The wall of rotting wood cast jagged shadows beneath the crimson moonlight. When Raine followed Merry through the crooked town gate, the decayed planks groaned beneath his steps as if unable to bear his weight. The entire town of Ashen looked like a broken toy tossed carelessly into the coniferous forest—leaning houses patched with animal hide and resin, streets stained with suspicious deep-purple puddles, and the air reeking of sulfur mixed with herbs.
"Don't look at those puddles." Merry's bird-beak mask tilted toward a few curled-up figures by the roadside. "Two idiots reached into them for 'moon tears' last week—now their fingers are still dancing in the town square."
Raine's mechanical eye auto-focused. Indeed, within the puddles floated half-transparent creatures, hybrids of jellyfish and centipedes. When the crimson moonlight swept across them, they instantly unfurled a forest of glowing tendrils.
"We're here." Merry pushed open a building marked by a bronze gear sign. The hinges screamed like something dying, revealing a smoke-filled chamber inside—two dozen sickbeds crammed into a space far too narrow. On each lay patients with grotesque mutations. One old man's entire left arm had become crystal, while his right hand desperately clawed at the ever-growing clusters.
"Master Hank! I found a treasure!" Merry shouted, tugging Raine's crystalline arm.
From behind the medicine cabinet shuffled a stooped figure. Only when the man approached did Raine realize his hunchback was caused by a massive metallic device embedded in his neck—the unmistakable neural coupler of the Holy Alliance, though its surface was etched with handmade runes.
"By the Eclipse…" Hank's clouded right eye suddenly widened. His age-spotted fingers trembled as they reached for Raine's crystalline arm. "These markings… the Gear Moon… the Gear Moon…"
Merry rolled her eyes. "Again? Ever since the red moon appeared three months ago, the old man's been chanting that nonstop."
Hank suddenly seized Raine by the collar, hot breath reeking of herbs spraying his face. "Boy! Have you seen a silver mechanical moon? Have you seen twelve clock hands driven into the sun?"
A stabbing pain struck Raine's temple. Shattered visions burst in his mind—gear-shaped vortices, beams of crimson light, an inverted mechanical bud… but when he tried to hold onto them, they slipped away like sand through his fingers.
"I… don't remember…"
"Aftereffects of a Memory Siphon." Hank released him and pulled a monocle from his filthy coat. "Merry, prepare a dose of Fernroot Clarity, double dragonmoss."
The girl whistled. "Fancy stuff." She bounced into the back room, the bottles on her leather armor jingling as she went.
Hank guided Raine to a cot in the corner, sprinkling a violet powder in a circle around him. "A temporary ward—to keep your mechanical parts from drawing Deep Dwellers." He rapped lightly on Raine's crystalline arm. "Holy Alliance craftsmanship, but fused with at least three alien energies… intriguing."
Raine looked down at his arm. The black-gold crystal shimmered like oil under the crimson moon, faint emerald filaments flickering within. When he tried to recall its origin, a jolt like lightning seared the back of his skull.
"Don't force it." Hank handed him a cup of fizzing green liquid. "Drink first."
The moment the potion touched his throat, it felt like an ice spike driving through him. The chill gave way to fire, the two sensations battling along his esophagus until finally merging into a clear stream that surged into his brain. The mist of memories suddenly sharpened—he saw a violet-gold figure crying out amidst a rain of fire, and a silver-blue-haired girl catching a falling gear with her mechanical arm…
"Ah—!"
The stabbing pain made Raine knock over the cup. The spilled liquid corroded the floorboards into a honeycombed pit.
But Hank only nodded in satisfaction. "At least that confirms it's no ordinary amnesia. Merry! Fetch the Memory Casket from upstairs!"
When the girl returned, clutching a brass box in her arms, Raine was still staring at his trembling hands. Flesh and blood on the left, alien crystal on the right—the split between them tore at his sense of reality. Merry set the box beside the bed; its lid snapped open by itself, revealing a tangle of gears and lenses forming a device of uncanny complexity.
"The pride of Ashen Town." She patted it proudly. "An alchemical machine that can read deep-layer memories—Master Hank rebuilt it using a Deep Dweller's crystal eyeball."
Hank was already pulling on leather gloves threaded with copper wire. "Lie down, boy. It might get… stimulating."
The moment the lenses aligned with Raine's eyes, the world collapsed into a tunnel. His consciousness was dragged through some viscous dimension, a blizzard of memories hurtling at him—
The Elven Forest in flames…
Ravenna's violet-gold dagger plunging into his back…
γ's silver-blue prosthetic eye weeping blood…
The cracked surface of the Gear Moon…
Suddenly, everything was swallowed by darkness. Raine "saw" a colossal figure wrought entirely of shadow, twelve pairs of luminous arms weaving radiant threads. As it turned toward him, the crystal of his right arm flared with feverish heat—
Bang!
The Memory Casket's lenses shattered. Hank was thrown backward by the shockwave, Merry crashed into a shelf of medicine. Raine curled on the bed, his crystalline arm etched with unfamiliar runes—ancient sigils that pulsed like a seal.
"Damnation!" Hank scrambled up, his monocle cracked in half. "What in the abyss is buried in your memory?"
Merry rubbed the back of her head. "I'd bet it's tied to the Red Moon." She gestured toward the window, where the crimson moon was sliding beneath the silver moon. At their overlapping edge, a shimmering halo began to form. "The monthly 'Twin-Moon Coupling' is about to start."
As if on cue, howls erupted outside the town walls. They weren't wolves—these cries were more twisted, hungrier. Hank's face drained of color. "Deep Dwellers' hunting rite… Quick! Seal the windows!"
Panic engulfed Ashen Town. Residents nailed potion-soaked planks across their shutters. Out in the street, the purple puddles began to boil as half-transparent creatures hauled themselves free, swelling beneath the crimson light until they towered as tall as men.
Raine's mechanical eye snapped into combat mode, his vision lighting up with pulsing red markers. Hank yanked a short staff inlaid with amethyst from beneath the medicine cabinet. "Merry! Take him to the cellar!"
"No way!" The girl had already loaded her hand-crossbow with glowing bolts. A grin spread beneath her mask. "I want to see our new friend perform!"
The first creature crashed through the infirmary doors, and Raine's body moved before his mind could catch up. His crystalline arm flared with black-green energy, carving a burning arc through the air—[Spirit Phoenix Slash]! The foreign name surfaced unbidden in his thoughts, muscle memory guiding the strike. The energy blade cleaved the monster clean in two—but the severed flesh writhed and split, multiplying into smaller spawn the moment they hit the ground.
"Physical attacks don't work!" Merry's bolt struck one of the fragments; the alchemical payload detonated, dissolving it into slime. "You need elemental—"
Her warning was drowned beneath the thunder of the roof collapsing. Three full-grown Deep Dwellers dropped into the room, their crystalline eyes refracting manic gleams beneath the Red Moon. The leader raised a grotesque forelimb, and the slime across the floor surged upward, solidifying into countless glittering spikes.
"Bone-Erosion Rain!" shrieked the creature, its voice a needle of sound.
At that instant, fire seared Raine's chest. The Life Seed's brand had awakened—emerald vines burst from his left hand, weaving into a dense shield. Spikes clattered against it like steel on steel, yet the strangest thing was the black-gold filigree crawling across the vines: each impact crystallized them, hardening the barrier instead of shattering it.
Hank's staff blazed with violet light, a beam lancing straight into one Dweller's eye. "Their visual organs—strike there!"
Raine's mechanical eye spun, gears screaming. In the whir of hyper-analysis he caught the telltale flicker in their pupils—a half-second warning before the next volley. When the signal flared, he was already surging forward. His crystalline arm punched straight into that trembling orb.
Crack!
The splintering made teeth ache. The Dweller howled, body shriveling like a punctured bladder. The other two recoiled, screeching, calling reinforcements as more slime-born horrors slithered in through the shattered doorframe.
"There's too many!" Merry's quiver was down to its last, her voice ragged. "The exit's—"
But Raine suddenly dropped to one knee. Forcing the Life Seed had fractured his focus; the present and the past overlaid in his sight—Ashen Town's infirmary bleeding into the Elven battlefield aflame in memory. Claws tore across his back. His blood spattered—only to crystalize midair.
"Hold him!" Hank's staff erupted into a firework bloom of violet mist, momentarily halting the tide. "Merry! The Moon-Scar Herb!"
Grinding her teeth, the girl ripped the pendant from her neck—a vial of scarlet dust. She scattered it over Raine's wound, chanting jagged syllables: "In the name of the Eclipse!"
The powder hissed on contact, and two forces collided in Raine's spine. Through the ruined ceiling the Red Moon's light poured down, igniting the runes embedded in his crystalline arm. They writhed, reassembling into a new pattern. Something sealed deep within him stirred, and a voice—his, yet not—spilled from his throat in a guttural invocation:
"[Draconic Eclipse · Waning Moon]!"
The black-gold crystal surged outward, elongating into a three-meter blade of pure energy. The crescent slash it loosed carved through reality itself, a fracture in the air. Everything caught in its arc—Deep Dwellers, slime spawn, the very walls of the infirmary—vanished into vapor and silence. Half the building was simply gone, exposing the blood-red heavens beyond.
Merry's beak-mask split in two, revealing her porcelain-doll face beneath.
"...Whoa."
Hank's staff clattered to the floor.
"Draconic tongue… impossible…"
Raine stared blankly at his right hand. The energy greatblade had already withdrawn, but new crimson veins crawled across the crystal surface—like foreign power forcibly etched into him. Stranger still, he could read the glowing sigils: draconic script, spelling [Borrowed Power of the Red Moon].
Outside, the howls shifted. As if commanded, the Deep Dwellers broke off their assault and retreated toward the coniferous forest. Overhead, the lunar conjunction unraveled—the Red Moon drifting apart from the Silver.
"They're afraid!" Merry leapt, clinging to Raine's crystalline arm—only to yelp and recoil. "Hot! It's burning!"
But Hank's face had gone ashen."No… they're running from something worse." He pointed toward the treeline, where the pines shuddered without wind. "The Dwellers are in flight."
The ground trembled, faint but rising. In the shattered clinic, glass vials rattled together in a death-knell chorus. Raine's mechanical eye auto-focused—three kilometers out, whole swaths of forest were toppling, as if some colossal bulk pressed inexorably closer.
Merry seized his hand. "Come! The mad prophet will know!"
They burst into the square. The townsfolk had gathered, panicked, staring at the crooked tower cobbled from rotwood and rusted machine-husks. At its peak capered a gaunt old man, his withered frame swaddled in bandages inscribed with runes.
"The Gear Prophet," Hank murmured. "Three years ago—on the first Red Moon—he was the only one to crawl out of the Dweller mines alive."
The old man halted his dance, turning eyes of pure blank white upon Raine."You are here! The key and the lock made flesh!" His voice was a chorus of ten overlapping throats. "The Red Moon rounds… and when it is full for the first time, the Sleeper Weaver shall—"
A spear of violet-black lightning split the sky, striking him where he stood. In an instant he was ash. Another bolt. A third. The tower itself went up in flames, a funeral pyre against the night.
Raine's crystalline arm lifted of its own accord, finger pointing heavenward. On the Red Moon's face, something moved—segmented limbs crawling across the surface.
Merry's voice quavered. "What… what is that?"
His mechanical eye resolved the details. Not a shadow—an extradimensional projection. Twelve pairs of jointed limbs plucked at invisible filaments, each stroke sending ripples of distortion through space itself. When that being turned its gaze upon Ashen Town, the crimson veins on Raine's arm blazed with searing heat.
"—Aahh!"
The pain drove him to his knees. Hank's cry cut through the crackle of stormfire:"His memory seal—it's breaking!"
Then came the flood. Images crashed over him like a breached dam:
Ravenna's amethyst tattoos…
Gamma's silver-blue prosthetic eye…
The fracture scarring the Gear Moon…
The radiant figure who called itself Weaver…
And at last—frozen on a single image: Ravenna's dagger driving into his back, her lips moving soundlessly. She was speaking a word. A word of utmost consequence.
"Remember…"
Raine collapsed to his knees, his crystalline arm plunging into the soil. "I have to remember…"
The Red Moon flared with blinding radiance.
Everyone touched by that light froze in place, their eyes crystallizing like those of the Deep Dwellers.
Only Raine's arm kept him immune, but Hank and Merry's gazes had already hollowed, their movements no longer their own.
"The key…" Hank's staff leveled at Raine's chest. "The Lord of the Red Moon requires the key…"
Merry moved with inhuman speed, her dagger already pressing against his throat."Give us… the gate's location…"
Raine braced to break free—when a streak of violet-gold fire split the heavens. The meteor slammed into the town square, its shockwave scattering the enthralled townsfolk like dolls.
Through the dust and ruin staggered a cloaked figure. She pulled back her hood—and Raine's heart skipped a beat.
Short silver-blue hair. Left eye mechanical, right eye bloodshot. Different garb, but unmistakable. The same girl from the shards of his memory.
"…Gamma?" His voice faltered.
Her mechanical eye fixed on him. Two trails of oily tears spilled down her cheeks.
"Memory wavelength—confirmed! It really is you, Brother Raine!" She whipped her gaze toward the Red Moon, the prosthetic eye strobing wildly.
"No time to explain—the Red Moon is a Council-built projector! It's amplifying the Weaver's psychic contamination! We have to—"
She never finished. A colossal shadow unfurled above Ashen Town.
The phantom of a many-limbed horror loomed over the rooftops, twelve pairs of radiant arms closing slowly inward—as though to embrace the town in its grasp.
Gamma yanked a writhing metal device from her pack, its shape shifting by the second."Take my hand—NOW!"
Raine seized her instantly, the other hand dragging unconscious Merry with him. Gamma slammed her thumb onto the device's core.
A scream like rending dimensions tore through existence, a sound too dreadful to be called sound. Agony of dislocation surged through Raine's body as the world was shredded around him.
And in the last instant, as reality folded—
He saw Ravenna's lips again, clear at last.
The word she spoke was: "Rebirth."