"...Any can be a savior? A savior can be anyone? Absence? Conceptual? You keep your mouth shut, you have absolutely no idea what you are saying, Frantzes..."
Zackier's voice didn't sound like his own anymore.
It was a hollow rasp, the sound of wind whistling through a graveyard.
He leaned down toward Trizha, his towering frame casting a shadow so dense it seemed to swallow the moonlight.
His presence was no longer just a physical threat; it was a conceptual weight that made the very air feel like cooling lead.
"By sacrificing yourself three hundred years ago, you lent your so-called 'burden' onto this girl in front of me and called it a 'Legacy.' What a pile of absolute, unadulterated bullshit. Of course anyone can be a savior—if they have it handed to them through inheritance. You didn't give her a gift; you gave her a life sentence."
As Zackier spat those words, Trizha lay paralyzed beneath him, her mind spiraling into a vortex of utter confusion.
None of those words made sense to her.
Inheritance?
Legacy?
Three hundred years ago?
But something deep in her subconscious told her that Zackier wasn't speaking to her at all.
He was looking through her eyes, addressing a ghost she hadn't yet realized was sharing her skin.
Frantzes... that was her last name, a name she had carried her whole life without a second thought.
But the way Zackier said it made it sound like a title of infamy.
"Run! Trizha, get away from there and run!!"
Nomoro's voice shattered the momentary paralysis.
The raw desperation in his scream was enough to snap Trizha's focus back to the immediate horror.
Despite the crushing pressure on her chest and the blood coiling in her throat, she shook her head, refusing to falter.
She wouldn't let him be the only one to bleed tonight.
She clenched her fists, her knuckles white against the dark concrete, and stood her ground.
She glared up at Zackier, staring past the dark and terrifying demeanor that had once made her heart stop.
"No! I can fight—"
The sentence was never finished.
Before she could draw a breath, Zackier's hand snapped out like a viper striking.
His fingers clamped around her neck, and with a sickening burst of strength, he slammed her down onto the rooftop floor with a force that vibrated through the entire building.
"I said keep your mouth shut, you reckless, arrogant fool."
Trizha let out a cracked and painful gasp, the sound of a dying bird.
The impact was so severe that the irises of her eyes almost vanished into her skull for a brief, terrifying moment.
The world turned into a blur of grey stone and black sky.
"O-oww… I-it hurts… it hurts all over…! I can't move, I can't even breathe…!! L-let go… please…!"
The thoughts were a frantic, silent scream inside her head.
Zackier's grip had effectively crushed her vocal cords, and a warm, copper-tasting liquid began to flow from her mouth.
It wasn't just her throat; she could feel the jagged edges of multiple ribs having snapped upon impact, and her left arm felt cold and distant, broken in places she didn't want to think about.
This sight was the final, agonizing spark for Nomoro.
Seeing her crushed like a discarded doll motivated him to a level of madness.
He gripped the iron bar impaling his chest with both hands, his fingers slipping on the hot, slick blood that coated the metal.
"Aaaarrrgggghhh!!!"
He knew that what he was doing was biological suicide.
He knew that by pulling himself against the bar, he was shredding his internal organs, turning a survivable wound into a lethal one.
But he couldn't leave her.
He couldn't let the last thing she saw be the face of a monster while she was in a state far more brutal and critical than his own.
"Tell me, Frantzes… Do you understand the burden you've lent?" Zackier coldly asked, his face inches from the suffering Trizha. "Do you understand that what you call 'legacy' is nothing more than your selfish desire to return? You're making Trizha your vessel just so you can walk the earth again, aren't you?"
He leaned closer, his eyes searching for a flicker of the ghost.
"Answer me. I know you can fucking switch bodies with her ever since you managed to get her to awaken the Harbinger state. That's how the 'vessel and mentor' trope works, doesn't it? It's a parasitic relationship masquerading as fate!"
He tightened his grip on her neck, choking the life out of her as she gasped for a breath that wouldn't come.
"I said answer me, goddammit!!"
Trizha couldn't respond.
Her throat was a ruin, her bones were dust, and her spirit was failing.
Tears finally began to flow from her eyes, hot and salty, as she realized the absolute gravity of her situation.
The power she had briefly held, the strength she thought she could be proud of, was being weighed down by a fantasy she didn't understand.
She closed her eyes, slowly accepting the encroaching dark.
She thought she could escape fate.
She was wrong.
In the end… she was just a Romance Character meant for school-yard person drama, not a war of gods full of action.
Suddenly, her eyes snapped open once more.
The blood that had been bubbling out of her mouth stopped as if the wound had been cauterized by pure will.
The eyes that looked up at Zackier now were not Trizha's.
They were filled with an entirely different, ancient light.
"The legacy you call 'burden'… you have it all wrong. You're an idiot. Don't you dare insult me, you pathetic weakling."
Trizha's face became unnervingly calm, her expression turning stern and cold as the Arctic.
Her shoulders relaxed, and she spoke in a tone so clear and sharp it was as if the trauma to her vocal cords and bones had never happened.
The sudden shift surprised Zackier, sending a jolt of excitement and fear through his veins.
He grinned widely, his teeth bared like a predator.
This was the first time he had ever had a personal conversation with a legend of her caliber.
He was momentarily speechless, his mouth hanging open, but as he tried to speak, Frantzes cut him off with a razor-tongue.
"What, cat got your tongue? If so, then I sure hope that same cat cuts off your tongue the next time it catches you," she hissed, her tone radiating a reckless hatred that made Trizha's previous anger look like a flickering candle.
"You can quit choking me and speak up. Talking ain't that hard, even for a bottom-feeder like you."
The way she spoke, the lack of a filter, the sheer density of the insults—it was clear she held nothing but pure contempt for beings like Zackier.
"...Your people, the Prophecy beings. You all hated being interrupted ever since we arrived from the void," Zackier said, his tone low and reverent.
"Exactly. You can call this your typical USA vs. Alien invasion shit, if you want to be reductive," Frantzes replied.
"And yet," Zackier countered, his eyes narrowing to slits, "you interrupt your own descendant by living inside her body. You planted YOUR burden in Trizha's soul. Now she has to bleed for your sins. She has to go through the same hell you did, all over again. It's stupid. It's cruel. It's worth hating."
"Except I didn't decide for any of this to happen. Resonance is a law of nature, not a choice," she responded back, her voice unfazed. "It just happened."
"And yet you still let it happen!" Zackier shouted, his grip on her neck trembling. "Let me guess, it's 'natural'? Because it's 'destiny'? No. It's a choice you make every second you stay inside her. You could have 'saved' your precious young self from re-experiencing your trauma. You had all the time in the world to sever the tie. And yet here you sit… watching as I reset it all back to day one. I'm unknowingly preventing your selfish return by destroying the vessel. That's why people like you… are more hopeless than 'we' are."
In a twisted way, Zackier was right.
It was heart-breaking.
It was like a mother forcing her child to endure the same abuse she suffered just so the child would understand her pain.
It was a cruel, parasitic love.
But Frantzes merely sighed.
It wasn't a sigh of defeat; it was a sigh of determined retaliation.
She postured up from the floor, projecting an aura that made it feel like she was the one looking down on him.
"...Ever had the thought to think if I ever wanted this in the first place, dipshit?"
She delivered the curse like a physical blow.
"I never wanted this to happen. None of us did. Nobody wanted to be a ghost in their own bloodline, and yet it happened. And it's because of people like YOU that my people were forced to stand together in ways we never found fitting."
She paused, watching the confusion flicker in Zackier's eyes.
Then, she put on a crazed, wide, and wicked grin.
"So go on, say what you want. Curse my name or hope I suffer in hell. In the end… I'm just a Romance Character who was forced to pick up a weapon just so my story could continue without your mindless, will-free interruptions. If giving my will, my legacy, my power, all to my descendants is what you call a 'burden,' then you better call it me returning the favor against you bastards. Now fuck off and die already. Just the smell of you makes me want to vomit."
Zackier stood frozen.
He was speechless, every word he had heard acting like a needle in his brain.
He stood there like a mannequin, his face half-shrouded in shadow.
In the background, the sounds of Nomoro's struggle echoed—a wet, desperate sound of metal against bone.
The rooftop was silent otherwise, a silence so profound that the distant murmurs of the townsfolk down below drifted up on the wind.
It seemed the hotel had been breached, but that world felt a million miles away.
BANG!
The silence was murdered.
The rest of the world seemed to go quiet in response to that sharp, percussive crack.
The crowd below fell still.
Nomoro's eyes grew wider than they ever had in his life.
That sound… that specific, metallic bang reminded him of a trauma so deep it had been buried for nine years.
He stopped pulling the bar.
He stopped breathing.
He was stunned, his mind flooded with a wildfire of old memories.
Frantzes, however, didn't even blink.
She slowly shifted her gaze to the right side of her temple, watching as a thin trail of smoke curled up from a fresh, tiny crater in the concrete just centimeters from her face.
"I'm surprised. You brought an emergency gun. That's bold—you must have incredibly low self-esteem, Zackier," she said, her voice nonchalant.
She shifted her gaze back to Zackier's troubled eyes.
He was panting, sweating, his hand trembling as he gripped the small, black firearm he had been hiding in his sleeve for the ultimate moment of failure.
Frantzes smirked. "And where did that low self-esteem lead you? Don't even give me an answer if it's about having a trash aim, because…"
She then narrowed her eyes slightly, never leaving the gaze of Zackier's own eyes — because those eyes, their shattered-glass like irises, are flickering and slowly fading.
"...you have a much better excuse, an excuse I want you to explain right after; just what the hell am I witnessing right now."
Zackier couldn't answer.
He could only heave for air, his body acting like it had just finished a marathon.
This was new to Frantzes, and it was terrifyingly new to him.
The eminence of his race as an Alter Being was evaporating.
"Well? Which goes first?" she prodded, her impatience returning. "The fire of your gun or the speech of your tongue? Heh, I don't even think you have the guts to explain."
Nearby, Nomoro had lost all sense of the present.
The gunshot had transported him.
He forgot about the bar, the rooftop, and Trizha.
All that existed was the cold, hollow feeling that had lived in his chest nine years ago.
He lost the strength to even keep his head up.
"My eyes… the patterns that define my existence… they're disappearing, aren't they?" Zackier asked softly, his face still veiled in shadow.
"Yeah. That's a new one for the history books," she said.
"...I truly am… hopeless, aren't I?"
"Yeah."
"All this time," Zackier whispered, his voice cracking, "I've been trying to keep you dead. I didn't know my real goal was keeping you alive. Not from me, but from yourself."
Frantzes narrowed her eyes. "I bet those words are not meant for me."
"Yeah. They're for Trizha. It doesn't matter if you're her or not."
He tightened his grip on the gun and slowly aimed it at Frantzes' forehead.
She gulped silently, her gaze fixed on the dark abyss of the barrel.
"Your gun… this is the first and last time you're using it. It's fitting that I'm the one who falls to it," she said, a small, genuine smile tugging at her lips.
"Yeah. How poetic. This next shot… I guarantee it; it's all for you, Trizha."
Frantzes' smile grew wider, but then it turned cold and sharp.
"Oh no. You're forgetting something vital."
As she spoke, Nomoro began to thrash against the wall, but it wasn't a fight for survival.
It was a fit of pure, unadulterated cowardice.
"I can't, I can't… I don't want to, please don't make me!" he whimpered to the shadows.
The second shot hadn't been fired, but in his mind, he was surrounded by a thousand firing squads.
He began to pull his own body deeper into the metal bar, the jagged edges shredding his lungs as he tried to hide within his own pain.
Blood gushed from his chest, but he felt nothing but the terror of nine years ago.
"No! No! No!! I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"
He pulled harder, effectively impaling himself further, ignoring the biological reality of his death.
The imaginary gunshots in his head grew louder, a cacophony of judgment.
He wanted to hide in a dark alley, to curl into a ball and disappear.
Frantzes continued her speech, her voice a calm anchor in the chaos.
"You're forgetting another thing, Zackier…"
The words made him hesitate.
These were the final words from the reason he existed.
He wanted to hear them before he pulled the trigger.
"Please, I'm sorry!"
The more Nomoro apologized, the more the ghosts in his mind screamed.
This was the torment he had feared his whole life.
This was the end of Nomoro Narasao—not a hero's death, but a lonely, pathetic collapse into trauma.
"No! Noo!!"
He slumped against the bar, his eyes losing their focus as he drifted into the final cowardice.
He had lost.
He had given up.
It was a miserable, unfitting end.