—
The battlefield blazed with fractured light. Syndicate agents moved like shadows, warping in and out of reality with cloaked tech. Kazuki ducked behind a shattered hovercar, launching EMP pulses to short their phasing.
"They're adapting!" he shouted into comms. "My tech's five seconds behind theirs!"
"Then buy me ten," Ayame snapped. She danced across a crumbling skybridge, blades spinning in arcs of crimson. Each strike left trails of burning air as she carved through two Syndicate elites mid-phase.
Hoshiro stood at the epicenter of the chaos. His mask was gone now, his eyes glowing a deep, electric blue. The boy—the younger version of him—hovered behind a protective sphere, unconscious but pulsing with power.
The leader of the Syndicate forces materialized again, this time inches from Hoshiro.
"You were never meant to awaken," he hissed, launching a spear of compressed gravity.
Hoshiro caught it barehanded. It cracked in his palm like glass.
"I wasn't meant to follow your script," he said. "I'm writing my own."
He slammed his fist into the ground.
A shockwave burst from him, sending Syndicate soldiers flying. Time flickered. Reality bent. Buildings righted themselves for a second—like memories trying to overwrite the present.Kazuki looked up, stunned. "Did you just—reverse entropy?"
"No," Hoshiro said quietly. "I reminded time who it belongs to."
—
As the last Syndicate soldier fell, a light opened in the sky. A gate. Faint and pulsing.
The war wasn't over.
It was just beginning.
—