Zack didn't realize his voice was about to break until it did—mid-syllable, mid-breath, like his throat betrayed him for having the nerve to still be attached to a heart.
"This isn't you."
He meant it as an anchor. A rope thrown across a widening gap. A simple sentence you could grab with both hands and pull someone back to shore.
Sephiroth didn't flinch.
Firelight played across his face in restless bands, orange and green fighting for ownership of his features. The mako spill turned the smoke the color of old bruises. Embers drifted down and caught in his hair and slid off like they couldn't find anything in him worth burning.
"This is the first time I've ever been me," Sephiroth said.
No malice. No heat. Not even triumph.
Just certainty—clean, smooth, and horrifying in the way a sealed verdict is horrifying. Like the world had already made its decision and was now politely informing Zack of the results.
Zack swallowed, hard enough it hurt. His eyes stung from smoke, sure, but that wasn't the whole truth. His chest felt like it had been opened and packed with ash.
"You're standing in the middle of—" Zack's gaze flicked to the nearest house as part of the roof collapsed inward with a sound like something giving up. A scream threaded through the hum and got swallowed by turbines. "—this. And you're talking like it's… philosophy."
Sephiroth's eyes moved once, slow, across the burning street—over the villagers running, over the troopers marching, over the bodies Zack refused to count.
"I'm talking like it's reality," Sephiroth said.
Behind Zack, the trooper with the flamethrower adjusted his stance and re-aimed, obedient as a metronome. Another trooper's rifle tracked Zack's shoulder like a lazy pointer.
Zack forced himself to look at them, really look.
They weren't panicking. They weren't yelling. They weren't improvising in the chaos like soldiers usually did when things went sideways. Their movements were too clean. Too synchronized. Like they were receiving instructions through the same invisible wire.
He'd joked earlier that Nibelheim felt staged.
This wasn't staging anymore.
This was possession with paperwork.
Zack's fingers flexed near the Buster Sword's grip. He didn't draw it. Drawing it would mean admitting what his body had already decided: that the person he'd trusted most in Shinra—maybe in his whole damn life—had stepped across a line Zack wasn't allowed to follow without becoming something else too.
"Seph," Zack said, and hated how small the name sounded in the roar. "Stop. Look at me."
Sephiroth did, finally—fully this time.
And Zack felt it in his gut: the look wasn't empty. It wasn't "gone." It was worse.
Sephiroth was present. More present than Zack had seen him in months.
Whatever voice lived under the refinery's hum, whatever lived in the mako like a thought with teeth, it hadn't erased Sephiroth.
It had sharpened him.
Zack took one step closer. Heat rolled off the street stones in waves. His boots stuck briefly in something tacky—sap, melted tar, blood, he didn't want to know—and pulled free with a soft, ugly sound.
"Listen," Zack said, steadying his breath like he was about to talk someone down from a ledge. "Shinra did horrible things. I'm not arguing that. But this?" He gestured, helpless, at the burning town like the flames might understand the point he was trying to make. "This isn't a correction. This is—this is you letting something drive."
Sephiroth's expression softened by a fraction. Not into pity. Into something almost… fond.
"You keep calling it 'something,'" Sephiroth said. "Because if you name it, you'll have to admit you've been living inside its shadow the entire time."
Zack's throat tightened.
He didn't want to name it.
Naming things gave them shape. Shape gave them power. And Zack had spent his whole career learning how to survive by refusing to give Shinra's monsters the dignity of being real.
But the hum under the street—under the fire, under the metal, under the screaming—was so steady it felt like a heartbeat that didn't belong to any human body.
And Sephiroth was listening to it like it was scripture.
"You're scaring me," Zack said, and the honesty tasted like blood in his mouth.
Sephiroth blinked once. Slow. Considerate. Like Zack had confessed something mild.
"I'm freeing myself," he said. "And you're still asking me to crawl back into the cage because you liked me better when I was useful."
That hit hard, not because it was true, but because it was close enough to true to bruise.
Zack's jaw tightened. "That's not—"
Sephiroth turned away from him mid-sentence like the argument had already bored him.
And then he started walking.
Not back into the town. Not toward the people who needed help. Not toward the troopers committing the crime.
Toward the refinery.
Toward the green wound in the mountain where the light was brightest, where the air shimmered with heat and pressure, where the hum turned sharp enough to feel like it could cut.
Zack stood there for half a heartbeat, watching him go, and something inside him split clean down the middle.
On one side: the mission. The civilians. The screaming. The instinct that said protect what's in front of you.
On the other: Sephiroth. The war. The future. The sick certainty crawling up Zack's spine that if he didn't follow right now, this moment would become a before-and-after the planet never recovered from.
Zack looked left.
A villager—an older man, face grey with soot—staggered out of a doorway with his hands up. He looked like he wanted help.
Then his smile slid into place like a mask.
He stepped directly into Zack's path, too deliberate, too calm, arms spreading wider as if to block.
Behind him, two troopers pivoted in perfect unison. Rifles up. No hesitation.
Zack's pulse spiked.
He tried the comm again, because hope is a bad habit SOLDIERs never quite kick.
Static.
Then the hum—patient, low, intimate—breathing into his ear like a mouth against a phone line.
"Are you kidding me," Zack whispered, furious, and the words came out shaking.
The villager's eyes fixed on Zack with that same recognition the child had worn earlier—like Zack wasn't a person, just an obstacle the town had been instructed to move.
Zack stepped forward anyway.
The troopers raised their rifles a fraction higher.
Zack didn't draw the Buster Sword. He didn't need to. He moved fast—SOLDIER fast—closing the distance with the villager in two strides, catching the man by the shoulders.
"Get out of the way," Zack said through his teeth.
The villager's smile didn't change.
Zack shoved him aside, not gently, but not cruelly either—just enough to clear a path. The man hit the street stones and didn't even swear. Didn't even gasp. Just lay there, blinking in time with the hum.
A rifle cracked.
Zack twisted, the shot slicing past where his head had been, and his body finally stopped negotiating with denial.
He yanked the Buster Sword free in one smooth motion. The blade caught firelight and mako glow at once, a strip of dull steel lit like an omen.
The troopers didn't flinch at the sight of it. Didn't hesitate the way sane men did when a First Class drew.
They fired again.
Zack moved.
He didn't think about it, not in words. His muscles knew what to do long before his brain caught up. He slapped the shots aside with the flat of the sword, sparks snapping off the edge, heat blooming against his gloves. He closed the distance and slammed the broad side of the Buster Sword into the first trooper's chestplate hard enough to fold the man backward into the street.
The second trooper aimed point-blank.
Zack drove a shoulder into him, knocking the rifle up. The shot tore into the air, useless. Zack elbowed the man's helmet, felt something crack, and the trooper dropped like a puppet whose strings got cut.
It should've felt like victory.
It didn't.
It felt like fighting the same nightmare in different uniforms.
Smoke tore at Zack's lungs. His eyes tracked down the street automatically—counting threats, counting exits—and found Sephiroth again, already farther ahead, already climbing the service route toward the refinery's lower gantries.
Sephiroth didn't look back.
Zack stared at him and felt grief hit like a second impact—because it wasn't just that Sephiroth was leaving.
It was that Sephiroth didn't need Zack to witness it.
That hurt more than the betrayal.
Zack took one step after him.
Then another.
He passed a woman dragging a child by the wrist, both of them sobbing, and his instincts screamed at him to stop, to help, to do what heroes did in the stories Shinra printed on posters.
He hesitated—just long enough to feel the weight of the choice.
The hum under the world sharpened, like it noticed his indecision and got impatient.
Zack clenched his teeth so hard his jaw ached.
"I'm sorry," he breathed, to the woman, to the kid, to the town, to himself.
Then he ran.
He hit the base of the service route at a sprint, boots hammering metal plates slick with condensation and ash. Heat rose in waves from the pipes lining the path, and the green light got brighter the higher he climbed, staining the smoke like toxic dawn. The refinery's grind filled his skull now—not background, not atmosphere, but a constant pressure like someone's hand on the back of his neck, steering.
Sephiroth was ahead, moving with impossible calm through chaos—coat snapping behind him, embers clinging and falling away, hair like a pale banner in the green spill.
Zack chased him, breath tearing, sword heavy on his shoulder, heart trying to do too many jobs at once.
Stop him.
Save him.
Save them.
Save the future.
His comm stayed dead. The chain of command stayed silent. Shinra stayed exactly what it always was: a machine that made monsters and then acted shocked when the monsters stopped taking orders.
And somewhere deep beneath the mountain, in the mako's furious surge, the Lifestream kept singing through iron teeth—low and endless and almost purposeful—like it had been waiting for this exact moment to become true.
Zack's legs burned. His lungs screamed. He didn't slow.
Because if he let Sephiroth reach the heart of that refinery—if he let him step into whatever was calling him from the green inferno below—then this wouldn't be a town burning in the night.
This would be the world tilting.
This would be the moment the war stopped being something fought in far-off places and became something that lived inside people.
Zack pushed harder, chasing the pale figure into the refinery's glare, into the brightest part of the wound—toward the place where the hum felt less like sound and more like a door that had already decided to open.