He crashed through the wall.
The corridor was quiet now.
Not the peaceful quiet of a building at rest, but the hollow silence of a battlefield after the killing had stopped. Blood pooled in the cracks between floorboards, dark and glistening, catching the emergency lights in brief, ruby flashes.
Lucy's lungs were still moving.
Her chest, what remained of it, rose and fell in shallow, irregular rhythms. The exposed tissue glistened wetly under the dim light, and each breath brought a wet, sucking sound that made Hoshimi's stare.
The line between inside and outside had blurred sometime in the past few minutes, sometime between Sarah's fingers closing around Seraphina's throat and Lucy's body hitting the floor.
Hoshimi pressed his palm flat against the wall and pushed himself upright. His legs shook. His arms shook. Everything shook, a fine tremor that ran through his body like a current, like something had been unplugged.
Dominic stood there, blood on his hands.
[Sophia's gone. We're all going to die. Times like this is when I wish that she was here. The whole word is fucked, everyone is fucked. Where the hell is Reina!?]
The thought circled his skull, sharp-edged and relentless.
[They sealed her. They trapped her. The only person who could have stopped this is gone.]
He looked down at his hands. They were still holding the gun, the barrel still warm, the grip slick with blood that wasn't his own.
"What am I supposed to do now?"
Behind him, Neila coughed, a wet, rattling sound that ended in a spray of blood across the floor. She was on her hands and knees, her twin-tails hanging in tangled ropes, her face gray with exhaustion.
"Hoshimi," she gasped.
Seraphina was slumped against the wall where Sarah had left her, her pink hair matted with blood, her hands still curled into claws. The fingers were bent at wrong angles, the wrists swollen and discolored, but she was breathing. Shallow, irregular, but breathing.
Edward lay in a pool of his own blood, the stumps of his legs blackened and charred, his face the color of old paper. His eyes were closed, his chest barely moving.
Hoshimi's hand tightened on the gun.
His feet moved before his brain could catch up.
He couldn't finish the thought.
Hoshimi's hand tightened on the gun.
His feet moved before his brain could catch up.
He ignored Dominic. Ignored the blood pooling around his shoes, ignored Lucy's shallow breathing, ignored Neila's desperate gasps. He walked past them all, through them, almost, like a ghost passing through the living.
Everyone else seemed to fade into the background, their faces blurring, their voices fading into a dull roar that he couldn't quite hear.
He walked down what seemed to be the corridor. His footsteps were too loud in the silence, each one echoing off the walls like a gunshot, like a countdown.
The stairwell door was open.
Beyond it, darkness.
Hoshimi stepped through without looking back.
The stairs descended into blackness.
Not the natural dark of a building at night, but something thicker, heavier, a darkness that seemed to press against his skin like water pressure, like the weight of everything he'd failed to do was finally catching up.
Each step took him deeper.
His mana flickered around him, a thin violet glow that barely illuminated the steps beneath his feet. The light felt pathetic. Inadequate. A candle trying to hold back the ocean.
"What am I doing?"
"Instead of stopping them, I'm running, I'm supposed to be a tool, give up my life for this task, but my curiosity is getting to me."
He kept walking.
"I have no plan to stop Sarah, I don't even know what the hell she is."
His hand found the railing. The metal was cold beneath his palm, slick with condensation.
"This is stupid."
"This is exactly the kind of stupid, reckless thing that gets people killed."
"Reina would tell me to stop. To think. To regroup, to plan, to find another way."
His foot hit the landing. The stairs continued down, spiraling into darkness.
A poster.
SHE TAKES THE SHOT ANYWAY.
BECAUSE IF SHE DOESN'T, WHO WILL?
He stopped.
[Sometimes I wonder, what did I feel for Audrey. Was it love? I doubt it. Do I miss her? No. But sometimes I wonder what would happen if she was still here]
The darkness pressed against him from all sides.
His hand went to his chest, pressing flat against his sternum. Beneath his palm, beneath the skin and muscle and bone, something pulsed. Not his heart. Something else. Something that had been waiting.
"Is this your doing?"
The white void stretched infinitely in all directions.
Hoshimi stood at its center, his feet flat against nothing, his hands loose at his sides. The darkness of the stairwell was gone, replaced by an endless, featureless expanse that hurt to look at.
"I'm back here."
The sword laid on the patch of grass, its blade gleaming with that impossible light, its surface crawling with runes that shifted and reformed as he watched. Beside it, the scabbard rested, its gold trim catching a light that didn't exist.
"You're hurt."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, from the blade and the void and somewhere deep inside his own chest. It was the same voice he'd heard before.
"Does it look like it?" Hoshimi said. His voice came out flat, but there was something beneath it now. Something raw.
"Physically?"
"Does it matter?"
The sword was silent for a moment. The runes on its surface flickered, dimmed, brightened.
"No," it said finally. "It doesn't."
Hoshimi looked at his hands. In the void, they were unmarked, unbloodied, the skin smooth and whole. No scars from the entrance exam. No wound from Audrey's bite.
"Why did you bring me here?" he asked.
"You brought yourself."
"I'm not in control of my own soul."
"Aren't you?"
Hoshimi looked up. The sword laying down in front of him, patient, waiting.
"I follow. I obey. I do what I'm told. I've never been in control of anything in my life."
"You've only been in control of other people. A cog in a machine controlled by a larger one."
The sword asked. "What do you want?"
[What do I want?]
Hoshimi opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
[I don't know.]
[I've never known.]
[I've been so busy doing what I'm supposed to do that I forgot to want anything for myself.]
"I want..." He stopped. The words wouldn't come.
[I want peace, to live alone in a cabin with Reina and Sophia in the middle of the woods, but I'd just be lying to myself. Lying to myself to make myself feel more human]
The sword waited.
"I want to be able to want. Like a normal human."
The admission came out raw, cracked, nothing like his usual flat, controlled voice. He sounded like a stranger. He sounded like himself.
"I've feel like I've always been missing something for so long I forgot what it felt like to have something inside me. Something that wasn't orders, wasn't obligations, wasn't just... surviving."
He looked down at his hands again. "There was someone apart from Reina that made me feel something. For a little while. And then she died, and I went back to being empty, and I thought that was fine. I thought that was just who I was."
He looked up at the sword.
"But it's not. I don't want it to be. I want to care about something again. I want to want something again. I want to feel like I'm not just a puppet going through the motions until someone cuts my strings."
The sword was silent for a long moment.
The runes on its surface stopped shifting. They held still, frozen in patterns Hoshimi couldn't read.
"That's enough," the sword said.
"What?"
"That's enough." The blade pulsed, a wave of warmth that washed over Hoshimi like standing in sunlight after years in the dark. "I've waited centuries for someone to say something true. Something real. Most of them come here and tell me what they think I want to hear. Justice. Heroism. Chivalry. All meaningless trash."
It drifted closer, close enough that Hoshimi could see his reflection on its surface, his own hollow empty eyes staring back at him.
"Arthur was never like this. The reason I liked him was because he was selfish. A warmonger. True to himself. He didn't pretend to be good, he just was what he was, and he didn't apologize for it."
It drifted closer, close enough that Hoshimi could see his reflection on its surface.
"Good people rarely exist in this world, there are those who feel bound by the rules of their beliefs or are too ignorant of the evils of this world, they lie to themselves. You don't have to be a good person to be true to yourself, you don't have to be a truthful person to be true to yourself, you just need to find what you really want to."
"I don't understand."
"You don't have to." The sword's voice was softer now, almost gentle. "Understanding isn't required. Only wanting. Only the willingness to reach for something, even when you don't know if you can grasp it."
The scabbard rose from beside the blade, floating to Hoshimi's side. Its gold trim gleamed, and he felt something brush against his consciousness, not quite words, not quite images.
A memory that wasn't his.
An arrogant, greedy and cruel king, kneeling in the mud, his armor dented, his sword broken, his kingdom burning around him.
And still, he didn't surrender.
"My wielder must be a king," the sword continued. "But kingship isn't about blood. It isn't about chivalry or justice It isn't about conquest or dominion."
"Then what is it about?"
"It's about wanting something larger than yourself, protecting what you have. Something worth fighting for. Something worth dying for." The blade pulsed again. "You want to want. That's the seed. That's the beginning. Everything else grows from there."
Hoshimi reached out. His hand closed around the hilt.
The sword didn't resist.
The warmth that flooded through him was not gentle. It was fire and ice and lightning, it was every nerve ending in his body firing at once, it was the sensation of something vast and ancient and impossibly powerful settling into his bones like a second skeleton.
Images flashed behind his eyes.
A king, in some remote cave, surrounded by stones and pebbles, sleeping.
A queen, her hair the color of honey, her eyes the color of the sea, living alone in solitude, trapped inside her room. She was singing, a lullaby and the walls of her mental prison pulsed with every note.
A bastard child, laughing, running through a battlefield with a spear sticking out of his chest, simply unaware. The blood didn't bother him. The death around him didn't touch him. He just kept running, kept laughing, kept living.
A throne, empty, waiting.
The images faded.
Hoshimi stood in the white void, the sword in his hand, the scabbard at his side. His body felt different now, lighter and heavier at the same time, as if something had been added and something had been removed.
"What did you show me?" he asked. "They felt like memories."
"Perhaps they are. Perhaps they will be. But time isn't linear."
Hoshimi looked at the blade. The runes on its surface had changed, settling into patterns that almost looked familiar.
"What am I supposed to do now?"
The sword's voice was soft, almost amused.
"Wake up, puppet."
The darkness of the stairwell rushed back in.
Hoshimi's eyes snapped open. His hand was still pressed against his chest, his palm flat against his sternum. The sword was gone, but he could feel it now, a warm weight in his chest, a presence that hadn't been there before.
[Or maybe it had. Maybe it had always been there, and I just couldn't feel it.]
He took a step down the stairs.
His body responded differently now. Faster. Smoother. The mana in his veins flowed like water instead of honey, responding to his thoughts before he'd fully formed them.
[The sword lent me its power.]
[Why?]
[Because I told the truth.]
[Because I said I wanted to want.]
He took another step. Another. His feet found the stairs without conscious thought, carrying him down into the darkness.
"Sarah's ahead. Somewhere. I can feel her now, a presence, her mana, it's overwhelming."
Red.
His hand closed around the hilt of the sword. The physical one, the one Reina had given him what felt like years ago.
"I can't stop her, I can't save everyone. But I'll do what I want to. And what I want to do is to kill Audrey's murderer."
His foot hit the bottom landing.
The door in front of him was old, wooden, warped with age. Beyond it, he could hear wind, and distant voices, and the soft hum of mana being channeled.
"I'll kill them with my own hands."