2:53 a.m. — Cikapundung River, Gate Residual Zone
The battlefield had quieted.
Only the faint hum of residual anomaly energy remained like broken chords echoing after a song ended.
Asvara stood at the river's edge.
Eyes closed. Breathing steady.
His right hand hovered inches above the water, sensing something deeper than any mortal eye could see.
"It's not over," he said flatly.
"Crumble's dead," Kenji argued, brushing ash off his sleeves.
"The Bishop wasn't the guardian," Riven added, holding his hourglass, "it was the detonator."
AIRA projected a holographic diagram in midair with layers of ley lines intersecting like a spiderweb under the city.
"The gate seal is unstable. Core rupture predicted in 23 minutes unless containment sequence is activated."
Lyra looked at Asvara.
"You said you had a plan."
Asvara smiled slightly.
"No. I have three. And all of them are stupid."
Phase One: The False Pulse Gambit
Asvara turned to Riven.
"I need you to invert your hourglass."
"...Why?"
"We're going to fake a temporal collapse. A controlled time fracture."
"That's suicide."
"No, that's the bait."
He turned to Kenji.
"And I need you to link with someone specific. Someone dead. Someone who's seen what happens when a gate opens."
"I know just the guy," Kenji said, pulling out a charm.
"Good. Make it flashy. Make it scream."
Phase Two: The Soul Bait Shell Game
"AIRA," Asvara called, "trigger seven phantom resonance pulses around the outer perimeter. Mismatch them in frequency by 13%. Make them too obvious."
"Confirmed. Creating spiritual decoys."
"What does that do?" Lyra asked.
"It'll confuse the gate's auto-selection matrix. Make it think there are multiple souls worthy of opening. It'll stall the rupture protocol."
"And in the chaos?"
"We force it to lock onto one specific target — Riven's reversed hourglass."
"You want it to eat Riven?"
"No. I want it to try."
Riven narrowed his eyes.
"You're making me a time grenade."
"You'll live."
"You said that last time at Sengoku era if I remember it correctly."
Phase Three: The Archive Loop Trap
Asvara drew a glyph in midair using Sensō no Uta's hilt.
"While it's busy swallowing fake time signals and Kenji's linked soul echo, I'll open a fragment of The Subspace Archive of my knowledge, just a peek."
"Your knowledge? Isn't that... forbidden?" Lyra asked.
"Everything I do is forbidden. That's why it works."
"What happens when you open the Archive?"
AIRA responded.
"The gate will recognize the Archive's signal as 'true history'. It will pause itself to compare. Think of it as forcing it to double-check its own programming."
"Which gives us how long?" Kenji asked.
"Twelve seconds," Asvara said.
"That's not enough."
"That's why in those twelve seconds, you will destroy the spatial anchor point."
"With what?"
Asvara pulled a bread bag from his coat pocket.
"With this."
Everyone stared.
"...That's a roti sobek."
"It's not just roti sobek," Asvara said seriously. "It's spiritually primed with 400 years of compressed aroma from an old monk's tea house in Kyoto."
"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard," Riven muttered.
"Which is why it'll work. No one would ever expect it."
The Strategy: In Short
Fake a catastrophic time burst using Riven's inverted hourglass.
Confuse the Gate's soul-targeting system with phantom signals.
Kenji links to a dead soul who's seen a Gate open to feed panic data into the gate.
AIRA projects decoy soul pulses.
Asvara opens a fragment of The Archive to cause a "system diagnostic stall" in the Gate's logic.
Kenji, using that delay, hurls the cursed roti sobek which overloaded with spiritual misdirection into the anchor.
BOOM.
No rupture.
Seal resets.
Gate closes.
Kenji blinked.
"This is so convoluted... I kind of respect it."
"If it doesn't confuse the enemy," Asvara said, standing, "it's not worth using."
"Even I don't understand all of this," Riven muttered.
"Exactly," Asvara said. "Neither will The Gate System."
3:07 a.m. – The Mouth of the Gate, Cikapundung
The ground cracked under invisible pressure.
The water shimmered upward, reversing flow.
Veins of violet light crawled beneath the surface like a living map.
The Gate was opening.
AIRA's voice buzzed in their ears.
"Rift stabilization dropped to 12%. Gate breach in 94 seconds."
Asvara flipped his coat.
His blade vanished into the ether.
He turned to the team.
"Positions."
Phase One: Temporal Burst
Riven knelt by the riverside, gripping his hourglass.
"This is going to hurt."
He whispered a mantra in old Latin, and turned the hourglass upside down.
The sand paused… then began to pour backward, glowing red.
Suddenly the river aged.
The grass surrounding it withered to white.
In the sky, the stars flickered out for just a second.
"TIME BURST INJECTED," AIRA confirmed.
"The Gate thinks time is collapsing," Asvara said.
Phase Two: Phantom Soul Decoys
AIRA's projection flared.
Seven blue ghost silhouettes bloomed across the riverbank each radiating spiritual resonance.
"Soul decoys launched. Frequencies unstable. Gate searching for access point."
The mist pulsed.
The Gate hesitated.
Phase Three: The Link
Kenji stood dead center, barefoot on the wet stone, holding his charm in one hand.
"Link : Kakugo no Yūsha!"("The Resolute Hero")
A ghostly aura engulfed him, the spirit of a warrior in torn battle robes, with only one eye and a shattered helmet.
Kenji's voice dropped deeper.
"He was there when a Gate opened once. He survived it. That's all the panic data it needs."
"Feed it fear," Asvara said.
The Gate's hum intensified and it is swallowing memories now, trying to decipher if this was the correct soul.
Phase Four: The Archive Disruption
Asvara stepped forward and tapped two fingers on AIRA's screen.
"Open a sliver. Just enough to trigger an existential error."
A beam of light shot upward.
Ancient symbols cascaded across the sky with all languages that known by human and the other is only known by Ancient God, all at once.
Reality stuttered.
"Gate entering diagnostic stall. 12-second window begins now."
Final Phase: Anchor Destruction
Kenji, still glowing with his Link, summoned the last of his energy.
Asvara tossed him the paper bag.
"That's it?" Kenji yelled. "You seriously want me to throw roti sobek at a cursed dimensional anchor?"
"Not just roti sobek," Asvara said, dead calm. "It's soaked in 400 years of spiritual tea-house scent. A chaotic relic."
"Bro. If this works I'm never doubting carbs again."
Kenji launched forward with intense aura swirling around him.
"Hadō — Pan no Tetsui!"("Wave Motion — Fist of Bread!")
He hurled the bread.
It glowed midair.
The scent exploded like a bomb of nostalgia, history, and breakfast.
The bread struck the river.
Not the surface but the spiritual anchor below it.
Boom.
A flash of white.
The Gate screamed like an idea being erased mid-thought.
The water exploded upward in a geyser.
All light vanished.
Then silence.
Complete, perfect, natural silence.
The stars returned.
The mist cleared.
The Gate was gone.
"Anchor destroyed," AIRA confirmed. "Gate collapse successful. Residual energy fading."
Kenji fell back on the grass.
"I just saved the world with a... dinner roll."
Riven, still recovering from his time reversal, muttered:
"I hate that this worked."
Asvara walked over and offered them both a hand.
"Strategy is like jazz," he said. "The more it breaks the rules, the more alive it feels."
"You just played interdimensional jazz with a bakery item," Kenji replied.
"And it hit the right note."
Lyra stood at the edge, silent.
She looked at the fading ripples.
"If there's one here... how many other Gates are there?"
AIRA answered.
"Seven."
Everyone went quiet.
"Let's hope," Asvara said, "they haven't fed the others yet."
On the way back to Liberium International High School
The city was quiet again.
Bandung, in its eerie 4 a.m. silence, looked like a memory frozen in time.
The four of them walked under the pale streetlights, uniforms soaked from river water, wounds half-healed, but no one speaking until Lyra broke the silence.
"Asvara," she asked softly, "who… are you really?"
He didn't stop walking.
"Told you already. I'm seventeen. Immortal. Addicted to webtoons and tea."
"That's not an answer," Lyra said, stepping closer. "I'm tired of half-truths and clever sarcasm."
Kenji glanced at Riven, but Riven gave no signal.
He just walked ahead like he already knew what was coming.
Asvara finally stopped.
They were under a flickering streetlamp near the school gates.
He turned around.
"You want to know who I am?"
Lyra nodded once.
"Then listen. And don't interrupt."
The tone shifted.
The boyish charm in Asvara's voice vanished.
When he spoke now, it was like hearing a forgotten story waking up from sleep.
"My name is Asvara Regalia but that wasn't always my name."
"Thousands of years ago, I was born in the age of myth. Not history. Not legend. Something older than all of it."
"I was a prodigy. At ten, I solved war strategies older men couldn't read. At twelve, I led my first hundred troops. At seventeen, I became the youngest general in the Spartan territories back when gods were still whispered in firelight, and oracles spoke in riddles soaked in wine."
"I bled under banners that had no name. I fought beside men whose names history forgot."
"And then, because of a foolish king's fear… I was cursed."
He looked at Lyra directly.
"The king made a deal with an ancient power to protect his kingdom. But he feared that I would grow too strong, that I would one day overthrow him."
"So, in exchange for power, he gave me to the gods."
"They cursed me not with death — but with eternity."
"My body stopped aging. I stopped dying. But I could never stop remembering."
"I wandered across time. Fought in Persia. Dined in Rome. Died in Tenochtitlán. Rose in China. Was worshipped in Egypt. Hunted in medieval France. Betrayed in Mongolia."
"And loved… only once."
His voice cracked at that last part, but he kept going.
"I mastered every art because I had the time. I mastered magic because I ran out of things to learn. And I mastered people because I had no one left to trust."
Kenji muttered under his breath.
"Every time I hear it, it sounds more like a damn poem."
Asvara ignored him.
"I met Zhuge Liang during the Three Kingdoms war. Served beside him as a foreign tactician. And that's where I met her, 玉兰花 - Yù Lán Huā, the woman whose soul lives inside you now, Lyra."
"She was my right hand. My shield. My shadow."
"She died saving me from an assassin. I buried her myself."
"And then I left China, never to return."
Lyra stood still, heart pounding.
Pieces inside her that feels broken since childhood began clicking into place.
"That's why… I cried. The moment I saw you."
"Your soul remembered before your mind did," Asvara said. "That's how Soul Core Rebirth works."
Riven finally spoke.
"The man you see now, well, he's been seventeen for longer than the stars have known your names. He's watched empires rise and fall like sandcastles. He doesn't sleep. Doesn't age. Doesn't get to forget."
"But how can your brain keep working when there's so much memory you've been through?", Lyra asked with honesty in her voice.
Asvara smirked a little, "That's why I create The Subspace Archive to hold all of the memory, the knowledge that I have till now. And also that's why I create AIRA to help me access my knowledge without me using magic all the time"
AIRA buzzing through the phone,
"Consider me as his portable SSD with faster speed and Egyptian Priestess conscience"
Kenji whistled low.
"And here I thought I was cool for being possessed by a samurai grandpa."
Asvara exhaled, tired but calm.
"I'm not a hero. I'm not a savior. I'm a broken machine built by time. I exist because someone feared me. I survive because I can't stop. And I fight because if I stop… all the wars I've ever lived through become meaningless."
Lyra stepped closer.
"So why go to school? Why wear a uniform? Why play the student role?"
"Because pretending I'm normal is the only thing keeping me from turning into the same monster that cursed me."
Silence.
"You don't need to remember your past, Lyra. You're not responsible for the life before this one. But me? I am my past. That's my curse."
He turned around again and walked toward the dorm.
The sky was turning blue now.
A new day.