There was no sky.
Just pulse-light — soft, gold and grey, moving like breath across a dark ocean of broken sigils.
Hina drifted, or floated, or maybe just existed sideways through it. She didn't know if this was sleep or space. But the Codex was here. She could feel it behind her eyes. Every time her heart beat, it echoed like a glyph being pressed onto glass.
This place wasn't silence.
It was waiting.
"This is the In-Between," Veyrun's voice said — not aloud, but through her perception.
She turned — and there he was. Still tethered in shadows, but calmer here. Stable. His form didn't glitch. His eyes didn't spiral. In this space, he looked more like memory than mistake.
"Are we… safe?" she asked.
"No," he said simply. "But we are unreadable."
That gave her pause. "Unreadable?"
"The system tracks patterns. Behaviors. Spell-chains. Books. Energy. Once a Momodo bonds, their glyph-chain logs into the Sigil Tree."
He pointed upward — or maybe outward — and the darkness peeled back like a veil.
Above them: a structure so massive it couldn't be real.
The Sigil Tree.
Not a tree in the plant sense — but a lattice of intersecting spell-branches, glowing with the light of every active spellbook. Thousands. Millions. Each line a life. Each leaf a glyph. A living record of the war.
"Every battle. Every chant. Every king who rose and fell. All stored here."
"But not us."
"No." His voice dimmed. "Because we were never written into it."
Hina floated closer. The tree responded to her gaze — leaves turning, patterns shifting.
She saw a leaf glow briefly, then vanish. A burned-out book.
A lost Momodo.
She watched as others flickered in and out — battles starting, ending, new connections forming.
"This is… beautiful," she whispered.
"And horrifying."
Veyrun nodded.
"This tree is why the war never ends. Why kings are crowned with blood. Every Momodo is recorded… and reduced."
"Reduced to what?"
"To their function. Attack. Defense. Loyalty. Obedience. Spell progression is a cage made of praise."
Hina turned toward him. "But you're not in it. You're not… obeying."
"Because I never chanted."
"Why?"
"Because I remember the time before the tree."
Silence.
A pulse moved through the Codex again — and with it, a memory surfaced.
Not hers.
His.
A different place. A different time.
The sky was dark-blue, fractured with raw glyphlight.
A younger Veyrun — no shadows, no stitching — walked among thousands of Momodo, each one holding a book of different hue.
There were no humans. Just raw will. Pure bondless power.
They weren't fighting.
They were choosing.
And Veyrun stood at the center of it all, holding a blank book.
The same book Hina held now.
A voice rang out: "Will you bind your fate to the system?"
He said nothing.
He opened the book.
And inside was written one word:
"NO."
The vision shattered.
Back in the In-Between, Hina gasped.
"You rejected it from the beginning."
"I was the first to say no."
"And they erased you."
"They tried. But memory leaks, even through deletion. And the Codex survived."
Hina looked down at the book now floating beside her. The cover was shifting — not glowing, but evolving. Symbols danced across it in spirals — never resting, never repeating.
"Why me?" she asked. "Why was I able to find it?"
"Because you were never taught to unsee the pattern."
"I don't understand."
"Most children are trained to obey the chant. To follow what works. To become part of the glyphstream."
"And I wasn't?"
"You were the first pattern-dreamer born after the recursion failed."
She paused. "Recursion?"
"The loop the system built to correct itself. Every time a glitch occurred, the Elder Agents would reset the surrounding memory field."
"Erase history."
"Erase awareness. Reboot the world until no one remembered what freedom looked like."
Hina floated toward the Codex again.
This time, she didn't just see symbols.
She saw faces.
Momodo she'd never met. Some sad. Some terrified. Some smiling just before their books were burned. And behind them all — a growing mass of unclaimed spells. Not attacks. Not defenses. But… possibilities.
"These are spells that never activated," she whispered.
"Because their wielders never made it far enough to awaken."
She turned to Veyrun.
"What happens if I keep the Codex?"
"You'll become a memory trigger."
"And if I don't?"
"The recursion stabilizes. The war continues. Another child becomes king."
"And forgets the cost."
"Yes."
The light began to dim.
The In-Between was closing. The Sigil Tree folded its branches — not rejecting them, just… losing sight of them.
Before they faded, Veyrun reached out and touched Hina's temple gently.
"Next time you dream," he said, "you'll see more than patterns."
"What will I see?"
"The laws they hid beneath the glyphs."
And then, the world flipped.
Not violently. Not dramatically.
Just… transitioned.
She woke in a cave. Her body shivering.
The Codex was next to her, pulsing faintly.
Veyrun sat beside it, eyes closed.
And outside the cave's entrance, a strange light flickered through mist.
She walked to the edge and looked up.
High above, in the half-formed sky — she saw it again:
The Sigil Tree.
But this time… one new leaf was growing.
Glowing black-gold.
A leaf with no record.
A leaf that didn't obey.
A leaf named Veyrun.
And for the first time, Hina understood:
The war wasn't the system's fault.
It was the law that made the system.
And that law was written.
So now…
They would rewrite it.
— who's ready to see Zatch and Zeno fight it out?