Zack didn't win against Sephiroth's momentum. He survived it.
There was a difference, and the refinery knew it.
The gantry shook under the pressure of their blades like it was trying to decide which of them to betray first. The air above the core wasn't air anymore—it was heat and vibration and that relentless green glare that made every thought feel exposed. Sephiroth pressed forward again with that clean, merciless certainty, trying to turn Zack into a solved problem. One decisive surge. One clean end. No room for regret to crawl back in later.
Zack's wrists screamed as he held the Buster Sword up like a door nobody should be allowed to open. The Masamune kept finding angles that shouldn't exist—slipping, sliding, searching for the part of Zack that would give first. Tendon. Breath. Focus. Faith.
Zack dug his boots in and felt the metal sweat under him. Condensation slicked the grating, turning the whole platform into a polite little invitation to fall. His arms trembled—not from fear, he told himself, not fear—just strain and heat and the fact that his best friend was trying to kill him like it was a mercy.
Sephiroth leaned in, blade singing against steel, and Zack felt it: that forward drive. That "I'm ending this now" commitment, so pure it was almost beautiful in the way a guillotine was beautiful—if you didn't have a neck.
Zack stopped trying to out-skill him.
He stopped trying to out-legend him.
He did the one thing Sephiroth couldn't account for, because it wasn't elegant.
He used the weight.
Zack twisted the Buster Sword's broad face into the Masamune's line—not to catch it edge-to-edge, but to hook it. He let Sephiroth's speed commit, let the blade slide into the trap he'd made with sheer surface area, and then he shoved with everything he had left in his body.
Not a swing.
A body move. A refusal.
Metal shrieked. Sparks snapped. The Masamune skated sideways, forced off its perfect path, and for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, Sephiroth's stance broke—not a stumble like a drunk, but that rare, startled half-step of someone whose physics got rewritten mid-sentence.
Zack followed the shove through, shoulder and hips driving, boots skidding, teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached.
Sephiroth went backward.
Just a pace.
Just enough.
And on a gantry this narrow, "just enough" was a cliff.
Sephiroth's heel caught the condensation-slick seam. His coat flared out behind him like a torn banner. For one horrifying beat, his balance didn't exist. There was no myth, no angelic calm—just a man on the edge of a bad outcome.
His hand shot out and caught the railing.
The metal rang under his grip. The force of it shuddered through the gantry and into Zack's arms like an aftershock.
Below them, the core answered.
The mako surged brighter in a sudden, violent pulse, as if the planet's blood had flinched at the sight of him nearly falling into it. Light blasted up through the grating, so bright it turned Sephiroth into a high-contrast silhouette—angel-green and devil-white, all sharp edges and impossible hair, like some religious icon drawn by an accountant with a cruelty kink.
Zack's breath caught.
His body moved before his mind could approve.
His hand went out.
Not with strategy. Not with calculation.
Instinct. Brotherhood. That stupid, stubborn part of him that still believed you didn't let people you loved fall, even if they deserved it, even if they asked for it, even if the whole planet was humming don't in your teeth.
"Seph—" Zack started, voice torn raw by heat and terror. "Take my—"
Sephiroth looked at Zack's hand.
Not at Zack.
At the hand.
And the look on his face wasn't panic.
It wasn't relief.
It wasn't even the cold concentration he'd been wearing like armor.
It was something uglier: offense.
As if Zack had offered him a leash.
As if help was the most insulting thing you could give a man who'd finally decided he was above needing anyone.
Zack froze mid-reach, fingers open, palm hovering over the gap between them.
"Don't," Zack whispered, and the word wasn't command or plea. It was a crack in him. "Don't do this like this."
Sephiroth's fingers tightened on the railing. For a second, Zack thought he'd pull himself back up. That he'd take the hand. That the world might—might—snap back into the old shape.
Then Sephiroth's eyes flicked to Zack's face, and something in them settled.
Not rage.
Not grief.
A decision completing itself.
A calm that wasn't human calm.
A calm that belonged to something that had already traded away the right to be saved.
Zack saw it, and his heart sank in that specific way it sank when you realized the argument had ended minutes ago and you'd just been talking to keep the sound of your own hope alive.
Sephiroth's mouth moved—barely. The faintest curve, almost appreciative.
Like Zack had proven a point for him.
Then Sephiroth looked back at the hand hovering in the air, and the offense sharpened into something like hatred—not the wild kind, not the screaming kind.
The clean kind.
The kind that cut.
He released the rail.
On purpose.
No scramble. No slip.
A deliberate opening of the fingers, one by one, as if he was letting go of a world that had never deserved his grip in the first place.
Zack's hand snapped forward reflexively, grasping at empty space.
"SEPHIROTH—!"
Sephiroth dropped.
The coat flared like wings, then became nothing but fabric in a furnace. The Masamune's long line flashed once in the green glare, catching light as it fell with him like a falling star insisting it deserved to be witnessed.
And the mako reacted.
Not like liquid.
Not like "power source."
Like a living thing being struck in its most sensitive nerve.
The roar below swelled into a higher, harsher pitch—still mechanical, still forced through turbines and iron teeth, but suddenly layered with something that made Zack's skin crawl. A rising howl braided into the refinery hymn, like the planet itself was trying to scream through a machine that refused to translate it cleanly.
The light surged. The heat slapped up hard enough to sting Zack's face. For a second, the whole chamber felt like it inhaled.
Then Sephiroth hit the glow.
Or vanished into it.
It was hard to tell. The mako was so bright it ate detail. It swallowed silhouette. It turned distance into a lie. One moment Sephiroth was falling—calm, chosen, terrible—and the next he was just… gone, consumed by green-white fire like the planet had opened its mouth and decided to take him.
Zack stumbled forward, knees bending, hand still out like a child reaching for a balloon that had already drifted past the point of catching.
His throat burned. His eyes watered. He couldn't breathe right, not because there wasn't air, but because the air felt full of electricity and grief.
The gantry kept trembling under his boots, metal groaning, bolts whining, railings shivering like they wanted to shake loose and follow.
Zack stared down into the inferno until his vision stuttered.
He waited for a splash.
He waited for a scream.
He waited for anything that made this make sense.
Instead, the hum changed.
Not louder.
Closer.
Intimate as breath against an ear.
And in the spaces where the refinery's teeth paused between bites, Zack could swear he felt a second presence slide through the sound—something satisfied, something patient, something that didn't need to raise its voice because it had all the time in the world.
Mine.
Zack flinched so hard his shoulders twinged.
"No," he rasped, to the light, to the machinery, to whatever was listening. "No, you don't—"
Something moved below.
Not a person.
A shape.
A dark line cutting through the brightness, too solid to be steam, too deliberate to be turbulence.
A mechanical arm rose out of the heat shimmer on a track Zack hadn't noticed—hidden behind scaffolding, concealed in the architecture like a secret the building had been keeping for the right moment. It was industrial, heavy, jointed like a crane but moving with a precision that felt wrong in a place this chaotic. A retrieval mechanism. A "safety" system. A Shinra answer to a problem Shinra had absolutely planned for.
At the end of it, a claw opened.
Not a hand.
A grip designed for cargo.
It plunged down into the mako glare like it couldn't feel pain.
The light flared again, violent as a migraine. For half a second Zack saw nothing but green-white, and the howl in the turbines rose higher, strained tight like the planet was trying to tear its own voice free.
Then the claw snapped shut.
On something.
It hauled up with a smooth, brutal certainty, and Zack's heart stopped because a pale shape came with it—half-seen, dripping light, coat in tatters, hair plastered back like wet silver flame.
Sephiroth.
Or what was left of him.
The claw dragged him sideways, away from the open channels, toward a service aperture in the scaffolding—an access route hidden behind warning panels and clean metal. The mechanism moved like it had done this before. Like the building had rehearsed the motion.
Zack took a step, then another, then caught himself because the gantry under him lurched and he realized with sick clarity that the platform could give way any second. The core's light flashed again, strobing the chamber. Alarms started to wail somewhere far above, late and useless, as if the refinery had just remembered it was supposed to pretend this wasn't normal.
"HEY!" Zack shouted, hoarse. "Stop! Where are you taking him?"
The retrieval arm didn't answer.
Of course it didn't.
It pulled Sephiroth into the dark seam of the structure and the aperture swallowed him like a throat.
Then the panel slid shut with a soft, polite click.
As if nothing had happened.
As if a man hadn't just chosen a fall into the planet's bloodstream.
As if Zack's hand hadn't hung useless in the air while the world changed shape around it.
Zack stood there, chest heaving, staring at the sealed metal like he could burn it open with anger alone. His fingers curled into a fist so tight his knuckles went white-green in the mako glare.
Below him, the Lifestream kept roaring through turbines, still howling in that strained, almost-screaming register. The whole refinery shook with it, a cathedral of machinery trying to process something holy and failing.
Zack lowered his hand slowly.
Not because he'd given up.
Because he finally understood: the person he'd reached for had already stopped wanting to be caught.
And whatever had just "rescued" Sephiroth hadn't saved him.
It had claimed him.