The storehouse was silent except for Yoshiki's ragged breathing and the restless flicker of shadows that clung to Hikaru's frame like a second skin. The air was hot, heavy, unstable—alive with resonance.
And Yuzuriha stood at the center of it, her hands trembling over scattered papers. Her lantern lay on its side, its flame guttered out, leaving only the glow of Yoshiki's ember-veins and Hikaru's shifting umbral haze to light the room.
She had seen this coming. Not the fire. Not the shadows. But the inevitability.
If resonance could surface in them, then hers—the quiet pulse she had felt her entire life—wouldn't stay buried forever.
Her eyes fixed on the parchment where Hikaru had drawn the resonance machine. The jagged black mass loomed back at her from the page, its lines crawling into her head like worms.
"Yuzuriha," Hikaru rasped, his voice steady despite the shroud of darkness curling around him. "Don't. You're shaking."
"I can't stop now." Her words came out sharper than she intended, but she didn't look up. "If they're feeding on us—if they've turned us into fuel—then we need to know how. We need to see it."
She pressed both palms against the diagrams.
Her breath caught.
The room tilted, and for a moment, the storehouse was gone.
She saw instead a lattice of light—a network sprawling across the island, veins of energy pulsing beneath the soil like roots of some vast, buried tree. She followed it, rushing deeper, faster, until the lines converged at a single core of blinding brilliance. Around it swarmed the machines. And behind the machines—faces. Cold. Watching. Smiling.
Her body convulsed.
Blue fractal veins cracked open across her temples and wrists, glowing like circuitry burned beneath her skin. Her eyes went wide, pupils scattering into jagged lattices of light.
Yoshiki lunged forward. "Yuzuriha!"
She screamed—not in pain, but from the sheer flood of information pouring into her skull. The resonance wasn't just awakening—it was consuming her, connecting her. She felt the villagers' fear like echoes in her head. She heard the soldiers' clipped voices on the other side of the perimeter. For one impossible second, she wasn't just Yuzuriha—she was everyone.
And then it was too much.
Blood spilled hot from her nose, dripping onto the parchment. Her knees buckled. Yoshiki caught her before she hit the floor, his arms burning with fresh blisters but steady all the same.
Her lips trembled against his chest. "It's all connected, Yoshiki… the island, us… we're not just experiments… we're keys."
And then she went limp.
Miles away, in the command outpost, monitors screamed with new alerts.
"Resonance spike detected. Subject Mori Yuzuriha… female, seventeen years old."
The voice of the soldier was flat, mechanical, as another codename flickered onto the screen.
Codename: Mindweaver. Resonance Type: Cognitive.
Director Shiga leaned closer to the glass, his reflection fractured across the data stream. His lips curled in quiet satisfaction.
"So," he murmured, "the third flame has joined the fire."
Three codenames pulsed in unison now:
Infernal Sovereign. Abyss Warden. Mindweaver.