The grand hall had stayed frozen for a long moment before people finally found their voices again and the low hum of conversation began to return.
They spoke far more softly now, and more than a few of them kept glancing toward Sasaki's back without quite meaning to, unable to fully shake the pressure that still clung faintly to the air.
Alia heaved a deep sigh, and for just a moment, a flicker of sadness passed through her eyes before she caught it and smoothed it away.
"He is still leaning on that Living Corpse form of his. He is never going to learn to sit with his own emotions if he keeps hiding behind it." She said this quietly, more to herself than to anyone, though Cief happened to be standing close enough to hear.
Cief kept his gaze on Sasaki's back, his expression carrying the kind of patience one only earns through long familiarity. "With respect, Miss Alia, you are one hundred and one years old, and Sasaki is seventeen. He has spent his entire life training himself not to feel anything at all. That is not something a person unlearns in a season, let alone in one evening. Today matters more to him than anyone in this hall realizes. Give him time. He will get there."
"Are you calling me old?" Alia turned to him with a sharp look, though there was no real heat behind it, only the faint challenge of someone used to being the one who set the tone of a conversation.
Cief's heart picked up its pace before he could stop it, and a thin sheen of sweat gathered at his brow. He shook his head quickly and excused himself, retreating into the crowd before she could say anything else.
Left alone, Alia's expression softened, the sharpness in her eyes giving way to something warmer and far more tired. Of everyone in this hall, she understood Sasaki better than anyone alive, understood exactly how heavy his silences were and how much it cost him to stand there looking like nothing touched him at all. She had married him knowing full well what that silence meant, and she had never once regretted it, even on the days it made her want to shake him by the shoulders and scream at him to just feel something for once. It was never as simple as telling him to let go. She knew that better than anyone. So she stayed patient, the way she always did, even when patience did not come naturally to her.
Not far from where Alia stood, two guests lingered near a pillar, their eyes still fixed nervously on Sasaki as they tried to make sense of what had just happened to them.
"I nearly lost my footing back there," one of them admitted, a young man in a gray suit who kept flexing his hand as though checking it still obeyed him. "I have met High-ranking Walkers before and never felt anything close to that. What was that?"
His companion, an older woman with a calmer bearing, shook her head slowly. "That was not just strength you felt. That was his dimensionality pressing against your comprehension. The higher a person's rank climbs, the further they step outside what our minds are built to understand. When someone that far above you appears without shielding it, your consciousness cannot process what it is looking at, and something in your World of Consciousness and Subconsciousness either breaks or gives way to your aura's subconscious instincts. That is why people scream, or freeze, or lose themselves entirely for a moment."
"Then why did we recover so quickly? If it was truly beyond us, should we not still be losing our minds right now?"
"Because he chose to let us recover." She glanced toward the stairs where Sasaki had descended. "Supernovas learn a technique called Veiling once they reach that rank, a way of wrapping a thin layer of meditation aura around themselves to hide their dimensionality from anyone weaker. It takes constant, deliberate control to maintain, which is part of why so few of them bother using it in casual settings. What we felt just now was the moment before he raised that veil, not the truth of what he actually is underneath it."
The young man swallowed hard. "And Hypernovas? Are they even worse?"
"Far worse, and they cannot use Veiling at all. Their existence sits too far outside our comprehension for a technique like that to hold. That is the real reason you never see Hypernovas walking through Lumenia to hand down orders themselves. Most of them speak to Lysi Novas through meditation aura instead, and even that exchange is difficult to sustain. The only ones who can appear before lower ranks safely are Dimension Pathway users, since their pathway lets them bend their own dimensionality to a level the rest of us can actually perceive. That is how Hypernovas like Edward Blackknight can stand in a room with normal or low-ranking Walkers and speak with them as if rank means nothing at all."
"Then how is anyone in this hall still standing?" the young man asked, glancing nervously toward the Hypernovas scattered among the crowd, none of whom seemed to be causing anyone the slightest discomfort.
"It is due to that giant veil," she said simply, tilting her head toward the pale shimmer that stretched high above all of Lumenia, barely visible unless you knew to look for it. "It is not the technique but the formation. Excalibur Blackknight designed it himself, and it covers the entire city, second in scale only to the colossal walls surrounding it. It is the only reason Hypernovas can walk among us at all without every lower rank in sight losing themselves on the spot."
The young man let out a slow breath and finally allowed his shoulders to relax, though his eyes kept drifting back toward Sasaki all the same.
This veil's entire purpose was to suppress the dimensionality of every aura user in the hall, letting them stand in the same room and look one another in the eye without any risk of losing themselves to something their minds could not comprehend.
Learning this for the first time had shaken every guest present, and it was, in its own quiet way, another sign of exactly how far Sasaki was willing to go to see these people actually build something real with one another tonight.
"He is quite the handsome man. Just looking at him makes me a little envious. Miss Mona is really lucky, marrying him even without much of a background behind her." Salvia's bubbly friend leaned in and whispered, nudging her lightly with an elbow.
Salvia did not answer right away. Her eyes stayed locked on Sasaki, and something in her chest had gone tight the moment she first saw him descend those stairs, a feeling she could not quite name pressing against her ribs. This was the first time in her life she had ever stood in the same room as a Supernova, and no amount of hearing about them in stories had prepared her for what it actually felt like to be near one. Even now, safely wrapped in the protection of the veil overhead, some deeper part of her still wanted to look away, and she had to consciously keep her eyes on him just to prove to herself that she could.
She was a Hypernova of the Mind Pathway, and unlike most aura users around her, she noticed things others simply could not: small shifts and undercurrents that slipped past everyone else entirely, and right now every one of those senses was telling her that the man standing at the door was something far heavier than his calm expression let on.
In another part of the hall, Malefic had gone completely still, his eyes fixed on Sasaki with a look that bordered somewhere between admiration and quiet devastation. Ever since he was a child, he had wanted nothing more than to become someone high and mighty, someone no one in this world could dismiss or trifle with, and standing here now, watching a boy barely older than himself command an entire hall into silence without saying a single word, that old childhood want came roaring back all at once, sharper and more painful than he had felt it in years.
Reality had never been kind enough to let that want become anything more than a want. He had the talent for it, and he had the aptitude too- more than enough of both- but his family had never had the resources to match what talent alone could offer, barely enough to go around even among his own household, and he had spent his entire life fighting his relatives just to claim his share of what little there was.
Even after all of that fighting, after everything he had clawed his way through, he was still standing at nothing more than the Lysi Nova rank, and watching Sasaki now, effortlessly and quietly proving himself a Supernova to an entire hall full of people, Malefic felt that gap between them settle into his chest like something physical, something he was not sure he would ever be able to close.
...
Sasaki had only been standing for a few minutes before the air outside the mansion shifted, growing heavy in a way that made even the trees seem to still.
A golden-brown meditation aura began bleeding out of a vortex, yellow and chestnut particles scattering as the ground itself trembled faintly beneath everyone's feet.
Every guest turned at once.
A middle-aged man stepped out of the light, a brown beard framing a composed face, his chestnut hair catching the glow of the vortex behind him.
His dark brown eyes moved slowly across the hall, as if they were reading something the rest of them could not see.
He came alone. He said nothing.
A brown, opaque veil trailed from his head all the way to the ground, and beneath it he wore a dark brown bodysuit that fit him like a second skin.
This was Robert Karma, head of the Karma family, keepers of the Overseeing Pathway.
"To think he would be the first to arrive." Sasaki had expected his grandfather, or perhaps someone from the Blackbells, to walk through that door first.
Not Robert.
It struck him as strange at first.
Then it clicked.
The Karma family is drowning in turmoil right now, both inside their walls and out. Circitia has protests breaking out daily, and there are revolutions already primed to move the moment someone gives the word. That kind of pressure does not just go away. By arriving first, he is buying my goodwill, hoping it smooths things over for him later.
If he manages to build something real with me, he stands to gain a great deal once I reach True Supernova. Shame he does not know I have no intention of climbing that high.
And the rest of them are not sitting at home unprepared. They are ready. They are just choosing to wait, dragging their feet on purpose. Robert likely paid a considerable sum just to guarantee he would be the one walking through that door first.
Sasaki's mind turned all of this over in the space of a breath, understanding far more in Robert's arrival than the man probably wanted him to.
Robert walked forward.
Sasaki watched him come, his face as unreadable as Robert's own.
He was shorter than Robert by a few inches, forcing him to tilt his head up slightly, though it did nothing to ease the weight now pressing down on every guest in the hall.
Sasaki moved first.
He raised his right hand to his chest, curled it into a fist, and dipped into a short bow, the gesture belonging to a world far from Lumenia.
Every planet bowed in its own way.
A small smile touched his lips as he did it, and somehow that smile looked far more unsettling than his usual stillness ever had.
Robert answered in kind, pressing his left palm flat over his heart and bowing, the traditional greeting of Lumenia itself.
"Thank you for blessing my humble wedding with your grand presence, Lord Robert Karma." Sasaki's voice came out warm on the surface and ice-cold underneath it.
"No worries at all, Lord Sasaki." Robert's eyes flicked briefly past him, scanning the hall. "It is an honor to have arrived first. Though I notice none of the others have shown themselves yet."
The words carried more weight than their size suggested.
Sasaki stepped aside, sweeping one arm toward the hall behind him. "Please, look around. Choose whichever room suits you."
Something flickered behind Robert's eyes- disappointment- there and gone in an instant, his smile twitching at the corner before he smoothed it back into place.
He said nothing more and walked past.
Three Hypernovas broke from the crowd almost immediately, falling into step around Robert and guiding him deeper into the hall.
Guests parted for him without needing to be told twice.
No one so much as glanced his way long enough to consider approaching. Supernovas spoke with Supernovas. Everyone else simply made room and kept their eyes down, content to remain exactly what they were.
Sasaki watched Robert vanish into the crowd, gave a small, cold nod to no one in particular, and turned his gaze back toward the open door.
He kept waiting.
The night, and the rest of the family heads, were far from finished with him yet.