Subaru was no longer merely a victim of fate's cruelty. He was the iron nail hammered through the heart of every universe, fixing them all in place. He was the constant around which every divergence spun, the pivot upon which eternity turned. To Pandora, there could be no finer plaything, no more exquisite obsession.
Her understanding crystallized into certainty. In this world, in any world, neither Natsuki Subaru nor even Flugel could ever be truly undone. Subaru's body might fall, be crushed, burned, torn apart again and again—but his essence, that unyielding core, would never perish. He was a being unshackled from time's chains, condemned yet empowered to remember what should never be remembered, to relive what should never be relived, to feel each agony anew across endless corridors of time. Death to him was no final curtain, only another door creaking open onto yet another stage.
"Then who," Pandora mused, her eyes flashing with ominous brilliance, "could possibly overcome such a man?" The answer revealed itself, simple yet terrible in its inevitability. Only another who walked the same cursed path. Only another who carried the burden of time. Only another Natsuki Subaru. His one and only weakness was not betrayal, not despair, not even death—it was the existence of another self, a mirror darkly reflecting everything he was and everything he might yet become.
Her plan had finally taken form, like a tapestry woven from the threads of eternity. The universes were endless; they were born in radiant bursts of creation, they collapsed into silence, and they rose again from the ashes. Each cycle birthed infinite variations, infinite choices, infinite distortions of possibility. Within this ever-expanding sea of outcomes, Pandora had discovered a singular path, a carefully carved route through chaos that could yield the result she desired. Her Authority gave her the power to examine reality's fabric with the eye of a seamstress and then, at will, rip through it like fragile cloth. And she would dedicate this terrifying gift to one singular purpose: to turn Subaru into a weapon unlike anything the multiverse had ever seen.
Her design reached for the root of all things. She would descend to the very beginning, to the instant Subaru first set foot in this world. That moment of trembling innocence, when his confusion was sharp, when his desperation was raw—she would be there. Invisible, yet omnipresent. Her voice would drip into his ear like venom masked as honey. She would weave her strings around his fragile hopes, around his festering fears, tying every beat of his heart to her own rhythm. Slowly, imperceptibly, she would begin her work. Not with haste, but with the patience of eternity. Not as a guardian angel, but as the sculptor of a tyrant.
When Pandora closed her eyes, the images were vivid, sharp enough to burn themselves into her mind: Subaru's first desperate cry echoing in a world that did not know his name. The suffocating weight of his first death crashing down like a mountain. The trembling of hands slick with blood, torn between denial and realization. And beside him, in every scene, floated her shadow—her reflection drifting like a wraith, whispering solace that was never real. To him, she was comfort, kindness in the dark. In truth, she was the puppeteer, her fingers wrapped tightly around invisible strings. If I am the one to guide him, then every agony he endures will be mine to wield. His torment will not break him—it will forge my blade.
Every death of Subaru's would become a strike etched into the grand weapon she was crafting. Every rebirth would not free him, but tighten the shackles she had coiled around his soul. His resilience would no longer be his own; it would be Pandora's instrument, her inexhaustible arsenal. Step by step, death by death, she would mold him into something beyond human, beyond mortal frailty. He would not rise as the pitiful hero others once expected, nor even as the flawed boy he believed himself to be. He would ascend as a sovereign born of despair, an emperor of inevitability, the instrument to unmake Flugel.
For Pandora, Flugel was not merely an obstacle. He was the ancient thorn buried in eternity's side, the sage who had outlived his purpose yet refused to fade. To crush him required more than strength, more than cunning. It required a paradox, a mirror wielded as a weapon. And in Subaru, she saw the ideal clay. To defeat Flugel, she needed only to fashion Subaru into a version of himself that surpassed every other iteration—a being darker, sharper, and infinitely more dangerous than the original soul who had stumbled into this world.
The cathedral around her was drenched in silence so deep it bordered on suffocation. She exhaled, and the sound alone seemed to disturb the stagnant air. A chuckle slipped from her lips, soft at first, then swelling into something more sinister. It ricocheted against the cathedral's stone walls, transforming into a melody of dread that reverberated in every corner. "My plan is nearly complete… All that remains is to give it breath, to shape it into reality."
Her laughter faded, leaving a silence even heavier than before. Only the ominous hum of the miasma lingered, a chorus of shadows filling the vastness of the cathedral. But within Pandora's mind, the quiet was not empty. A whisper rose from the depths of her being, an echo born of countless selves across infinite reflections. Their voices layered upon one another, her own yet not her own, a symphony of alternate Pandoras murmuring in unison. Each variant lent its approval, each shadow-self weaving its conviction into hers, until the boundaries blurred and her certainty solidified.
And there, in that sacred convergence of infinite voices, Pandora smiled once more. The path was clear. The weapon was within reach. And soon, Subaru's every scream, every death, every futile resurrection would resound not as tragedy, but as the drums of her victory.