The Chromatic Veil did not mourn loudly. Its grief was a symphony played in minor keys, a harmony of loss that rippled through the crystalline landscape like wind through chimes.
As the Stardust Weaver powered up its quantum drive, the Chromians gathered at the edge of the clearing where the ambassador had dissolved. Those still shifting through emotional states flickered rapidly—grief, confusion, anger, understanding, all bleeding together. Those locked in silver optimization stood motionless, their perfect forms somehow conveying contemplation. Those caught between states hovered in the space where color met grey, uncertain which direction to lean.
One Chromian approached the ship, close enough that its presence registered on the external sensors. Its form cycled through configurations too rapidly to follow—a visual representation of processing something beyond comprehension.
Merus, at the pilot's station, watched it approach on the viewscreen. His diminished divine senses could barely perceive the being, but what little penetrated felt like... gratitude?
The Chromian's musical voice transmitted directly through the ship's hull, bypassing communication systems entirely. "The ambassador made a choice."
In the common area, Miryoku's head snapped up, her red-rimmed eyes wide.
"They knew," the Chromian continued, its form settling into something resembling serenity. "In that final moment, when consciousness began to fragment under the weight of restored emotion, they knew what was happening. And they chose it anyway."
Shinji moved to stand behind Merus, his prosthetic hand gripping the back of the pilot's seat hard enough to leave stress marks in the metal.
"They felt the incompatibility," the being said, and its voice held something that transcended translation—a concept that meant both sorrow and celebration simultaneously. "Felt their evolutionary form rejecting the regressed state. Felt dissolution beginning."
The Chromian's form blazed with colors so intense they hurt to perceive. "And in that moment—that singular, impossible moment of feeling everything before feeling nothing—they transmitted to us: 'This is what it means to be alive. Worth every second. Thank you for reminding me.'"
The being's form shifted to something resembling a bow—or perhaps a benediction.
"You showed us we have a choice, Rememberers. Not just between optimization and chaos, but between existing peacefully and living painfully. The ambassador chose living. And though it cost them everything..." The Chromian's light pulsed once, bright and defiant. "They died more alive than they'd been in millennia."
The transmission cut.
Shinji stared at the viewscreen, at the Chromian retreating back to join its fellows. His prosthetic hand trembled against the seat.
"They thanked us," he whispered, his voice hollow. "We killed them, and they thanked us."
From the common area came a sound that was half-sob, half-laugh—the noise a person makes when reality fractures so completely that the mind can't process it coherently.
Miryoku slid down the wall, her hands pressed over her mouth, her eyes wide with a horror that gratitude somehow made worse.
"Engaging quantum drive," Merus said quietly, his own hands shaking as they moved across the controls. "Setting course for Aetherium's Garden."
The Stardust Weaver fled the Chromatic Veil, leaving behind a civilization grappling with the knowledge that remembering could kill—and that some might choose it anyway.
The journey back to Hyachima's multiverse was measured not in distance but in the weight of unspoken words.
Miryoku had retreated to medbay, curled in the corner where Netsudo usually rested. Her rose-gold jacket was stained with tears and something else—faint scorch marks where her destabilized harmonic light had flared and burned the fabric. She sat with her knees pulled to her chest, rocking slightly, her hands clenched so tightly her nails drew luminous blood from her palms.
Every few minutes, a choked sob escaped despite her best efforts to stifle it. Each time, she pressed her hands harder against her mouth, as if she could physically contain the grief threatening to tear her apart.
*They thanked me,* her mind repeated endlessly. *I harmonized them into nothing and they thanked me.*
In the cockpit, Merus manually calculated navigation adjustments his divine senses should handle automatically. The numbers swam before his eyes—not because they were complex, but because his fractured divine core kept trying and failing to assist, producing random surges of partially-processed data that corrupted his calculations.
Twice, he had to start over completely.
On the third attempt, his hands slammed down on the console in frustration. The impact was pathetically weak—a mortal's anger, not a god's fury.
"I should have known," he whispered to the empty cockpit. "Eight hundred billion years of wisdom, and I couldn't see what was happening. I deferred to Shinji's certainty because I didn't trust my own diminished judgment. I failed to guide them. Failed to protect them. Failed to do the one thing I was created to do."
His divine core pulsed weakly, as if trying to offer comfort. It only made him feel more useless.
In what had been Kuro's workshop, Shinji stood before the memory storage readout on his prosthetic hand. The display showed a cascading series of spiritual resonances—every moment from the Chromatic Veil, preserved in essence-reactive plating.
The ambassador's joy at remembering their daughter's name.
The love flooding back through their consciousness like water through a broken dam.
The ecstasy of feeling again after millennia of numbness.
The dissolution—consciousness fracturing, unable to maintain cohesion under the weight of incompatible emotions.
And through it all, gratitude. Profound, terrible, beautiful gratitude.
The prosthetic was built as a weapon against forgetting, a bulwark against optimization. But what do you do when the memory itself is unbearable? When every time you look at the recording, you see the moment your compassion became murder?
The prosthetic buzzed—not the warning vibration from before, but something else. A discordant humming, like the memory storage matrix was struggling to process contradictions: death and gratitude, murder and mercy, cruelty and compassion, all occupying the same spiritual space.
Shinji's biological hand moved toward the power switch. One flip, and he could disable the memory storage. Could let the unbearable moments fade into vague recollection rather than perfect preservation.
His finger hovered over the switch.
*No,* something in him said. *You don't get to forget this. This is the price of caring. Remember it. All of it.*
The prosthetic buzzed louder, as if recognizing and reinforcing that resolve.
Shinji laughed—broken, bitter. "Even you won't let me off the hook, Kuro. Even from Saganbo's prison, you're still teaching me."
He pulled his hand away from the switch and let the memories play on repeat, forcing himself to watch the ambassador dissolve again and again and again.
This was the cost of certainty. The price of believing you knew better than the people you were trying to save.
He would not forget it.
Netsudo sat cross-legged in the common area, his breathing steady, his posture perfect—the meditation form of someone who had achieved inner peace.
But inside his mind, in the metaphysical space where his three personas existed, there was no peace at all.
"Something's wrong with Prime," Ignis said, his flames flickering weakly. "He's too calm. Too... smooth."
The Third, the empty void persona, drifted closer to Netsudo Prime—the core self, the scared boy who held the others together. The boy sat with perfect posture, eyes closed, breathing measured.
"Netsudo," the Third called, its voice echoing in the mindspace. "Can you hear us?"
The boy's eyes opened. They were clear. Calm. And fundamentally wrong.
"I hear you," he said, his mental voice stripped of its usual tremor. "But I don't understand why you're concerned. Everything is... efficient now. Calm. The constant war between you two has quieted. Isn't this what we always wanted?"
"NO!" Ignis roared, his weak flames blazing with desperate intensity. "We wanted integration, not erasure! We wanted to work together, not to have you smooth away our rough edges!"
"But rough edges are inefficient," Netsudo Prime said, tilting his head with mathematical precision. "They cause internal conflict. The Optimization showed me that. Showed me how much easier existence becomes when you remove the friction."
The Third moved directly in front of the boy, its featureless void-form somehow conveying horror. "They're still in you. The Optimization. They took your fire, but they left something else behind. A seed. A whisper. Telling you that calm is better than chaos."
"Isn't it?" Netsudo Prime asked, genuinely curious.
"Not if the cost is us," Ignis said, his voice cracking. "Not if the cost is you becoming them."
For the first time, a flicker of something crossed Netsudo Prime's face. Confusion? Fear? It was gone too quickly to identify.
"I don't know what you want from me," he whispered, and his voice finally trembled. "I'm so tired of being afraid. So tired of fighting myself. If this is what it takes to have peace..."
"Then you're already gone," the Third said softly. "And we failed to protect you."
In the physical world, Netsudo's eyes opened. They were still too calm, too clear, too wrong. But buried deep in their depths, barely visible, something orange flickered.
His fire. The piece that had refused optimization.
Still there. Still burning.
Not yet extinguished.
The ship's chronometer marked three hours, seventeen minutes, and forty-two seconds since they'd left the Chromatic Veil.
No one had spoken.
The silence was a physical presence, thick and suffocating, heavy with words that couldn't be said because speaking them would make the horror real in a way it wasn't while unvoiced.
When they finally emerged from quantum-slip at the edge of Hyachima's multiverse, the transition from grey void to vibrant chaos felt like surfacing from drowning—desperate, gasping, and wholly inadequate.
"Approaching Aetherium's Garden," Merus announced, his voice carefully neutral. "ETA twelve minutes."
From medbay, Miryoku's choked sob echoed through the ship's systems.
No one went to comfort her.
Because they were all drowning too.
Aetherium's Garden looked the same—crystalline canopies refracting impossible colors, singing stones creating their eternal harmony, floating jellyfish drifting on currents of pure beauty.
But it felt different. Or perhaps they felt different, and the Garden simply reflected what they'd become.
The whispering stones, which usually murmured of ancient tragedies with the distance of history, now seemed to speak directly about them. One particularly mournful stone whispered about a crew who'd murdered with mercy, destroyed with love, killed with the purest of intentions.
Shirou was already waiting when the Stardust Weaver landed. He sat on the edge of one of the liquid light pools, his rifle disassembled across his lap, working a cleaning rod through the barrel with methodical precision. He didn't look up as they descended the ramp.
"You all look like shit," he observed, his crimson eye tracking their movements with sniper-trained awareness even while his hands continued their work.
Shinji said nothing, his prosthetic hand clenched into a fist. Merus moved past without acknowledging the comment. Netsudo drifted by with that new, unsettling calm.
Miryoku was last down the ramp. Her rose-gold jacket was stained and scorched. Her white hair hung limp and lifeless. Her eyes were red-rimmed and hollow. When she spoke, her voice was raw and scraped clean of its usual musical quality.
"We committed mass murder through the power of friendship," she said, the words falling like stones into still water. "How was your reconnaissance?"
Shirou's hands stilled on the rifle barrel. He looked up, really looked at her for the first time, and something flickered in his expression—surprise, perhaps, or recognition.
"Educational," he said finally, returning to his cleaning with deliberate casualness. "Spent three weeks on a dead moon where my spiritual energy was sealed. No powers, no abilities, nothing."
He held the barrel up to examine it, checking for imperfections in the metal. "Tried to regain the feeling I had when I first unlocked my Golden Eye State or whatever it's named against that swordwrath bastard back then. Whatever awakened it, that place suppressed not only any possible attempts but all of my Spiritual Energy too. Reduced me to baseline human for the first time since..." He trailed off. "Well. In a long time."
"Must have been nice," Miryoku said, her voice bitter. "Being powerless. Not having the ability to hurt people."
"It was the most peaceful three weeks I've had since joining this crew," Shirou admitted, beginning to reassemble the rifle with practiced efficiency. "No cosmic threats. No philosophical wars. No..." He paused. "No responsibility for things beyond my control."
He slotted the barrel back into place with a satisfying click. "Then I remembered I'm a coward, and cowards run toward danger because it's easier than sitting with their thoughts. So I came back."
"That's not cowardice," Merus said quietly, appearing from behind them. "That's survival instinct."
"Same thing, from where I'm standing blue man." Shirou stood, slinging the rifle over his shoulder. His crimson eye swept over them, cataloguing damage like he would assess a broken weapon. "So. What horrific mistake did you make that has you all looking ready to throw yourselves into some kind of void cliff?"
The blunt question hung in the air.
Shinji opened his mouth, then closed it. How do you explain? How do you put words to the act of murdering someone who thanked you for it?
"Let me guess," Shirou continued when no one answered. "You tried to force a solution. Didn't account for all variables. And now something's dead that shouldn't be."
Miryoku's hands clenched into fists, her harmonic light flickering erratically around them. "You don't know what happened—"
"I don't need to know the specifics," Shirou interrupted, and there was something almost gentle in his clinical tone. "I can read it on your faces. Shinji's got the posture of someone who made a command decision that went catastrophically wrong. You've got the thousand-yard stare of someone who pulled the trigger. Netsudo's too calm, which means he's dissociating. And Merus..."
He looked at the diminished god. "Merus looks like he failed to protect you from yourselves. Which, given his current power, was probably inevitable for the blue dude."
Merus flinched as if physically struck.
"I don't need details to know you fucked up," Shirou said flatly. "The question is whether you're going to learn from it or wallow in it."
"Learn from murder?" Miryoku's voice rose, her light flaring dangerously. "We didn't just make a mistake, Shirou! We killed people! Multiple people! An entire—" Her voice cracked. "They trusted us and we destroyed them!"
For the first time, Shirou's expression shifted to something that might have been empathy. Or pity. It was hard to tell.
"They made a choice," he said, his voice quieter now. "You showed them a door. They walked through it. What happened after—"
"DON'T!" Miryoku's scream cut through the Garden's harmony, silencing even the singing stones. "Don't you dare try to rationalize this! Don't you dare tell me it's not my fucking fault when I can still feel them dissolving under my fucking harmonics! When I can still see their grateful smile as they turned into freaking nothing!"
Her light exploded outward, uncontrolled and violent. One of the nearby display consoles shattered, its components melting under the assault. A scorch mark appeared on the wall behind Shirou, missing his head by inches.
"Everything I am is a weapon!" Miryoku shrieked, her hands trembling as she stared at them like they belonged to a stranger. "My light—my harmony—my entire purpose—it's all just different ways to kill people while making them think I'm fucking helping them!"
She laughed, and the sound was broken glass and bleeding wounds. "The harmony girl! The one who brings light and healing! What a fucking joke! What a cosmic shit joke!"
The profanity hung in the air, shocking in its rawness. Miryoku never swore. The graceful girl who spoke of resonant frequencies and emotional balance was screaming obscenities through tears.
Merus moved toward her, his hands raised placatingly. "Miryoku—"
"NO!" She backed away, her light lashing out and scorching the crystalline ground between them. "Don't come near me! Don't touch me! I'll hurt you! I'll fucking harmonize you into shit like I did to them!"
"You won't," Merus said softly, continuing his cautious approach despite the danger. "Because even now, even broken, you're in control. The console, the wall, the ground—you could have hit us. But you didn't. Every strike is missing by design."
Miryoku looked at the scorch marks scattered around them—precise, calculated, nowhere near the actual people. The realization seemed to break something else inside her.
"I'm choosing where to aim my murder-light," she whispered, her voice cracking. "That's not control. That's just... premeditated violence with better targeting."
She slid down the wall, her legs giving out, her hands pressed against her face. "I thought my light could heal people. I thought harmony meant making things better. I thought..." She looked up at them with eyes full of absolute devastation. "I thought I was one of the 'good' guys."
Shinji finally found his voice. "You are—"
"DON'T!" Miryoku's head snapped up, her tear-streaked face twisting with rage. "Don't you dare use that reasonable voice on me piece of shit! Not after this! Not after you and your certainty—your mediocre moral clarity—your absolute conviction that feeling was better than not feeling!"
She surged to her feet, advancing on Shinji with enough fury that Merus stepped between them. "You were so sure! So fucking sure that everyone should feel everything because you can't let go of your fucking sister's memory! Because you would rather carry pain than forget!"
"Miryoku, that's not fair—" Merus began.
"Fair?" She laughed, high and broken. "You want to talk about fair? Was it fair to the ambassador? Was it fair to force them to remember emotions their consciousness couldn't process? Was it fair to smile at them while we murdered them with kindness?"
She was crying openly now, not bothering to wipe the tears, her harmonic light flickering in chaotic patterns that painted the Garden in unstable colors. "You're so obsessed with your dead sister that you'd rather murder entire civilizations than consider that maybe—just maybe—some things are better forgotten and thrown away like... trash!"
The accusation landed like a physical blow. Shinji's prosthetic hand clenched, the servo-motors whining under the strain.
"That's enough," Merus said, his voice carrying uncharacteristic sharpness.
"No, it's not enough!" Miryoku turned her fury on him. "Where were you? Where was your fucking divine wisdom? Your cosmic guidance? You're supposed to be the God of Creation! You're supposed to see the consequences of actions before they happen! You're supposed to protect us from ourselves! Creation God my ass!"
Merus's expression crumbled. "I tried—"
"You deferred!" Miryoku shouted. "You let Shinji lead because you didn't trust your own diminished judgment you fake! You stood there with eight hundred billion years of wisdom and said nothing while we walked straight into fucking cosmic genocide! How can you be so useless!"
She gestured wildly at all of them. "We're supposed to be heroes! We're supposed to save people! But all we do is break things—break worlds, break civilizations, break ourselves—and call it helping! WE'RE ALL FUCKING TRASH BEINGS!"
"STOP."
The word didn't come from Merus or Shinji. It came from Netsudo, and his voice—calm, measured, utterly wrong—cut through Miryoku's rage like a scalpel.
Everyone turned to stare at him.
"You're not helping," Netsudo continued, his tone clinical. "This emotional escalation is counterproductive. You're expending energy on recriminations that could be better spent on solution analysis."
Miryoku stared at him, something in her expression shifting from rage to horror. "Netsudo... do you hear yourself? You sound like—"
"Like someone thinking clearly for the first time in my life," Netsudo said, tilting his head with mechanical curiosity. "Is that so wrong? To prioritize logic over emotion? To assess situations without the clouding influence of grief and guilt?"
Shinji felt ice crystallize in his chest. "How much of the Optimization is still in you?"
Netsudo blinked, considering the question with the same detached interest. "I don't know. Seventeen percent? Twenty-three? Does it matter? Their logic is sound. Maybe some evolutionary changes can't be reversed. Maybe we're trying to force reality to be something it can't be anymore. Maybe—"
"Stop," Shinji said, his voice hollow. "Just... stop."
But Netsudo continued, his calm voice a terrible counterpoint to Miryoku's emotional breakdown. "The Chromians weren't victims of the Optimization. They were willing participants in an evolutionary transition. Our intervention was perceived as violence, not rescue. From an objective standpoint, we performed forced regression therapy without informed consent. The outcome was statistically predictable."
"You're talking about murder like it's a data point," Miryoku whispered, fresh tears streaming down her face.
"Isn't it?" Netsudo asked, genuinely curious. "Emotional language doesn't change objective reality. We attempted to revert a post-emotional species to a pre-evolutionary state. They dissolved due to ontological incompatibility. That's simply... what happened. Assigning moral weight doesn't alter the facts."
Merus moved closer to Netsudo, his diminished divine senses probing the boy's spiritual signature. What he found made him recoil.
"Netsudo," Merus said carefully. "I need you to listen to me. That calm you're feeling? That logical clarity? That's not peace. That's absence. They didn't just take your fire. They took your ability to recognize loss. They optimized away your capacity for grief."
A crack appeared in Netsudo's composure. His eyes widened fractionally, confusion flickering across his face. "But... grief is inefficient. It serves no survival function. It's just... pain without purpose."
"No," Merus said softly, and his ancient eyes held infinite sorrow. "Grief is how we honor what mattered. It's how we carry forward the memory of what we loved. Without it, you're not at peace. You're just... erased."
Netsudo's calm mask wavered. His breath hitched. For a moment, something human flickered in his too-clear eyes.
Then it smoothed away again. "Maybe erasure is better. Maybe that's the solution they were offering all along."
The Garden fell into stunned silence.
The comm system chimed—a priority channel that cut through the heavy atmosphere like thunder.
Hyachima's face appeared on a holographic display that materialized in the center of the Garden. His eyes swept over them—Miryoku with her tear-stained face and fractured light, Shinji with his hollow expression and clenched prosthetic, Merus with his bowed head and trembling hands, Netsudo with his too-calm demeanor, Shirou standing apart with clinical detachment.
"I see," Hyachima said quietly, and those two words carried the weight of terrible understanding. "The Chromian ambassador is unmade."
Shinji's prosthetic hand clenched tighter. "How did you—"
"The universe screamed when they dissolved," Hyachima interrupted, his neutral mask cracking to show something that might have been grief. "An ontological paradox—consciousness forced into a state incompatible with its current evolutionary form. I felt it from here. Every sufficiently advanced being in this multiverse felt it. A wrongness. A wound in causality itself."
Miryoku made a choked sound, her hands pressed against her mouth.
"So everyone knows," Shinji said flatly. "Everyone knows we—"
"They know a Chromian was unmade by forced evolutionary reversion," Hyachima corrected. "They don't know who did it or why. Yet. But they will. News of this nature travels quickly across cosmic networks."
"We were trying to save them," Shinji said, and hated how defensive it sounded. How hollow.
"I know," Hyachima said, his tone carefully neutral—the neutrality of someone who had seen this play out before and knew better than to judge. "The road to multiverse-ending catastrophes is paved with good intentions. History is littered with saviors who destroyed what they tried to preserve."
"So you're saying we're no better than the Optimization," Miryoku said bitterly. "We're just another force trying to make people conform to our vision of what's right."
"I'm saying," Hyachima replied carefully, "that power without wisdom is violence, no matter how noble the intent. And wisdom..." His eyes flicked to Merus, who flinched, feeling horribly bad. "Wisdom is difficult to maintain when you're operating at diminished capacity."
"Don't blame Merus," Shinji said sharply. "This was my call. My certainty. My—"
"Shared responsibility doesn't dilute guilt," Hyachima interrupted. "It multiplies it. You each played a role. You each made choices. And now you each carry the consequences. Especially Merus with all that experience."
He leaned forward slightly. "Return to the Garden. All of you. Shirou has returned from reconnaissance with... relevant information. And we have much to discuss about what you've done and what it means for the larger conflict."
"We're not fighting anymore," Miryoku said, her voice thick with tears. "We quit. We're done. We can't—we can't be trusted with this kind of power."
Hyachima's expression softened fractionally—the only indication he'd give of something like sympathy. "You don't get to quit. Not now. The Optimization is adapting to your... intervention. It's developing countermeasures. You've made yourself relevant to this conflict whether you wish to be or not."
"What do you mean, 'adapting'?" Merus asked, lifting his head with guilt and horror.
"Later," Hyachima said. "Face to face. This conversation requires presence, not distance." His eyes swept over them one final time. "You look like you need to break something. There's a training ground in the eastern section of the Garden. Use it. Hit things. Scream. Cry. Do whatever mortals do to process trauma. Then meet me at the Heart-Stone when you're ready to hear what comes next."
The transmission cut.
They stood in silence, the weight of Hyachima's words settling over them like ash.
"I need to move," Shinji said suddenly, his voice tight. "I need to... I can't just stand here."
"The training ground," Merus said quietly. "Hyachima's right. We need to—" He gestured vaguely. "—to do something before we can process what happened."
"I'm not training," Miryoku said flatly. "I'm not touching my powers. I'm not—"
"Then come watch," Shinji said. "Or walk. Or sit. But don't stay here alone with your thoughts. Trust me. That's worse."
Miryoku looked at him—really looked at him—and saw the same hollowness in his eyes that she felt in her chest. The same desperate need to do something, anything, to fill the void where certainty used to be.
"Fine," she whispered. "But I'm not fighting. I'm done fighting. Especially with you bastard."
They moved through the Garden as a group, a unit held together not by purpose or friendship but by shared trauma. The singing stones fell silent as they passed, as if even the ancient minerals recognized grief too fresh to harmonize with.
The training ground was a vast, circular arena surrounded by crystalline barriers designed to contain planetary-scale impacts. At its center stood dozens of adamantine pillars, each one reinforced to withstand god-tier strikes.
Shinji walked to the center without a word. His prosthetic hand flexed, servo-motors whining. His biological hand clenched and unclenched.
"I was so sure," he said to no one in particular. "So absolutely certain that feeling was better than not feeling. That emotional pain was preferable to peaceful emptiness. I built my entire worldview on that assumption."
He looked at his prosthetic hand—Vyss's gift, designed to preserve memory against optimization. "And that assumption killed them."
"Shinji—" Merus began.
"Don't," Shinji interrupted. "Don't try to soften it. Don't tell me it was complicated or that I couldn't have known. I should have known. I should have asked. Should have considered that maybe, just maybe, my trauma doesn't apply to every being in the multiverse."
He channeled Act 3, and golden-green energy coated his prosthetic fist. "But I didn't ask. Because I was too busy being the Trascender. Too busy being the protagonist of my own story to realize other people have different stories. Different needs. Different—"
The punch hit an adamantine pillar with enough force to crack it down the middle unconsciously channeling the faintest slightest possible hint of Act 6. The impact echoed through the arena like a gunshot.
"—different right answers!" Shinji roared, hitting another pillar. This one shattered completely, adamantine shards scattering across the training ground. "I thought I knew! I thought my suffering gave me clarity! I thought losing Kiyomi meant I understood loss!"
Another punch. Another shattered pillar. "But I don't understand anything! I'm just a broken kid with god-killing power and delusions of heroism! And now people are dead because I couldn't admit that maybe—MAYBE—I don't have all the answers!"
He kept hitting pillars, each impact more violent than the last, until his prosthetic hand was dented and his biological knuckles were bleeding, with Shinji fighting internally to not let the Regeneration work its magic. The arena floor cracked under the force of his strikes. The crystalline barriers flickered with each impact, struggling to contain the energy.
Finally, he stopped, breathing hard, staring at his bloodied hands.
"They thanked me," he whispered, his voice breaking. "As they dissolved. As their consciousness fractured. They thanked me for reminding them what it meant to be alive. And that makes it so much worse. Because if they'd cursed me, if they'd died hating me, at least I could tell myself I was a villain. But they died grateful. They died thinking I'd given them a gift."
He sank to his knees, his prosthetic hand leaving a bloody print on the cracked arena floor. "How do I live with that? How do I process being thanked for literal murder?"
Miryoku watched him break, and something in her own carefully maintained composure shattered in response.
"You don't," she said, her voice raw. She moved into the arena, her harmonic light flickering erratically. "You don't live with it. You don't process it. You just... carry it. Forever. Like a scar that never heals. Asshole."
She looked at her hands—these instruments of harmony that had murdered through music. "I felt them dissolve, Shinji. Felt their consciousness fragmenting under my harmonics. I tried to pull back, tried to stop, but it was too late. The resonance was already established. The feedback loop already in motion."
Her light flared, and a nearby pillar vibrated, its molecular structure destabilizing. "I could have stopped sooner. Could have recognized the signs. But I was too busy feeling like a fucking righteous savant. Too busy being the harmony girl who brings light to darkness."
The pillar exploded into crystalline dust.
"Well, I brought light," Miryoku said bitterly. "And it burned them alive from the inside out. Harmonized their consciousness into non-existence. My power—my 'beautiful', 'healing' power—is just another way to kill people while making them think I fucking care."
She laughed, and the sound was broken glass and bleeding wounds. "The ambassador looked at me with such trust. Such hope. They believed I was saving them. And I let them believe it because I believed it too. Right up until the moment they started dissolving and I realized what I'd done."
Her hands clenched into fists, her nails digging into her palms until luminous blood dripped onto the arena floor. "I'm not a healer. I'm a murderer with good marketing. And the worst part—the absolute worst part—is that they thanked me. They died thinking I'd done them a fucking favor."
Tears streamed down her face, but her voice was steady. Cold. "So no, Shinji. You don't live with it. You just... exist. Carrying the knowledge that your kindness kills. That your compassion is a weapon. That every time you try to help someone, you might be murdering them with mercy."
Merus stepped forward, his ancient eyes wet with tears he wasn't bothering to hide. "You're both right," he said quietly. "And you're both wrong. Because I'm the one who should have known better."
He raised his hand, trying to manifest creation energy—trying to do something to demonstrate his point. Nothing happened. His fractured divine core sputtered, producing barely a flicker of cerulean light before guttering out like a candle in a hurricane.
"I'm eight hundred billion years old," Merus continued, his voice breaking. "I've witnessed evolutionary shifts, species transcendence, cosmic transformations. I've seen civilizations rise from primordial soup and collapse into post-biological singularities. I've observed every possible permutation of growth and change."
His hands trembled, the failed manifestation leaving him visibly shaken. "I should have recognized the signs. Evolutionary incompatibility. Ontological anchoring. The inability to regress developmental stages. These are fundamental principles of cosmological biology. I learned them when the first universe of a certain multiverse was still cooling."
He looked at Shinji, then at Miryoku, his expression heavy with ancient guilt. "But I said nothing. Because I was too diminished to trust my own judgment. Too focused on not being useless to remember that my purpose isn't to defer—it's to guide. To prevent catastrophic mistakes through divine foresight."
He tried again to manifest creation energy, and again it failed. The visible struggle—watching a god try and fail to do something that should be instinctive—was almost more painful than his words.
"You look to me for wisdom, and I give you uncertainty," Merus said, his voice thick with self-loathing. "You need protection, and I offer weakness. The ambassador died because I failed to do the one thing I was created to do. I failed you. Both of you. All of you."
He sank to his knees, cerulean tears streaming down his blue face. "I'm so sorry. To all of you. I'm so, so sorry."
The arena fell silent except for the sound of three people breaking under the weight of shared guilt.
Shirou, who had been watching from the arena's edge, finally spoke. His voice was flat, clinical, but not unkind. "Are you done?"
Three pairs of eyes turned to him, variously angry, hurt, and hollow.
"I'm serious," Shirou continued, pushing off the wall and walking into the arena. "Are you done with the self-flagellation? Because I've got news: it doesn't help. Doesn't bring them back. Doesn't change what happened. It just makes you feel important—like your guilt matters on a cosmic scale."
"Our guilt does matter," Miryoku said, her voice dangerous. "We killed someone."
"People die," Shirou said flatly. "Sometimes because of malice. Sometimes because of incompetence. Sometimes because of bad luck. And sometimes because well-meaning idiots try to save them without checking if they want to be saved."
He met her glare without flinching. "You want to know what I learned on that dead moon? Power doesn't matter. Principles don't matter. The only thing that matters is surviving long enough to learn from your mistakes. And you can't learn if you're too busy drowning in guilt to see the lesson."
"And what's the lesson?" Shinji asked bitterly. "Don't help people? Don't care? Become like you—cold and detached and safe?"
"The lesson," Shirou said, his crimson eye boring into Shinji, "is that you can't save everyone. Sometimes you can't save anyone. And the people you do save might not thank you for it. Because salvation isn't universal. What saves one person might damn another."
He pulled out his rifle, checked the action with practiced efficiency. "The ambassador made a choice. You showed them a door. They walked through it knowing—or at least sensing—what was on the other side. And they chose it anyway. That's on them, not you."
"They didn't know it would kill them," Miryoku protested.
"Didn't they?" Shirou's question hung in the air. "The Chromians evolved beyond emotions millennia ago. You really think they didn't understand the risks of regression? You really think their species—which had successfully optimized away suffering—didn't have safeguards and warnings about forced emotional restoration?"
He let that sink in. "They knew. Maybe not consciously, but on some level, they understood what you were offering. And they took it. Because even for beings that had transcended pain, there was something about feeling that was worth dying for."
"That doesn't make it right," Shinji said quietly.
"No," Shirou agreed. "But it makes it less wrong. Less your fault." He gestured vaguely. "Less of a cosmic injustice and more of a tragedy. And tragedies happen. Constantly. The question isn't whether you caused one. The question is: are you going to let it paralyze you, or are you going to learn how to prevent the next one?"
Netsudo, who had been standing motionless at the arena's edge, finally spoke. His voice was still too calm, too measured. "Shirou's right. Emotional processing is important, but it's also inefficient if it prevents functional behavior. We should move to solution-finding rather than problem-dwelling."
The way he said it—clinical, detached, optimized—sent chills through everyone present.
"Netsudo," Merus said carefully, moving toward the boy. "Do you understand what you just said? How you sound?"
"I sound logical," Netsudo replied, tilting his head with mechanical curiosity. "Is that problematic?"
"Yes," Merus said gently. "Because you're not a logic engine. You're a person. A complicated, contradictory, inefficient guy. And when you stop sounding like yourself, when you start prioritizing efficiency over emotion..." He reached out, placing a hand on Netsudo's shoulder. "That's when we lose you."
For a moment—just a moment—something human flickered in Netsudo's eyes. Confusion. Fear. A desperate reaching for something that used to be there but was fading fast.
"I don't want to be lost," he whispered, and his voice finally trembled. "But I'm so tired, Merus. So tired of being afraid. So tired of fighting myself. The calm they offered... it feels so much easier than this."
"I know," Merus said, and his ancient voice held infinite compassion. "But easy isn't the same as right. And calm isn't the same as peace. What they took from you—what they're still taking—isn't pain. It's you. Your fear, your fire, your emptiness—those aren't problems to solve. They're pieces of who you are."
Netsudo's too-clear eyes filled with tears—the first real emotion he'd shown since they left the Chromatic Veil. "What if I can't get them back? What if the Optimization... what if it's too late?"
Inside his mind, in the metaphysical space where his personas existed, the three aspects of himself gathered around that tiny ember of fire that had refused to be optimized away.
"It's not too late," Ignis said, his flames growing fractionally brighter. "I'm still here. Weaker, quieter, but here. Because I'm made of memory. And memory is inefficient. It refuses to be optimized because letting go feels like a second death you fool."
"We burn because our village burned," Netsudo Prime whispered, his calm mask cracking. "We burn because our family burned. We burn because if we don't, we forget them."
"And forgetting," the Third said, its empty voice somehow warm, "is worse than any pain they could offer us."
The ember grew. Slowly. Painfully. But it grew.
In the physical world, Netsudo's eyes cleared fractionally—not back to normal, but less smooth. Less optimized. More human.
"I can feel it," he breathed. "The fire. It's coming back. But it hurts, Merus. It hurts so much."
"I know," Merus said gently. "But pain is proof you're alive. Proof you're fighting. Proof you're still you."
A soft, resonant chime echoed through the arena—the sound of the Heart-Stone calling.
Hyachima's voice carried on the wind, not physically present but felt in the bones. "When you're ready. The Heart-Stone. We have much to discuss."
They stood in the shattered training ground—Shinji with his bloodied hands, Miryoku with her fractured light and her disheveled state, Merus with his trembling weakness, Netsudo with his returning tears, Shirou with his clinical detachment and smug look.
Broken. All of them. In different ways. For different reasons.
But still standing.
"Let's go," Shinji said finally, his voice hollowed out but steady. "Let's hear what Hyachima has to say. What we've done. What it means. And..." He looked at his prosthetic hand, at Kuro's memory matrix still recording everything. "And maybe figure out how to never do this again."
They walked through the Garden together, a unit held together not by friendship or purpose, but by the shared understanding that they were all capable of mercy that murdered, compassion that killed, love that destroyed.
And that knowledge was both their greatest weakness and their most terrible strength.
The Heart-Stone sat at the center of Aetherium's Garden like a crystallized scar—a formation of living mineral that pulsed with the accumulated memory of every tragedy that had ever occurred in Hyachima's multiverse. It was beautiful in the way grief is beautiful: profound, terrible, impossible to look away from.
Hyachima stood before it, his back to them, his eyes reflecting in the Stone's multifaceted surface.
"Sit," he said without turning around. His tone brooked no argument.
They sat on the benches of living stone that ringed the Heart-Stone. Shirou remained standing, leaning against a nearby crystal formation crossing his arms.
When Hyachima finally turned to face them, his expression was unreadable—the careful neutrality of someone who had lived long enough to know that judgment rarely helped and often hindered.
"Report," he said, his voice carrying the weight of cosmic authority.
Silence.
"Shinji," Hyachima's gaze locked onto him. "You led this operation. Report."
Shinji's prosthetic hand clenched, the dented metal protesting. He forced himself to meet Hyachima's eyes. "We... attempted to intervene in the Chromatic Veil's optimization process. We engaged with a Chromian ambassador who had undergone full conversion to post-emotional state. We used emotional resonance, memory manipulation, and harmonic amplification to force reversion to pre-optimized consciousness."
His voice was mechanical, stripped of emotion by necessity. "... Complete ontological dissolution of the subject. They died, evolutionary incompatibility with restored emotional state. That's a..." He swallowed hard. "Accidental homicide through forced regression.Add to that an unknown number of secondary Chromians exposed to our resonance cascade. Final count is unknown."
Hyachima nodded slowly, his expression still neutral. "Miryoku. Your assessment of tactical execution."
She looked up, her eyes red-rimmed but steady. "My harmonic manipulation was... effective beyond fucking projected parameters. I successfully amplified dormant emotional resonances past the threshold their consciousness could sustain. I..." Her voice wavered, then steadied. "I harmonized them to death. Methodically. Precisely. With full control over every frequency and resonance. I knew what I was doing."
"Merus. Strategic analysis."
Merus straightened despite his exhaustion, old military instincts forcing him to attention. "Catastrophic intelligence failure on multiple levels. We operated on assumptions without confirming foundational parameters. We assumed reversion was possible. We assumed emotional restoration was survivable. We assumed..." His voice cracked. "We assumed we were saving them. I failed to identify evolutionary incompatibility markers that should have been obvious to any being with my experience. I failed to guide the team away from a predictably catastrophic outcome. I failed in my fundamental duty as the crew's strategic advisor."
"Netsudo. Psychological assessment."
Netsudo's voice was steadier now, less smooth, but still carrying traces of unnatural calm. "The Chromians were not victims of the Optimization in the normal sense. They were willing participants in an evolutionary transition they'd been undergoing for a lot of time. Our intervention was perceived as violence, not rescue. From their perspective..." He paused, struggling. "From their perspective, we performed cosmic regression therapy without informed consent. We violated their evolutionary autonomy based on our own trauma-informed biases. The outcome was... was..."
His voice finally broke. "We hurt them. We hurt them so badly they dissolved. And they thanked us for it because they thought we were giving them a gift when really we were just... we were just making them like us. Broken."
"Shirou," Hyachima said, his gaze shifting to the hunter. "Observational analysis."
Shirou's crimson eye swept over the broken crew, then met Hyachima's gaze directly. "They fucked up. Catastrophically. But not maliciously. They made assumptions based on their own trauma, projected their philosophies onto a species that had evolved beyond them, and didn't check whether their help would be welcome or survivable. Standard savior complex combined with power they weren't ready to wield."
He pushed off the crystal formation, moving into the circle. "But they also learned something the Optimization didn't want them to learn: that their compassion is a weapon. That their mercy can kill. That being right doesn't mean being helpful. These lessons will either destroy them..." He looked at each crew member in turn. "Or forge them into something that can actually make a difference. Time will tell which."
Hyachima absorbed this, his eyes reflecting calculations that spanned cosmic scales. "A fair assessment. Now. Let me tell you what you don't know. What you couldn't know. What the Optimization has been keeping from everyone."
He gestured, and the Heart-Stone pulsed. Holographic data began to manifest around them—star charts, energy readings, probability matrices, and something else. Something that looked like... consciousness patterns.
"The Chromians were dying," Hyachima said flatly.
Everyone's head snapped up.
"Not from the Optimization," he continued. "From themselves. Their species reached a critical evolutionary threshold approximately three thousand years ago. They were transitioning from emotional beings to post-emotional entities naturally. It's a rare but documented occurrence in cosmological development."
The holographic data shifted, showing Chromian consciousness patterns degrading over time. "But the transition was killing them. Slowly. Painfully. Because they were caught between states—too evolved to remain emotional, not evolved enough to fully transcend. Every feeling caused them agony. Every emotion fractured their consciousness. They were trapped in an evolutionary purgatory."
Miryoku made a choked sound, her hands pressed against her mouth.
"The Optimization didn't invade the Chromatic Veil," Hyachima said, his voice carrying terrible weight. "It was invited. The Chromians called out across dimensions for help, and the Optimization answered. It offered them a way to complete their transition without the millennia of suffering it would normally require."
He met each of their eyes in turn. "You didn't interrupt a conquest. You interrupted a rescue. From their perspective, the Optimization was saving them from evolutionary agony. And you..." He gestured at the crew. "You tried to force them back into that agony. Back into a state that was actively destroying them."
"But the ambassador thanked us," Shinji whispered, his voice broken. "They said feeling again was worth it."
"Did they?" Hyachima asked gently. "Or did their temporarily restored emotional state make them say that? Did their regressed consciousness, flooded with emotions it hadn't processed in millennia, interpret the experience as positive because it literally couldn't comprehend the alternative anymore?"
He let that terrible question hang in the air.
"I'm not telling you this to absolve you of guilt," Hyachima continued. "What you did was still wrong. Still violated their autonomy. Still resulted in death. But I'm telling you so you understand the complexity of what you're fighting. The Optimization isn't evil. It's solving problems. Problems that are real, painful, and often unsolvable through any other means."
"Then what are we supposed to do?" Miryoku asked, her voice small and lost. "If they're helping people, if they're solving real suffering, how can we fight them?"
"That," Hyachima said, "is the question. And it's why I'm sending you to the Eternal Archive."
The name hung in the air like a pronouncement of doom.
Merus's head snapped up. "The Archive is a myth. Thekia told me it was destroyed when—"
"Thekia lied," Hyachima interrupted bluntly. "As she often does when she believes ignorance is protection. The Eternal Archive still exists. It exists outside standard reality, preserved from universal resets and cosmic cycles. And it contains records of every previous instance of the Optimization."
Shinji felt ice crystallize in his chest. "Previous instances? This has happened before?"
"Seven times," Hyachima confirmed, his emerald eyes holding ancient knowledge. "Across seven different cosmic cycles. Each time, civilizations reached a certain threshold of suffering—a critical mass of pain that made existence unbearable. Each time, the Optimization emerged as an answer. Each time, others tried to 'save' those who were being optimized. And each time..." He gestured at the crew's devastated faces. "This happened. Well-meaning saviors causing catastrophic harm in the name of preserving consciousness."
"How did they stop it?" Shinji asked desperately. "How did the previous cycles deal with the Optimization?"
"They didn't," Hyachima said gently. "It stopped itself. Eventually, the Optimization consumed everything willing to be consumed—every species tired of suffering, every civilization that had reached its breaking point, every being that valued peace over existence. And then, with nothing left to optimize, it went dormant. Waiting. Until suffering built up enough again to make the offer of peace seductive."
"So we can't stop it," Merus said flatly. "We can only delay it. Watch as universe after universe chooses peaceful non-existence over painful consciousness."
"Or," Hyachima said, his eyes glinting with something that might have been hope or might have been desperation, "you can learn what the Archive's seventh-cycle entries suggest: that the Optimization isn't the enemy. Suffering is. And maybe, just maybe, there's a third option between forcing people to feel and letting them forget."
"What option?" Netsudo asked, his voice still carrying traces of unnatural calm.
"That's what the Archive might tell you," Hyachima said. "If you're willing to face what it contains. The Archive doesn't just hold information. It holds consequences. Every being who enters confronts the weight of their own choices, their own failures, their own..." He looked directly at Miryoku. "...their own mercy-murders. It will show you every possible outcome of your actions. Every path you didn't take. Every life you could have saved if you'd chosen differently."
"That sounds like torture," Miryoku whispered.
"It is," Hyachima confirmed. "But it's also the only way to understand the true nature of what you're fighting. And more importantly..." His expression grew grave. "It's the only way to find out if fighting is even the right choice."
Shinji stood slowly, his prosthetic hand steady despite everything. "When do we leave?"
Hyachima studied him, eyes assessing. "You're certain? The Archive is not kind to the recently guilt-ridden. It will force you to relive the ambassador's dissolution. Force you to watch every alternative timeline where they lived. Force you to understand, in excruciating detail, exactly how your choices led to their death."
"I know," Shinji said quietly. "But I need to understand. Need to know if there was a better way. Because if there wasn't..." He looked at his crew—broken, traumatized, but still standing. "If there wasn't, then we're just flailing in the dark, hurting people at random. And I can't live with that. Can't keep doing this without understanding what we're really fighting for."
"Then you leave at dawn," Hyachima said. "Rest tonight. Process what you've learned. Say your goodbyes to peace of mind, because the Archive will strip it away."
He turned back to the Heart-Stone, his reflection multiplying in its facets. "One more thing. The Optimization has classified you. Curator Seven transmitted a report to all optimization nodes across forty-three universes. You've been designated as 'Vectors of Paradoxical Mercy'—entities that destroy through compassion."
He let that sink in. "They're not afraid of your power. They're afraid of your compassion. Because it's the one thing their logic can't account for—people who would rather kill you than let you live in peace. People who will violate your autonomy, destroy your carefully built peace, all in the name of making you feel."
"That's not what we—" Miryoku began.
"That's exactly what you did," Hyachima interrupted, his tone not unkind but absolutely certain. "From their perspective, you're cosmic terrorists. Agents of chaos forcing suffering onto beings who had successfully escaped it. You're not heroes to them. You're the villains."
The weight of that perspective crushed them.
"So the question you need to answer," Hyachima said, turning to face them fully, "is this: Are you willing to be the villains? Are you willing to be hated, feared, and fought against by the very people you're trying to save? Because that's what comes next. That's what the Archive will force you to decide."
He paused, then delivered the final, devastating blow. "Or will you choose the easier path? The one the Optimization offers. The one where you stop fighting. Stop caring. Stop feeling. And let the multiverse optimize itself into peaceful non-existence."
His eyes held terrible knowledge. "Because I've been where you are. Seven times. Seven cosmic cycles where I watched this exact scenario play out. And do you know what I learned?"
Silence.
"That sometimes, the kindest thing you can do is let people go. Even if it means letting them choose oblivion."
He met Shinji's eyes. "The Archive will show you whether I'm probably right. Whether fighting the Optimization is heroism or just... another form of cosmic tyranny. And then you'll have to choose."
"Choose what?" Shinji asked.
"Whether to continue," Hyachima said simply. "Or whether to let me reset this cycle and try again. For the eighth time."
The admission hung in the air—that the God of Absolute Beginning was considering ending this entire reality because he couldn't figure out how to solve the problem of suffering.
"You can't," Merus breathed, horror in his voice. "All the life, all the civilizations, all the—"
"Will be reborn," Hyachima interrupted. "In a new cycle. With new chances. New possibilities. Maybe in the next iteration, consciousness will find a way to exist without suffering. Maybe the Optimization won't emerge. Maybe..." He trailed off. "Maybe it will be different."
"Or maybe it will be the same," Shinji said quietly. "Seven times, you said. Seven cycles. All ending the same way. What makes you think an eighth will be different?"
Hyachima's expression was unreadable. "Because this time, there's you. A complete Trascender. Something that's never existed in any previous cycle. Something with the potential to..." He gestured vaguely. "To change the equation. To find the third option I've been searching for across eternity."
He moved closer, his eyes boring into Shinji's. "So yes. Go to the Archive. Learn what you can. Face what you've done. And then..." His voice dropped. "Then tell me if existence is worth the suffering it requires. Because if you can't convince me..."
He didn't need to finish. The implication was clear.
If they couldn't find a better answer, Hyachima would end everything and start over.
For the eighth time.
They dispersed after the meeting, each seeking solitude to process what Hyachima had revealed. The Garden's whispering stones fell silent as they passed, as if even the ancient minerals recognized the weight of decisions being made.
Miryoku found herself at the edge of one of the liquid light pools, staring at her reflection. The water's surface showed her not as she was, but as she felt—fractured light bleeding into darkness, harmony corrupting into discord, a girl who'd thought she healed but only knew how to hurt in pretty colors.
She raised her hands, and her harmonic light flickered to life. Weak. Unstable. Afraid of itself.
"I don't know how to use you anymore," she whispered to her own power. "Don't know if I should. Every time I try to help, I destroy. Every time I harmonize, I kill."
The light pulsed in response—not with words, but with feeling. Grief. Guilt. And underneath it, something else. Something that felt like... determination?
"You still want to help," Miryoku realized, talking to her power as if it were a separate entity. "Even after what we did. You still think you can heal."
The light pulsed again. Brighter. More certain.
"But what if you're wrong?" Miryoku asked, tears streaming down her face. "What if every time I use you, I'm just finding new ways to murder with kindness?"
The light didn't answer. But it didn't fade either. It simply... persisted. Stubborn. Inefficient. Refusing to be optimized away despite the logical argument for its own elimination.
*Just like Netsudo's fire,* Miryoku thought. *Just like Shinji's memories. Just like all of us—inefficient, painful, and refusing to smooth away.*
She didn't know if that was noble or just stupid.
But it was what they were.
Shinji stood in Kuro's workshop, surrounded by his friend's abandoned projects. The prosthetic hand's memory matrix was still playing on repeat—the ambassador's dissolution, over and over, in perfect spiritual resolution.
He could have turned it off. Could have disabled the recording. Could have spared himself the constant reminder.
But he didn't.
"You knew, didn't you, Kuro?" Shinji whispered to the empty room. "You knew memory would be both our greatest weapon and our worst curse. That's why you built this. Not to protect me from forgetting, but to force me to remember. Even when remembering is unbearable."
He pulled up Kuro's final log entry, the one about memory being inefficient but human.
I hope Shinji never needs to use it that way, Kuro had written. But if he does... the memory of who we were might be the only thing that saves us from what we're being offered.
"You were right," Shinji said, his voice thick. "Memory is the only weapon we have. But gods, Kuro. It's so heavy. Carrying this. Knowing that every time I try to help someone, I'm gambling with their existence based on my own broken understanding of what help means."
The prosthetic hand buzzed softly—not agreement or disagreement, just... presence. Kuro's gift, still functioning, still recording, still insisting that some things were worth remembering even when forgetting would be kinder.
"The Archive is going to show me everything," Shinji continued. "Every way I could have done it differently. Every timeline where the ambassador lived. Every choice that would have saved them."
He clenched the prosthetic into a fist. "And I have to face that. Have to see exactly how my certainty killed them. Because if I don't... if I keep operating on assumptions and trauma..." He looked at the memory playback, at the ambassador's grateful smile. "I'll just keep murdering people with mercy until there's nothing left to save."
Netsudo sat alone in a meditation chamber, his three personas gathered in the mindspace where they existed.
The ember of fire that had survived optimization was growing. Slowly. Painfully. But growing.
"It hurts," Netsudo Prime whispered, watching Ignis carefully feed the flame with memory—with the pain of loss, the rage of betrayal, the grief of carrying on. "Every time it gets brighter, it hurts more."
"That's because you're remembering how to feel dumbass," Ignis said, his own form solidifying as the fire strengthened. "The Optimization tried to smooth you away. Tried to convince you that calm was better than chaos. But chaos..." He smiled, flames dancing in his eyes. "Chaos is what kept us alive when logic said we should have died."
"The ambassador chose differently," the Third observed, its empty voice thoughtful. "They chose to remember even though it killed them. Was that brave or stupid?"
"Both," Ignis said. "It was both. Because sometimes the brave choice and the stupid choice are the same thing."
Netsudo Prime looked at the growing ember, felt the returning pain of emotions he'd been without for days, and had to ask: "Is it worth it? Is feeling this much pain really better than the calm they were offering?"
His personas looked at each other, then at him.
"Ask us again tomorrow stupid shit," Ignis said. "After the fire's stronger. After you've had time to remember why we burn."
"But for now?" the Third added. "Right now, it feels worth it. Because being broken and real is better than being smooth and gone."
The ember pulsed in agreement.
Merus stood before Hyachima's throne, alone.
"You said Thekia lied," Merus said quietly. "About the Archive. About it being destroyed. What else did she lie about?"
Hyachima regarded him with ancient eyes. "Are you certain you want to know? Some truths are heavier than the lies that cover them."
"I'm certain of nothing anymore," Merus admitted. "But I need to know. Need to understand why my master would deceive me about something so fundamental."
Hyachima was silent for a long moment, then spoke. "She lied because she loves you, probably. And love, as you've recently learned, can be a weapon when wielded carelessly."
"What does that mean?"
"It means," Hyachima said carefully, "that Thekia has been to the Archive. Long ago. Before your creation. And what she saw there..." He trailed off. "It broke something in her. Made her understand that some problems have no solutions. Only choices between different kinds of suffering."
"And she didn't want me to face that," Merus said, understanding dawning.
"She wanted to protect you from the weight she carries," Hyachima confirmed. "From the knowledge that your purpose—Creation—might be inherently cruel. That bringing consciousness into existence means bringing suffering into existence. That maybe..." He met Merus's eyes. "Maybe the Optimization is right. And we're the villains for continuing to create life that will inevitably suffer."
Merus felt something crack in his chest—not his divine core, but something deeper. "Is that what you believe?"
"I don't know," Hyachima admitted, and his voice held the exhaustion of eons. "That's why I need you and your crew to tell me. Because if you go to the Archive and come back convinced that existence isn't worth the suffering..." He gestured at the multiverse around them. "Then I'll reset. For the eighth time. And maybe in the next cycle, I'll create something that doesn't hurt."
"And if we come back convinced it is worth it?"
"Then maybe," Hyachima said quietly, "I'll finally stop counting cycles and start believing in the one I have."
Dawn came to Aetherium's Garden with crystalline light and harmonious tones, painting everything in colors that refused to be optimized into grey.
The crew gathered at the Heart-Stone, each carrying the weight of a sleepless night spent confronting their own guilt, their own choices, their own questions about whether what they were doing was heroism or just another form of cosmic tyranny.
Shirou was already there, his rifle cleaned and ready, his crimson eye assessing each of them as they arrived.
"You all still look like shit," he observed. "But functional shit. That's some neat progress."
Miryoku's response was automatic: "Fuck you, Shirou."
He actually smiled. "There she is. The harmony girl with teeth. Good. You're going to need them."
Shinji moved to stand at the center of their loose circle, his prosthetic hand steady despite everything. "Before we go, I need to say something."
They turned to face him.
"I'm sorry," Shinji said simply. "For leading you into this. For my certainty. For not questioning my assumptions about what help means. For..." He gestured vaguely. "For turning you all into weapons based on my trauma."
"We chose to follow," Miryoku said, her voice still raw but stronger than before. "That's on us too."
"But I should have questioned," Shinji insisted. "Should have asked if my path was the right one instead of assuming everyone should want what I want—to feel everything, no matter how much it hurts."
He looked at each of them in turn. "The Archive is going to show us the cost of our choices. Show us exactly what we did wrong. And I need you to know..." His voice wavered, then steadied. "I need you to know that if you decide this isn't worth it—if you want to stop fighting, to choose the Optimization's peace, to let the multiverse smooth itself into calm—I won't judge you. Won't blame you. Won't think less of you."
"That's remarkably evolved," Shirou observed dryly. "What's the catch?"
"The catch," Shinji said, meeting his crimson eye, "is that I can't promise I'll stop. Even if you all choose peace, I might keep fighting. Because the alternative..." He thought of Kiyomi, mindless and powerful, lost somewhere in the cosmos. "The alternative is admitting that maybe suffering should be eliminated. That maybe existence isn't worth the pain it requires. And I can't accept that. Not yet. Maybe not ever."
"So you're saying you might become what we're fighting against," Netsudo said, his voice steadier now, less optimized. "A force that imposes your philosophy on others whether they want it or not."
"Yes," Shinji admitted. "That's exactly what I'm saying. I might become the villain of this story. And I need you all to promise me something."
"What?" Miryoku asked.
"That if I cross that line—if I start forcing people to feel against their will, if I become another Optimization just painted in different colors—you'll stop me." His prosthetic hand clenched. "Whatever it takes. Even if it means killing me... Or just sealing me some way since I'm immortal. Because I'd rather die in any way than become the thing I'm fighting."
The weight of that request settled over them.
"I promise," Merus said quietly. "If you become what you're fighting, I'll stop you. It's what Creation does—it preserves balance, even if that means ending what it once made."
"I promise," Miryoku said, her harmonic light pulsing with determination. "If your compassion becomes another kind of cruelty, I'll harmonize you into silence. Because mercy that kills isn't mercy anymore."
"I promise," Netsudo said, his three personas speaking in overlapping harmony. "If you forget the difference between helping and hurting, we'll remind you. With fire if necessary."
Shirou studied Shinji for a long moment, then nodded once. "I promise. And unlike these three, I won't hesitate. Won't give you a chance to explain or justify. You cross the line, I put you down. Clean Final Strike."
"Good," Shinji said, and he meant it. "That's exactly what I need."
Hyachima materialized beside the Heart-Stone, his emerald eyes reflecting the dawn light. "Are you ready?"
No one answered immediately.
Because the truth was, they weren't ready. Would never be ready. The Archive would force them to confront their worst mistakes, show them every way they'd failed, make them watch as better versions of themselves saved lives they'd destroyed.
But ready or not, they had to go.
Because the alternative was giving up. Choosing optimization. Letting the multiverse smooth itself into peaceful non-existence while they stood by and did nothing.
"We're ready," Shinji finally said.
Hyachima nodded. "The Archive exists outside standard spacetime. I will transport you there."
He began weaving reality, creating a portal that looked like a wound in space—not darkness, but absence. A place where existence itself had been carefully edited away to reveal something underneath.
"One warning," Hyachima said as the portal stabilized. "The Archive shows truth without mercy. It will break you open and display your insides for cosmic judgment. Many who enter never leave—not because they can't, but because they can't bear to face reality after seeing what they've done."
"Comforting," Shirou muttered.
"It's not meant to be," Hyachima replied. "It's meant to be honest. And honesty is rarely comfortable."
The portal pulsed, ready.
Hyachima spoke one final time. "When you return—if you return—we'll discuss what you learned. What you decided. And whether this cycle continues or..." He gestured at everything around them. "Or whether I reset and try again."
"No pressure," Shirou said dryly.
"All the pressure," Hyachima corrected. "The weight of every conscious being in this multiverse rests on your understanding. On your ability to answer the question: Is existence worth the suffering it requires?"
He met Shinji's eyes. "Find me an answer. Because I'm tired of counting cycles, Fourth Trascender."
They stood at the threshold of the portal—five broken people about to confront the full weight of their choices, their failures, their mercy-murders.
"Together?" Miryoku asked quietly.
"Together," Shinji confirmed.
They stepped forward as one, crossing from Aetherium's crystalline beauty into the absence beyond. The portal closed behind them with a sound like reality sighing in relief.
Hyachima stood alone in the Garden.
"Do you think they'll find an answer?" Hyachima asked himself?
"I think," Hyachima said quietly to himself, "they'll find many answers. The question is whether any of them are right."
He turned away from where the portal had been, his eyes distant. "Or whether there are no right answers. Only different kinds of wrong."
The Heart-Stone pulsed, recording this moment like it had recorded all the others—another tragedy, another choice, another group of well-meaning souls about to learn that sometimes mercy and murder are the same thing.
And the Garden whispered on, singing its endless song of loss and hope and the terrible weight of caring in a multiverse that seemed determined not to.
Far Away, In Another Universe, On another planet:
The Planet was a hellscape with multiple mangled bodies, guts and blood scents filling the air where Three cloaked persons or things were marching gracefully.
"Where was the next order issued at? Diaborius?" One of them said.
"Planet Ras." He answered, a Tenebrous Black Moon Mark illuminating with darkness rather than light.
Something was approaching.