Trinity

by eerfquake

Summary:

The Empire has returned. Stronger. Stranger. And somehow.. from a time long forgotten.

Hope, once the fearless leader of her own rebellion, struggles to rebuild the fractured Rebel Alliance with new allies who must face the ghosts of a sinister past… and others who were never truly gone at all.

Chapter 1: Visitors

A FIELD OF STARS stretched endless and cold across the heavens, their pale light trembling against the last breath of day.

Below, the storm rolled in long before nightfall, a heavy shelf of cloud pushing across the sky like a slow, deliberate tide. Thunder rumbled somewhere deep inside it — not loud, but constant, a low vibration that settled over the island and refused to leave.

If someone stared long enough, they might have seen something move inside that darkness. A shape too straight to be cloud, too deliberate to be lightning. An outline that flickered and was gone again — triangular, oblong, impossible. But the storm swallowed everything just as quickly as it revealed it.

Oninoshima lay restless beneath the weather. The wind traced old paths through the abandoned shrines, rattling loose boards, lifting old paper charms from the dirt. Somewhere along the coast, a lantern swung on a rusted hook, creaking in the gathering breeze. The tide dragged at the sand in slow, steady pulses, as though pulling the shoreline a little farther out to sea each time.

The island remembered things — battles, disappearances, storms that never came alone. People here said it could feel when something was approaching. Tonight, even the air seemed to hold its breath.

Far above, hidden inside the thunderheads, something enormous kept its silent watch.

 

A streak of fire cut across the dimming sky, carving a brilliant wound through the stormbank. The sound reached the ground a moment later — a dull, heavy concussion that trembled through the roots of Magic Mosses.

Steam hissed from the crater as the earth cooled. When the smoke thinned, a black sphere crouched in the center, its surface gleaming with scorched heat. It stirred once, twice — then unfolded in a slow, deliberate bloom. Spindly limbs extended, clicking into place like a predator stretching after a long sleep. Sensors rotated, humming, tasting the air.

The probe droid rose on humming repulsors a handspan above the ground.

It drifted forward with unsettling grace towards the treeline, bulbous frame gliding with a dull, quiet wopwopwop through the undergrowth without disturbing a leaf. Each arm moved independently, probing the shadows, tapping at vines, tracing the cracked lacquer of an old shrine mask half-buried in the dirt. Red optics panned across the clearing in narrow beams that cut through steam and foliage alike.

It was hunting. And it was patient.

A cicada sang somewhere overhead. The storm pressed low over the canopy, the air thick and electric, as if the weather itself were waiting for the droid to decide something.

Then — a crack. Sudden and human. A single gunshot broke the stillness.

A bullet pinged off the droid’s chassis, metal on metal, sparking harmlessly away. It reeled, optics whirling, arms flaring wide. Another shot followed, sharper, striking one of its limbs with a screech of tearing metal. The probe’s electric scream was piercing, mechanical — and then it convulsed, lights strobing red as smoke spewed from its vents. 

The probe kept screaming, repulsors dipping. It struggled to correct its balance, rotors whining under the strain — wounded, but not destroyed.

From the shadows of a banyan, Jade didn’t move. Her breath was steady, her hands still. She hadn’t expected the thing to go down easily; she also hadn’t expected to hit exactly where she wanted.

Not bad, she thought.

She’d followed the falling light on instinct, picking her way through the storm-thickened jungle. The pistol wasn’t much — an old, battered sidearm with a scuffed cylinder and a temperamental hammer. But it was reliable, and Jade never carried anything she didn’t trust. Especially on nights like this.

She adjusted her grip, keeping her eyes on the droid as it staggered through its recalibration cycle.

The probe’s scream grew even louder — a harsh, metallic wail, something desperate and terrified — and its optics strobbed wildly. Smoke bled from vents along its spine. 

For a heartbeat, Jade thought she had snagged something volatile in its internals. Then she saw it. A red diode, blinking irregularly. Faster, and faster.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” she muttered.

The probe detonated.

Not a fireball — a contained, surgical blast meant to destroy its core. But it exploded in a bloom of light and sparks, scattering fragments into the trees. Shards of steel hissed into the soil. The jungle swallowed the noise almost as soon as it came. Smoke curled skyward, leaving only silence and the stink of burning oil.

From her cover, Jade lowered the pistol, heart hammering.  Her eyes widened at what she’d done — or what she thought she’d done. She hadn’t expected it to fall so easily. She hadn’t meant to destroy it. 

When she let herself breathe again, she groaned. “Just my luck.”

“That wasn’t you.”

She heard a shift of undergrowth behind her. She didn’t flinch.

Jones stepped out of the shadows, rifle at low-ready. His expression barely changed as he took in the scene: the destroyed probe, the steam rising from the crater, the storm rumbling overhead.

“Probes like that don’t leave bodies,” he said. “They wipe themselves clean.”

Jade raised an eyebrow. “So it blew up on purpose.”

“It knew it was compromised,” Jones replied.

His tone carried something beneath it — recognition, maybe, or something harsher. His gaze was fixed on the remains. The dead casing of the probe’s optics stared lifelessly back at him.

He moved toward the crater, inspecting the scorch pattern, the scattered fragments. Jade followed, irritation and curiosity wrestling behind her eyes.

“Why? I barely scratched it.”

A corner of Jones’s mouth twitched — the closest he ever got to a smile. “These things don’t let you study them. They take themselves out.”

“Is that… normal?”

He didn’t answer right away. His gaze settled on a torn-out piece of circuitry half-buried in the dirt — something unfamiliar, alien to anything Jade had ever seen on the island.

“Depends on who made it. These guys? Really don’t like being followed,” he said finally.

Jade folded her arms. “You say that like you’ve seen this kind of thing before.”

He didn’t answer. He just thumbed his comm. “Hope, this is Jones. We found a probe. It self-destructed before we could get anything off of it. Looks like you’re right. Someone’s piggybacking on Zero Point signals.”

Static hissed through the channel. He adjusted the frequency.

“Hope, do you read?”

More static. The storm rolled overhead.

Then a voice — cool, irritated.

“She’s not answering.” The Night Rose’s tone cut through the interference like a knife. “And I’m losing my patience.”

Jade exhaled sharply. “Of course she isn’t.”

But Jones wasn’t listening anymore. He was staring past the treetops, toward the heavy wall of cloud massed above the ridge. Something in his posture went still.

Jade followed his gaze.

Another streak of fire tore through the storm — brighter than the first, and closer. For one heartbeat, the lightning inside the cloudbank illuminated a shape behind it, something massive behind the storm: an angular shadow, triangular and impossible.

Jade felt the hair on her arms rise. “…Jones?”

Jones didn’t look away from the sky. The second meteor vanished into the belly of the island.

Jade swallowed. “Is there something behind those clouds?”

The storm rolled again, deeper, heavier — like something enormous shifting its weight inside it.

Jones finally lowered the comm. His silence was answer enough.

 

---

 

The storm had settled over Lonewolf Lair like a heavy lid. Lightning flashed behind the cloudbank, illuminating the cracked windows and the ruined upper terrace. Once, the estate had been Kane’s shining monument to excess. Now it sagged, battered by months of fighting, ringed with overturned barricades and scorch marks. Bullet holes pocked the columns. The fountain burbled unevenly, spilling water through fractured stone and pooling in dark streaks across the driveway.

The Night Rose stood at the center of the courtyard, the only one among the armed Outlaws not wearing a mask. The comm was still warm in her hand from the exchange with Jones. Probe droids. Piggybacked signals. Something drifting through the storm overhead.

Whatever Kane had brought to this island, he hadn’t kept it to himself. And it was time she checked on their “neighbor.”

Behind her, the Outlaws gathered in a loose, ragged semicircle — mismatched armor, dented helmets, scavenged rifles. A few still had bandages around their temples or knuckles, souvenirs from the last skirmish with Kane’s Alphas. Hope had told her a thousand times they weren’t built for frontal assaults.

The Night Rose didn’t care. Someone was trespassing on her island.

Leaves rustled atop one of the planters. A figure hunched low, craning his head to the sight in front of him. A giant, possum-shaped shadow, furry and broad-shouldered, goggles glowing faintly beneath the moonlight atop a battered bulletproof vest.

“Well, ain’t that a view,” Skillet chirped, nodding at the mansion. “Old dog Kane ever gonna stop redecoratin’? She’s lookin’ fancy tonight. Looks worse every time we come by.”

The Night Rose didn’t bother looking at him. “Skillet.”

“Yeah, boss?”

“Get down.”

His grin widened — too many teeth, not enough sense. He dropped off the planter immediately, landing in a crouch. His tail (or whatever it was) flicked once in annoyance.

Joss arrived last, stomping through gravel in torn boots. One strap of her overalls barely hanging on over one of her shoulders, pink hair plastered to her cheek by the humidity. Her bandanna sat loose around her throat. She looked exactly like someone who’d slept under a tree somewhere to try and nap off a hangover, after waking up in a prisoner’s convoy.

“Alright,” Joss muttered, wiping rain from her brow, “why are we ‘ere and why does this place still stink like an old mutt’s nest?”

“You’re late,” the Night Rose said.

“Joss ain’t slow — she’s just still drunk.” Skillet snorted. “She means she’s still nursing the Slurp Room hangover from hell.”

Joss grabbed him by the collar. “Say that again an’ I’ll pass you out.”

The Night Rose raised one finger without turning around. “Both of you. Quiet.”

They shut up instantly.

She nodded toward the mansion’s upper windows — where lightning briefly lit the silhouette of a tall, armored shape standing motionless behind the curtains.

Joss swore under her breath. “That… is not Kane.”

 

Inside, the lair had been gutted. The wide ballroom foyer — once a place of chandeliers and opulence — was littered with crates and bodies, old banners crushed beneath armored boots. 

Stormtroopers moved in practiced lines, hauling crates across the broken marble. Their boots ground ash and plaster into the floor, scuffing across burn marks that streaked the hall like shadows frozen mid-motion. The chandeliers were gone. The stair railing was warped. The Empire had turned Fletcher Kane’s palace into a staging ground.

At the center of it all waited the final piece.

At the center of the foyer rested a containment vault — two meters long, half as tall, its rectangular frame armored in matte-black durasteel plates. Thick locking clamps ran along its edges, each stamped with Imperial sigils and warning glyphs. A recessed viewport, narrow as a slit, pulsed with a faint blue standby glow. Nothing stirred inside; the vault was empty. But the design left no doubt it was meant to hold something dangerous, something alive or volatile. Even sealed and unoccupied, it radiated an ominous tension — as if the air itself hummed around it. The stormtroopers kept their distance, careful not to linger too close, as though proximity alone might trigger whatever it was built to contain.

Two troopers lingered by the sled, their white helmets reflecting the crate’s sickly glow.

“Maybe it’s another drill,” one muttered, voice tinny over the comm.

The other shifted his weight. “Doesn’t matter what it is. They’ll ship it, we’ll never hear about it again. Same as always.”

The first gave a short, uneasy laugh, but it rang hollow in the cavernous hall. He turned his head, instinct tugging him toward the marble staircase that swept down from above.

The figure was already there.

Captain Phasma stood at the landing, her chrome armor catching the ruin’s fractured light. Motionless, towering, she watched as her soldiers fidgeted beneath their helmets. The stormtroopers fell silent, their chatter smothered in an instant. Even without words, her presence pressed heavy against the room, a reminder that nothing here was trivial.

Kane hovered beside her, hands clasped around his ornate cane — not for effect, but to keep them from shaking.

The grizzled wolf cut a vivid figure even in ruin — draped in velvet shadows, his pinstriped suit scorched at the cuffs, the fur-lined cape dragging across marble streaked with ash. Gold glinted from his wrists and throat, and his fingers sported enough rings to be tacky even in peacetime.

His mercenaries flanked him, ragged but loyal, yet it was Kane’s own poise — half-pride, half-desperation — that filled the space. He tried to wear his pride like armor. His smile stretched too thin, his voice pitched high with false bravado.

“When the Emperor hears of this, he’ll know who delivered. You’ll… tell him, won’t you, Captain? That I kept my end? That it was Kane who did it?”

Phasma did not turn when Kane spoke. Her chrome visor remained fixed on the stormtroopers below, as if his words were nothing more than the buzz of an insect. Yet when she answered, her voice slid through the amplifier with an awful smoothness, each syllable sharpened by the machine.

“If your usefulness were exceptional, I would not need the reminder.”

It was Kane who needed reminding — of what he was, then and there. Above the shattered ballroom, next to a towering chrome officer and a legion of white-armored soldiers, he looked like a stage magician who had wandered into a military tribunal. His ears lowered, like he had been told he was a bad dog. 

But then those same canine ears twitched with irritation as another squad of stormtroopers marched past. He spread his arms, cape spilling wide, as though trying to frame the lair itself around him.

“Must we really have them milling about my property? I thought the Empire had no interest in my… little operation.” His grin was sharp, but his voice cracked with exasperation. “Smuggling, protection, the usual taxes — I’ve kept the island profitable. I’ve kept it in line. That was the deal, wasn’t it?”

The helmet tilted slightly, just enough for him to catch the mirrored void of her gaze. 

“You should be grateful,” she said, the words drawn through the amplifier into a silken snarl. “Stormtroopers are a better garrison than the rabble you parade in masks. They will not scatter at the first sign of fire. They will not sell their loyalty to the highest bidder. They are the Empire’s gift to you.”

Kane dipped his muzzle, forcing a grin. “Of course, of course — grateful. Ever grateful.”

The crate below hissed, punctuating the silence. Phasma leaned closer, her voice slipping colder, sharper — close enough that his reflection warped across her visor.

“Grateful does not mean unsupervised. The Emperor expects results. And you, Kane, will be watched.”

The words settled like iron shackles around his throat, and though he kept smiling, his claws flexed against the gilded pommel of his cane.

The hiss of the crate faded into a new sound — deeper, stranger. A slow, mechanical draw of breath, followed by a low, ominous rumble. Kane’s ears flicked toward it before his eyes dared to follow.

From the far shadows of the ballroom, she emerged. A woman draped in black, her cloak trailing like spilled ink across the marble. A hood shadowed her face, the gleam of sunglasses catching the torchlight, her mouth and nose hidden behind a mask that pulsed faintly with every inhalation. Each step she took was deliberate, weighted, the soft sweep of fabric carrying the same gravity as falling stone.

The mercenaries shifted uneasily. Even the stormtroopers, drilled into silence, stiffened as she passed.

Kane’s throat caught. He had heard whispers of her — of the mask that fed her, a constant drip of something chemical and toxic. The way it bound her deeper to her power. The way her very breath seemed to shake the air — a rasp that filled the hall like thunder.

Why are they always like this? he thought bitterly. The masks, the cloaks, the rituals. Always breathing like tombs alive. His lips twitched with the thought, but he dared not let it slip.

When she reached the stair’s base, she stopped. She said nothing. She did not need to.

Kane’s claws tightened their grip around the cane. He forced a grin that showed too many teeth. “She’s… staying?”

Phasma’s helm tilted toward him, voice sliding through the amplifier like oil.

“She is the Emperor’s apprentice. You will address her as such. And yes, Kane —” her visor caught his reflection in its mirrored void — “she is staying.”

The rumble of the apprentice’s breath filled the silence that followed. Kane’s grin faltered, his chest tight, as the truth settled on him heavier than the storm overhead: he was no longer a broker, no longer a partner. He was a man under watch, and the eyes behind those sunglasses saw far more than he wished they did.

 

The sudden crack of a blaster outside made Kane’s fur bristle. His ears twitched toward the sound, but he forced a laugh, thin and nervous. A misfire. Just a drill. Just soldiers testing their weapons.

Phasma didn’t answer. The tilt of her helmet said everything: that was not a misfire.

Then the world detonated.

A shaped charge slammed the front entrance, sending glass and splinters of the frame flying like shrapnel. Smoke poured into the ballroom in a rolling wave, swallowing the lower stair. Stormtroopers staggered back, shielding their visors. 

The doors buckled inward first, sagging under sudden structural failure — an old, wooden groan that froze everyone milling about the ballroom. 

“Positions! Return fire!” Phasma barked from above. 

Troopers surged forward, rifles raised, forming a double line in front of the ruined entryway. They pressed against stacks of crates — cargo meant for the shuttle parked outside — taking cover as dense smoke billowed through the breach.

“Skillet, I said the small charge!” a voice snapped through the smoke.

“Was the small one!” Skillet shouted back. “Someone mislabeled it! Not my fault!”

Then —

BOOM. 

The doors blew inward in a white-hot explosion, a fireball and shockwave tearing across the foyer. Troopers flew backwards, slamming into pillars and overturned equipment. Alarms wailed. Marble dust rained from the ceiling as the whole frame of the mansion shuddered. 

A volley of blaster fire ripped into them before they could rise — rapid, wild, scavenged bolts that chewed across the front ranks. Troopers dropped where they stood. 

“Return fire! Return fire!” Someone shouted. 

Blaster bolts answered, red streaks firing blind into the swirling smoke. But the smoke only thickened, swallowing the color and light. Red bolts scorched into the fog, disappearing without a target. 

At the landing, Kane grabbed Phasma’s chrome arm in a panic.

“Send more troopers!” he barked, voice cracking. “Where — where is the protection you promised me?!”

Phasma peeled his hand off her vambrace as though removing lint.

“You are not owed reassurance.”

Then she marched down the stairs — a gleaming executioner descending into chaos.

“Reinforcements!” she snapped.

A fresh squad sprinted in from the side corridors, vaulting over the wounded troopers sprawled across the marble.

They didn’t get three steps into the foyer. Two blaster bolts slammed into their chests, sending them tumbling backward like dominos.

“Eat hot laser, bucketheads!” Joss snarled as she burst through the doorway, firing from the hip with a stolen trooper blaster, eyes narrowed with mercenary focus. Blaster fire filled the hall. Stormtroopers dropped. Others rallied. The ballroom became a thunderstorm of colors — red bolts, white armor, muzzle flashes.

And beside her —

Skillet. Eyes wide as dinner plates. Tongue lolling. Holding two stolen rifles like they were hot potatoes.

“HOO! HOO! HOO!” he shrieked, firing wildly. “THESE THINGS SHAKE!”

A blaster bolt hit the ceiling. Another hit a bannister. One hit Skillet’s own foot and he yelped.

“Just shoot straight, you goblin!” Joss spat, blasting two troopers clean off their feet.

Kane recoiled as stray bolts sizzled past his head.

Phasma stepped onto the foyer floor — and the mood changed. Blaster fire slammed against her chrome plate and ricocheted harmlessly away. Her mirrored armor threw back the firelight like a shield of burning suns.

She extended her forearm — snap — and a crackling plasma staff unfolded into her grip.

“Stand down,” she commanded, voice smooth as a blade’s edge. “You are outmatched.”

Joss kept shooting.

Skillet fired both rifles at once, screaming, “GET HER, JOSS!”

The plasma staff flickered —

— and then the sound changed.

A sharper report. A harder impact.

Not the whine of blaster fire —

But bullets.

PING. PING. PING-PING-PING.

The impacts hit like hammer blows. Chrome cratered. Her shoulder plate folded. One round tore clean through her cape and punched into the marble behind her. Phasma staggered, one knee dipping as sparks skittered across the floor.

The smoke parted. A silhouette stepped through. Slow. Measured. Like a divine punishment answering its cue. Even Joss froze for half a heartbeat.

Skillet’s ears went flat. “Ohhhh no,” he whispered.

The Night Rose emerged. Kimono trailing, fan-blades folded at her hips like the ribs of some dormant predator. Her SMG smoked faintly in her hands. Her eyes — black, bottomless, old — glimmered through the drifting soot.

Her first burst wasn’t blaster fire — it was bullets, a rattling string of mechanical percussion the stormtroopers weren’t ready for. The rounds hammered Phasma center-mass, each one slamming into her armor with a metallic thud that echoed like body-blows from a giant.

Phasma tried to rise, but another volley punched into her chest plate. She hit the marble on one knee, armor dented inward like an aluminum can. The plasma staff clattered once against the floor.

The Night Rose did not hurry. She did not look at the carnage. Her gaze followed the architecture of the staircase for one thing. She looked only at Kane.

Kane froze at the top of the stairs, cane in his trembling hand rattling softly against the marble banister.

“Kane.”

Her voice rolled through the foyer like a cold front, like something older than the Empire itself rediscovering its hunger. His name wasn’t spoken — it was summoned.

He whimpered.

The Night Rose stepped forward once — just once — and light shifted around her, as if the smoke wanted distance. Her voice cut the silence cleanly, as though it were a blade pulled from a sheath.

“Who,” she said, each word measured, deadly, “did you sell my island to?”

The last embers of smoke curled around her like a halo of ruin. Phasma struggled to her feet.

And Kane — Kane forgot how to breathe.

 

The Night Rose descended the foyer like judgment descending from the ceiling. Smoke swirled around her ankles. Her shadow grew over the stairs, stretched long by the floodlights out in the courtyard behind her, long as a spear and twice as sharp.

Kane staggered back a step, hand slipping on the railing.

“N–now wait —” he wheezed, voice high and cracking.

She ignored him, continuing to close the distance across the battle-marked marble of the foyer — past groaning Stormtroopers writhing among the others that were already dead. 

Then something moved behind her — something chrome and glinting. The sound of a servo-assisted rising stopped the Night Rose before she advanced any further, drawing her attention back what she could only imagine the sound was. 

Phasma rose. Not steadily — mechanically. Like a machine rebooting mid-mission.

Her dented armor groaned as she forced herself upright. The plasma staff hissed weakly in her grip, one end flickering. Her posture slouched for half a heartbeat… then straightened with a horrible, hydraulic precision.

The Night Rose had heard the motion and had seen it out of the corner of her eye, peering sideways through the pale and red-stained fray of her hair. But when she fully turned to address it —

— Phasma lunged.

The staff jabbed downward, its crackling head driving deep into the muscle above the Night Rose’s knee. Pain ripped through her leg; her stance faltered, but only barely. She staggered back one step, the kimono bunching around her legs in an awkward, in elegant position.

“Agh — !”

Phasma expected her to fall, but she didn’t.

“Nnnngggh — !!”

The Night Rose hissed — a sharp, animal noise — grabbed the staff’s shaft, and tore it sideways. The blade sputtered; the metal screamed.

Phasma abandoned the weapon instantly. She switched tactics.

Her fist slammed into the Night Rose’s gut with a sickening thud — servo-assisted, brutally efficient. The impact folded the Night Rose forward, breath ripping out of her in a ragged choke.

“Aaaagggghh!!”

Kane flinched so hard he hit the railing.

But the Night Rose didn’t go down. She straightened. Slowly. Inevitably. Her eyes gleamed black and furious behind the smoke.

She swung.

Her fist drove into the plating across Phasma’s midsection with a piston’s force. The chrome dented, folding inward like foil under a hammer. Phasma reeled, one boot scraping across the marble. 

The Night Rose didn’t let up.

Her next punch whipped across Phasma’s helmet — a downward, brutal arc. The visor shattered at the corner. The helmet buckled inward with a sharp metallic scream.

“Ngghkk — !” Phasma grunted — the first sound of pain she’d allowed. The sound didn’t come so silky through the vocoder, peaking and crackling out. 

Kane’s mouth fell open. If this creature could shred Phasma — Phasma — then what was she going to do to him? He stumbled backward up another step, tail bristling, cane clattering against marble.

Down below, Joss whooped, “That’s our girl!”

Skillet fired wildly into the ceiling and shouted, “KICK HER TIN FACE IN!”

Phasma and the Night Rose collided again, locked in a vicious, close-quarters grapple — chrome against kimono, rage against steel.

Then —

A presence swept the foyer.

Cold. Heavy. Intentional.

The Emperor’s Apprentice stepped from the smoke, unhurried, dark lenses of sunglasses catching the artificial light. Her breathing apparatus rumbled and hissed with a slow, awful rhythm.

Joss and Skillet tensed, raising their rifles. But the Apprentice did not go for them. She went for Kane. Her gloved hand clamped around his bicep like a shackle snapping shut.

Kane gasped, high and strangled, legs kicking as she dragged him bodily down the upper corridor.

“No — no, wait — WAIT — !” he shrieked, scrambling for purchase as his cane clattered away down the steps.

Joss and Skillet moved to pursue —

— but a fresh squad of stormtroopers appeared at the top of the stairs, rifles raised in unison.

A dozen white helmets aimed down the atrium.

“Troopers!” Joss snarled. “Down!”

She yanked Skillet behind an overturned crate as a storm of red bolts screamed down the staircase. Joss returned fire, clipping the shoulders of one, and then another. Skillet fired both rifles in different directions, screaming incoherently. But more troopers poured in behind them, filling the stairwell with white armor and blaster glare.

The Night Rose still wasn’t done with Phasma. 

“You — invader…!”

Below, the Night Rose slammed the chrome-plated captain into a pillar — cracking the marble — but Phasma recovered faster than any normal soldier. She ducked a hook, pivoted, and drove an uppercut square under the Night Rose’s jaw.

The Night Rose’s head snapped back. She hit the floor.

Phasma staggered, shoulders heaving, chrome dented and smoking. She spared the Night Rose one hard, assessing look — the kind predators give one another to mark unfinished business.

Then her helmet turned toward her garrison.

“Hold them here,” she ordered, voice distorted through the ruined vocoder. “All of them. You will not retreat.”

“Ma’am!” echoed through the hall as troopers repositioned, fanning out.

Phasma took one step toward the upper corridor, then stopped and pointed at two troopers near the front line.

“You two,” she rasped. “With me.”

The chosen troopers scrambled after her, leaving the others to the slaughter below.

Joss cursed as she ducked another bolt. “They’re regrouping — !”

Skillet clutched both rifles to his chest. “Is that good or bad?!”

The Night Rose stirred on the floor, rising slowly, fury radiating off her like heat. She wasn’t finished. She braced a hand against the cracked marble and forced herself upright. Her legs trembled; smoke stung her throat. The last blast had knocked the wind out of her, but rage pulled her up like a marionette string.

She staggered once —

— then stopped.

Because the blaster fire had stopped. Not just paused — stopped entirely. Silence rolled across the foyer like a tidal pull.

Even the stormtroopers noticed. Their helmets turned — not toward her, not toward Joss or Skillet — but toward the windows.

One trooper near the stairs lowered his rifle. “Do you hear that — ?”

Another took a stumbling step back. “That’s — that’s not artillery —”

A low vibration crawled through the floorboards, rattling dust loose from the ribs of the ceiling. The fixtures that remained in the foyer shivered. The torn banners fluttered in an unfelt wind.

The Night Rose lifted her head.

That rumbling… that drawn-out, metallic groan… It wasn’t a beast. Wasn’t weather. Wasn’t anything this island had ever birthed.

It was engine.

Something colossal overhead, its mass pressing into the very air, folding the storm around its weight.

One of the remaining troopers dropped his rifle entirely and bolted for the door.

“No— no— no— MOVE! MOVE!” he shouted, shoving past his squadmates. “IT’S RIGHT ON TOP OF US!”

The others scrambled, discipline breaking as the vibrations built. The floor trembled hard enough to make even the Night Rose’s vision jitter.

The windows darkened. Not dimmed — darkened, completely.

A shadow crawled over the walls, swallowing the gold light of the sconces, strangling the colors of the fire. The ballroom fell into twilight — then deeper still. Glass fractured. Hairline cracks webbed across every pane at once, like frost forming in reverse. The Night Rose narrowed her eyes, her breath seething between her teeth.

“What in the hell…” Joss whispered from behind an overturned crate.

Skillet whimpered. “Big. Too big. Too big, Joss —”

The rumble deepened — no longer a vibration but a force, a gravity that seemed to pass through bone.

The Night Rose’s gaze locked on the tallest window. Outside the swirling smoke, an enormous silhouette moved. An angular shadow, triangular and impossible.

Panels and mullions shattered outward as the thunderous pressure hit them. Shards of glass rained across the foyer in a glittering cascade. The shadow eclipsed the entire window wall.

The Night Rose didn’t breathe.

“That,” she whispered, eyes narrowing to slits, “is no machine built by men on this island.”

The whole mansion shuddered again — harder. And the night outside glowed green.

 

The Apprentice dragged Kane through the upper corridor like he weighed nothing at all. His claws scraped uselessly across the tile; he scrabbled for purchase, for anything to anchor himself to — doorframes, banisters, the rags of his once-fine curtains. None held. Her grip was iron.

“Wait — wait — PLEASE — !” he howled as he lurched through the final archway and out onto the terrace.

Cold rain hit him like thrown stones. Wind whipped his fur into a frantic halo. The night was alive — boiling clouds colliding overhead, lightning strobing like the world itself was snapping photos of its own ending.

The Apprentice marched him forward without a word. Her black cloak snapped violently in the wind, the mask over her mouth glowing faintly with each mechanical inhalation.

Behind them, Phasma staggered out into the storm, one arm limp, the other gripping the terrace railing so hard the metal groaned. Her armor was cratered, dented inward from bullet impacts and swings of fists that should have killed her. For the first time, Kane heard something like strain in her breathing.

He opened his mouth to speak —

— and then the sky opened. Not with light, but with shape.

A massive, angular shadow slid out of the clouds like a continent being lowered by a hand of God. Its surface caught the lightning — slabs of angular durasteel gleaming black-blue, windows burning like rows of teeth, the underbelly illuminated by a lattice of green-tinted tracking lights.

Kane’s breath left him in a single, thin sound.

“N–no…”

He knew ships. Kane had bought, sold, sabotaged, smuggled around them for years. But nothing on this island — nothing in this world — looked like this.

The Star Destroyer completed its emergence, monstrous and silent, blotting out half the sky. Three colossal ion engines burned at its stern, blue light washing the clouds into boiling white steam. It dwarfed Lonewolf Lair the way a hawk dwarfed an ant.

Phasma did not look surprised. The Apprentice did not look impressed. Kane could not look away. His heart hammered like it wanted to escape his ribs.

“This — this was not part of the deal,” he stammered. “This wasn’t — I didn’t —”

The Apprentice stopped walking. Her masked head tilted toward him. Just slightly.  Enough for Kane to feel the weight of the gaze behind those black lenses settle on him like a verdict.

Then the rumbling changed.

The vibrations under Kane’s feet deepened into something slower, heavier — like the sound of a mountain waking. He looked up, following the source.

And saw the turbolasers.

Mounted on the Destroyer’s underbelly, enormous cannons rotated on their mechanical gimbals, aligning downward. Their long barrels began to glow — first dull green, then brighter, then an emerald intensity that turned the storm itself luminous.

“No… no no no — WAIT —” Kane stumbled backward, slipping in the rain, scrambling like a cornered dog. “That’s my home — that’s my home — STOP —!!”

Phasma’s voice came over the storm, cool and metallic:

“Fire.”

The cannons discharged.

A beam of pure green annihilated the night between ship and earth. It struck the ballroom first, erupting in a tower of flame that devoured the central hall in an instant. A second shot carved through the eastern wing, collapsing it like a kicked anthill. A third vaporized the terrace, shredding the stone balcony where Kane had once held his most ostentatious parties.

The whole manor convulsed, sucked inward, and then exploded outward in a roaring plume of dust, fire, and pulverized marble.

Kane dropped to his knees as the shockwave rolled over him, hot and violent, smelling of ash and melted plaster. Lonewolf Lair — the monument he had built, the seat of his power, the place he had schemed and ruled and celebrated — was gone. Nothing remained but a crater and the burning skeletons of decorative towers. Nothing inside could have survived. None of his prized, priceless works of art, or any of the “trophies” he had collected from his most hated enemies. Certainly not the Outlaws — the Night Rose and her band of misfits and freaks. And most definitely none of the troopers Phasma had knowingly ordered to their death. 

The Star Destroyer drifted lower through the smoke, indifferent.

Kane stared, trembling violently, ears pinned flat against his skull. Rain and tears mixed on his muzzle.

“I… I gave them everything,” he whispered. “I — I helped them. I brought them here —”

The Apprentice’s hand clamped onto his shoulder. Her voice rumbled through her mask, soft and terrible:

“You gave them permission. That is not the same as control.”

Phasma stepped forward, rain dripping down the torn edge of her visor. In the shadow of the shattered frame and the glowing light of the flames that engulfed the mansion, a lone human eye was visible. 

“Welcome to your new arrangement, Kane,” she said. “You belong to the Empire now.”

Kane looked once more at the smoldering ruin of his home — and understood, fully, horribly, that he was no partner. No ally. No host. He was a prisoner.

And the Empire had only just arrived.

 

---

 

The grounds of Lonewolf Lair smoldered under the weight of the Empire’s victory.

Stormtroopers worked in grim rhythm, dragging the bodies of Outlaws into piles along the shattered gates. Smoke rose from the ruins in slow pillars. The courtyard lights flickered, struggling against the haze of ash drifting through the air.

Among the fallen, the Night Rose lay where the blast had thrown her — kimono torn, one horn snapped, blackened cords hanging limp at her sleeves. Even unconscious, she looked less defeated than paused, like a myth caught mid-breath, waiting for the next chapter to find her.

Kane tried not to look at her. His cape clung damply to his shoulders; his tail dragged through the dust. No swagger, no affectation — only the bone-deep tremor of someone who finally understood what he had done, what exactly he had invited to the place he had once called home and meant it.

Phasma stood at the edge of the courtyard, chrome smeared with soot, visor reflecting the heaps of bodies the troopers were dragging into piles. The ruined fountain gurgled behind her like something dying.

Her head tilted — slow, deliberate — toward Kane.

“Well,” she said, voice smooth as cut glass through the vocoder, “it seems your little Outlaw problem is more persistent than you advertised.”

Kane’s jaw worked uselessly. His cane trembled in his grip.

Phasma continued down the line of corpses with an almost idle grace, as though inspecting inventory rather than the dead.

“You assured me,” she went on, “that these creatures were scattered. Leaderless. Broken.”

Her fingers brushed a dented stormtrooper helmet as if to emphasize just how wrong he’d been.

Kane swallowed hard. “They — they were. They are. This… this was an anomaly —”

She cut him off with a motion so small it might as well have been a flinch of her eyelid.

“Anomaly?” The word dripped disdain.

Her visor angled toward where the Night Rose lay sprawled among the rubble.

“That,” Phasma said calmly, “was not an anomaly.”

Kane wilted.

Phasma leaned in just enough for her breath — cold and synthetic — to fog the inside of her visor.

“Let us hope,” she murmured, “that these savages remain ignorant of our true purpose here.”

A beat. A long, metallic exhale through the amplifier.

“For your sake.”

Kane nodded stiffly, unable to speak.

An officer in gray sprinted across the rubble-strewn courtyard and stopped before Phasma, saluting.

“Captain. We’ve found it.”

Phasma turned, chrome underbelly reflecting the last embers of the burning estate. She didn’t speak — she simply moved, and everyone followed. Kane stumbled after her like a dog dragged by its leash.

The shuttle door hissed open — and long ramp lowering down to lead Phasma up and her guest into the hold of it. The interior was stripped bare: consoles bolted directly to exposed joists, containment clamps where seats had once been, the air thick with coolant and scorched metal. The hum of the crate — the one that had been so prized and important in the once-standing foyer, and that had been quickly retrieved — vibrated faintly through the floor.

A screen flickered to life at the officer’s touch.

The probe droid’s feed appeared in crackling grayscale first, then stabilized. A stretch of gravel shore. Rippling vines. Mist curling low.

And in the center—

A portal, wide and trembling, a wound of pink light carved open across the world. Its edges fluttered like torn silk. The glow pulsed in uneven waves, warping the static of the recording. Strange shadows passed behind it — shapes not native to this world, too fluid, too tall, too aware.

Kane’s breath seized. Not awe. Not pride. Something closer to dread.

“That — That’s the breach,” he whispered. “Daigo’s breach. He actually… opened it.”

Phasma didn’t answer. She watched the screen with the impassive stillness of a statue.

Kane swallowed, seized by a sudden, frantic urge to prove himself invaluable.

“It’s all there,” he rushed out. “Everything I promised you. With the portal open, it’s a simple matter of sending troopers through, retrieving the Shard, and — and placing it in the containment crate.” He gestured weakly toward the massive reinforced case bolted to the shuttle floor. “You see? Now we finally have something to put in it. I told you. I told you I could deliver —”

Phasma’s helmet turned toward him by a fraction. Just enough to silence him.

“You omitted several… complications,” she said, voice low and bitterly even. “Your Outlaws. Their leaders. Their capabilities.”

“I — I thought they were scattered —”

“You thought incorrectly.”

Her visor snapped back to the screen. A dark movement in the corner of the feed made her posture sharpen.

“Officer,” she said, voice suddenly edged like a cut in steel. “Expand the feed. Now.”

The officer complied. The probe panned downward. Over drifting petals. Over a ripple of water. Over a patch of disturbed gravel.

And the breath hissed out of Phasma’s vocoder.

A shape. A body. Face-down in the dirt. A young woman. Blue hair fanned across the shoreline like a trail left by a comet.

A girl lay sprawled at the portal’s edge, half-conscious, clawing through the mud toward the breach. Her hair glinted in the breach’s glow. Her fingers stretched toward it — as though trying to crawl inside, or trying to keep someone else out.

Not dead. Not lost. Interfering.

The room went still. Even the shuttle’s engines seemed to dim themselves to witness it. Phasma straightened, then turned her helmet toward Kane. Slowly. Deliberately. The mirrored surface showed him his own reflection — small, distorted, shaking.

“So,” she murmured, “we are not the only ones hunting the Shard.”

Kane blanched.

Phasma stepped closer to the monitor until her broken visor nearly touched the glass, her voice dropping to a metallic growl.

“Who is she?”

Kane stammered, but no sound came out.

Phasma turned her shattered helmet fully toward him, each word spoken like a plated gauntlet closing around his throat. Her chrome filled the space around him, colder than the rain outside, heavier than the rubble of his ruined home.

“Who. Is. She?”

 

The jungle still hissed with heat where the second comet had fallen. Birds had long fled. The only movement was the flicker of embers dying in the cratered earth.

What little flame remained in the crater of the second meteor burned low and blue, the soil around it baked to cracked clay. Smoke no longer rose in plumes — only thin, wavering threads that drifted upward and vanished into the canopy. The air hung heavy with the scent of scorched leaves and ozone.

Daigo’s camp sat just beyond the crater, gutted and abandoned. His tents sagged inward where the supports had been kicked free. The firepit was cold, trampled through with panic. Tools lay scattered in the mud like offerings dropped mid-ritual. A circle of rope, once taut and ceremonial, had been sliced open as if by a desperate hand.

Whatever happened here had happened hours ago. Whatever Daigo had opened… stayed open.

Across the lake, the island at the center was washed in pink light.

The portal — the entrance to the Spirit Realm — yawned wide, its light clouded and turbulent, a storm of pink mist rolling in endless circles. The glow painted the lake in sickly colors, staining the branches, the stones, the very air.

Hovering before it was the probe droid.

Its repulsors hummed — quiet, steady, patient — as it recorded the breach. Frosty rings of light flickered across its lenses as it swept its scanners back and forth. Every few seconds, it beeped softly: the same diagnostic ping Phasma had already seen in the shuttle.

“Hope, it’s Jones. Come in. …You were right about the signal — they’re here. We need you to answer, do you hear me? Just give me something. Anything.”

Something crackled at the edge of that light — a walkie-talkie, half-buried in gravel, its voice broken with static. Jones’ concern flickered and died, the device buzzing weakly.

Beside it, a gloved hand lay still. Someone else was there.

Face-down where the gravel met the waterline, one arm stretched towards the portal, lay Hope.

She had dragged herself yards through the shore mud — faint streaks marked the path of her struggle — before her strength finally gave out. Blue hair clung damply to her cheek, shifting only when the faint breeze off the lake brushed past. One glove was smeared with blood where she had scraped across the stone.

She had made it here. She had chased Daigo. And she had been too late.

A faint crackle buzzed from the walkie-talkie half-crushed beneath her arm — Jones’ voice flickering in and out with static.

“…Hope — if you can hear me — the Empire’s on the island — respond if —”

Then silence. The probe droid recorded it all. 

The probe drifted closer, red optics glinting. Its vision narrowed and refocused, sensors sweeping from the chaotic pulse of the portal to the shards of Zero Point energy tangled in its light. Data scrolled across its view, lines of code and readouts flashing — unstable signatures, anomalous currents. Then the optics swung back, centering on the girl at the shore.

A girl at the edge of the impossible. Unconscious.

But not alone.

Chapter 2: Hope in Chains

THE CHAINS RATTLED AGAIN. A harsh clink against the metal floor as the transport hit another rut in the dirt road, jostling its passengers and sending another dull ache into Hope’s bound ankle.

She barely reacted. It was a familiar feeling, after all. She’d been silently counting the bumps to herself, each clank and rattle just punctuating them. The thick durasteel restraint clamped around her ankle had a short length of chain welded to a ring bolted beneath the bench, leaving her with just enough room to shift her foot but not stand. It felt like it was welded to her flesh and bone. The noise was constant now — every turn of the wheel, every jolt of suspension, every breath of the road chewing through the wilderness. But the bumps, the rattle and jangle of the chain, she could feel as though she was part of the vehicle itself.

She sat motionless on the hard bench, her back straight against the cool wall of the transport’s interior, and focused. Without a watch, without her phone — and certainly no clocks on the wall — counting each bump in the road was the best she could do. It wasn’t a precise count. Often when there was a big bump that felt all too familiar, she could confirm exactly what it was or at one point in the journey she suspected she was at. The driver rarely ever deviated from course.

She tilted her head up toward the windows — slim, reinforced slits high up on the curved walls of the transport. Through them, fragmented shafts of daylight flickered across her face, broken by leaves and the speeding silhouettes of thick, unfamiliar trees. She squinted. The forests were denser now. Greener. Messier. The pavement had ended ten minutes ago. They were on back roads, or worse — no roads. Just overgrown trails once used by smugglers, poachers, and whoever else Fletcher Kane had let rot in these woods when Alpha Company still held the island by the throat.

This wasn’t a route anyone took by accident.

The transport had once belonged to Kane’s faction — a brutal, makeshift convoy built from scavenged armor plating and street-racer tech, meant for hauling gold, weapons, and whatever else could be bartered in bullets. Now it had been cleaned. Repainted in the sterile gray of the Empire. Disguised to the denizens of the island, it was business as usual to see a transport like that lumbering around. But familiar enough, now, to those in the know — those carrying out this covert operation. The lines were too straight. The steel too new. Even the air smelled different — ionized, recycled, like it had been scrubbed of everything human.

Her arms, braced together on her lap in front of her in a worn set of Imperial binders, pressed against the cold wall at her back. Above her, the faint black sigil of the Empire had been stenciled across the interior plating. No spray paint. No streaks. No brush marks. Precision and permanence — the kind of mark you didn’t try to cover up. The kind you didn’t get out from under.

Another jolt. Another clink of chain.

Hope exhaled through her nose. The mask covering the lower half of her face muffled the sound, giving it a kind of hollow timbre that echoed back against her cheek. She liked the silence better. Every second that passed, her heartbeat pressed tighter against her ribs — not with fear, but calculation. She had about an hour left, maybe less, before they reached the destination. She’d done this loop before.

Her eyes narrowed. The muscles around them tightened — anger rising, like heat under her skin. Don’t show it. Not yet.

She kept staring through the sliver of window. She couldn’t place the trees. Not exactly. But she’d been here before. Some version of here. The loop always changed the details. A different tree, a missing sign, a new bend in the road. The trick wasn’t to remember — it was to recognize the shape of what was coming. And brace for it.

 

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP.

“Ay, yo! Driver! Easy!”

The chains weren’t hers alone.

Two other sets rattled across the transport’s steel floor — rolling like spilled coins every time the vehicle shuddered. The sound turned the interior into an echo chamber of metal scraping, sliding, and clinking in dissonant rhythm. The air was heavy with rust, oil, and the faint sting of ozone — that sharp, sterile tang that clung to everything Imperial. And just as Hope was beginning to focus her thoughts, the sound she dreaded rose up like an itch behind her ear.

“Yo, Shadow Babe. You ain’t gotta sit so mysterious all the time. I’m tryna vibe with you.”

She didn’t move. Not yet. Not even a twitch.

But the voice rolled on anyway — smooth, confident, and hopelessly committed to whatever broken dialect its speaker thought was cool that day.

“You got that fire, girl. That whole ninja-gone-sad thing? That’s cultured. I feel that. Like, spiritually.”

Hope closed her eyes, bracing herself.

The voice belonged to none other than Big Dill — a seven-foot-tall, anthropomorphic pickle with spindly arms, knock-off sneakers, and the swagger of someone who’d never once heard the word no and taken it seriously. He sat sprawled across from her, long legs bouncing lazily with each bump in the road. Around his lumpy green torso hung a thick gold chain bearing the unmistakable emblem of Dill Bits — his failed crypto-of-a-kind venture, now mostly remembered for crashing the market and somehow turning profit for him and him alone.

A faded fanny pack clung to his waist like a trophy, slumped sideways over his gut. Over his eyes, a dusty bandit mask sat just crooked enough to make his grin visible — an irritating, self-satisfied expression permanently carved into his briny skin.

“You don’t gotta play hard to get,” he purred, adjusting his recline like this was his private tour bus and not an Imperial prisoner convoy. “But I respect it. Mystery is sexy. You look like you journal in the dark, yo. That’s deep.”

Hope finally looked up — just her eyes, shadowed and sharp beneath the edge of her hood. The rest of her face remained behind the half-mask, unreadable. She didn’t speak.

Big Dill grinned wider, unfazed.

“Ohhh, you giving me the eye stare? I see you. That’s mad poetic, honestly. Real holographic vibes. Like, if trauma was a fashion statement?” He shrugged. “You’re making it werk.”

The transport jolted again, sending a loose cuff skittering beneath the benches. The others — silent so far, silent as ever — shifted in place, their chains reacting with dull clangs. One prisoner mumbled in her sleep. But Big Dill? He was fully in his element, spinning nonsense and basking in his own delusion of charisma.

“Ayy… don’t hate me ‘cause I’m beautiful, playa,” Dill said, spreading his stubby green arms like he was basking in applause. “Haters gon’ hate. Briners gon’ brine. That’s nature, baby.”

Hope’s eyes lingered on him just long enough to make the point, then drifted back to the window — the only place left to look. Flashing treetops blurred past the narrow slats. The illusion of movement. Of escape. One hour to go. Maybe less. She could endure this.

Dill, naturally, took the silence as an invitation.

“You know, people been trying to put my name in the dirt lately,” he said, tapping his gold chain. “But real ones remember the truth: I’m a visionary. Y’all just mad at the grind.”

Hope didn’t look at him. Her fingers brushed the edges of her binders — not from fear, but calculation. The others still thought this was a simple transfer. They hadn’t noticed the little things, the true identity of their new captors.

That this wasn’t Kane’s route anymore. The Empire was here.

 

And the next sound she heard — the soft, groggy murmur from the other bench — meant someone else was finally waking up to it.

Another bump hit, harder this time, and the prisoner beside Hope groaned before slumping sideways.

“Ughhhh… whuhhh… gimme five more minutes, mam…”

Joss.

The ridiculous bandit with the traffic cone hat and a perpetual state of half-consciousness — at least for most of the loops Hope had seen her in this cycle. The jolt had sent her sprawling face-first into Hope’s shoulder, where she immediately resumed snoring like it was a competition. Her bright orange cone toppled off and clattered across the floor.

Hope stared at it in mild disbelief. Joss’s breath was hot through the patchy bandanna covering the lower half of her face, and smelled like there was enough alcohol content in it to start a small fire.

“You good over there, Cone Queen?” Dill snorted, not bothering to hide his amusement. “You droolin’ on a legend right now.”

No answer. Joss just groaned again, burrowing closer like a hung-over toddler.

Hope sighed quietly and nudged Joss’s head back toward the wall without waking her. Chains rattled. Another bump.

One hour to go.

And Big Dill hadn’t even started getting annoying.

 

Big Dill was still talking. Still himself, in that slow, slippery rhythm like he thought the world was his podcast and everyone else was lucky just to be in the episode.

Hope had learned how to tune him out — not well, but enough. She let her gaze drift again to the narrow slats of the window, watching the forest blur by. The world outside was quiet. Honest. Everything this ride wasn’t.

But the thing about Big Dill — he knew how to find the hairline cracks in people. He didn’t have to mean what he said; he just had to say it with the right kind of grin.

“Y’know what’s funny, though?” he asked. “You really think you’re the good guy in all this. That’s adorable.”

Hope didn’t look at him. Not yet.

“Like, sure, play your little rebel-ninja fantasy, Miss Shadow Blade. Pretend this is about honor. But come on, girl. You rolled with Kane. You ran with the Outlaws. You think the dirt just washes off?”

The words slid through the air like oil. He wasn’t wrong. That was the worst part.

“Ain’t no soap for that,” he said, almost kindly this time. “You in the muck now. Might as well enjoy the slide.”

Hope’s jaw tightened beneath her mask. Still she stared out the window — seeing everything and nothing at once.

Big Dill didn’t stop talking. He never did. His voice rolled through the transport like static — soft, constant, impossible to scrub out. He was halfway through a story about some half-baked smuggling gig on the coast, complete with sound effects, when Hope stopped hearing the words.

She’d heard all of them before. Every story, every tone, every pointless tangent. The same rhythm, the same breaths, the same lazy lilt between syllables. It was almost comforting in a way — the pattern of someone who didn’t know the walls were closing in.

He didn’t know how she’d gotten roped into this.

He didn’t know Joss had been with her.

He didn’t know who was really driving the truck.

And he definitely didn’t know who the new owners were.

Hope’s eyes stayed locked on the sliver of light cutting through the narrow window. She’d counted the turns. The grade. The shift in traction when the dirt flattened out and the road tilted west. She could almost hum the route, note for note.

But this time —

The transport lurched. Harder this time — harder than Hope remembered. 

Those brakes hissed and squealed until they held — the momentum leaning and then snapping back. The jolt sent her weight forward against the restraints, the chain around her ankle biting tight and going taut. The soles of her sneakers squealed as she too braked herself. Across from her, Big Dill stumbled mid-sentence, catching himself on the bench with a startled grunt. The clattering thud beside Hope on the bench was too distinctly the caution cone hat of Joss’ tumbling — until it very clearly was her head thudding, and slumping across the bench with the rest of her body. 

Then came the silence. 

The engines cut. The low drone of the engine that had filled the cabin was now gone, like a breath held too long. Only the faint crackle of the forest outside and the slow hiss of cooling metal remained.

Hope’s chest went still. That wasn’t right. Or, this. This wasn’t right. It shouldn’t have happened yet — none of this should have. The stop always came later. Two more bends. Three more bumps.

Outside, the world shifted. Gravel crunching under boots. A metallic clack — safety switches snapping open.

Then… Gunfire. Short. Controlled. Two bursts, one return. Then nothing. A muffled shout. The kind she knew by heart.

“Move up! Watch the ridge!”

Hope mouthed the words before they came, timing them like lyrics. She didn’t like to show off. She just wanted to reassure herself, test her memory and make sure it was right — at least, that there was something familiar here. Something similar to what she’d seen before.

Out of the corner of her gaze, Hope could see Big Dill freezing, mouth hanging half-open. Her obvious attention to all of this was enough for the strangely good-at-reading-people pickle to take notice. She could feel his eyes on her, searching for some sort of explanation from her still posture. 

“Uh… yo, that part of the show?”

Hope didn’t answer. Her gaze had already shifted to the door — and then so did his. 

It wasn’t time yet. Not for another few minutes. But the rhythm was off now — one beat early, maybe two — and that was enough to twist something low in her stomach. The chain at her ankle went taut as she shifted forward, muscles ready. If this loop was breaking pattern, it wasn’t a good sign.

Another shout outside, closer this time. The thump of boots.

A metallic hiss as the lock on the rear hatch disengaged.

And then — bam. The blast hit like thunder. 

A blinding flash split the dark interior. The doors on the back of the transport — the ones right next to Hope, the back wall of the transport’s hold — flew open in a burst. Daylight flooded in through the haze of gunpowder and kicked-up dust, slicing across the rows of bound prisoners. The air filled with the ragged chorus of shouting, engines, and metal groaning under stress.  

Hope blinked hard against the sudden brightness, eyes narrowing at the silhouettes framed in the open doorway. Two figures in cracked armor and mirrored visors, rifles drawn, masks pulled high. 

“Hands where I can see ‘em.”

The first stormed in like she’d rehearsed the moment. Sharp, deliberate, theatrical. Cassidy Quinn — that harlequin mask unmistakable beneath the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat — cut through the threshold in a sweep of black and red. 

Silver braids snapped across her legs as she swept her gaze across the interior. Her twin holstered swords caught the light, but the pistol in her hand hung low, its threat muted. Then it dipped fully — a pause, a breath — as recognition flickered beneath the cloth of her mask. Outlaw bravado softening into something more familiar, if disbelieving. 

And behind her came a biker’s helmet with a mirrored windshield, colored braids spilling over armored shoulders. Keisha Cross. The cropped tank, scuffed cargo pants, and mismatched boot laces gave her the look of someone who’d bolted straight from a street race into a gunfight — and somehow made it work. She held her rifle low, steady, the barrel sweeping through the haze like a searchlight.

Right on cue. Just like always.

Hope’s pulse steadied — and that was the part that scared her most. For a heartbeat, for a flash of a moment, relief was there. And it felt real, too. The loop was still intact. This was how it always went. If anything, Hope felt the creeping fear that her mind really was playing tricks on her, that she was unable to get away from her thoughts plaguing what should have been the steely focus the mission of the loop required. 

Because if it was always like this… then why did it feel like they’d arrived too soon?

Then —

“Hope!”

The voice was small, high, and unarmored. Not through the muffle of some helmet or mask. Definitely something that didn’t belong here. Something different. 

Hope froze. It came again, clearer this time, threaded with disbelief. 

“Hope, are you — oh my God, it’s really you!”

Her pulse jumped. She knew that voice — every tone, every syllable, every too-earnest note that cracked when it tried to sound brave. 

No — no. No no no. Not here, not now. 

The two Outlaws — armed to the teeth, just as threatening to Hope and the other imprisoned occupants of the armored transport — parted ways, just enough to see the new figure who had raced up to stand among them. 

Jade stepped into the light behind them. Face flushed, helmetless, the barrel of a borrowed pistol trembling just slightly in her hands. As surprised to see Hope as Hope was herself. 

She didn’t want to look disappointed. But Hope’s face went still — rigid, before the fear could set in. Her mind went still too. Her breath hitched, caught somewhere between a laugh and gasp. For a heartbeat, she thought she was hallucinating — that her mind really was playing tricks on her. That was what she had thought when she first heard that voice, coming somewhere from the ancient recesses of memory and what she had longed to hear once she got out of such a dire spot. That her brain, desperate for something new, had conjured Jade’s voice — just as her face was conjured now. Just a trick of the glare. Something that if she narrowed her eyes she wouldn’t see. 

But then Jade blinked, eyes wide and bright, a smile just as glowing cutting across her face. And the illusion didn’t fade. 

“We got here early,” she said breathlessly, almost proud. “They said you’d be dead if we waited —”

“That’s what you said, squirt.” The shape of a face breathed words beneath the pinstripe lines painted on it — Cassidy Quinn’s voice sharp and unmistakable, quick to correct Jade even if it was pointless. She shouldn’t have sounded so frustrated, but Hope could only imagine the ways Jade had pushed her — even if she had only just begun to fathom it. 

Early. Hope didn’t hear the rest. The words washed over her, drowned out by the sound of her own pulse. The confirmation she needed to know that her fears were real. She should’ve felt grateful — she wanted to. But gratitude didn’t come. Only the cold, twisting fear that something fragile and sacred had been broken.  She felt her throat tighten behind her own mask. The ache of the cuffs around her wrists and gripping her ankle bit deeper as she shifted, restless and disbelieving. 

The loop wasn’t supposed to change. Jade wasn’t supposed to be here. 

The loop — her one constant — was gone. Now, Hope didn’t know what was coming next. 

 

Chapter 3: The Outlaws

THE WORLD HAD GONE quiet again.

Smoke still hung in the trees, low and acrid, curling around the edges of the wrecked transport. The ground beneath them was soft, churned mud slicked with pine needles and ash.

Joss was the first to break the silence. She doubled over beside the rear wheel and threw up — hard.

“Christ alive —” she sputtered between coughs, bracing one bare hand against the armor plating while the gloved one clamped over her mouth. She fished her hand free of it with her teeth, smearing off the slimy leftovers of her sickness from her lip onto the backside of it like a napkin. 

But then she braced herself against the wall again, realizing she was going to be sick again. 

“Oh, Jaysus, I’m dyin’. Don’t look at me, Hope, for the love of God.”

Hope winced, and looked away. She didn’t need to be told twice. The sort of thing wasn’t all that uncommon in gristly situations. Because of the loop, she’d seen Joss do this before too — same spot, same angle, same miserable sound. It still got to her every time. 

It was the first thing Joss had done since the three of them — herself, as well as Big Dill and Hope — had been freed from their armbinders and the chains around their ankles keeping them from running off. Even that graceless fall she’d had hadn’t fully woken her. As soon as she had been pulled up from where her unconscious self had tumbled over when her fellow Outlaws stopped the armored transport, and she really did have to wake up, all the sickness came flooding back to her. 

Hope was already kneeling next to her, one gloved hand patting her shoulder with detached precision. “You’re fine,” she said softly. Her voice was low, flat — the kind of tone that could pass for comfort if you didn’t listen too closely. “Just breathe. It’s going to be okay.”

“‘Okay,’ she says,” Joss groaned, spitting into the dirt. “We wake up in chains and she’s actin’ like it’s just another Tuesday.”

Hope let out a faint exhale, something that might have been a laugh if it had any warmth in it. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “You’ve had worse nights at the Slurp Room. You just picked the wrong night to be ’you’… The wrong audience, I guess.”

Joss blinked up through her fringe of pink hair, eyes glassy but trying to focus. “Aye, I remember the drinks. I don’t remember signin’ up for the hangover from hell.”

“They wanted us quiet,” Hope said, tugging her mask loose. “Somebody slipped something into the round. Could’ve been a spy or a bounty job, or one of Kane’s rats — someone who knew we were there looking for something. Or, could’ve just been someone sick of you singing at the bar.” 

Her tone stayed flat, even as she blinked away smoke from her eyes.

“Either way, you didn’t earn this one.”

Joss, still catching her breath like she had lost a fist-fight with her stomach, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, this time forgetting the glove. “You don’t look half as green as me. How’re you not sick, huh? You drinkin’ battery acid regular now or somethin’?”

Hope froze for half a second — just long enough for it to register. She could feel Joss’s eyes on her, waiting for an answer.

“I was,” Hope said finally, awkwardly tugging her sleeve down over her wrist. “You just… missed it. Earlier. I was a mess.”

Joss gave a weak laugh, half disbelief and half gratitude. “Ha! Wish I’d seen that. Would’ve made me feel better, so it would.”

“Yeah,” Hope murmured, eyes flicking toward the tree line. “You would’ve loved it.”

Joss didn’t notice the way her voice tightened at the end — or how Hope’s expression, calm and pale in the fading smoke, never quite softened. She just leaned her head back against the cold metal, breathing hard, whispering another small, miserable prayer to herself.

Hope stayed kneeling beside her, one hand still resting on her shoulder, playing the part.

Inside, her stomach was a knot — not from the smoke, or the fear, or even the memory of the loop resetting.

Just the lie.

Jade’s voice cut through the quiet.

“So, uh… what was that thing we had to shoot through to get to you?”

Hope blinked. The words slit like a paper cut — small, sharp, enough to break the silence. For a second, she didn’t move from where she was, tending to Joss like the sick drunk she was. She’d nearly forgotten Jade was still here. Or maybe she’d been trying not to remember. Trying not to look at her — at the bright, reckless human being who wasn’t supposed to exist in this part of the story.

But Jade wasn’t looking at her. She was staring down past the smoking engine bay of the armored transport. Hope’s eyes drifted past Jade, to the edge of the road — to the white shape slumped there in the mud.

“Is that —” Jade started, squinting. “It’s not one of Kane’s guys, right? Their armor doesn’t look like that. That’s… cleaner. And heavier.”

Hope knew what it was. It was a Stormtrooper.

Jade took a few slow steps forward, the gravel crunching under her sneakers. Sunlight hit the edge of the body, glinting off the white shell armor, lighting her eyes. She tilted her head, trying to make sense of it, her expression flickering between awe and unease.

“Wow,” she whispered. “That’s… new. Look at that plating. It’s like something from a movie.”

The armor’s black lenses stared up at nothing, glossy and blank, reflecting the treeline above. For a moment, Jade saw her own face in it — small, warped, framed in pink hair and smoke.

Joss groaned from where she still sat against the transport, dragging herself up enough to see what Jade was gawking at. “What’re you on about now?” she muttered, squinting through her pink fringe. “We done already, or is somethin’ still shootin’ at us?”

Jade pointed toward the shoulder of the road. “That thing. The guy in white. You see that, right?”

Hope didn’t answer. Her pulse had started its slow climb again, that familiar throb behind her ribs.

Joss wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and followed Jade’s stare. Her face went slack. “Ah… hell.”

The armored figure lay sprawled across the mud, one arm twisted beneath the body, the other stretched toward the ditch. The armor was cracked open in two places — one neat hole at the shoulder, another scorched bloom across the chest where the plating had blown out. The clean white of the plastoid was smeared with dirt and smoke, black streaks tracing the path of the bullets that had found him.

Joss took an uneasy half step closer. “That ain’t Kane’s.”

“No,” Hope said quietly.

The word came out before she could stop it. Too certain. Too practiced.

Jade glanced back at her. “Then whose?”

Hope didn’t answer. Her eyes were still on the body, tracing the black scorch marks across the armor, the insignia faintly visible where the plating hadn’t shattered. The smell of burned metal hung in the air — sterile, synthetic. She knew that smell.

Joss crouched beside the corpse, curiosity outweighing caution. “Weird helmet design,” she muttered. “Can’t even see his face. Kinda freaky, actually.”

Jade frowned. “Maybe poking it isn’t a good idea.”

“I’m not—” Joss started, but she couldn’t look away. “It’s just… look at it. Whoever these guys are, they’re not local. You’d need serious backing to make armor like this.”

The two of them stared, waiting for Hope to fill the silence. And when she didn’t, the silence grew heavier.

Hope’s mask hung loose around her neck, her jaw set tight with nothing to hide behind. She knew what she was supposed to say — the easy lie, the vague deflection. But the sight of the body made it impossible.

Joss straightened, following her gaze. “You know somethin’, don’t you?”

Hope’s eyes flicked from the armor to Jade — bright, eager, too close — and then back again. She took a breath.

“Yeah,” she said. “I do.”

 

“Then you can start talking,” came a voice from above.

Hope turned.

Up the slope where the dirt road curved into the trees stood Cassidy Quinn, her silhouette sharp against the light cutting through the canopy. The red of her pants burned bright through the haze, her twin swords slung at her hips, the long silver braids at her back gleaming like whips. The bandit mask was gone now, revealing a face as severe as her voice — cold green eyes narrowed beneath the shadows of the treetops.

And she wasn’t alone.

Behind her, Keisha Cross leaned against one of those trees, boot clamping down on top of her helmet in the dirt. Her pink braids glinted in the smoke, expression hidden behind a lazy frown. She looked tired — not from the fight, but from the people she’d had to save.

There were others, too — masked Outlaws with mismatched rifles, scavenged armor, bandanas in every color. Familiar faces from the camps. People Hope had traded words, favors, and threats with over too many loops to count.

And Big Dill, of course, skulking just far enough back in the shadow of a tree to pretend he hadn’t been watching everything. His gold chain glinted in the sun, that permanent grin unchanged.

The only one who actually seemed happy to see her was Skillet.

“Well I’ll be buggered,” he chirped. “She’s still breathin’! We were takin’ bets, y’know. Keisha said you were paste by now.”

Hope wasn’t sure what exactly he was supposed to be. Possum, rat, some mutt-breed of marsupial. She wasn’t even totally sure if he was supposed to be smiling — his face was split open so wide with teeth like he just wanted to show them. 

“Shut it, Skillet,” Keisha muttered without looking at him.

Hope straightened, wiping dirt from her hands. “Cassidy.”

“Don’t ‘Cassidy’ me.” The bandit leader stalked closer, boot heels crunching in the gravel. “You got five seconds to start explainin’ what the hell those white-armored freaks are and why they were haulin’ you around like freight.”

Hope hesitated. “It’s not —”

Cassidy cut her off. “They’re not Kane’s, that’s for damn sure. Not Syndicate, either. So who are they? You pullin’ new friends outta thin air now?”

Keisha stepped forward, tossing something down at Hope’s feet. It landed with a metallic clatter — a blaster rifle, black and gleaming, its power cell still faintly humming.

“Picked that off one of the bodies,” Keisha said. “Doesn’t fire bullets. Shoots like… lasers. Real weird lasers. You wanna tell us why the hell people with this kinda tech are cartin’ you around like a prize cow?”

The words hung there, heavy and sharp.

Even Skillet’s grin faltered. “You don’t reckon she’s workin’ with ‘em, do ya?” he asked, looking between the others. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone traded sides for a shinier paycheck.”

Cassidy didn’t laugh. Her gaze stayed locked on Hope, unreadable but burning. “Start talkin’, Shadow Blade. Before my patience runs out.”

Hope’s brow furrowed before she could stop it. It wasn’t just the accusation — it was the echo of it. She’d heard that same line before. Same rhythm. Same tone. Big Dill’s voice, slick and taunting, filling the silence in the back of the transport just minutes earlier. He was good at that. Poking the bruise until it hurt. And here it was again, spilling out of Cassidy’s mouth. It didn’t sound forced. 

Before she could answer, Joss lurched upright.

“Oh, don’t you start with that shite!” she snapped, staggering a little but standing her ground. Her hair stuck damply to her cheek, and her voice cracked between anger and nausea. “You don’t talk about her like that, Cassidy. Hope’s a bloody hero, y’hear me? Saved our arses more times than I can count!”

Cassidy’s head tilted, her eyes narrowing. “Sit down, Joss.”

“I won’t! She’s done nothin’ wrong—”

Cassidy’s voice went cold. “You forget who you’re talking to?”

That shut her up. Almost. Joss’s lips twitched, like she might still say something, but the weight of Cassidy’s glare pressed it back down her throat. She sank half a step behind Hope instead, muttering under her breath, “Can’t even drink with the best of us, but she’s the truest friend I’ve got.”

Keisha snorted. “Yeah, well, friendship don’t erase the smell of trouble. And don’t think this gets you out of bein’ a plastered little gremlin, sweetheart.”

Joss’s mouth fell open, a protest half-formed — but nothing came still. 

The argument was still hanging in the air when another voice cut through it. 

“Enough.”

It didn’t come from Cassidy. It wasn’t loud, but it carried — low, smooth, the kind of tone that didn’t need to rise to command attention. 

Hope felt it before she saw her. That hush. That slight pull in the air, like gravity remembering where it was supposed to point. Every eye turned toward the voice — toward the woman standing half in shadow behind the others. The gathering of Outlaws crowding the ridge shifted, parting just enough for someone new to step forward out of the haze. 

Valentina.

The last time Hope had seen Valentina, the woman had been all swagger and spectacle — a bandit mask with horns, knitted like a joke at everyone else’s expense. But not now. Now she wore no mask. The silver in her earrings caught the light as she moved. The purple sweater she wore — the same bright, absurd, color as the missing mask — looked out of place in the mud and smoke, but the pistol at her hip made it clear she wasn’t here for show. Her dark hair fell in a sharp line over one shoulder of it, the rest tied back in a loose braid that brushed the strap of her holster. She had that same thief’s composure — every movement too deliberate, too silent, like she was already planning her exit.

“Hope isn’t the Imperial snitch you think she is,” Valentina said. Her tone was casual, but her eyes weren’t. They swept over the crowd — Keisha, Cassidy, the others — and stopped on Hope. “If she were, those bodies up the road would still be walking. And anyway — Galactic Empires?” She gave a humorless half-smile. “That’s exactly the kind of nonsense our little do-gooder here tends to steer clear of.”

Hope’s breath caught. For a moment, the scene around her blurred — the smell of oil, smoke, and pine drifting together. She hadn’t expected to see her again, least of all here.

“Valentina,” she said softly. “Didn’t think you worked with a team anymore — much less lead one.”

Valentina’s mouth twitched into a half-smile. “I don’t,” she said. Her tone was steady, but there was a flicker of something behind it — fatigue, maybe. “But somebody needs a leader. Looks like I drew the short straw.”

Hope studied her for a moment, searching for anything familiar behind that poise. “So you’re calling the shots now that Midas is gone?”

Jade’s head snapped up. “Gone?” she repeated, her voice pitching high. “Wait — gone gone?”

Valentina’s eyes flicked toward her. “Looks like he took off running,” she said simply. “Can’t say I blame him. The man knows when to get out of the game. Knows when the tide’s turning — and whatever’s coming here on Oninoshima?” She glanced down the road, toward the scorched armor, the broken transport. “Not worth sticking around for.”

“So that’s your grand plan? ‘Cut and run’?” Hope asked quietly, a humorless smile of her own tugging at her mouth. “Guess we all stick to what we’re best at.”

Valentina turned her gaze back to her — and then to Hope.

“While we still can.”

The words hung there, heavy in the air. Even the wind seemed to pause, like the island itself was holding its breath.

Hope stepped forward, boots sinking into the churned mud, and kept her gaze level on Valentina. The smoke and the stink of burnt plastoid seemed to pull the words from her throat as if the air itself insisted on hearing them.

“This isn’t Kane showing up with new toys,” she said, voice low and even, the kind that stopped chatter. “This is the Empire. They’re not here for territory or favors. They’re here to take. They’ll turn Oninoshima into a staging ground if we let them. The Baron’s little plays will look like preschool next to what they bring.”

Valentina watched her, expression unreadable. Hope felt the forest narrow until it was only her and that cold face. She leaned in a fraction — a tiny physical risk, the kind that read honest even when she wanted it not to.

“If they get a foothold here,” Hope went on, louder now because the quiet needed pushing, “they don’t stop at the island. They follow. They hunt. They find whatever doorway, whatever pocket you crawl through. They don’t care about friends or favors. They’ll flatten everything so they can move on. We can’t let them take the Shard. We can’t let Daigo walk into that portal. He opens it, they get it — they don’t just leave it be. We stop him, now, or we burn later.”

She could feel the truth of it like a thing under her ribs — not theory, not rumor, the weight of a thing she’d seen enough times in loops to be sick of repeating. 

“I’m asking you to help us. Not because I want to be a hero. Because if we don’t do this, there won’t be anywhere to run to. Not for any of us.”

Valentina’s mouth curled, not in humor but in something colder. The laugh that answered Hope was short, an amused exhalation that ate the heat from the words. “You ask like you think anyone owes you a hand, Hope.”

The Outlaws around them shifted, waiting. Even the trees seemed to lean in.

“Daigo?” Valentina said, slow, tasting the name like it belonged to someone else’s mess. “That kid made his bed. He chose the Baron. If he thinks a portal’s a toy, let him find out the rules of the thing the hard way.”

Hope’s chest tightened. “You can’t just —”

“Why not?” Valentina interrupted, almost gentle. “Why should we bleed for every spoiled pawn who bets on the wrong boss? He signed up. He wanted power. Let him get what comes with it.”

Hope felt something cold unspool in her — the argument thinning into a different kind of danger: not ignorance, but indifference. “This isn’t just Daigo,” she said. “You understand that, right? You know what happens when something like that gets loose. It’s not cleaning up a scrap between factions. It’s an invasion. It’s…” Her voice dropped into a ragged edge. “It’s every nightmare that’s ever chased us at night.”

Valentina’s eyes glinted. “I know exactly what it is, girl. And I know when a fight is worth my neck.” She shrugged, careful as a thief counting coins. “If Midas ran, maybe he knew something sensible. Maybe the island’s done being worth keeping.”

Hope swallowed. For a second the world narrowed to the set of Valentina’s jaw. “So you’d watch it happen?” she asked. The words felt absurdly small and colossal at once.

Valentina considered that, the expression on her face unreadable for a beat that stretched. Then she lifted her chin, the decision already settling like cold coin in her mouth. She glanced past her at the dead trooper, then back to Hope. “I’d watch a fool get what he earned,” she said. “I won’t die for his mistakes. Neither should you.”

Around them, murmurs rose — anger, fear, the business of a crew deciding how soft they could be before they’d be eaten alive. Hope looked at Jade, then at Joss, at Skillet’s little face, at Big Dill lurking like a bad omen. She saw the calculation passing through them, as clear as anything.

Then, a smaller voice spoke up. 

“That’s not fair,” Jade blurted. The words came out too fast, too sharp, cutting through the smoke before she realized who she was interrupting. Her pulse jumped, but she didn’t stop. “Don’t talk about him like that. You don’t even know him. He’s a good man — he’s —”

Cassidy’s head tilted, eyes narrowing. Keisha folded her arms, the faint creak of leather cutting the air. 

Valentina, eyes so sharp on Hope’s, turned her attention towards Jade slowly. The look she gave Jade wasn’t angry. It was worse — a predator’s stillness. “Your brother,” she said, almost gently, “is the reason any of this started.”

Jade froze. The words hit her like a slap she hadn’t braced for. It wasn’t the specifics of what Valentina was saying it. It was the calm behind it, the lecturing tone. 

Valentina took a step closer, just enough to make the difference in height matter. “You think good men don’t get people killed? You think ‘good’ means anything when a bigger bully shows up on your doorstep?”

Jade’s breath caught, her hands curling into fists. But the weight of that stare — the quiet authority behind it — pressed her back a step, and yet gave her nowhere to run all at once. 

Hope moved before she thought about it, stepping between them. 

“Enough,” she said. 

Valentina’s eyes flicked to her, then down — the faintest smile touching her lips. “You’ve got guts, Hope. I’ll give you that.”

She straightened, looking from Jade to the broken transport, to the white-armored figures lying strewn about on the road. 

“But you’re still wasting your time. This is your last chance. Come with us. Let these poor townies play hero somewhere that won’t get them killed.”

Her gaze lingered on Jade — deliberate, dismissive. 

“They can’t defend themselves. They’ll just make bigger problems for you.”

Then, back to Hope. 

“You could still walk away with something. We could use someone like you. You’ve got instincts. Just —” she gave a slight shrug, “— a lot to learn.”

Hope grimaced, the cold twisting in her chest almost visible in her posture. She wanted to tell Valentina every casualty the Empire would make, to paint the future in gore and loss until the woman’s eyes softened. Instead she swallowed, a small, raw movement that felt nothing like a victory — more like she had nothing at all. 

“You’re better than this, Valentina.”

Valentina’s smile widened — not kind, not cruel, just matter-of-fact. “No,” she said softly. “I’m really not.”

She turned, nodding to Cassidy and Keisha. 

“We’re done here. Sounds like the island’s in fine hands anyway.” She started walking, boots crunching in the dirt. “Good luck, Blue.”

Hope stood still, watching as the Outlaws began to fall back toward the tree line. The sound of shifting rifles and boots in mud filled the spaces their presence left behind. That spiteful good luck promise — fragile as it was — hung between them like the ugly wet gesture it was. Hope felt the island tilt under her boots, felt the loop she relied on ripple into something she could no longer navigate by memory alone. She’d bought herself a sliver of resolve, but mostly nothing. That was all.

And then — 

“Joss,” Valentina said. 

Joss froze where she stood, her back stiffening. The whole ordeal that had just taken place, the whole standoff between Hope, Jade, and her bosses had left her frigid with terror already. Just hearing her name through the shuffle of the forest, breaking the awkward tension, turned her into a Joss-sicle — barely capable of lifting her head, but forced to. 

Valentina didn’t turn around. “You’re coming with us.”

The quiet that followed felt colder than the air.

Hope’s eyes, tracing circles in the mud in front of her, burning different spots with the pure heat of her anger, snapped to her, and then her friend. “What?”

Valentina finally looked over her shoulder, her patience finally tested. It wasn’t something she had to expend any effort on. “Don’t throw your life away chasing some star-struck cause. Hope’s no hero — she’ll only drag you down with her. You know that. You’ve seen it.”

Joss didn’t answer. Her mouth opened, fishing for air, and then shut again. 

Valentina took another step — now tested. She made it quick. “We’re your family, Joss. Don’t throw that away.”

Hope’s throat tightened. “Joss,” she said quietly. It was the start of something she didn’t have words for. 

Joss didn’t look at her. She just hung her head, shoulders slumping.

When she finally moved, it was slow — one step, then another, toward Valentina and the others.

Hope didn’t move. She couldn’t.

Valentina gave her one last look as she passed — unreadable, satisfied, maybe even pitying. Then she turned and walked on.

The group disappeared into the trees, their voices fading with the rustle of branches.

Hope stood there, the smoke rising in thin, uncertain lines around her, the silence settling heavy and final.

Jade exhaled, barely a whisper. “What do we do now?”

Hope didn’t answer. She just kept staring at the road — at the empty space where her friend had been — and the blaster thrown down on the ground. 

Chapter 4: A Note on the Loop

ARCHIVED FIELD NOTE — SOURCE UNCONFIRMED
Recovered from the Aegis (three years prior)

Something irregular has occured today — a disturbance in what should have been a perfectly predictable pattern. A puzzle I cannot yet solve. 

A looper, as I understand it, is governed by a remarkably small set of edicts. They are immutable, inelegant, and blunt, but they hold. The most sacred of all these edicts is remarkably simple and easy to understand, even if it is the most miraculous: death always resets the day. To the uninitiated, — the ones who drift through life without any particular purpose — this truth might go wholly unnoticed. Only once a looper acquires intent, a conviction that a certain catastrophe must be prevented, does the rhythm become visible. Purpose exposes structure. 

From this, two rules emerge:

- To start over, one must die. 
- To continue, one must live. 

... Or sleep. (Infuriatingly simple, but the evidence is clear.) Sleep appears to function as a marker — a checkpoint, if one prefers the vulgar term — advancing the loop to its next iteration without disruption. 

This principle sits at the heart of the entire enterprise. Other rules exist, of course, but they all orbit this one. The looper retains memory across resets; they percevie what others dismiss as déjà vu or nonsense dreams. Armed with that knowledge, they may act upon constants, reproduce prior outcomes, or alter them. This is the looper's greatest advantage — and their greatest curse.

Yet even this is not entirely true. 

The looper may be the only conscious observer of the phenomenon, but their awareness does not guarantee uniformity. I have witnessed — and heard credible accounts of — an unsettling inconsistency. When the loop resets, not everything reverts. 

Even if one were to relive the day with near-complete fidelity to their prior choices, the outcomes to not always align. This discrepancy cannot be explained solely by human falibility. Something else is meddling. Interfering. Tugging on the thread. 

And yet, none of this violates the rules. Death resets. Survival progresses. Memory persists. 
But the expression of the day — who appears, who intervenes, what forces converge — may vary. 

Which leads me to an uncomfortable conclusion: 

If the primary constant is intact, then there must be another constant at work. One I have not yet identified. One that sits beneath the surface, dictating the anomalies I have observed. 

I intend to find it. 

The pattern is too deliberate for chance. 

And I do not care for puzzles that refuse to be solved. 

Chapter 5: When The Whistle Blows

THE FOREST THINNED by degrees — the trees growing shorter, the light growing longer, until the shadows finally let go. The stink of smoke clung to Hope’s shoulders like a shawl; she could almost see the gray wisps curling from her sleeves as she pushed through the brush and stepped out into open air.

Ahead, the road unfurled across a rise of green — the kind of green that hinted at the paradise Oninoshima used to be, and sometimes still was. Cracked asphalt ribboned through meadows slick with leftover morning dew, climbing toward a weather-stained depot squatting in the valley below, somewhere between the gentle hills they had left behind and the snowcapped mountains that framed Seaport City. Signs in faded kanji traced the outlines of old color where the paint had peeled back to raw brick. Behind the depot, stacks of shipping containers leaned like tired monuments, leading toward a looming warehouse draped in rust. The letters on the platform’s awning read BRUTAL BOXCARS — painted black, chipped to the bone.

It had been at least an hour since the Outlaws vanished into the trees — and since Joss had followed them. The walk wouldn’t have taken half as long if they’d found a car, but that wouldn’t have felt right. Better to stew with their thoughts, and with the silence that came with them — and come up with a plan.

Hope adjusted the strap of her satchel — the one she’d stolen back from the transport’s hold — and kept walking. Her sneakers scraped the edge of the pavement, each step blending with the hush of wind through the grass. She’d almost forgotten they were bright blue once; that’s how many loops it had been since she’d washed anything that wasn’t blood or mud.

Beside her, Jade trudged in silence — arms crossed, eyes fixed on the horizon as though daring it to move. Hope studied her sidelong, trying not to make it obvious. This should not have been Jade. Not today. But she forced her face to stay neutral — polite, nice, and normal.

“You’re quiet,” Hope said finally.

Jade didn’t answer right away. “Just tired.”

Hope nodded, buying a breath before she risked her next question. She needed answers without tipping her hand.

They’d been walking long enough that the silence between them felt lived-in, almost comfortable. Hope had kept trying to steer the conversation somewhere useful — somewhere that would let her take the measure of this version of the day — but every time she got close, she veered off.

Now, with the depot shimmering ahead, she tried again.

“So… earlier,” Hope said, nudging a twig off the road with her shoe, “when you said Jones sent you away —”

Jade glanced over, brow creasing. “Yeah?”

Hope swallowed. Careful. Don’t sound too interested. Don’t sound like you’re checking boxes — or checking the timeline. Keep it casual. Keep it light.

“That’s… that’s really what happened?” she asked lightly. “He actually sent you home? Last I heard, you and Jones were setting up scanners in Magic Mosses. Tracking meteorites, right? All those blue dots on the map. Just wondered what changed.”

Jade let out a slow breath. “Pretty much. He said something big was coming and I shouldn’t be anywhere near it. Arranged for someone to take me back to Masked Meadows. Told me to stay inside, keep my head down. That sort of thing.”

Hope nodded as if this were all expected — all normal and fine. But her stomach tightened. It fit. But only in the broad strokes. The details didn’t match the day she remembered. Not exactly.

“Sounds like him,” she said.

“Yeah,” Jade said quietly. “Always keeping the kids out of the fire.”

Now Jade was trying to sound casual. But the edge of it cracked. It wasn’t just about the Outlaws’ cowardice — or Daigo’s recklessness. Hope could hear what really hurt in her voice. Jones didn’t think she was capable.

“He’s not wrong about one thing,” Hope said softly. “Things are about to get ugly.”

“So maybe I should go home.”

Hope glanced sideways at her. “You believe that?”

Jade shrugged. “The Outlaws won’t help. If even they think this fight’s not worth having…”

Hope stopped walking. “Don’t give them that much credit.”

Jade blinked.

“They’re not prophets. They’re cowards,” Hope said. “If there was money in it, they’d be heroes already. If there was glory, they’d fight to the death. But there’s no profit in fighting the Empire — just a black eye. And they’ve got no one left to hide behind. Not without Midas.”

She started walking again. The tall grass whispered around their legs.

Then, with a faint grin, Hope threw a gentle punch against Jade’s shoulder. “Besides, you’re braver than you think. You pulled off a rescue. Hell, you disobeyed Jones — that’s a bolder move than anything I’ve done lately.”

Jade laughed once — too softly, too tired. “Yeah. Real brave of me.”

Hope looked away toward the depot where the empty railcars shimmered in the heat. The air was still cool, but the sun was high in the sky. The invasive fingers of the coming summer pressed against their skin. She didn't need to see Jade's face to know what it looked like. It was that faint, fragile smile that didn't touch her eyes. 

Even out of the corner of her vision, Hope could see it written there. Jade’s decision had already been made. Just like something else had been decided long before this day ever began.

She was going home.

And Hope still didn’t know why she’d been there at all.

 

The road curved down into the valley, the meadows giving way to gravel and rust. The depot grew larger as they approached — not brighter, not warmer, just closer.

Brutal Boxcars looked worse up close. The paint on the siding had long since peeled to bare metal, and the iron rails that cut through the platform gleamed like old scars. A single banner, half-torn and flapping in the wind, still hung above the ticket booth: faded kanji and cartoon mascots promising scenic rides that no one had taken in months.

The sun had already passed its climb, hanging white and high in the sky — harsh enough to flatten the colors of the world. The morning had escaped them.

Hope didn't say anything, but she didn't have to. She knew the timeline — how this was all supposed. Daigo didn't reach the portal until sundown. They had time — too much time, maybe. Enough to drop Jade off, find her next step, get ready for what was coming.

It should have felt like a reprieve. It didn't.

Because as the depot loomed closer, Hope felt something awful settling behind her ribs — a feeling all too familiar. That sick, misaligned déjà vu, yes. But also the mistake she'd already made. She'd told Jade too much. She hadn't meant to, but panic made her careless —  especially in front of the Outlaws. And now Jade knew more about Daigo than she ever had before. 

But the guilt went deeper. Jade wanted to go home. And Hope wanted to let her. Jones had probably been right — Jade didn't need to be dragged into this. 

And now, walking beside her, Hope finally understood him. The way he'd sent Jade home. The way he'd kept her out of the fire. She'd always assumed it was caution. Or protectiveness. Or that stubborn paternal streak of his. 

But it wasn't that. It was this. This awful clarity. 

Some selfish part of her wanted Jade's help. Wanted any help she could get. Wanted someone — anyone — to give her an edge against Daigo. The missing piece she'd felt across so many loops. 

Hope hated herself for even thinking it. Hated how easily she could see herself dragging Jade into this just to feel less alone, less doomed, less certain she would fail again. 

They stepped onto the platform, their footsteps echoing through the open-air terminal. The sound bounced off of concrete pillars, hollow and sharp. No birds. No trains. No movement at all — only the low, electric hum of the waiting world.

Jade walked a few paces ahead, her two short knots of hair catching in the wind. She stopped beside one of the cracked benches, looking out over the empty tracks like she could still imagine the trains that used to come through here all the time — the chatter, the music, the rhythm of ordinary life.

Hope stood beside her, hands in the pockets of her Shadow Blade hoodie, watching her instead. 

Dragging Jade into this would be suicide. She knew that as sharply as she knew the shape of the loops. Jade wasn't just anyone — she was Daigo's sister. If Hope showed up at the portal with Jade at her side, would Daigo even listen? Or would he see it as a threat, a manipulation, proof she was twisting family against him? Would bringing Jade make Hope's plea more human — or more fraudulent? She didn't know, and the not knowing hollowed her out. 

But what about Jade? What about the girl who would go home and wonder if she had done more? What about the possibility that this too would break her? Hope had no right to choose that future for her. 

She wanted to tell Jade she didn't have to go. She wanted to tell Jade that she could help. That she was brave enough, smart enough, strong enough. That Hope needed her — not as a weapon, not as leverage, but as someone who made the impossible feel less lonely. That stopping Daigo wasn't something she could do alone.

The words sat heavy in her throat, climbing towards daylight — but they never got the chance.

Because before Hope could open her mouth, another voice reached them. Low and and familiar — and smiling in that way that made the hair on Hope's neck lift.

"There you are..."

The echo of their footsteps hadn't even faded before the voice came. Both women turned.

She was perched halfway up a stack of shipping containers, one knee bent, the other boot hooked against the corrugated metal. Her jacket caught the light — black leather with violet studs, matching the streaks of visible hair that flashed like glass when she moved. The bill of her cap shadowed her eyes, but the crooked smirk underneath it was unmistakable.

Peri hopped down the side of the stack, boots hitting the ground and catching her weight in three quick thuds. She didn't so much walk as roll through her own momentum of catching herself step over step over skidding gravel — quick, fluid, confident.

"Told you," she said, dusting her hands off as she came closer. "Those Outlaws weren't gonna lift a finger. Whole lot a talk, and none of it useful. Should've saved yourself the trouble."

Hope's shoulders stiffened. "You've been following us."

"Yeah, and lucky for you, huh? Somebody's gotta make sure this kid doesn't get herself killed before the day's out."

"I don't need a babysitter," Jade muttered, her tone softening only when she turned toward her. "Jones said you'd be here."

Peri gave her a short nod. "Yeah, well. Guess the old man's got instincts. Told me you'd probably try something stupid." She flicked a glance at Hope. "Didn't say you'd bring company."

Hope met her look without blinking. "I could say the same about you."

That earned a crooked grin. "Cute. Real cute."

For a beat, the wind filled the silence — that low whistle that comes from wide, empty places. Somewhere down the line, a lone seagull called, the only thing alive enough to move.

Peri sighed and shook her head. "Listen, I get it. You're both riled up about the big bad Empire or whatever that you stirred up out there. But this? This ain't your fight. Not any more."

Jade frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means," Peri said, hooking her thumbs into her belt, "you don't throw your life away on some reckless crusade just because people think it sounds noble. You stay alive. You let the fight come to you, and you take it on your own terms. Not theirs."

"You sound like you've already given up," Hope said quietly.

Peri shrugged. "Nah. Just realistic. The way I see it, there's no winnin' this one. Empire rolls through, we're roadkill. So, maybe —" she pointed a thumb over her shoulder toward the rail lines, "— maybe you do the smart thing and take the next train to Masked Meadows. Tell Kendo what's goin' on. He's better at talkin' sense into people than you two are at playin' hero."

Hope's brow furrowed. "Kendo?"

Peri smirked. "Yeah, your precious boy-toy. Maybe he'll know what to do."

Hope exhaled, her patience thinning. “Hiding doesn’t save us, Peri. You really think running away fixes this?”

“I think it keeps you breathin’ long enough to try somethin’ else later. Big difference.”

That was it — the moment Hope had been trying to avoid. The moment she couldn’t anymore.

She stepped closer, her voice steady but sharp. “You don’t get it, Peri. Daigo’s not just poking at some relic — he’s tearing open something he doesn’t understand. If he opens that portal, it’s not just his problem. It’s everyone’s. The Empire won’t stop at this island. They’ll drag everything and everyone through it.”

Peri tilted her head. “So let the kid learn his lesson. Maybe having a nice fat ‘L’ to hold onto will build some character.”

Hope’s jaw clenched. “This isn’t about winning — or losing. It’s about what he could let through — or what the Empire could get a hold of. You can run from the Empire. Sure — you can dodge soldiers, patrols, all of it. But there’s something on the other side of that portal that nobody should ever have their hands on. And that? That’s something you can’t go anywhere to hide from.”

The words hit like a tremor — quiet, but heavy enough to shift something in the air between them.

Peri’s smirk vanished. The shoulders beneath her jacket stiffened; the playful edge in her voice hollowed out.

“And… what?” she said slowly, already hating the answer. “You think the three of us can stop that? And not die tryin’?”

A breeze curled across the platform, stirring dust over steel. Something was coming — maybe the distant train, maybe just Hope’s imagination tightening around inevitability. She didn’t flinch.

“Two of us,” Hope corrected gently. But something begrudging and bitter clung behind the words. “Jade goes home.”

Jade swiveled toward her, startled. “What?”

“Jones was right.” Hope’s jaw worked — every word like pulling thorns from her throat. “Dragging you into this is wrong. And dangerous. And selfish.”

Peri folded her arms, giving the smallest, humorless snort. “There we go. Something to agree on.”

But Jade didn’t hear her. She didn’t glance at Peri. Her eyes were fixed on Hope — wide, raw, filling with something sharp and rising too fast.

“You can’t be serious,” Jade whispered.

Hope should have been surprised. She wasn’t.

But when she forced herself to meet Jade’s eyes, the platform suddenly felt too large, too empty. Jade didn’t have to raise her voice for the disappointment to land like a blow. It was the same look Hope used to get from Jones when she’d done something she obviously should’ve known better than to do.

“Tell me you’re not being serious right now,” Jade stammered. “Tell me that was supposed to be a joke.”

“Jade—”

“No.”

The word cracked upward — not loud, but desperate, frayed. Her hands balled at her sides, nails biting deep into her palms.

“You said this was everyone’s problem. You said the Empire won’t stop. You said Daigo is about to open something nobody can walk away from.” Her voice broke. “So how am I supposed to walk away from it?”

Hope opened her mouth — but Jade barreled on.

“What did you mean, Hope? That I’m not strong enough? Not smart enough? Not important enough? What is it?”

Hope flinched at that last one. Of course she didn’t think that about Jade. The instinct to roll her eyes — that old reflex she used when Jones scolded her — almost rose, but died before it reached her brow.

There was no shield that would hold here. She wanted to snap back with something sharp or clever, some sarcastic needle to deflect how painfully exposed this felt — but nothing came. Jade was actually hurt. And that alone knocked the wind out of Hope’s pride. Jade deserved better than Hope’s old defenses. Better than the armor she’d spent too long hiding behind.

Hope felt suddenly, painfully ridiculous — cornered not by accusation but by the realization that Jade was right to feel betrayed. That somehow, without meaning to, Hope had become exactly what she’d spent so many loops trying not to be. She wasn’t Jones in this moment. She was herself — on the receiving end of judgment she deserved.

“I—I’m not—” Hope’s breath stuttered. Her voice cracked trying to find something, anything. “Jade, that’s not what I meant—”

“Then say what you mean, Hope.”

Hope stepped toward her — not thinking, just trying to steady her — and reached out to her shoulder.

“Jade—”

The reaction was instant. Jade jerked back with a startled, almost panicked sound, swatting Hope’s hand away so hard their fingers slapped.

“Don’t.” Her voice trembled with anger she couldn’t contain. “Don’t you touch me right now.”

Hope froze. This wasn’t stubbornness. This was Jade defending the part of herself she didn’t want anyone to see — the rawness, the fear, the vulnerability she’d rather choke on than show in a place like this.

“I’m not a kid,” Jade said — louder now, breath hitching. “I’m not some fragile little sister you can pat on the shoulder until I calm down. Don’t treat me like that. Don’t make me—”

Her voice broke so sharply she had to turn away.

And then, without warning, Hope’s mask slipped. She stepped in close and caught Jade by the arms — not rough, but firm enough to stop her from spiraling away.

“No. Jade,” she said, quiet but unshakeably direct. “Look at me.”

Jade resisted — shoulders tightening, breathing sharp — but something in Hope’s voice cut through. Slowly, reluctantly, she lifted her gaze.

And that was the moment everything shifted. Because what she saw wasn’t pity. Wasn’t patronizing calm. Wasn’t older-sister gentleness.

She saw fear.

Real, bone-deep fear. The kind Jade had mistaken for stubbornness or grit. The kind Hope had been swallowing since morning.

Hope searched her face — reading every tremor of hurt and panic. When she spoke, her voice wasn’t breaking. It was steady. Too steady — the steadiness of someone holding back more than they were letting through.

“You don’t know what this is going to be like,” she said. “You think you do. You think it’s danger, or a bad plan, or your brother making one stupid mistake. But what’s waiting out there…”

Her voice thinned.

“…it’s bigger than all of us.”

Jade’s throat bobbed. She tried to lean back, but Hope held her gently, grounding her.

“I’ve been in fights I couldn’t win,” Hope murmured. “Watched people make choices they couldn’t take back. And I’ve had to live with what comes after. You don’t want that on you. Not if you can help it.”

Something flickered behind Jade’s eyes — fear, or maybe the beginning of understanding.

“You don’t have to carry what I carry,” Hope whispered. “Not yet. If you walk away now… that’s not cowardice. That’s a chance most people don’t get.”

Jade’s face faltered — outrage, confusion, and hurt all bleeding together.

“Hope—”

Hope cut her off gently.

“I’m asking if you’re sure. Really sure. Because once you step into this… you don’t get to go back to who you were before.”

For a long moment, Jade didn’t speak. She didn’t even breathe. Her face was a battleground — a tug-of-war behind her eyes, every emotion clawing for ground. Hope watched it happen in real time: the anger, the confusion, the hurt… and beneath them, a dawning awareness Jade had no language for yet.

Not understanding — not fully. But the outline of the truth Hope had been trying so hard to spare her from.

 

The rumble of the train swelled beneath the platform. A distant rumble of steel on steel — low, distant, rolling beneath the soles of their shoes before it touched the rails. A metallic shudder carried up through the platform, the promise of a train long before it came into view. 

Peri’s eyes stayed on Jade, unreadable beneath the bill of her cap. "You're really gonna let her drag you into this?” she asked. “You walk away now, you live. You chase her, you burn. Your call, kid."

Jade swallowed. The sound of the train swelled — brakes screaming, steel crying against steel as it approached the terminal. The sound was almost deafening now, echoing through the hollow depot, bouncing off concrete pillars and chipped signage until it felt too big for the world around them.

She looked from Peri to Hope — one familiar, one frightening, both demanding something of her.

"I'm not going home," Jade said. 

Hope flinched. "Jade —"

"No."

Jade's voice steadied, even as her fingers trembled. "You’re right. I don't know what's waiting out there. I don't know if we can stop Daigo or the Empire or... whatever that portal is waking up.” Her breath hitched. “But I know I can't just walk away."

She drew a breath that felt too big for her lungs. 

"If something terrible is coming... then it's coming for us all. And I'm not going to sit somewhere safe while you two face it alone. I'm not doing that. Not again. Not ever."

Hope just stared at her — no anger, no reprimand. Just something stunned and unbearably tender, like she wasn’t sure whether to pull Jade close or push her as far from danger as possible. 

The train screamed into the station, kicking up plumes of dust from the gravel below. The low thrum of engines and the hiss of cooling metal blurred into a steady heartbeat beneath the noise, until it was unsettlingly quiet.

Peri, hands stuffed into her pockets, turned towards it. She didn't move right away — didn’t step forward, didn’t speak. She just stood there, eyes on the horizon where the dust thinned and the sunlight broke through. Her jaw tightened the way it did when something hurt, and she didn’t want anyone to see. 

"Figures," she muttered. "You always were a stubborn one." 

Jade’s brow tightened — a small startled crease, like she’d expected Peri to laugh or tease or argue. Like she'd been expecting something else. Anything but this. She didn't answer. Neither did Hope.

Peri let out a long breath through her nose, watching Jade with that flat, guarded look she used when something hurt more than she wanted to admit. 

“Kid,” she said quietly, “I’m not goin’ with you.”

Jade blinked. “What? Peri, you — you can’t just —“

”I can.” Peri cut her off with a shrug too casual to be real. “I ain’t built for this one. Empires, portals, whatever your brother’s pokin’ at — that’s all suicide. You two wanna run headfirst into it? That’s your mess to make. But me?” She tapped her temple. “My instincts say turn around and get on that train.”

Jade looked immediately to Hope — searching for backup, pleading for contradiction, for a sign Peri was wrong. But Hope didn’t say a word. She didn’t move, didn’t argue. Didn’t even blink.

She just stood there, exhausted down to the marrow, shoulders slack in a way that told Jade everything: 

Hope had already had this fight once today, and lost. And she didn’t have the strength to do it again. She had nothing left to argue with. 

Then, Peri shook her head once, slow. "You don't get it yet. Nobody wins these fights. Not the ones that matter." 

Her voice cracked in the faintest way — not soft enough to sound weak, but enough that Jade caught it. The sound made her flinch, just slightly.

Peri sighed, tugging her cap lower. A telltale sign she was about to walk away. "I don't blame you for tryin. Guess somebody's gotta. Just…” Her eyes softened when it landed on Jade. "Don't die tryin' alright? You're too good at makin' trouble not to get better."

She turned and stepped towards the platform’s edge.

"Peri—" Jade began, voice breaking.

Peri lifted a hand without looking back — a wave, maybe, or a dismissal. Or both. "Go," she said, voice already rasping through the hiss of steam. The breaks whined beneath the platform. Neither Hope nor Jade had noticed the train doors were already open — and about to close. "Do what you gotta do. I'll catch up later. Hopefully before it's too late."

The words hung there, thin and fragile against the sound of the train. Almost hopeful. Almost not.

Hope watched her a moment longer — the hard edges in Peri's posture, the tension locking her jaw. Beneath all that armor, she was afraid. Not for herself. For them.

Jade’s throat tightened. So that was it. 

Peri wasn’t going because running was the smart choice. And Hope wasn’t stopping her because she knew it too. Just like the Outlaws. Just like everyone who had a chance to run. 

A chime rang through the broken speakers overhead — a garbled announcement in the island's native tongue that the train was departing.

"See you around, kid."

 

---

 

The sound of the train bled into the distance until it was only a hum behind the wind.

Hope and Jade stood side by side on the cracked platform, watching the gray plumes twist and thin into the afternoon sky. The sun had slipped past its peak; shadows stretched long and lean across the tracks. Somewhere, a station clock ticked behind the walls, but neither of them looked at it.

"We don't have long," Hope murmured.

She didn't have to check the time to know. She could feel it — the way the air seemed thinner, the light harsher. Even if she had never been to this part of Oninoshima during the loop, the day felt the same, like circadian rhythm. She'd learned to sense it in her bones, even if it was against her will. The day had entered its closing act.

Still, she didn't rush. She couldn't. This moment wasn’t hers. It belonged to Jade. This was Jade's time to breathe — to understand what she'd just chosen.

Hope adjusted the strap of her satchel — now back over her shoulder, ready to trek away. She kept her eyes on the empty tracks, afraid even looking at Jade would shatter the fragile peace there. 

"You okay?" She finally asked, daring to test with even that.

Jade didn't answer right away. Her arms were folded tight across her chest, shoulders curling inward as if she could disappear into the shadow she cast on the concrete. 

"I don't know."

Hope waited.

"I just keep thinking," Jade said quietly, "what if this was a mistake? What if we're wasting time? I just didn't want to run because I didn't want to disappoint myself. But now I'm scared I'll just... disappoint him."

"Daigo?"

She nodded. "What if I can't reach him? What if I'm not enough?"

Hope's throat tightened, but she didn't speak. She felt the words settle in her — heavy, familiar. Her optimism was real, but fragile. And it flickered, strained thin by the long day, the long loop. Jade wasn’t wrong to worry. Hope had lived some version of this outcome more times than she wanted to count. The world had a way of breaking faster than she could patch it back together.

But Jade couldn’t know that. Not yet. 

Hope opened her mouth, searching for something gentle, something steady — but she found nothing that wouldn’t betray her. 

Before she could try again, Jade spoke. 

“I’m scared,” she said quietly. “I… I thought choosing to stay would make me feel brave. But now all I feel is…”

She hesitated, waited. Left an opening. 

Hope finished softly, “Small?”

Jade nodded once, hard. “Yeah. Small.”

Hope didn’t reach out. Didn’t touch her. She could feel Jade’s boundaries as sharply as her own exhaustion — and Jade had been touched enough today, showed towards too many decisions she wasn’t ready for. So Hope just stood there beside her, letting the silence do what words couldn’t. 

The shadows stretched longer across the platform, sliding like dark water beneath the rails. The day was slipping — Hope could feel it thinning around them, tightening the way a loop always did when it neared its edge. 

She let out a slow breath. 

“People run when they can,” she said softly. “Peri, the Outlaws… all of them. Doesn’t matter how many times I get to try. It never works.”

She meant it to sound light. Consoling. Maybe even a little self-depreciating. But it wasn’t light. And Jade heard exactly what Hope hadn’t meant to let slip — the weight behind it, the history she didn’t know yet. The bruised kind of certainty that only comes from failing over and over again. 

Jade’s expression tightened — not with fear this time, but with thought. 

“Maybe,” Jade said carefully, “you’re just talking to the wrong people.”

Hope blinked, thrown by the sudden shift. “What?”

Jade turned toward her — something sharper, steadier settling behind her eyes. 

“We’re not alone,” she said. “We don’t have to be.”

Hope frowned, uncertain. “Jade —?”

But Jade didn’t wait. 

She had already taken off — not hesitating, not checking back, already striding off the platform with a sudden, electric purpose. She’d snapped into motion the idea hit her. That brittle uncertainty she’d carried all afternoon was gone; in its place was momentum, pulling her forward almost after than she could keep up with herself. 

Hope just stared for a beat — dumbstruck, rooted to the concrete, watching Jade’s knotted hair as she marched straight toward the depot steps as if she’d been waiting hours for an excuse to move. 

“Jade?” Hope tried again, but it landed in empty air. 

Jade didn’t turn. She only threw her voice back over her shoulder, sharp and breathless and sure: 

“C’mon! I know something!”

Chapter 6: We Had A Deal

STORM CLOUDS MASSED over the northern stretch of Oninoshima — heavy, roiling banks of charcoal and slate that stacked upon each other like the ribs of some colossal, sleeping beast. They weren’t natural. They never were. Not when they gathered this way. Not when they moved with purpose.

Wind tore through the treetops along the island’s north shore, bending the pines until their needles shivered like warning hairs. The ocean below churned in restless spirals, darkening with the shadow creeping over it.

Then — a streak.

An Imperial shuttle burst out from the canopy line, engines screaming as it knifed upward, angling toward the storm front. Its hull caught what little sunlight remained, flashing in hard, cold glints before the clouds began swallowing it whole. 

The closer it climbed, the more the sky changed: the air thickened, the light thinned, the storm’s underside flickering with the faint electric pulse of something vast concealed within.

And then the clouds opened. Just enough for the shuttle to slip through.

For a breath — a single, shuddering heartbeat — the silhouette inside was visible: the dagger-shaped outline of a Star Destroyer, its hull washed in the shifting gray of the storm that hid it. Turbolaser turrets rested like patient eyes. Engine fins glowed with low, predatory blue. An entire Imperial war machine, hovering unseen above the island like a sword waiting to fall.

The clouds sealed behind the shuttle as it disappeared into the gloom.

 

“My, my. An Imperial escort. You gentlemen certainly know how to make a partner feel valued.”

Inside the cargo bay, Fletcher Kane sat like a king in exile. Which, in his mind, was close enough to the truth to make no difference.

He lounged in a jumpseat clearly not designed for lounging — all harsh plating, exposed bolts, and Imperial austerity — and yet he reclined anyway, one leg crossed over the other, his massive lupine arms draped over the crash restraints like he owned the vessel outright. The red lining of his cape pooled beneath him, spilling like fine velvet over cold durasteel.

Stormtroopers ringed the bay in perfect formation, rifles braced against their armor. Their helmets never moved, but Kane swore he could feel their attention on him — rigid, disciplined, the military might he’d always dreamed of commanding.

My Alpha Company… he savored the phase, lips curling into a wolfish smile, letting it unfurl in his mind like a banner he could already see billowing over a conquered skyline. Imagine those white helmets with my sigil stamped on the side… He closed his eyes and imagined the same Alpha Company crest emblazoned on the tall guidance wings of a shuttle like this, imagined his Alpha Guards barking orders at battalions of these pristine white troopers before dispatching them to handle his enemies. Even imagined Alpha Company supplying weapons and armor across the galaxy under Imperial contract.

A stupid fantasy, perhaps — but he savored it all the same.

The Alpha Guards — his ragged, tattooed men with their patched armor and scavenged rifles — stood bristling near the shuttle door, clearly uneasy in the presence of the Empire’s soldiers. Kane relished the contrast: the Stormtroopers still as statues; his men shifting, fidgeting, trying to look twice as tough to hide the fact that they felt half as important.

For the first time in months, things were looking up. 

Things had been positively dreadful all that time — ruinous to anyone possessing a lesser will. Establishing a modern banking system across an island full of hut-dwelling simpletons and “too-ancient-to-understand-interest-rates” dunces in vestments that were sitting on the greatest deposits of untapped gold Kane had ever laid eyes on had its challenges. Each one of the brand new banks built in Kane’s signature opulence seemingly came with a fat target painted on the side of it. And the miscreants crawling out of Oninoshima’s cracks had grown bold. Organized. Annoyingly principled. 

And then, of course, Midas came back. His old rival. His glittering, golden albatross. Smile like a knife, touch of literal alchemy, ego like a continent. Once Midas showed up, the petty disobediences had swelled into outright rebellion. Kane had tried everything — raising taxes, tightening rations, a little fear here and there — but it was never quite enough. Soon the whole island had been sliding toward civil war, teetering on the lip of collapse. 

But Kane was nothing if not adaptable. Resourceful. A survivor. 

And then he’d met the boy. 

Daigo. Strange, brooding, fatalistic Daigo — another one of those creed-clutching naïfs. Who wanted gold not for wealth, but to fix those ridiculous masks he doted on. A foolish pursuit — which made him the perfect pawn.

Look where that alliance had gotten him. Closer than ever to the Zero Point Shard. Closer than Midas. Closer than anyone. And yes, Daigo would betray him. Kane knew betrayal better than anyone alive; he would’ve been insulted if the boy hadn’t planned to double-cross him. But nothing got past the steel trap of Fletcher Kane’s mind. He had contingencies on his contingencies. 

And now — now he had this. 

He looked around the shuttle’s cargo bay: the rows of silent, pristine Stormtroopers; the polished bulk of Imperial plating; the hum of technology not cobbled together from scrapyards and desperate men, regardless of how good the man — or wolf — holding the whip thought himself to be. But manufactured at a scale he could barely comprehend. The might of populations. The discipline of empires. The cruelty of a machine built to rule galaxies. 

Kane’s claws tapped idly against his belt buckle as he gazed around the interior. It wasn’t glamorous — not like the high-backed seats in his suite at Lonewolf Lair, not like the armored limousines he used to ride through Crimson City — but it felt glorious.

Industrial. Cruel. Powerful.

It thrilled him. 

Real power isn’t polished, he told himself. It’s steel. It’s thunder.

Sure, the deal required “turning over” the Zero Point Shard once Daigo inevitably cracked open that portal to the Spirit Realm. But what of it? Kane didn’t need to keep the Shard. He only needed to be the one who delivered it. A finder’s fee, the finest kind. And with the Empire at his back — an army, a real army, professional and efficient and unshakeable — he could fetch it again later, one way or another. 

Soon, he wouldn’t just control Oninoshima, in that quiet unseen way he had held every one of its meager institutions up until this point. He would govern it. Rule it, shape it. Governor Kane. He savored the words, let them melt on his tongue. 

By the time the shuttle pierced the cloudbank and the Star Destroyer loomed into view — a metal horizon blotting out the sky — Fletcher Kane knew only one thing with absolute certainty:

Everything, finally and gloriously, was coming up Kane.

 

The conference room shuddered with the blow.

Kane’s fist slammed into the obsidian-paneled table hard enough to spiderweb the glass beneath it — a sharp, splintering crack that echoed off the narrow metal walls. 

“WE HAD A DEAL!”

The sound rattled through the chamber, swallowed almost immediately by the deeper, ever-present swell of the Star Destroyer’s engines. The entire ship hummed like a living creature, the thrumming vibration sinking into bone, ribcage, and teeth alike. 

The chamber was small by Imperial standards — more like the wardroom of a submarine than the cathedral-like command decks Kane had imagined. Low ceilings, angular steel panels, harsh recessed lighting. No windows. No luxury. 

He felt trapped in a pressure chamber. 

Stormtroopers lined the walls behind him, rigid and silent as ever, just as they had been in the hold of the shuttle. Helmets forward, rifles resting against plasteel breastplates, unfazed by the scene in front of them. The kind of audience a man like Kane should loved — rows of armor witnessing his fury. 

But the longer their lens-dark visors stared passed him, above him, through him, the more the rage curdled into something else. 

Phasma stood at the head of the table, unmoved and unbothered. Her chrome armor reflected the fractured lines on the glass as if she admired them. 

Kane snarled, breath fogging as he leaned across the table towards her. 

“You told me,” he spat, “that by the time I handed you the Zero Point Shard, I would be Governor of Oninoshima. Governor. Ruler of this backwater rock. I would have the might of the Empire behind me. That was our agreement.”

Phasma’s helmet tilted — a small motion, but more like a predator adjusting its gaze than a person choosing their words. 

When she spoke, her voice carried the cool resonance of an armored coffin. 

“You failed to mention,” she said, “that this island is encased within a closed-loop temporal containment field.”

Kane blinked. “Excuse me?”

“The energy barrier encircling Oninoshima,” Phasma continued, tone unchanged. “Imperial scans confirm the field prevents all egress. Vessels cannot exit into orbit. Transmissions cannot penetrate the shell. We are… sealed.”

The engines growled beneath their feet, as though emphasizing her point. 

Kane stared, incredulous. Then he barked a laugh. 

“So what? You’re the Empire. Break it. Drill through it. Blast it apart. Once you have the Shard — which you will, thanks to me — none of this will matter. You can walk wherever you please through reality.”

To Kane, the whole thing really was laughable. This was the crisis? The obstacle bringing the mighty Empire to its knees? A minor setback? A little wrinkle in an otherwise perfect plan that would flatten out the moment they retrieved the Shard? Pathetic. Mere child’s play. If these Imperial wretches had spent even one season in Kane’s world, they’d crumble before lunch time. This was nothing. These bucket-heads needed him more than he thought they would.

But then Phasma stepped closer, and Kane’s laugh died. 

“You misunderstand the nature of our… arrangement,” Phasma said. 

Kane opened his mouth, but she cut through his breath like a blade. 

“If I were upholding my end of our deal, Kane… You would already be a rug on the floor.”

Kane’s ears pinned back. His throat bobbed. 

Phasma continued, stepping into his space until her mirrored visor filled half his field of vision. 

“You misrepresented the strategic value of this island. You concealed the containment field. And worse — far worse — you failed to disclose the presence of other parties aware of the Shard. Parties who have already interfered with our operations.”

Kane blinked rapidly, head jerking side to side. 

“I— I didn’t— What parties? Who told you that? Nobody else is even close—”

“Do not insult my intelligence, wolf,” Phasma said. 

Her voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to.

“You have an insurgency. You have dissidents. A warrior cult — not just of savages, highly organized and armed. Fugitives, disrupting Imperial retrieval efforts.”

Kane was stone-still. His mind raced — Outlaws? Those damn townies? That stupid girl at Daigo’s side? How could the Empire know any of this? How could they know faster than he did? He swallowed agin, suddenly aware of how damp his paw-like palms felt against the polished table — of the heat that made the table’s surface fog. He tried to speak — some defense, some excuse — but all that came out was a breath. A pitiful one. 

Then, the conference room doors slammed open — a hard thing for hydraulic, sliding doors to do, unless guided by some dark, unseen force. 

Every Stormtrooper snapped to attention. 

A figure cut through the threshold like a shard of a living shadow — draped in black, movements sharp and decisive. Her mask gave off a sickly mechanical resonance each time she inhaled, a broken, warbling hrrnnk-ssshh that made Kane’s fur prickle along his spine. Red indicator lights pulsed along the contours of the mask with each breath, slow and predatory. 

The Emperor’s Apprentice. Even Phasma straightened at her arrival. Kane’s relief evaporated. 

The Apprentice didn’t even look at him. Not at first. Her focus was locked on Phasma as she strode to the center of the room, boots striking the metal decking. 

“It was her,” she said — voice filtered, distorted, impossible to place. Female? Young? Old? It folded through the modulator like something out of a fever dream. The idea of a girl in a voice changer shouldn’t have unsettled Kane, but it did. “The girl from the portal.”

Kane blinked. “What portal? Daigo hasn’t—”

The Apprentice ignored him. 

“She is the one who broke free of the transport this morning.” A tilt of her head — unnervingly smooth, something trying to imitate human motion. “She interfered again.”

Kane opened his mouth again to complain — to say he was in the middle of something, or at least to ask what the hell she was talking bout — but the Apprentice was already moving. 

She reached into the pouch at her hip and withdrew a data-disk — thick and ugly, made of utilitarian plastoid. She slid it into the wall terminal, and the monitor above the conference table flickered to life. 

A grainy, flickering still-frame appeared. 

A mugshot-like image, captured from some angle Kane didn’t recognize — blue hair disheveled after a fight, face hardened, glare defiant. 

Kane’s stomach dropped clean out of his body. 

Her. Hope. That cursed little rat. She’s back. 

Phasma approached the screen with the deliberate, dangerous calm of someone restraining the urge to break the console with her bare hands. Her helmet tilted slightly — enough to suggest a glare beneath the visor. 

“You,” she growled, turning her head towards Kane. “Failed to mention her.”

Kane stiffened. “I— I didn’t think—”

“She,” Phasma barked, jabbing a finger at the flickering image, “tries to stop the portal. Every loop. Every time. And you —” the accusation sharpened, “— did not disclose her existence.”

Kane’s breath caught. Loops. She said it as if she knew. 

A cold, horrifying thought crawled slowly up Kane’s spine and sank ganging teeth into the back of his neck. One that entered his mind as soon as he dared to look over at those baleful brown eyes staring back at him. The Apprentice. She’s like her. She can see ahead. She remembers. 

Which meant —

Which meant something happened. Something bad enough to alter the plan. Bad enough to make Phasma drag him up here early. Bad enough that maybe this wasn’t the first time they’d sat in this room… even though for Kane, it was. 

How many times had she stood in this room with him? Twice? Ten times? More? If she remembers… if she’s seen this before… then what have they seen him do?

The Apprentice tapped the terminal again. The image changed. 

“She had help,” she said flatly — the Apprentice’s modulated voice broke through his spiraling panic. “This one.” 

A gloved finger traced the outline of the face on the screen. 

“She interfered with the extraction.”

Jade. 

Kane’s heart stopped. Actually stopped. He felt his claws curl into his palms, fur bristling with primal dread. 

Impossible. Ridiculous. The notion that this slip of a girl had broken Hope out of an armored prisoner convoy… it made no sense. But sense didn’t matter. The Empire had marked her. 

On any other day, Kane would have dismissed the whole matter outright. If some hapless bystander wandered into the line of fire, well… that was simply the natural order. Wrong place, wrong time — happens to the best of fools. Collateral damage was just the cost of doing business.

But Daigo’s sister? If anything happened to her — if Daigo even suspected Kane’s involvement — betrayal would be merciful. The boy wouldn’t simply kill him. He would mutilate him. Slowly, quietly — with that unblinking, devotional fervor that clung to him like a disease. 

And Kane could see just as clearly: there would be not talking the Empire out of their own bloodlust. They smelled a double-cross. They had decided someone would pay. 

His voice cracked. “I didn’t — I had no idea —”

Phasma, who had been savoring this from the moment the Apprentice entered — every whispered hint, every flicker of Kane’s panic confirming her suspicions — turned her helmet toward the masked figure.

“Find them,” she ordered, voice low and lethal.

The Apprentice didn’t acknowledge the command. She simply turned and stalked out, her breathing apparatus pulsing like the heartbeat of something vast and predatory. She vanished through the half-functioning door, and for a moment Kane couldn’t tell whether the throbbing hum in the air belonged to the Star Destroyer… or her.

Stormtroopers peeled way from the walls to follow her, perfectly synchronized. 

Kane sat frozen, staring at Jade’s face on the flickering screen. The weight in his chest was no longer fear — it was understanding. The Empire didn’t need his explanations. They didn’t need him. They already knew more more than he did. 

And suddenly — brutally — Fletcher Kane understood:

He was no longer a partner. He was something far worse. Something he despised in any operation more than incompetence, betrayal, or insubordination. 

He was a liability. 

He looked to Phasma — seeking anything, even disdain. He only found confirmation. 

“Until the containment field is neutralized,” she declared, her tone reverting cold Imperial procedure, “I remain the commanding authority over Oninoshima. You will continue your… cooperation. And you will provide whatever is necessary to ensure the Shard is retrieved.”

Phasma leaned forward, her plated gauntlet resting on the edge of the table. Her reflection swallowed him whole in the chrome — small, trembling, already condemned. 

“If the Empire suffers another setback because of you, Kane… I will make an example of you.”

 

---

 

The train hummed along the tracks, its old metal frame swaying with each curve in the line. Afternoon light strobed through the windows — trees, rocks, flashes of coastline, then trees.

Peri sat alone in her row, boots up on the opposite seat like she owned the whole damn car. A half-crumpled packet of rice crackers sat beside her, unopened. She wasn’t hungry. She was thinking. 

Mostly about Jade. Mostly about stupid the whole thing felt. 

“Kid’s gonna give me gray hair,” Peri muttered to herself, leaning her head against the cool glass. Her breath fogged the window for half an hour second before the air running through the cabin wiped it clean. 

Peri tapped her boot against the floor, restless, angry at herself. Why didn’t she just grab her? Throw her over her shoulder, kick dust into the wind, leave that blue-haired bimbo to her suicide mission? 

She slumped lower in her seat. She knew exactly why she hadn’t dragged Jade out of that station. Because Jade wasn’t wrong. Because Hope wasn’t wrong.

Because she’d seen Hope’s face. Because she’d heard the crack in her voice. 

Because somewhere underlay that bravado, Peri was scared of bein’ the only one who ran. 

Stupid. Stupid. 

“Stupid, stupid, stupid…”

She exhaled, long and slow. 

Then the train began to slow. 

Not the gentle, predictable deceleration of a scheduled stop — this was sharper, rougher, like someone had slapped the brakes in a panic. Peri’s boots dropped to the floor automatically. Her instinct pricked to the back of her neck. 

Huh. That ain’t right.

The intercom clicked on, fizzing with static — then cut off abruptly. No announcement. No conductor. Just dead air. 

The train rolled to a hard stop in the middle of the woods. 

Peri’s hand slid into her jacket on pure reflex, fingers brushing the hilt of the little knife she kept tucked under the lining. Not comforting. Not nearly enough. 

The doors at the far end of the car slammed open. 

Two white-armored boots stepped through. 

Then two more.

Then four more after that.

Twelve Stormtroopers filled in with synchronized precision, rifles angled down — but ready. Their helmets caught the light polished bone. Peri stiffened in her seat but didn’t rise. No point pretending she could get past twelve guns in a train car without turning herself into a cautionary tale. 

One trooper broke formation and marched down the aisle towards her. The visor never wavered. 

“Passenger,” the trooper said, voice filtered through the vocoder,” remain seated.”

Peri gave him a flat look. “… Wasn’t plannin’ on takin’ a stroll.”

Another trooper approached, this one carrying something metallic and segmented — a pair of Imperial armbinders, the kind built to lock the wrists together in front with an electromagnetic seal. 

“Peridot Aoyama-Reeves,” the lead trooper said. Not a question — a verdict. “By authority of the Galactic Empire, you are to be detained for questioning.”

Peri blinked once, slowly. 

“…For what, exactly?” she snapped. “Last I checked, it ain’t a crime to sit on a train mindin’ my business.”

No laugh — but no charge, either. Figures.

The nearest trooper lifted the armbinders. 

Another voice spoke behind her — flat, amplified through a helmet: 

“Do not resist.” 

She heard the shift of boots on the sealed floor. Then another pair behind that. A circle tightening.

“I’m sittin’, I’m sittin’,” Peri muttered, palms lifting. “Twelve of you for one of me — yeah, message received.”

She turned her wrists outward and offered them. 

The trooper nearest her reached down without a word and seized her wrists. 

Peri didn’t fight. Didn’t flinch. She just let her arms be hauled forward, elbows wrenched until her shoulders strained. Cold plastoid clamps snapped shut around her wrists — armbinders lock with a hiss and a metallic click that sounded far too final for a Tuesday afternoon. 

Her eyes stayed fixed ahead, humorless and guarded. The trees outside were motionless now. He own reflection — hard, closed off — stared back at her in the window glass. 

She didn’t ask why. She didn’t ask where they were taking her. She didn’t give them anything. 

Inside, though — just under the surface — something dropped sharp and heavy. 

Stupid Jade, she thought. 

But she didn’t say it out loud. Not here. Not with twelve rifles breathing down her neck. Not when she already suspected exactly why they’d come for her.

Not when this was probably the price of letting that kid walk away. 

Chapter 7: No More Riddles

THE ROAD WEST of Brutal Boxcars was little more than a scar of asphalt, half-buried beneath creeping moss and split by the roots of trees that had outgrown it. But the air grew cooler as they left the road and descended the ravine. The sound of the river murmured somewhere below, hidden behind walls of pine and rock.

Jade led the way, her stride quick and urgent. Hope followed close behind, watching the ridges of the valley with suspicion. Every curve of bark, every overturned crate, felt like it could hide a rifle barrel.

"There," said Jade, pointing ahead.

A shack clung to the slope just above the waterline — wood warped gray with age, tin roof sagging like a weary spine. The windows were boarded, the path overgrown, but Hope's eyes picked out what Jade probably didn't: thin lines of trip-wire glinting in the underbrush, the faint glimmer of a scope lens in the sun.

"Hold up," Hope hissed, grabbing Jade's arm. "See those? Motion sensors. And... yeah. Two. Maybe three trip-wires. She's still alive, alright."

Jade blinked, startled, then whispered, "You think she's inside? You think she's... alive?"

"Wouldn't bet otherwise." Hope crouched low, easing around a broken sign half-buried in the dirt. A faded warning read in chipped paint: NO TRESPASSING — THIS MEANS YOU. "Alive and armed. Which, for her, are the same thing."

They crept closer. The air smelled of oil and cedar. Somewhere behind the shack, a generator hummed faintly.

Hope's gloved fingers brushed against a hanging charm on the doorframe — a rose carved into bone, humming faintly with residual power. She eased her hand around the door handle—

—and the world snapped into focus. Before she could speak, the door cracked open a hand's width.

Click.

A shotgun barrel thrust out of the dark and stopped an inch from Hope's face — right between her eyes.

"Not another step." 

That voice was low, melodic, but carried that cold resonance that seemed deathly inhuman.

"State your names. Slowly."

Hope froze.

The door had cracked open only a few inches, just enough for the barrel to slide through, steady and unmoving. Then a pair of eyes appeared in the gap — black and unblinking, framed by ragged white and red-stained locks of hair that spilled between two cresting pink horns.

"State your business," she said, calm but deadly. "And it better be more interesting than the last batch of idiots I buried."

"Night Rose," Hope began carefully. "It's..."

Jade moved before Hope could breathe a warning —

"Rose!"

— and the shotgun snapped up in perfect lethal response. 

But Jade didn't stop. She flung herself through the doorway, arms wrapping tight around the demon behind then gun.

The Night Rose did not move. Her arms stayed at her sides, the shotgun balanced awkwardly in one clawed hand. Only her eyes shifted in that imperceptible way they always did — slowly downward, regarding the mortal wrapped around her waist.

The Night Rose staggered half a step back, genuinely thrown off balance.

"You're alive," Jade gasped, voice cracking. Her grip only tightened. "You're alive — I thought — the train —"

The Night Rose's expression barely flickered. The corners of her mouth turned, almost like amusement, almost like revulsion. Her brow furrowed, her arms hovering awkwardly in the air as if the concept of returning a hug might be physically dangerous.

"Child," she hissed, "does this emergency warrant the violation of my most sacred commandment — 'no touching, no embracing, and no clinging'?"

Hope swallowed, and lowered her hands slowly, the tension breaking just enough for her to exhale. She’d forgotten how small the Night Rose could make a room feel. 

"Depends," she said, a small, weary smile creeping in despite herself. "You planning to shoot us, or can we come in?"

The Night Rose's gaze slid towards her — slow, evaluating, predatory. Then, with a sigh that might've been theatrical if it hadn't sounded so ancient, she lowered the weapon.

"... Enter." she said at last. "But control your moral outpourings — emotional or otherwise. I have mopped enough humanity from these floors"

Jade still didn't let go.

 

The shack’s single window threw a pale bar of light across the dirt floor. Inside, it smelled of rust, old stew, and something older — the faint, stubborn tang of a thing that refused to be washed. The Night Rose had not made a home so much as a bastion: a low mat in one corner, weapons boxed and unrolled on the walls like medals, a battered pot steaming on a single ring. No chair. No bed. No softness that would invite a human to stay.

When they stepped in, the Night Rose returned to what she had been tending to most carefully: the small, meticulously organized piles of tools and parts on the floor where her Veiled Precision SMG lay apart. She worked with the same attention she would if it were a sacred thing — oiling a bolt, fitting a spring, testing the fit of a magazine. A set of blades she had already sharpened to a vicious, glinting edge lay nearby, ready to be fitted to the sash of her kimono.

Jade watched her — just attentive, just as determined. “What are you getting ready for?” she asked. Her voice was small in the stripped room.

Hope didn't know what she was looking at — only that the precision of it meant trouble. The Night Rose's movements were too deliberate, her tools too clean. Every piece had been set out like a ritual. Try as she might not to judge a demon's habits, Hope couldn't help but feel the same uneasiness in her stomach as she would if she really believed she was looking at some evil act of summoning.

She wanted to ask, but held back. Better to let Jade do it — better to see what answer the Night Rose would give her without prompting.

The demon hummed around the barrel of her weapon, the sound low and tuneless — less like she was humming a tune, but like the low growl of something animalistic awakening, an unbridled hunger stirring deep within her. Her hands worked the metal with unsettling grace, as though she'd done it for centuries.

"Whispers," she said. "The island stirs. The air tastes of blood again. When the wind moves wrong, it means someone's making promises they shouldn't. The kind that means a storm's coming. The kind that leaves the ground hungry."

Jade blinked. "You mean a fight."

The Night Rose didn't look up. "Everything worth keeping is fought for. Some fools just choose poor ground."

Jade's eyes darted to the floor — to the rows of disassembled weapons, the boxes of ammunition coiled like serpents, the blades lined like silver teeth.

"You're talking about Kane, aren't you?"

The Night Rose smiled faintly, eyes still on the weapon in her lap. "The gilded dog who sold his leash? Yes. He plays host to guests he cannot feed."

Jade squinted, trying to follow. "Guests... You mean the Empire?"

That earned a glance — just a flicker of black eyes through her hair. "You're quick. Good. Saves me explaining what your kind should already know."

She slid a magazine home with a click that seemed to punctuate her irritation.

"So what are you doing?" Jade asked, careful, almost too careful. "You're not — planning something stupid, are you?"

The Night Rose's smile sharpened. "Every act of honesty looks like stupidity to the fearful."

Jade soured. "Can you maybe stop talking like a fortune cookie for five seconds?"

That made Hope snort despite herself. That simple, annoying sound made the Night Rose's head turn — her smile gone.

"I am going to the Baron's estate," she said finally, each word landing clean and heavy. "Lonewolf Lair. Tonight."

Jade went still. "You're... going alone?"

"I was born alone," the demon said flatly. "It will not be the first army to die disappointed."

"Are you out of your mind? That place is crawling with soldiers—"

"Then they will die standing close together," she interrupted. The snaps and clicks of the Night Rose reassembling her weapon were just as much an interruption. A signal to the bewildered Jade, who had seemingly lost the ability to see while she stared at the spot the Night Rose worked at, that the demon had moved on. She paid no attention to Jade as she swam in her thoughts, seemingly waiting for her to come back to reality. "Easier aim."

The silence that followed was thick and brittle. Jade looked at Hope, who said nothing — because she could see it too: the Night Rose had already made up her mind.

"Someone invited them. Maybe your Baron. Maybe your brother. Mortals are very generous when they want power — forever trying to buy their way out of insignificance." The Night Rose said, still fixated on the SMG in her lap — testing the weight of it in her grasp, and raising it to see if what she had assembled was balanced and not loose. "I will pay the Baron a visit," she said. "He opened the door. I'll remind him what walks through it."

Jade's mouth fell open. Even when she had looked at Hope she had found nothing assuring her that this plan made any sense. "You can't be serious. That’s — that's suicide! Kane..."

The word died in Jade's mouth. As convicted as she was of their truth, she couldn't be convinced she was addressing a real scenario. The Night Rose turned slowly, the candlelight sharpening the hollows of her face. Her black eyes fixed on Jade as if she were six inches tall. 

“Kane will bleed,” The Night Rose said casually. “Kane’s death will be a thing of simple delight to the universe.”

The words hit Jade like ice. She made a sound then — not a wail, not yet. Something sharp and stunned, the sound of gears locking in place.

"You're not planning to win," she said, slowly, the realization forming as she spoke. "You're loading up for a massacre."

The Night Rose didn't answer. Didn't even glance her way. The tiny, mechanical clicks of the weapon filled the silence instead — too calm, too steady.

Jade pressed on, voice rising. "You think if you kill enough of them, it'll scare the Empire off? That they'll just... take the hint and leave?"

Still nothing.

"That's not a plan — that's a death wish!" Jade snapped. "You're going to march straight into Lonewolf Lair and take as many of them with you as you can, and then what? You die and they keep coming! You call that payback? You call that saving anyone?"

The Night Rose's hand paused on the receiver. Just for a breath.

Hope saw it — that fractional stillness, like a blade deciding which way to swing.

Then the demon's voice came — low and smooth again, but quieter now. "Better to die biting than to die begging."

Jade shook her head, stepping closer. "No. You're not dying to make a point. You're dying because you've already decided there's nothing left to save."

That line seemed to land, and made the Night Rose pause — not much, but enough for Hope to notice. The way the Night Rose's gaze shifted, the faint curl of her lip, not quite a snarl but not denial either. A single beat between motions, just long enough to feel the temperature shift. Her silence was answer enough.

Jade pressed on. "Maybe it's too late to stop them. Fine. But at least stop something that matters! Stop that damned portal before someone else gets trapped in that place you crawled out of! You want revenge? Get it on the monsters who put you there."

The Night Rose's eyes lifted, black and sharp as glass. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed — a dry, cutting sound that could have been amusement or threat. It was not a kind sound.

"You lecture me about throwing my life away, little one," she said. "Yet you'd have me spend it clawing at the dark that unmade me. Do you think it's less futile to fight what has no face? What cannot die?"

Her voice softened, almost pitying. 

"You've never seen it. You can't imagine it. The things that live in that place do not fall to bullets or courage."

Jade's jaw tightened. "Maybe not all of it. But you said it yourself — Kane's playing host. He's the one who invited the Empire here, thinking he could leash them. You don't have to lift a finger for him to pay for that. They'll eat him alive."

The demon's mouth twitched — not quite a smile, not quite a snarl.

"So what good does it do to die for him?" Jade pressed on, stepping closer, the words tumbling faster than her breath. "If the Empire's already going to crush him, why waste yourself trying to prove it? You think that's justice? You think killing a dead man scares anyone?"

The Night Rose's hands stilled over the weapon, fingers hovering just above the steel. Her eyes lifted — a brief flash of black and irritation — but Jade didn't stop. She took another step, emboldened by her own voice.

"Meanwhile, Daigo's tearing a hole in the world. That portal — it's not just some door, it's them." She jabbed a finger towards the floor, as if the whole island were a stage built over something rotten. "You think the Empire's bad? Wait until what's behind the that portal spills out. Kane's greed is a joke next to that."

The Night Rose's voice cut in like a blade drawn from a sheath. "I know what I fled from. Better than you ever will."

Jade froze mid-sentence, heart hammering — but only for a beat. "Oh yeah?"

"But please. Continue. Perhaps if you say it enough times, you’ll convince yourself.”

Jade's throat bobbed. Her voice came quieter, but sharper, like she'd found a splinter and kept pressing. "You're scared to look that way again, aren't you? Back toward that place. Toward what's really coming. So you tell yourself fighting the Empire's simpler. Easier. Human."

The last word landed like a slap — one Hope felt as much as the Night Rose. For a heartbeat, nobody breathed.

The demon froze mid-motion. Her hand tightened on the gun's receiver, knuckles whitening, and the soft click of metal under her palm was the only answer she gave. When she finally spoke, her tone was lower, colder.

"Careful, child," she murmured. "You mistake understanding for courage."

"You think you're brave?" Jade pressed, voice cracking on the word but refusing to stop. "You're not. You're just — " She gestured helplessly, searching for the shape of it, "you're just hiding behind all this doom and prophecy, pretending it's courage!"

The Night Rose's head tilted, her eyes narrowing — a flicker of teeth at the corner of her mouth. "Mind your words."

"No," Jade said, louder now, her words trembling but quick, "you make it sound noble — dying for some doomed fight, going out in a blaze — but that's not bravery, it's—" the thought hit her, sharp and sudden, and she spat it before she could stop herself, "It's vanity!"

Hope's heart lurched. The word hung there like a spark over dry brush.

Jade pushed on, reckless now. "You want the story to end your way. The big glorious finish demons crave. Easier to die like a legend than live like the rest of us!"

For a heartbeat, nothing moved. The Night Rose's expression didn't change — not right away — but the air did. The stillness in the shack twisted, drawn tight around her like a storm reeling in its first breath.

When she finally spoke, her voice had lost every trace of restraint.

"Glory," she repeated softly. "You think that's what this is? You think I crawl through your filth and eat your fear for glory?"

The Night Rose rose to her feet in one smooth motion — too fluid, too fast — and the room felt suddenly too small for her. 

"Glory," she repeated again, the word twisting into something bitter. "You think I chase glory? You think I crave your little songs and graves?"

Her gaze pinned Jade to the floor. The air trembled faintly — not from heat, but from the weight of her voice.

"I have lived longer than your bloodlines remember their names," She said, each syllable deliberate, cold as iron. "I have seen empires rise and crumble to dust, and every one of them thought their cause was noble. Daigo is no different. The boy's pride will burn him to ash, and he will deserve it."

Jade's mouth opened — but no sound came. The Night Rose stepped forward, the hem of her kimono brushing over the piles of weapons parts.

"If he is fool enough to open that door, then let him walk into the teeth of what waits beyond. I will not save him from his own ruin. The strong perish, the weak perish — there is no glory in that. Only inevitability."

The words hit Jade like a slap. Her throat worked, but nothing came out. Hope could feel the tremor in the girl's breath from across the room, the same flicker of disbelief she herself felt.

Then the Night Rose's head turned — slow, deliberate — until her eyes found Hope.

"And yet you would follow her into this farce," she said. Her tone didn't rise; it sank, heavy with contempt that felt far more dangerous. "Why, Hope? Hope, who clutches her past so tightly she won’t even speak the name she was born under. Why bend your power to a child's sentiment? Is it pity? Or..." her eyes narrowed, the faintest curl of her lip, "is it the ghost of another fool you couldn't save yourself?"

Hope's jaw tightened. Her stomach turned to ice at the word she knew the demon was biting back — the 'V' word.

"I'm stopping the Empire," Hope said quickly. The words sounded thin, defensive. "That's what this is about. If they reach the portal, if they get control of what's inside —"

The Night Rose laughed — not a human laugh, but something hollow and sharp, a chime of metal struck too hard.

"If that's your goal, then you waste your hours chasing a brat who cannot be redeemed. You had the chance to stop them — to stop him — a hundred times over. Yet you stand here again, pretending choice matters."

Hope's breath came short, words trembling somewhere behind her teeth. But the Night Rose didn't give her room to find them.

"Tell me, then," the demon said, "if this folly of yours is so vital, why did Jones not come himself?"

The name made Hope flinch. It was everything the Night Rose meant by those words — everything she wanted to see. She pressed on, voice quiet but merciless.

“Yes, tell me. Where is he then? Where is this streetwise Hercules I’ve heard so much about? The man who bleeds heroism and pisses wisdom.”

Her eyes gleamed — predator’s amusement, razor-thin and delighted.

"Why send a child to do a killer's work? Why entrust the fate of an island to a girl too frightened to act? Unless," she tiled her head, slow and serpent-like, "he knows what you refuse to see — that this cannot be undone. That your precious Daigo cannot be turned."

"That's not true," Hope snapped — too fast, too thin — and she hated how it sounded.

The Night Rose didn't even blink. "Isn't it?"

She stood over her now, black eyes glinting with cruel comprehension. A strange calm settled over her — everything falling neatly into place.

"You — the loop-walker. The all-seeing savior. You've played this song before, and every time, the same refrain. You plead, you hesitate, you fail. And now, in your desperation, you bring me this child" — she gestured towards Jade, who shrank back as if the air itself had teeth — "to try where you would not. Sympathy as a weapon. That is your grand strategy?"

Hope's jaw clenched. The breath in her chest turned raw.

"You haven't stopped this," the Night Rose said, each word clean and final. "You haven't saved him. You haven't saved anyone."

For a heartbeat, the only sound was the simmering pot beside the demon's mat — the faint hiss of something overboiling. Hope stared at her sneakers, at the dirt floor, at anything that wasn't those eyes. Jade looked between them, pale, realizing what the loop had really cost her mentor.

The Night Rose's voice softened, almost to a whisper. "So tell me again, Hope-who-refuses-to-speak-her-own-name. What makes you think this time it will be different?"

She wasn't going to wait for Hope to think of an answer. Without so much as a glance at the SMG resting on the mat, the Night Rose reached for the pot instead. Her fingers closed around the wooden spoon with the same certainty she'd shown handling blades — an ordinary motion made terrible by the face that did it without ceremony. She stirred, slow, watching the rim of steam curl and break.

"Look around you," she said, voice soft as if reading from a ledger. "This is why Jones sent the child away. Not because he doubts your courage, Hope. Because he knows what must be done, and he knows you'll find excuses to stop it."

Jade's breath hitched. Hope's hand tightened on her satchel strap; the room felt smaller than the demon's silence.

The Night Rose didn't meet their eyes. She watched the stew pull at the spoon, the fat breaking on the surface like a map. "You are sharper than most of the dumb, blathering apes on this island," she went on. "You see patterns. You stitch time to memory. So look now — look without wanting the past to give you mercy. Jones will not do the killing because he cannot bear the stain in his own hands. He sent you away because he cannot face the thing he must become. He wanted distance. He wanted you and this child kept safely away from what he’s willing to let happen.”

Hope's mouth went dry. The words moved too easily; they arranged themselves until they were the unmistakable shape of the truth. Jade's face crumbled as if a hand had closed over her ribs.

"You think me cruel," the Night Rose said, and for the first time there was no riddle in it — only the plain blade of fact. "I think you are afraid of the only clean action left. If Daigo cannot be turned, if he will open that door no matter how many speeches we give him, then killing him is not vengeance. It is quarantine. It is the only thing that keeps the rest of you breathing."

Jade made a sound — no protest now, only the brittle intake of someone learning the price of a thing too late. Tears pooled at the corners of her eyes.

The Night Rose stopped stirring. For the first time since they entered the shack, she looked directly at them — no riddles, no ritual, no ancient cadence coating her words. 

Just the truth. 

“Daigo must die.”

It landed without drama, without emphasis. No prophecy. No metaphor. A diagnosis, not a sentence. Hope’s stomach hollowed out. Jade’s knees nearly buckled. 

Hope swallowed against the taste of iron in her mouth. The loop folded behind her, all the failures and the mornings she'd woken to try again. The Night Rose's words were a map of every half-step she'd taken and every hand she'd let go. 

When she spoke, her voice came out small — honest in a way she hadn’t allowed herself to be. 

"Then you know I'm not strong enough," she said. "You know Jones can't do it either. You know what you'd have to do." 

Her fingers dug into the strap of her satchel until the leather creaked. 

"So —" 

She lifted her eyes, and for the first time the plea outweighed the stubborn set of her jaw. 

"We need you, Rose. Not because I want mercy for him. Because we can't stop the Empire without you. Maybe we fail Daigo. Maybe we do. But if you can help us keep the portal closed, then we have a chance. I'm asking you. I —" 

She faltered, swallowed.

"I need you."

The Night Rose's spoon hovered. For a long moment she simply watched the little whirlpool she'd made turn in the pot. The hush in the shack felt like the world holding its breath.

Then, she finally set the spoon down — no flourish, no decision — and finally looked at Hope. The black pits of her eyes were unreadable for a beat that seemed to stretch thin.

"Fools ask for courage when they have none," she said quietly. "They ask for miracles and call them plans. You ask for my blade, and you offer grief in return." 

Her mouth titled, an expression that might have been pity. 

"Very well. Tell me one thing first.” 

She leaned in just slightly.

“If we fail, what will you do with the knowledge that you keep?"

Hope let the silence settle around the Night Rose’s question like a stone disappearing into deep water. When she finally spoke, her voice was stripped of every flourish — no posture, no loop-worn bravado or heroics. Just the truth.

“No tricks,” she said, meeting Jade’s eyes first, then the demon’s. “Not from me. Not this time. No loops, no half-measures, no excuses. We won’t beg tomorrow for a do-over. We won’t crawl back here pretending courage can be borrowed from another timeline.”

Her jaw tightened. 

“I’m not asking you to chase miracles with us. We try once — with you, with everything we have. And if it still isn’t enough…”

She exhaled a breath, raw and steady.

“Then we live with that.”

Jade touched her sleeve, small and shaking. The Night Rose watched the small gesture like an omen, her eyes narrowing as she weighed the meaning. 

And for the first time since they arrived something like consideration passed over her face — not pity, not approval, but the cold, precise weighing of consequence.

The shack went still. The Night Rose considered them both for a long, barren moment. 

Then she tapped the spoon twice against the rim of the pot. 

“Very well,” she murmured. “Your courage buys you a meal. Sit. Eat. Mortals fight better on a full stomach.”

Jade’s face drained, staring at the pot as though it might unfurl fangs. Hope didn’t look much better — and had no answer ready when Jade whispered, horrified: 

“… Full of what?”

Chapter 8: Chessmen of Olympus

THE FOREST CLOSED around them the farther they went — vines like veins across the trunks, moss breathing on stone, the air growing thick with the weight of dusk. The trail through Magic Mosses was less a path and more a suggestion, swallowed by the green as if the island itself wanted to take it back. Every few steps, the hum of insects swelled, then dipped again, lost beneath the drip of water and the low creak of wood.

Hope led, though not quickly. Her sneakers sank in the loam, soft with centuries of decay. The strap of her satchel bit into her shoulder, heavy with the last of their supplies. She adjusted it — anything to break the quiet.

“You did good back there,” she said finally. Her voice was quiet enough that it didn’t seem to belong to the world outside their little pocket of air. “Standing up to her, I mean.”

Jade didn’t answer right away. Her eyes were on the trail, where the last light of the sun shone through the canopy in long green bars. Her hands were still clenched at her sides, nails marked with dirt.

“I just said what I had to,” she murmured.

“Yeah,” Hope said softly, “that’s what doing good usually feels like.”

Jade’s laugh was small and hollow — a breath that didn’t make it to a smile. She stepped over a root, eyes flicking up toward the deeper forest ahead.

“Doesn’t feel like it,” she said. “Feels like I just made her hate me.”

“Trust me,” Hope said, “the Night Rose doesn’t really feel things like that.”

She looked over her shoulder, just long enough to see the demon pacing behind them — silent but for the occasional scrape of metal from one of the countless weapons hanging at her sides. Her gaze was lowered, her stride even. She could have been thinking about anything, or nothing at all.

“She’ll be fine,” Hope added. “You said what needed saying.”

The demon’s voice slipped free like a blade turned in a practiced hand — smooth, unlabored, and cutting all the same.

“Flattery’s a poor salve for fear,” the Night Rose said. “Keep your mind on the path, child. It’s shorter than you think to die lost.”

Jade stiffened, her mouth twitching with a half-swallowed retort. Hope raised a hand without looking back.

“Easy,” she said quietly. “She’s just reminding us who’s in charge.”

The forest breathed around them — cicadas swelling, leaves whispering above. Hope thought their words had died in the underbrush, swallowed by all that noise. But then —

“I am reminding you that hesitation is what kills,” came the voice from behind, smooth and precise. “You may waver in thought, but not in purpose. From here, we walk toward truth. If Daigo cannot be swayed, he must be stopped.”

The sound hadn’t carried so much as arrived, like it had been waiting in Hope’s ear the whole time. She flinched before she caught herself. She’d forgotten — how demons heard, how distance meant nothing to them. That their supernatural senses rendered what even their remarkable intuition couldn’t. Nothing whispered stayed private.

Jade froze. She glanced back at the Night Rose, still pacing behind them, gaze fixed straight ahead. There was no sign she’d spoken at all — no breath, no strain, no motion of her lips. Just that voice, hanging cold between the trees.

The words sat heavy in the air, and even the forest seemed to lean in to listen. Hope’s throat tightened. She could feel Jade’s gaze on her now — the faint question hanging there, the one neither of them wanted to say out loud.

“Yeah,” Hope said finally, forcing a breath out through her nose. “We’ll stop him.”

Jade’s steps slowed for just a moment. She drew a breath, eyes on the dark ahead.

“No talking circles — no more riddles,” she murmured. “No ‘maybe next time”. If it doesn’t work  —”

She didn’t finish, but she didn’t need to. The thought was enough.

Hope met her eyes, caught the flicker of fear hiding behind the resolve, and nodded once.

“Then we do what we have to,” she said.

 

For a long moment, the only sound was the forest — the slow, rhythmic pulse of the island’s breath. The sky above the canopy had gone from gold to gray to something close to violet. Fireflies blinked through the undergrowth, their glow threading between the roots.

Hope reached out, brushing her fingers against the bark of a tree as they passed — grounding herself, just for a second.

“You’re braver than I was,” she said, almost to herself.

Jade glanced at her, confused. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Hope smiled faintly — not the kind that warmed, but the kind that accepted something inevitable.

“You’ll see,” she said — quiet, apologetic, her voice thinning like she wished she could take the words back.

 

The Night Rose’s shadow stretched long across the path behind them. Ahead, the jungle thickened — vines drooping low like wet ropes, the air cooling to a wet hush. Through the undergrowth, a faint shimmer began to pulse between the trees, not firelight but something paler, colorless — the ghost of daylight trapped underground.

Hope slowed, squinting toward it. The moss ahead glowed faintly, sick with a light that didn’t belong to the sun or moon. The place where Daigo meant to open the portal wasn’t far now — the old clearing where the ground had already begun to thin between worlds.

She felt the pull in her bones before she saw it, that hollow ache the loop always left behind when it knew the ending was close.

“We’re almost there,” Hope said quietly, though it sounded less like reassurance than resignation.

Jade stepped over a tangle of roots and looked up, scanning the thinning canopy. “Is this the spot?”

She caught herself a heartbeat later, surprised she’d asked the question out loud — and not to Hope. The Night Rose had taken point without ever saying so, her presence warping the silence around her until command seemed a natural gravity.

The demon didn’t answer. She only stopped walking. The forest listened.

Then came the sound — a dry, mechanical rhythm: click, snap, hum. The red gleam of the Night Rose’s Veiled Precision sight flared to life, painting a pulse of red light across the dark trunks. 

Jade’s breath caught. She wasn’t naïve to think the Night Rose meant to turn the gun on them — but something in the way the demon stilled made the moment feel final. Too soon. Too sharp. This was it — the moment. A moment Jade wasn’t ready for — not yet. 

She glanced at Hope for some unspoken signal, but Hope’s brow was furrowed, her steady mask folding into something else: not fear, but confusion with edges. 

“This isn’t it,” Hope said, half to herself. “Not yet.”

The Night Rose’s voice followed, low and even. “You think in patterns. In your circles of time. But the world does not obey your design. Something has shifted — just as you have spoken. I can feel the breath of it.”

Hope blinked, uneasy. “Shifted how? What kind of shift?”

The demon’s head tilted, nostrils flaring. 

“Fire. Metal. Something detonated deep in the woods.”

Hope’s first instinct was denial — sharp, automatic. That wasn’t how this went. This wasn’t part of the pattern. The clearing, then the confrontation, then — 

She shook her head. “We can’t go off path. This is the trail Daigo takes — it’s the same every time.”

She heard it as she said it — the wrongness of it, the thin crack in the armor. 

In the dark, Jade’s eyes flicked towards her — not at the words, but at the admission buried inside them. Every time. A phrase Jade wasn’t supposed to hear, not so plainly. 

Hope felt the weight of Jade’s stare — the soft, frightened question hiding behind it — but she couldn’t look back. 

Because…

Because something in her bones was tightening. An old ache threading through her ribs as if the loop itself had reached up and hooked a finger beneath her sternum. Because the forest felt familiar in a way that had nothing to do with sight or sound, that wasn’t tied to memory at all. Nothing to do with the countless days she had walked this trail. 

It was deeper. Lower. A pressure — a heaviness, pressing at the base of her skull. A tug she’d come to trust more than memory. A warning. The loop pulling at her, whispering that she’d been here before — not on this exact path, but in this exact shape of dread. Something she’d seen falling through the sky once before.

Comets. Falling like knives. A sky torn open. A shadow behind the clouds. Probe droids crawling out of cratered dirt, steam rising off their armor in slow, living breaths. The day everything came undone. 

She didn’t remember it fully — not yet. Her mind couldn’t hold onto it. The picture slurred, broke apart. But the echo was there, pulsing like a bruise beneath the skin. 

For a moment, she thought she saw stars. 

“Every available blade,” the Night Rose said flatly. “Every hand. You said you needed all of them.”

Hope finally looked up. Suspicion pinched behind her eyes. 

“What are you saying?”

“Jones,” the demon replied, as if it were obvious — the only possible conclusion. “If he’s here, we find him. You find Jones, you find Daigo.”

Hope’s stomach turned. The name landed like a stone she’d been pretending not to see.

“Jones?” she echoed, though she already knew the answer.

Jade looked between them, her voice careful but steady. “You said it yourself, Hope. Anything’s possible.”

Hope exhaled, heart pounding. Right. The mission — their excuse to find Daigo, to find the truth. But now it was something else entirely. A sign. A reminder.

“That’s them,” Jade said softly, following her gaze. “The anomalies. That’s what we’re supposed to be tracking, remember?”

“Then we find where they fell,” she said. “If Jones is out there —”

“Then the forest will tell us,” the Night Rose finished, already stepping ahead.

 

They moved faster after that, the green closing tighter around them until the trail felt like a throat narrowing. The night grew restless — insects scattering, birds shrieking, the smell of smoke threading the air like a warning.

When the trees finally opened, it was onto a wound in the earth. Heat rolled out first — a dry, breathless wave. The crater yawned before them, smoking and hot, ringed with splintered trees and scorched moss. At its center, half-buried in soil and flame, lay the twisted wreckage of a black Imperial probe droid — its mechanical limbs bent inward like a spider curling in death.

“That’s… not one of ours,” Jade whispered. “And definitely not Kane’s.”

Hope stared at it, her stomach tightening into a knot of dread and recognition.

“Yeah,” she said. “They’re here all right. And it’s a good bet that they know we’re here, too.”

The wreck hissed faintly in the cooling air, smoke bleeding from its ruptured core. The Imperial probe droid’s shell was half-buried in the crater, its black carapace cracked open like an insect’s husk. One red sensor still blinked weakly, cycling through static, the light catching in the hollow of its shattered eye.

Jade crouched at the rim. “You said you’d never fought the Empire before, right?”

Hope didn’t answer at first. She stood just behind her, arms crossed tight, eyes fixed on the dying machine as though it might recognize her.

“Not directly,” she said finally. “Not in this lifetime.”

Jade glanced up. “But you’ve seen them?”

Hope’s jaw tightened. She opened her mouth, closed it again. 

“Once,” she said slowly. “Back home… things weren’t simple.”

A beat. Smoke curled from the droid’s shattered lens. Hope exhaled through her nose, searching for the least ridiculous way to phrase the next part. 

“People depended on powers they didn’t understand. And those powers —” She grimaced, almost wincing at her own words. “Look, this is going to sound insane, but… where I come from — my island — we were ruled by gods? Kind of?”

She flicked her hand in a small, helpless gesture — part apology, part please don’t laugh. Hope had grown up with stories too, the kind adults told with a wink and a warning, meant to scare kids away from certain cliffs and certain ruins. Myths and fairytales — the kind everyone outgrew. 

And yet here she was, trying to wrap those same stories in plain words, hoping Jade wouldn’t hear them as nonsense. Jade, who had her own bedtime stories turn real the moment magic returned to the island. Hope knew the look — that careful, bracing quiet someone wore when the world asked them to believe one impossible thing too many. 

“Real ones,” she added quietly, the humor bleeding out as the memory took hold. “Or… close enough that it didn’t matter.”

The shift in her tone — the sudden drop from awkward deflection to something flat and distant — made Jade straighten a little. Hope’s eyes stayed on the wreck. 

“People thought they didn’t need gods anymore. Thought they could run things themselves. And maybe they could have — until my sister decided to remind them what it looked like when gods got angry.”

“Valeria,” Jade said quietly. 

Hope nodded. “She brought them back. Maybe thought she was helping. Thought the world needed to see power again.”

She trailed off, watching the smoke twist from the machine’s eye. The Night Rose prodded the wreck with the end of her gun, metal clinking against metal, but said nothing.

“The gods liked to test us,” Hope went on, her tone lowering. “They played games. Sometimes with the weather. Sometimes with lives. Once, one of them decided to test me — said it was a lesson in foresight. If I wanted to see the future, I should understand what kind of monsters would live there.”

She gestured at the droid with a slight, almost rueful motion. 

“And that’s what they showed me.”

Jade frowned. “The Empire?”

“The first time I saw their ships, their soldiers — I thought it was a dream. But it was a preview. A warning. The gods thought it would make me careful.”

Her mouth tilted in something that wasn’t quite a smile. 

“They meant well,” she said — and the words sounded tired in a way nothing else had. 

Jade watched her. Even in the dim light, she could see it — the exhaustion hanging behind Hope’s eyes, the shadow of something that had never really left. She wondered if Hope realized how much that little phrase gave away.

The Night Rose’s voice cut through the silence, low and distant. “The gods played their games with you. The Empire would too. Tell me, prophet… when do you stop pretending you’re the one moving the pieces?”

Hope didn’t argue. She just kept watching the droid’s eye flicker, the red light fading into ash.

She was still staring down at the probe droid’s shattered lens when a voice drifted in from behind them — dry, familiar, and far too casual for a place like this. 

“Wasn’t planning on seeing you here.”

Hope spun before the sentence finished — so hard her sneakers slid in the ash. The Lock-On Pistol was already in her hand, breath sharp in her throat, sights tracking the movement through the mist. 

A tall figure stepped between two trees — long coat, scarf trailing, posture easy in that irritating Jones way. His hands lifted instantly, fingers splayed. 

“Easy, kid,” Jones said, with a ghost of a smile. “Didn’t think I’d have to remind you what I sound like.”

Hope didn’t lower the gun. Couldn’t. 

Her pulse pounded in her teeth. For a breath, the forest was gone — replaced by the memory of a shoreline, a broken sunset, the last time she’d seen him before everything reset and reset again. 

Seeing him here — in a place he shouldn’t be, in a moment she had never been allowed to change — clawed something raw and terrified open inside of her. 

Jones read it. Of course he did. His expression softened — a quiet apology beneath the bravado. 

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, “bad spot for reunions. I get it.”

Then came another sound: the clean, surgical click of the Night Rose’s weapon charging. 

Hope turned just in time to see the red dot blink once across Jones’ chest. 

pop.

The shot cracked like a suppressed breath. Jones’ sunglasses flew clean off his face, cartwheeling into the dirt.

“HEY — what the —”

pop.

The second shot cut him off, hitting center-mass with a thick, sickening thud against the vest. Jones staggered, a strangled yelp tearing out of him as he clutched his ribs like he expected to find a crater there. A warped slug spat out of the torn knit of his turtleneck and clattered into the leaves. 

“ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR —”

He didn’t finish. The Night Rose lowered the SMG with exquisite calm. Smoke curled from the muzzle like a satisfied breath.

“I suppose,” she said dryly, “you don’t care for surprises either.”

Hope’s stomach lurched. 

Jade’s eyes went wide with open horror. 

“WHAT — what is wrong with you?!” Jade snapped. “He’s on our side!”

Jones was still wheezing, one hand pressed to his chest. “Lady, you’ve got a terrible sense of humor —”

Hope whipped back toward the Night Rose, fury slicing through the shock. 

“Humor?” 

The Night Rose tilted her head, unbothered. 

“He’s alive.”

A cold shrug.

“If I wanted him dead, I wouldn’t have wasted ammunition proving the point.”

Jade looked ready to explode. Hope holstered her pistol, but the look she gave the Night Rose was sharp enough to skin something. 

“You ever do that again,” Hope said quietly, “and I don’t care what side you’re on.”

The Night Rose’s only reply was a faint, unrepentant smile. 

 

The argument died on Hope’s tongue. Jones was alive — upright, breathing, cursing —  and the sight split something in her chest wide open. 

“Right,” he breathed, trying for casual and missing by a mile. “Now that that’s… taken care of —”

Hope didn't mean to move — her body just went. Jones barely had time to register her before she collided with his chest. One second he was brushing the shattered plastic of his sunglasses from his hair — bits of black lens falling and glinting in the dirt. The next, Hope’s arms were around him, tight and desperate, her face pressed into his coat like someone finally allowed to breathe. 

He froze from pure surprise, inhaling sharply, rigid for the span of a heartbeat. Then — slowly, cautiously — he folded an arm around her. One hand hovered as if afraid to touch her wrong before settling between her shoulders.

"Hey," he murmured, breath unsteady. "Hey. Easy. I'm here."

"It's been too long," Hope whispered into the lapels — and even she heard what lived under those words.

Jade opened her mouth — reflexively — to say something stupid and obvious like, "It's only been a day, drama queen." But she didn't say it. Couldn't. The words died on her tongue. 

Because the last time she'd seen Hope — really seen her — was twenty-four hours ago outside the Slurp Room. Tired, yes. But alive, grounded, smiling that stubborn smile like nothing could touch her. Like everything was going to be alright, just like she told Jade it would. 

The Hope standing in front of her now looked nothing like that girl. The way she hugged Jones like someone clinging to a life raft; the way a shadow clung under her eyes; the way she breathed like she'd been holding the world together alone for far too long.

Jade's stomach twisted.

For her, it had been a night. For Hope... God knew how many loops she'd lived through since then — how many failures, how many losses. Just trying to reach out to her stupid brother, trying to stop him from damning them all.

Whatever Hope had lived through in the loop since that moment... it hadn't been short.

The hug broke slowly. Hope stepped back. Jones kept his hands on her arms for a beat longer, searching her face with a seriousness that didn't belong to someone seeing her after twenty-four hours — but to someone who felt he'd missed weeks, maybe months, of her life. Who had searched for her, but couldn't find a trace. Who only grew more concerned, but couldn't act or change anything about that.

"It's the Empire," he said. "They're here, on the island. They're after the Shard."

Hope nodded. "I know. They grabbed me last night — me and Joss. At the Slurp Room. Kane's been working with them."

Jones' expression shifted so fast it hurt to look at — disbelief and confusion at first, then horror, then a quietly fury that tightened every line in his face.

"You — they took you?" He swallowed. "You got taken and I — I didn't even… Hope, I had no idea.”

“I’m fine,” she said quickly. 

But her voice shook at the edges. The hardest part hadn’t been escaping. Jones heard that tremor. It gutted him. 

Jones dragged a hand through his hair, pacing half a step like he needed the motion to keep from folding. He didn't say anything for a moment, his jaw just clenching and unclenching.

Then, Hope tilted her head towards Jade.

"And Jade... Jade saved me."

Jade went stiff, completely. Her breath stuttered, caught mid-halfway. Her shoulders curled, gaze dropping to the moss underfoot. No sooner did she flinch did she feel Jones' gaze swing towards her — not angry, startled and raw, too open, but nothing she could register and trust her feelings on.

Jones had frozen too. His gaze snapped to her. He took her in the way someone might take in a kid who came home scraped and bruised. Suddenly the whole world felt like it was tilting underneath him. His breath hitched — pain? Disbelief? Pride? It was impossible to tell. 

Hope didn’t see it. Not yet. 

Jade did. 

Jones’ breath hitched — sharp, involuntary. He looked at Jade like she wasn’t standing there at all, but returning from somewhere no one ever came back from. Like she was a ghost. Like someone he had already mourned, because the alternative hurt too much to hold. 

The shock cracked first — then the relief. Small, trembling, unmistakable. 

Before Jade could speak, before she could brace or retreat or even breathe, Jones stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her. 

Jade froze. 

Her spine locked, her breath punched out of her. Her hands hovered uselessly in the air — like she didn’t know whether she was allowed to touch him. 

“Kid… I can’t — I can’t even tell you— Jesus, Jade, you’re alive.”

For a heartbeat, Hope almost read Jade’s stiffness as embarrassment — praise had always made her go rigid. And Jones could undo a person with a steady look. 

But Jade wasn’t overwhelmed. She was stricken. 

Her fingers curled too tight into Jones’ coat. But she wasn’t absorbed in it. That same place against the lapels Hope had taken moments earlier had a pair of wide, frozen eyes looking out from over them. Jade was staring at nothing but the forest floor, but even then Hope couldn’t be sure that she was really looking at anything at all. Her breath came shallow and uneven, like someone bracing for impact instead of basking in approval. 

And something else — something Hope couldn’t name — trembled underneath her skin. An old hurt? A new fear? Something she had missed?

The thought snagged — sharp, unwelcome. Hope blinked, uneasy. 

She stepped closer, opening her mouth to break the tension in the only way she knew how — with a joke, a tease, something easy and grounding: 

“Give her a little credit,” she said, smiling crookedly. “She’s tougher than she looks.”

But Jade didn’t smile. And Jones didn’t loosen his hold. 

Hope’s confusion sharpened. Something cold curled in her stomach — wrong, wrong, wrong — but she couldn’t name it yet. 

She stepped forward, trying to reclaim the moment, trying to ground them again. 

“We’ve got a chance now,” she said. “Jones, we can do this. This time —”

Jones still held Jade by the shoulders, but his grip wasn’t firm anymore — it was trembling. Less desperate, more like he couldn’t hold on. Like he didn’t have the strength. His own shoulders were shaking — barely, but enough that Hope saw it. His breath didn’t land right. Too shallow, too ragged. 

And that’s when Hope’s brain finally stopped trying to fill in blanks with comforting answers. 

Because when he lifted his head…

There were tears on his cheeks. Real ones. Quiet, stunned, disbelieving tears. 

And, just like that…

The false story Hope built in her head shattered. 

The realization crashed through her so fast it made her step back. Something was wrong. Deeply, catastrophically wrong. 

Jones finally pulled away. His hands stayed planted on Jade’s shoulders, gripping hard, like he needed to feel her bones to believe she was real. 

“… Jones?” she whispered. 

He didn’t look at her. Not at first. When he finally did, the dread in his eyes was something she hadn’t seen in years. He didn’t even try to hide it as he turned towards her — the dread, the grief, the apology. 

Hope felt something cold and ancient curl behind her ribs — the loop tugging at her again, warning her she’d missed something essential. 

“It’s Peri,” he said. Quiet. Crushed. “Hope… the Empire picked her up. And I —”

His voice cracked. 

“I thought they had Jade too.”

Jade’s breath hitched — small, wounded, almost a sob. Hope felt her stomach drop straight through the forest floor. 

 

The wind shifted. Not a breeze — not weather. A pressure, a wrongness. 

Jones lifted his head first, something sharp and familiar ripping across his expression — like an old wound remembering how it hurt. Hope felt it too — the evil gale threading cold fingers down her spine, stirring the dirt around her sneakers. 

The forest exhaled sharply, bending as though something colossal had breathed against it. The canopy swayed in a rolling shudder that made the branches groan. That smell hit next: charged metal, ozone, the electric tang that Hope remembered with the clarity of a scar. 

The storm was coming. The storm that always came before everything broke. 

Jade noticed last. 

She clutched Jones’ coat suddenly, fingers twisting in the fabric as if holding on could anchor her to something that wasn’t falling apart. Tears streaked hot down her cheeks. 

“We have to go back,” she choked. “We have to loop back — we can save her, we can still save Peri —”

“Kid —” Jones started, instinctively pulling her in. His voice gentled, softened, tried to be the promise she needed. 

But it broke. Right where the truth lived. 

He closed his eyes. His hand on her back stalled, suspended between comfort and confession. 

“That’s… not how it works.”

Jade stared up at him, tears trembling on her lashes, widening like he’d struck her. For one terrible heartbeat she looked like she expected him to take it back. 

He didn’t. 

Her breath hitched in a sound that didn’t belong in the world. 

And then Jade turned to Hope — not as a soldier, but as a friend begging someone to undo the unbearable.

But Hope wasn’t looking at her. She wasn’t looking at anything. She stood too still, too quiet, eyes fixed on a future she already knew. And Jade felt something cold bloom inside her: Hope didn’t expect to save Peri. Hope didn’t expect to save anyone. She wasn’t overwhelmed — she was resigned. The loop had carved something out of her that Jade didn’t recognize.

“Is… is this where you say it?” Jade whispered. “Where you tell me I wasn’t cut out for this? That you warned me? That I should’ve stayed behind — that I should’ve just been… just been —”

Hope’s stomach lurched so hard she thought she might vomit.

“Jade, no,” she breathed. “I would never —”

But Jade was barely hearing her. She was reaching for Hope now, fingers catching in the sleeve of her hoodie like someone slipping underwater and grasping anything that might hold.

Her voice broke apart.

“Please, Hope,” she gasped. “Please. We can fix this. We have to. Please.”

Hope’s throat burned. She could feel Jones beside her, silent, braced. She could feel the Night Rose behind them, cold and unmoved — black eyes reflecting nothing, not even Jade’s grief.

And for a moment — just one — Hope wished she were cruel enough to lie.

Tell Jade they’d undo this.

Tell her they’d rewrite it all.

Tell her Peri was safe somewhere waiting.

But Jade’s hands were shaking against her sleeve. Her heart felt like it was splitting open under her ribs.

Hope stepped closer despite herself. She rested her forehead gently to Jade’s, voice barely a breath.

“I’m so sorry.”

Not enough. Not even close.

But it was all she had that wasn’t a lie.

Jade crumpled, shoulders folding in on themselves as another sob tore loose — small, strangled, terrified. She clung to Hope like gravity had given out beneath her.

And that evil gale rolled again through the trees, colder this time. As if the island itself were listening.

Jade didn’t scream.

She just broke.

Her knees hit the dirt with a soft, miserable thud — the sound of someone stripped of even the strength to fall. Hands clutched at the moss, fingers digging in, but there was nothing to hold. Her sobs came in small, miserable gasps, the kind that hurt to listen to.

Hope dropped to a crouch beside her, useless, helpless, hands shaking an inch above Jade’s back and not knowing how to touch her without making it worse.

Jones turned away like he couldn’t bear to watch a kid cry because of him — shoulders locked, jaw trembling, eyes red around the edges.

For a heartbeat, the forest held all of it.

 

A sharp, cutting gust ripped through the clearing and scattered ash across the crater like shrapnel. The trees leaned groaning under the pressure, leaves rattling like distant bones. The storm’s breath swallowed Jade’s sobs, swallowed Jones’ unsteady exhale, swallowed even Hope’s too-still silence. 

And then the Night Rose spoke. 

Her voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. It slid through the gale like a blade, clean and merciless.

“This,” she said, low and venom-cold, “is what comes of playing gods.”

Hope stiffened. Jones did too. Not flinching at the sound — flinching at the truth threaded inside it. 

The wind whipped harder, tugging at fabric and hair, but the demon moved through it untouched. She stepped closer, shoes sinking inches into the crater’s soft edge. Each footfall was deliberate, heavy, like she was claiming the ground. 

Her shadow stretched long across the dirt, swallowing Jade and Hope in a single, distorted sweep — stretched by the flickering firelight from the wrecked probe, reaching before she even arrived. 

The storm swelled, snarling around her. Her voice rose above it anyway.

“You two loop-walkers,” she hissed, “with your delusions of pattern and mercy. You throw yourselves at the same wall, again and again, insisting the stone will grow soft for you.”

Hope inhaled sharply — ready to protest — but the demon cut straight through her breath.

“How much time have you wasted chasing after that boy?” The Night Rose went on. “How many cycles? How many deaths? How many mornings have you woken thinking the loop would give you favor?”

She gestured — at Jade crumpled in the dirt, at the still-smoking probe droid, at the storm tightening above them like a closing fist.

“And still you fail.”

Jones’ jaw ticked, fury rising — but not enough to drown out what he already knew. He didn’t snap, not yet. 

Hope, though — 

Hope flinched. Not at the accusation — at the accuracy. A tremor she thought she’d carved out of herself a long time ago. Anger pushed up through it, cracked and fragile, but real. The ghost of tears threatened at the corner of her vision. 

She swallowed it down — hard — and rose halfway, one knee in the dirt, an arm instinctively braced between Jade and the demon. Not dramatic — protective. Something human. 

“You cling to the illusion that you are the only hunters in this game,” the Night Rose continued. “But someone else has seen your trail.”

But all that bravery Hope had crumbled the very instant the Night Rose said the obvious. Her breath caught — a tiny, involuntary intake. Not fear. Not recognition — understanding. A cold, sudden click of pieces falling into place. 

Jones went rigid beside her — not flinching, bracing. The kind of stillness that meant he had just realized something he didn’t want to name. 

Enough for the demon’s eyes to narrow. The Night Rose looked down at them all like they were children caught in a lie.

“Yes,” she murmured. “You heard me. Either your Empire has glimpsed one of your precious attempts… or you two have grown sloppy.”

Jones’ fists curled.

Hope looked at him — really looked — and something inside her buckled. She saw what he saw. Saw who the Empire would go after first. Saw the cost. 

Not Daigo. 

Jade.

The Night Rose wasn’t warning them that the Empire had found Daigo’s trail. She was warning them that the Empire had found theirs — and their trail led straight to the one person neither of them could afford to lose. 

Hope’s gaze flicked toward Jade — small, shaking, ruined in the dirt. 

That was the cost. That had always been the cost. 

It hollowed her. A split-second of clarity so sharp she could barely breathe. 

She saw Jones’ guilt. Saw her own reflected in it. Saw the truth the Night Rose had been circling since the shack. 

The demon savored it.

“Why else,” she purred, “would they track down the girl and her little friend?” 

She gestured lazily toward Jade with a flick of her clawed fingers — dismissive, taunting. 

“Why else would they follow her… instead of you?”

Jones’ breath hitched  — a blow he didn’t see coming. 

Because she’d struck the softest thing he had. 

Hope looked sharply at him. And this time, something in her expression cracked open — not resignation, not strategy: fear.  A thought she hadn’t allowed herself to think until now. 

The Night Rose watched both realizations bloom. Delighted — like a wolf watching wounded prey understand the shape of the trap. 

Jones snapped.

“That’s enough,” he barked. “This doesn’t concern you, Rose.”

Her head turned toward him — a predator listening. Firelight caught the black in her eyes.

Then she smiled. It wasn’t kind.

“Everything concerns me,” she said. “If your enemies are hunting children in your place, loop-walker, then you two have run out of attempts long ago. And now —”

She pointed at Jade.

“Now your friends pay the price you tried so desperately to avoid yourselves.”

Jones took a full, furious stride towards her — the wind catching his coat like it meant to drag him straight into the demon’s shadow. 

Hope grabbed him before he could take another. Her fingers clamped around his arm, muscles straining as the gale shoved at both of them. 

“Jones,” she said sharply. “Stop. This doesn’t help.”

His breath shook. Anger cracked — split clean down the middle — revealing something rawer.

“She’s right,” he said. “I never should’ve sent her away. God, Hope — I thought she’d be safer. I thought if she stayed out of this—”

His voice broke.

“—I thought I could keep her from ending up like us.”

Hope tightened her grip.

“Jones…” she said softly, “I know why you sent her away.”

Jones looked at her — desperate, ruined, waiting for judgment he already believed he deserved. 

Hope swallowed hard.

“I know what you were trying to keep her from. I know what you… what we have to do.”

The truth landed heavy between them. Even the Night Rose paused — the storm bracing around her, waiting. 

Hope’s eyes softened as she looked at Jade — sobbing into her hands, shoulders trembling — and her voice softened, gentled, even as her eyes hollowed with resignation.

“She can’t be shielded anymore, Jones. Not by you. Not by me.” 

A breath.

“She’s in this now. For good.”

Jones’ mouth tightened. Guilt rose in him like a flood.

Hope stepped closer, squeezing his arm once — not reassurance, not comfort.

A promise.

“You did everything you could,” she said.

Jones looked away, jaw trembling.

“Then why does it feel like it wasn’t enough?” he whispered.

Hope didn’t answer.

She didn’t have to.

The Night Rose moved past them then, silent as a scythe.

And the gale through the woods rose again — colder now, charged with the storm’s approach. 

As if the island itself agreed:

There would be no next time. 

Time was up.

Chapter 9: I'm (Not) In Your Mind

THEY HADN’T TAKEN five steps from the crater when the forest shifted.

Not the wind. Not the trees. Not even the light.

It was the air — the pressure in it dropping all at once, like the jungle itself had sucked in a breath and refused to release it.

Then, a voice came through the canopy:

“You should not have come here.”

It didn’t sound spoken. It sounded projected. Broadcast, as if the jungle floor itself were a speaker, rising from the soil, vibrating through moss and bark. The tone was Daigo’s — Hope knew it instantly — but warped by some reverberation that didn’t obey distance or direction. It rolled through the leaves in layers, each syllable splitting into a dozen ghostly echoes that skittered down the back of their skulls.

Jade cried out softly, clutching her ears. Jones staggered. Even Hope felt her teeth rattle — her vision shearing at the edges, something hot and bright blooming behind her eyes.

Only the Night Rose remained still, unmoved, her head angling the way predators do when they decide something needs killing.

The echo went on too long. Stretching, grinding — a kind of sonic torture that hit nerves instead of eardrums, a sound designed to flay the senses rather than warn them. It wasn’t meant to warn them. It was meant to hurt.

Hope’s blood went cold.

Daigo could have run. Could have avoided them. Could have left them behind in the chaos of the crater and the storm and the approaching Empire. Every instinct she had told her he should’ve fled straight to the portal.

But he didn’t. He wanted this.

The thought chilled her deeper than the voice ever would.

Jade pushed forward a step, voice cracking in the air:

“Daigo — Daigo please! Stop this madness! This can’t be what you want!”

The jungle quieted.

The echo died so suddenly it felt like a plug that had been pulled. Whether it was Daigo, or the way Jade’s voice had reached him, Hope couldn’t tell. She only felt it in her chest: a stutter. A hesitation, a fracture. The silence that followed was sharp enough to bleed on.

Branches parted. Daigo stepped into the clearing.

Hope didn’t recognize him at first.

He stood wrong — too tall, too motionless, the air around him bending slightly, as if depth itself were warped. Light caught his eyes through the slits of his mask and made them look bottomless, reflecting nothing.

When he spoke, it was quieter. But that unnatural echo still curled around the words like a shadow moving half a heartbeat behind him:

“Is this the weapon you’ve chosen?”

His gaze slid to Jade — slow, hollow, pitying.

“Guilt?”

The clearing settled around them like a held breath — too still, too expectant, as if the jungle itself were afraid to move.

Daigo didn’t even seem to see the others. Jones, standing in front of Jade with one hand subtly shifting toward his holster. Jade, trembling, voice caught between a plea and a cry. The Night Rose, expression unreadable, pulse steady as stone. None of it mattered.

Daigo’s attention was locked — frozen — on Hope.

He stepped closer, the dimming light from the crater forging the edges of his silhouette in molten gold. That was when Hope truly saw the mask.

Once, ages ago, Daigo had carved a simple, desperate thing to protect Jade from the Spirit Realm. That mask had been an act of love, desperate and homemade, softened by fingerprints and fear.

This one was its corpse.

Reassembled, reforged. Veins of gold solder stitched through fractures like a map of healed wounds. Colder than bone. Heavier than metal. Perfect in its wrongness, an imitation of humanity made with surgical precision and pure terror. It made Daigo look like the ghost of the boy he’d once been — or the grim echo of the monster he thought he now had to become.

He didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe. Didn’t move.

He just stared at her.

“This is really, truly pathetic.”

Hope flinched so hard it cracked through her like a fault line.

She tried to keep her face still — failed — and the words sank deep, vibrating through her ribs like he’d struck her with a tuning fork.

Pathetic.

Pathetic.

Pathetic.

The echo surged again — not loud, not external — inside. A pressure behind her eyes, a crackle in her jaw.

Hope gasped and lifted both hands to her ears. A childish reflex; pointless.

Her palms — even through the leather of her gloves — couldn’t muffle any of it. The sound wasn’t in the clearing. It was in her skull. Buzzing, thrumming. Needling between nerves like an instrument tuning itself on her pain.

And then the voice changed.

Not Daigo.

It spun in her skull, uncoiling slowly, reshaping itself, until she wasn’t hearing Daigo anymore.

She heard Valeria.

Pathetic, truly you are. Still clinging to that brittle little hope of yours as if it hasn’t cut you to ribbons, praying it won’t fall apart in your hands.

Her pulse spiked, sick and fast.

Something tightened in Daigo’s eyes. Something small and slight, as if he felt the flinch. As if he were savoring it. He knew. He had to know. Her chest tightened, breath strangling in her throat.

Hope pulled her hands away from her ears — slowly, terrified — because she finally understood:

There was nothing to block out.

The forest was quiet now. Deafeningly quiet.

Behind her, a voice broke through the stillness — trembling, desperate:

“…Hope?”

Jade’s voice hit the air behind her — and didn’t connect to anything.

Hope turned. Jade was there — she knew she was — but her eyes slid off her like oil on glass. Jones, the Night Rose… the clearing refused to hold their shapes.

Not gone.

Unrendered.

Like a dream deciding it didn’t need them anymore.

Hope’s sneaker scraped through dead leaves with a crunch that came a beat too late, like the sound belonged to someone else. Her legs twisted beneath her as she tried to find her footing, but she didn’t feel any of it. The air pressed against her skin, but she couldn’t feel that either — not properly.

Something was wrong. Deeply, impossibly wrong.

She turned back to Daigo. He was exactly where he’d been. Same posture. Same mask. Same stillness.

But when he spoke again, the warped echo was gone. His voice was normal. Quiet. Human.

“Even from you.”

Hope’s stomach dropped out of her, a hollow plunge she couldn’t catch.

Voices didn’t just heal themselves. Silence didn’t swallow sound whole. People didn’t blur and fall away because you looked at them wrong.

Only dreams did that.

And with creeping dread, Hope understood enough to be terrified: whatever this was, it had decided she was alone. 

 

Daigo watched her — silent and still, the molten seams of the mask catching faint light as if they were breathing.

“You think you can stop me?” he said, almost gentle. “I’m doing this island a favor. I’m ending the Dark Presence. Once and for all.”

“That’s not victory,” Hope said. “If you open that portal, you won’t find salvation. You’ll find ruin. Kane will hand the Shard to the Empire.”

Daigo didn’t react. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t even blink.

Just watched.

Something in Hope’s chest tightened. This wasn’t right. She didn’t just go still like this. She didn’t let someone loom over her without fighting back.

The wrongness pressed in — intimate, invasive — like a thought that hadn’t originated with her settling behind her eyes.

A pressure bloomed at the back of her skull. Not pain. Not sound. A directive without words, heavy and insistent, urging stillness.

Her limbs felt distant. Sluggish. As if her body were being asked to lie down before she’d agreed to it.

“Daigo,” she tried again, softer. “We could fight it together. All of us. You don’t have to do this alone. Don’t damn us all for your obsession.”

Something moved behind the mask — not an expression, but a presence. A shadow leaning forward. Listening.

“You still don’t understand,” he murmured. “It took Jade. What am I, if I don’t face the thing that stole my sister?”

The pressure deepened. A weight settled behind her thoughts — not hers. A blade laid flat against her mind, cold and patient.

Dark magic. Old magic. Predatory magic.

Only one Presence hollowed people like this. Only one thing wore grief like a lever and pulled until there was nothing left underneath.

The realization didn’t arrive gently. It cut.

“That isn’t you talking,” she whispered.

Something inside her recoiled — not fear, not panic — a thin, instinctive resistance, like muscle memory flaring too late to be useful.

Daigo’s hand rose.

Hope didn’t see it move — only registered it already there, fingers parted, palm angled toward her like he was measuring her soul.

She didn’t feel the spell begin so much as notice sensation leaving: numbness crawling up her spine, her thoughts blurring as though someone had pressed a thumb to her mind and pushed.

A pressure pressed down on her from above — ancient and cold — and her knees gave.

The world tipped. Sleep rushed into her like water flooding a sinking hull.

And in the space where the answer should’ve been, Daigo spoke again — softly, almost kindly:

“You’re not losing me,” he whispered. “You already did.”

 

The Night Rose moved first. No hesitation. No warning. Her hand slid over her hip, seized the Veiled Precision SMG, and in one fluid motion she brought it to her shoulder. The red dot glowed like a coal on the forehead of Daigo’s mask. 

“Don’t lose your nerve, Jones,” she said, voice low and steady, not even sparing him a glance. 

Jones bristled. 

Daigo didn’t. His eyes slid towards Jones — humorless, hollow, cutting. 

“That’s right, Jones,” he said softly. “Don’t lose your nerve again… like you did for Hope.”

It was a surgical strike. Jones’ jaw twitched. His breath hitched. The memory hit him like a fist. 

“Well don’t make it easier for me,” he muttered — bitter, brittle. 

Hope staggered forward. 

Jones noticed it first: 

The way she had gone still — too still. The unfocused stare. The silence. 

He felt it in his bones — something was wrong. Something was pulling her under. 

“Hope?” He said.

She didn’t answer. 

Her knees buckled. 

Jones lunged to catch her —

— but the ground answered first, with a rumble. A deep, gut-level tremor — wrong, sustained, not like meteor impacts. Like something waking up under the soil. 

“What —” Jones started — 

CRACK.

The earth split open beneath him. 

Something black and slick shot upward — a tentacle, thick as a man’s wrist — and wrapped around his ankle with impossible force. 

Jones was yanked off his feet, slammed flat on his stomach, fingers clawing at the dirt as he slid back. 

“NO— Hope!” He shouted, reaching desperately. 

But he fell short. 

Hope collapsed — hitting the ground hard, a cry ripping from her throat as consciousness flickered. The shock broke through Daigo’s spell for a moment. Her eyes fluttered open — glassy, terrified, fighting. 

Another wave of exhaustion slammed her. Sleep crashed over her like surf. 

More tentacles burst from the ground around her — black roots veining upward, wrapping around her wrists, her ankles, pinning her as she thrashed weakly, her movements slowing as the spell dragged her deeper under. 

The Night Rose’s expression didn’t change — but her stance did. She lowered the SMG a fraction, letting the red dot sight paint trembling circles across the writhing mass of tentacles erupting through the soil. 

“The corruption has already started,” she said. Quiet. Cold. Certain. “He’s under the spell of that monster that lives in the Spirit Realm.”

Jones clawed harder at the ground, dragging himself inches, fighting the pull on his leg. 

“Hope— Hope! Stay awake—!”

Another tendril spiraled upward, weaving like a vein between the stone and roots. A thicker one coiled around his calf, jerking him violently backward. 

Daigo didn’t move. 

Not when Jones clawed at the dirt. 

Not when Hope struggled in the grip of the tentacles, or when she fought sleep like she was drowning. 

He just stood — posture straight, mask gleaming dull gold. Not with malice. Not even interest. The tentacles raked across the earth, dragging Hope and Jones into a tangle of roots and shadow, and Daigo simply observed, a silent witness to suffering he no longer recognized as real. It was the patient, eerie stillness of a hunter who knows the struggle will end soon enough on its own. 

The Night Rose shifted her aim — then stilled, and swore under her breath. Too many targets. Too much movement. One wrong bullet and she’d cut Hope in half… or wake something worse in the roots beneath them.

She lowered the muzzle a fraction, jaw clenched. A faint, unreadable tension bled across her features — not fear, not hesitation, something colder. Whatever had hold of Daigo, it wasn’t something she could shoot loose.

Jade didn’t move. 

She couldn’t. 

She knelt in the dirt, both hands braced against the ground, eyes wide and unblinking. Her breath came in broken little pulls. She stared at her brother, at Hope being swallowed by whatever darkness he’d pulled from the earth, at Jones losing ground, at tentacles threading like veins across the clearing. 

She didn’t scream. 

She didn’t cry. 

She simply stared — frozen in wide-eyed horror — as the world she knew collapsed.

 

Had this… happened before?

Had Hope been here before? Had she gotten this far?

The thought chased her in circles, panicked and dizzying — not her panic. 

Jade’s. 

The loop — it had teeth. And the boy was already caught in them. Nothing reached him. He wasn’t hearing any voice. Whatever she threw at him vanished before it landed. A spirit stood between him and the waking world — an old, starving thing — turning every voice to dust before it could reach him. 

A thought with empty black eyes.

Hope’s thoughts began slipping — no longer shaped in her cadence, no longer hers alone. Emotions she wasn’t feeling trembled through her; instincts she didn’t recognize flickered like sparks at the base of her spine. 

Panic that wasn’t hers. Resolve that wasn’t hers. A blade-edged warning that belonged to someone who had never once spoken gently in her life. 

They didn’t feel like memories. They felt like interruptions — hands pulling on different parts of her mind from above. 

But she was too far under to understand that. 

She pressed her palm against her skull. The pain was there, it was real. But when she clawed at the muscle, at the bone underneath, she couldn’t feel anything at all. 

The ground felt wrong beneath her — too distant, too soft — as if she were standing in the clearing only by habit. She thought she was still on her feet. The clearing still held her — that empty space where Daigo had found Hope and her friends, and made Hope alone. It had to.

Her heart was throwing. Breaths spacing apart. Sleep dragging her down by the ribs.  

“Daigo… someone’s in your head,” she said, her own voice sounding far away. “You’re not fighting it. You’re feeding it.”

He stepped closer. The air pulsed. Hope staggered. 

He’ll kill you if you hesitate. Do not hesitate. 

The Night Rose’s voice — cold, merciless — slicing through Hope’s thoughts like a blade. 

Hope squeezed her eyes shut. 

No, no — that wasn’t real either. 

Another voice crashed through, strained and furious: 

Kid, wake up. Hope — Wake. Up.

Jones. 

But he was gone. She’d seen it. They’d all vanished in an instant. 

These weren’t voices. They were anchors her mind was throwing upward. 

And she was still sinking. 

Daigo’s next words came slow,  doubled — one voice human, the other crawling and cold. Something rising with them from the soil beneath her feet. The same forest floor calling to her, begging her limbs to sink in, to stop resisting gravity, stop resisting sleep. 

“You think I’m lost,” he said — and then laughed, sharp and brittle, a sound she knew too well. 

A pause. 

“Lost? No. You’re misunderstanding me.”

The words slid, rearranging themselves as he spoke — certainty setting into something colder. 

“Lost is not knowing what you’re willing to become.”

Another beat — too long. 

“I know exactly where I am.”

His gaze sharpened.

“You don’t.”

Hope tasted iron in her teeth. 

“No,” she breathed. “I think you’re drowning.”

A tremor ran through him — the first flicker of the boy he’d been. Then the mask’s gold seams pulsed. 

“My sister needs me,” he whispered. 

“And Jade needs you to stop,” Hope said. “She needs the real you. Not this thing wearing your voice.”

The clearing darkened. The shadows behind Daigo lengthened, creeping like tendrils.

Hope’s knees buckled. Sleep crashed over her in a hot, dizzy wave. 

She had to break free. She had to. She couldn’t let the sleep take her. She couldn’t let him lull her under. 

Hope — please. Wake UP. 

Then —

Not a sound — a jolt. A flash. Someone shouting underwater. 

Hope, get up —

Stay awake!

Fight him — 

FIGHT — 

She forced her eyes open, a gasp ripping through her. 

“Daigo,” she choked, vision flickering. “Take off the mask.”

For the first time, something in him cracked. 

And something else — something vast, heavy, wrong — cracked back. 

 

Jones hit the ground hard, the air punched out of him. A black tentacle — thick as a tree limb, slick with soil — cinched around his leg just above the knee. He kicked at it, heel slamming uselessly against rubbery flesh, but the thing only tightened, pulsing like a contracting muscle. 

He tore a hunting knife from his belt and swung down —

— but another tentacle snapped up from the earth, coiling around his wrist with eerie precision. It squeezed until his fingers trembled, the blade slipping dangerously. 

He looked to Hope. 

She was fading. Eyes half-lidded, limbs slack, tentacles sliding over her as if she weighed nothing. Her head lolled, breath shallow, trapped between consciousness and the spell dragging her under. 

He wanted to scream her name. Wanted to beg. 

But then —

pop-pop-pop

The night cracked with a familiar rhythm:

“Jones. Girl. Listen well.” 

The Night Rose’s voice cut clean through the chaos — cold and clinical.

“This is not Daigo you defy. He is enthralled. His will overwritten. The Dark Presence has embedded itself deep within him. This attack is the execution of its long design.”

Half-shrouded by swirling dirt, the demon held her Veiled Precision SMG in both hands. The silenced muzzle sparked in faint, stuttering bursts. Each flash lit the nightmare around her — dozens of tentacles, maybe hundreds, writhing through the forest floor. Roots split. Mud convulsed. The clearing had become a nest — alive, starving, waking. 

Even she couldn’t shoot fast enough.

Jones’ jaw clenched so hard it hurt — a self-inflicted pressure fighting the crushing grip around his legs. 

Oh, he’s possessed? Yeah. No kidding. Jones hadn’t seen this trick at their last get-together.

The same flash of fury lit through him that he’d felt when the Night Rose blew his sunglasses off his face. 

Thanks, Captain Obvious. Must be nice having all that skull to cushion your insights. 

But the anger curdled into something colder — fear sharpened into purpose. 

Because the Night Rose hadn’t said it as commentary. She’d said it as a diagnosis. 

And the math clicked hard and fast:

If Hope falls asleep, the loop doesn’t reset. Not this time. Not with Daigo’s corruption wrapped around the outcome like barbed wire. 

A permanent loop meant a permanent state. Whatever Daigo unleashed — the portal, the Presence, the bodies — would stay. No do-over. No second chance. No Hope. 

A tentacle tightened around his leg, bone grinding. Jones kicked at it, teeth bared, knife slipping in his grip as another tendril coiled his wrist. 

Hope can’t go under. If she goes under, they’re finished. 

He looked at her — her eyes fluttering, her breath slowing, the spell dragging her down like undertow. 

No. 

No. No.

If Hope fell asleep now, this was the loop they would die in. 

He didn’t think. He roared: 

“ROSE! SHOOT HER!”

The Night Rose didn’t even turn. 

“Is this more of that ‘humor’ you accuse me of?” She called back, bone-dry. “Your timing remains appalling.”

“DO IT!” Jones barked, voice cracking. 

A beat — the barest shrug in her stance — and she pivoted. 

One sharp exhale. One squeeze of the trigger. 

The round punched through the weak plating just beneath Hope’s knee. 

Hope’s scream tore straight out of her — raw and animal. The pain was white hot, slicing through the sleep like a flare. She gasped — the world snapping back around her in a single, painful frame. 

The fog in her eyes shattered. 

The spell cracked. 

Her gaze cleared like stormclouds ripping apart. 

She thrashed, kicking, clawing — tentacles suddenly struggling to hold someone who was awake again. 

The demon observed Hope’s agony with clinical interest, like a puzzle-box clicking open. Her eyes tracked every convulsion, every gasp, as if taking quiet inventory of the effect. 

“Attagirl,” Jones breathed, tension snapping out of his chest. 

Jones twisted towards the Night Rose — and, for a fraction of a second, he swore he saw something flicker in her expression. Not warmth. Not humor. Something cold and sharp. A glint of satisfaction — faint enough he could almost pretend he imagined it. 

Almost. 

Then, flat as a guillotine blade:

“I assumed this spectacle of tentacles was meant to satisfy someone else’s fantasies,” she said, bone-dry. “I did not expect to indulge one of mine.”

Jones gaped at her, horrified. Hope screamed again — and the Night Rose didn’t even blink. 

She didn’t get to enjoy the quip. 

A thicker tentacle whipped up from the ground, clamping around her forearm — and then another snared the long barrel of her SMG. More surged upward, wrapping her waist and legs, dragging her sideways across the dirt. 

She snarled — a sharp, guttural sound, utterly inhuman — and with a violent jerk snapped the first tendril in half. The wet pop echoed off the trees. 

But two more latched on immediately. Then three. Then more. 

Her kimono sleeves tore as she twisted, fabric ripping like paper. One shoe flew off — a dark arc through the air — as a tentacle wrenched her leg out from underneath her. 

Her SMG was torn from her grip — crushed midair, metal screaming as the barrel folded in on itself. The tentacle holding it folded the metal like foil, barrel groaning as it warped inward. 

The Night Rose shrieked — not in fear, but in rage — baring perfect, predatory teeth as tendrils slammed over her, pinning her limbs, cocooning her in writhing coils. 

The forest floor swallowed her scream. 

The clearing didn’t settle. The thing beneath it finished what it had started.

Jones didn’t vanish — he sank.

The tentacles around his legs multiplied, winding into each other, swallowing him in a mass of black, churning flesh. He fought upward, neck straining, barely keeping his head above the writhing mound as coils tightened across his chest and crushed the air out of him. His knife was long gone; his arms were pinned; only his voice was still free.

“Jade—” he choked, fighting to turn his head toward her. “Kid— go. Go!”

The Night Rose went under next.

She didn’t disappear quietly — she fought like a feral god. Her claws screeched across bark as she dug her feet into the trunk behind her, holding herself upright even as three — five — seven tentacles dragged her downward. She carved through one, then another, cleaving them with brute force, sending wet chunks splattering across the dirt. A flash of metal spun off her wrist — a knife gone flying into the dark.

But even she couldn’t hold out.

The pile surged, folding over her. Her kimono tore at the seams. Her horns snapped back against the ground. Her howl was a guttural, demonic thing, cut short as tendrils slammed over her mouth. Her last act was to wrest an arm free long enough to point — shaking, furious — at Jade.

“GIRL—” her muffled voice forced its way out, warped by dirt and pressure. “Do not falter. You must reach her. Do you hear me? YOU MUST—”

Then she was dragged under too.

The clearing convulsed. Jones was dragged lower — the mud already at his throat now, breath tearing in shallow, useless pulls. The Night Rose vanished beneath it. Tentacles swarmed in every direction like living roots.

And Jade —

Jade was the only one left standing.

She trembled so hard her teeth clacked. One hand over her mouth, the world spinning, her stomach heaving in hot, weak waves. She didn’t think — didn’t breathe — she just stared at the nightmare swallowing her brother’s allies whole.

Hope was next.

The girl sagged, eyes half-lidded again, body slackening as the tendrils slid up her sides, lifting her with horrible gentleness — like something setting aside a doll.

Jones managed one ragged sound, raw and panicked:

“Jade— go to her— before she sleeps—”

And something in Jade broke.

Not courage. Not clarity. Just the realization that if she didn’t move right now, Hope was gone — Daigo was gone — this loop, this world, everything was finished.

So she ran.

A stumbling sprint, knees buckling, breath catching in sobs — straight into the nest.

One tentacle rose like a striking snake —

and stopped.

Its tip hovered inches from her throat, quivering. A threat. A warning. A test.

Jade didn’t slow.

She pushed past it, ducking another that wound around her waist — and it simply slid away, skimming her skin, recoiling as if burned.

The realization didn’t hit her like revelation. It hit her like mercy.

They weren’t touching her. They couldn’t.

But she didn’t stop to question it. Didn’t stop to think.

Hope’s eyes fluttered again. Her body sagged, breath thinning dangerously.

“No— no, no, Hope— stay with me—” Jade pleaded, voice cracking.

Her hand brushed something in the dirt — cold metal. A knife. The Night Rose’s.

She grabbed it, fingers trembling so violently she nearly dropped it. 

And for one terrible, suspended moment she didn’t know where to put it — Hope’s neck? Her shoulder? Her leg?

Then she saw the scar.

It poked out beneath where the sleeve covering her arm had slipped. The burned, ugly, puckered patch just above the bicep — the one she knew ran all the way down to her wrist. The place Hope always hid, always protected. The place she’d once said she couldn’t feel properly.

Jade plunged the blade down.

Hope screamed — a jagged, ripping cry — eyes snapping open, breath tearing back into her lungs. Her whole body convulsed with pain.

“J—Jade—?” Hope gasped, panting, blinking hard, fighting the spell.

Jade swallowed, tears streaking her face.

Hope sucked in breath after breath. Each one ragged, desperate, pulled through clenched teeth. The pain in her arm kept her awake, barely — a flickering candle in a hurricane. 

Jade hovered over her, knife slick in her hand, shaking so violently, the blade jittered in the air. Tentacles curled and writhed all around them — but where Jade knelt, they pulled back. One brushed Hope’s shoulder and tightened. The same limb skimmed Jade’s sleeve — and recoiled, shuddering, as if burned.

“Hope— please— don’t— don’t close your eyes—” Jade pleaded, voice breaking. 

Hope’s eyelids sagged. Her breath trembled. The spell was still dragging at her, whispering, pulling, coaxing. 

She forced her eyes open again — violent, stubborn. Her hand shot up, grabbing Jade’s wrist — more strength than she should have had left. 

“Jade…” Hope rasped. “Listen to me.”

Jade froze. 

“The mask,” Hope whispered. “It’s all in the mask.”

Jade blinked. “Wh—what?”

Hope forced the words out through a shudder. “He’s still in there. Daigo. He’s trapped. The Presence is using the mask to hollow him out. If you get it off— he’ll break free.”

Jade stared at her.

Hope swallowed hard, fighting the pull of sleep with a visible spasm that tore through her body.

“You have to take it off him,” Hope breathed. “Not me. You.”

Jade nearly dropped the knife. “Hope— I—I can’t—I can’t get near him— he’ll kill me—”

“No.” Hope’s grip tightened. “He won’t.”

“How do you know that?”

Hope’s eyes flickered — unfocused, then sharp, then unfocused again.

“Because… he’s fighting.” A breath. “He’s fighting everything except you.”

The tentacles around them convulsed — like something underground had heard her speak that truth and recoiled from it. They twisted, searching, tightening their grip on Jones and the Night Rose.

One lashed out.

It wrapped around Hope’s forearm, slick and brutal, coiling tight enough to draw a sharp cry from her throat. Hope gasped, her body sagging again as the spell tugged her downward, breath thinning, eyes fluttering.

“No—” Jade choked, scrambling closer.

She didn’t think. She just reached. Her fingers closed around Hope’s arm — right where the blade had gone in. Right over the raw, ruined scar she’d just reopened.

She squeezed.

Hope screamed.

The sound pierced through her — sharp, furious, and alive. Her back arched, and her breath returned to her lungs as pain gripped through the haze, dragging her up with an inexplicable force.

And the tentacle reacted.

It didn’t tighten.

It recoiled.

The limb spasmed, peeling away from Hope’s arm with a wet, shuddering snap — as if Jade’s touch had burned it. It writhed once in the air, then withdrew, vanishing back into the soil.

Jade froze.

Around them, the others surged closer — tentacles tightening on Jones, hauling him lower; coils cinching around the Night Rose’s limbs as she snarled and fought —

—but none of them crossed the space where Jade knelt.

Another tendril crept toward Hope’s shoulder.

Jade leaned over her without thinking, one hand still clamped on Hope’s arm.

The tentacle faltered. Hovered, then slid back, recoiling again — skimming Jade’s sleeve like it had brushed a live wire.

Jade’s breath hitched, ribs locking around a half-swallowed sob. They weren’t just avoiding her.

They were afraid of her.

Her gaze snapped down to Hope.

“You’re right,” Jade whispered, the words barely a sound. “It’s me.”

Hope dragged in a shaking breath, eyes glassy but open now, focused on Jade with fierce urgency.

“Yes,” she rasped. “He’s fighting everything except you.”

Jade swallowed hard, terror and understanding crashing together in her chest.

Hope’s voice thinned, wavering at the edges.

“Jade… if I fall asleep— that’s it.” Her breath hitched. “No more loops. No more chances. We stay here. Forever.”

Jade’s whole body shook with terror. Not bravely — helplessly. 

Hope squeezed her hand — weak, but grounding.

“You’re the only one he won’t hurt,” Hope whispered. “The only one he can still see. He needs you.”

Jade’s throat bobbed. Her breath came in quick, panicked bursts. Her eyes glistened, wide and terrified.

She looked at Hope — the strongest person she knew — pale, fading, struggling with everything she had not to collapse back into the spell.

And something painful cracked inside Jade’s ribs.

Not courage. Not confidence.

Responsibility.

Hope was trusting her. Daigo needed her. No one else could do this.

Jade clenched her jaw, wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve, and nodded — a small, trembling nod, but real.

“O-okay,” she whispered.

Then firmer:

“Okay. I’ll do it.”

Jade pushed herself up from the dirt.

Her knees wobbled. Her hands were slick with Hope’s blood. Her breath rattled in her throat like it belonged to someone weaker — someone smaller — someone she didn’t want to be anymore.

But she stood.

The tentacles nearest her paused.

Not recoiling this time. Not startled. 

Simply… waiting.

Jade took one step.

The limbs uncoiled, drawing back. 

A second step. 

And they parted for her like tall grass bowing under a breeze. Not a single tendril brushed her ankle.

Jones saw it first. Through the writhing mass strangling him, he hoisted his head and choked out:

“Jade— hurry— hurry, kid— Hope can’t—”

He couldn’t finish. A tentacle cinched around his ribs and hauled him deeper into the nest,  cutting the rest off, only his face still above the coils. His voice strangled against the pressure.

But Jade didn’t answer him. Couldn’t. If she spoke, she’d fall apart.

So she walked.

The forest felt smaller with every step. Quieter. Like the world was holding its breath for her.

Daigo didn’t move.

He stood at the far edge of the clearing, framed by the halo of stuttering light leaking from the now-tarnished seams of his mask. He didn’t speak, didn’t warn, didn’t threaten.

But something twitched beneath the gold-soldered fractures. Just a flicker. A catch at the jawline. A ripple beneath the rigid stillness.

Jade stopped breathing.

“Daigo…” she whispered.

No response.

But the tremor came again — tiny, pained, like someone knocking from inside a locked door.

She stepped closer. Her voice quavered, but she kept it steady.

“Daigo… I came to stop this.”

The mask tilted ever so slightly.

Jade swallowed the rising sob and kept going.

“Please,” she whispered, “let’s go home.”

A breath escaped the mask — shallow, almost human.

Then another twitch. Stronger. A falter in whatever controlled him.

Her heart broke cleanly in her chest.

She reached out — fingers trembling — toward the mask.

And the voice that answered was the mask’s. 

Quiet. Raw. Torn between two selves. 

“…I wish you could.”

 

Hope drifted. 

Not asleep. Not awake. Suspended in the thin, trembling space where consciousness frays into threads. 

The voices were gone — all of them. Jones’ panicked shouts, Jade’s trembling pleas, the Night Rose’s cold deductions. Even the phantom echoes clawing at her from outside the dream — silence stole them clean.

What remained was a hum. Soft and low, pulling her downward like the ocean’s undertow.

But then —

A sound cut through the haze.

Not a voice spoken aloud. A memory. A verdict. A confession dressed in the shape of her friend’s voice.

I wish you could.

The words didn’t echo. They hung suspended, like a blade waiting to fall.

Hope’s eyes snapped open. 

The clearing rushed back into place in shards:

The heave of the forest floor. The lattice of writhing black tendrils swallowing Jones to the chest. The Night Rose half-buried, thrashing, horns gouging the dirt. Daigo — motionless, the mask glowing faintly beneath the fractures.

And Jade.

Jade standing alone before him, hand outstretched, her fingers trembling inches from the mask — as if she were reaching for a ghost.

Hope’s breath snagged. Her pulse lurched up her throat.

Her vision sharpened with terrifying clarity. Every detail stabbed awake:

Jade’s hair plastered to her cheeks. The way her arm hovered in the air — reverent, doomed — like touching something that would break her back.

And underneath it all:

I wish you could.

I wish you could.

I wish you could.

Something inside Hope buckled. Not understanding. Not yet.

Just the gut-deep certainty that something in those four words was wrong — catastrophically wrong — more wrong than any loop, any corruption, any mask-bound spirit.

Her eyes widened. Her breath froze halfway to her lungs.

The realization hadn’t formed, but terror had. Pure, crystalline terror blooming in her chest — a crack racing across glass.

She tried to move. She couldn’t.

All she could do was stare — helpless, shaking, blood hammering in her ears — as Jade’s fingers reached the edge of the mask.

And Hope finally felt it:

Something had been set in motion.

Something awful.

Something irreversible.

And it was already too late.

 

Jade’s fingers hovered at the edge of the mask. Just a breath away — a trembling, hopeful, human breath.

Hope’s throat tore open around a sound she didn’t know she could make.

“JADE — DON’T!”

The scream ripped through her chest like she was trying to haul Jade back with her voice alone. It wasn’t warning — it was panic, terror, recognition, too late too late too late—

Jade froze.

Her eyes flicked toward the sound, wide and startled. Her balance shifted — just a fraction, just long enough. 

And that was all it took.

The forest floor didn’t crack. Didn’t shift. 

It ruptured.

A colossal tentacle — thick as a support beam, plated in tar-black sinew — shot upward with a roar of torn earth. Mud and shattered roots exploded skyward as the limb burst free, impossibly fast for something so monstrous.

Hope saw it too late.

Jones saw it too late.

Even Daigo didn’t move.

The tentacle swept sideways in a single brutal arc. It caught Jade across the ribs. The impact boomed like a stormstrike.

Jade’s body lifted off the ground — weightless, ragdoll light — and then she was gone, hurled into the trees with bone-snapping force. She struck a trunk with a sickening crack and tumbled into the brush beyond, swallowed by the dark, her scream cut short by impact.

“JADE!” Hope’s voice shredded itself on the name.

Jones bellowed something wordless.

The Night Rose snarled through her restraints.

Daigo didn’t even turn. Only the mask gleamed.

Leaves drifted down in a long, cruel rain of silence.

Hope’s heart stopped beating for one endless, shattering second.

Jade wasn’t moving. Not even a breath.

And the tentacle that struck her curled back toward Daigo like a loyal hound returning to its master.

Chapter 10: The Forest For The Trees

THE CLEARING DID NOT fall silent after the violence. Silence was too human a word.

What settled over the broken earth was older than silence — a hollowing, a withdrawal, a great and ancient listening. As if the jungle had witnessed something it was never meant to see and pulled its spirit back into the roots.

The storm above them dimmed, then breathed once — a long, thunder-deep inhalation — and held.

Roots lay split open like ruptured sinew. Trees leaned at sick angles where the ground had heaved between them, as though some enormous hand had pressed down on the world and twisted. The ground itself still shivered in slow, aftershocked breaths. Leaves spiraled through the air without wind to carry them.

And in the center of that devastation, Daigo stood alone.

Not victorious.

Not triumphant.

Merely upright, as if held in place by forces that did not obey the body.

He didn’t look at the ruin. He didn’t look at the world.

He just… stood. Still in a way no living thing ever should. Untouched, even as the forest lay broken at his feet. 

Then… 

Something moved through him. Not a thought, not a choice. A tremor, thin as a puppet string tightening. 

And he walked.

The storm’s light flickered across the molten seams of his mask, catching each fracture and briefly making it look alive. He didn’t turn toward the Night Rose’s muffled struggle beneath the coils, nor toward where Jones was disappearing inch by inch into the writhing. Nor toward the shattered treeline where Jade had vanished, broken and silent.

Not toward the wounded. Not toward the living.

Toward Hope.

She lay on the churned soil, slack and unmoving, head turned to one side — limp, breath shallow, the spell sunk deep into her bones. The tentacles had released her the moment she surrendered fully to sleep, as if convinced their work was done.

Daigo lowered himself beside her. Not kneeling — just folding, joint by joint, with a precision that ignored weight and gravity both.

His hands slid beneath her back and knees. He lifted her.

In another story, the way he lifted her might have passed for affection. There was a flicker — the faintest echo of something like longing, a crude imitation of a gesture he no longer remembered how to feel — in the way he gathered her up. As if some shivering remnant of the boy he’d been still reached for warmth without knowing how to feel it. 

Hope’s head lolled against his arm, hair dragging through the dirt in a dark comet-tail. A single unconscious twitch flickered through her hand, as though something far beneath the spell still grasped for the waking world. But it faded, swallowed by sleep’s undertow.

Daigo stared at her face for a long, soundless moment.

No sorrow.

No tenderness.

No hatred.

Just the cold attention of a mask studying what it had claimed.

But the grace — whatever phantom of it existed — vanished as quickly as it came. The mask never changed. The stillness never broke.

Lightning flared, whitening the fractures across the gold like skeletal veins. Thunder rolled a heartbeat late — hesitant, distant, almost reverent.

This was no benediction. It was an offering.

He wasn’t holding her. He was presenting her.

He did not look back.

He advanced with the slow inevitability of something that no longer questioned its purpose. 

The forest parted before him. Not by force. By presence. Bushes seemed to shrink from his path. Roots stilled. The tentacles recoiled into the earth like lesser creatures shying from a greater predator. Even the storm dimmed, lowering its rumble into a warning hum, as though it knew its time to strike had not yet come.

No ritual yet.

No portal.

Not the end.

Not quite.

The story wasn’t finished with her yet — but something else was. Something waiting to claim the part of her that still belonged to the waking world.

But the path was there.

The shore beyond it.

The storm waiting like a judge with its gavel raised.

He walked into the dark beneath the trees, Hope in his arms, and the storm gathered behind him like a hand closing over the world. 

 

Something stirred in the wreckage. 

A faint shift of dirt. A breath caught on broken air. 

Then a small, cracked sound — half-whimper, half-groan — as consciousness clawed its way back to a body not ready to hold it. 

Jade’s fingers curled, dragging a thin line through the soil as she tried — and failed — to push herself up. Pain answered first: a spreading, throbbing ache that lit every nerve along her ribs. Splinters of bark lodged in her arm. Dirt filled the half-moons of her nails. Something warm slipped down her calf in a slow, unwelcome trickle. 

She tasted blood. 

Her breath came sharp, stuttering on the inhale, faltering on the exhale. Not broken ribs — not quite — but close enough to make her wonder. 

A soft, pained sound escaped her. She lifted her head — barely. 

Only then did she force her eyes open. 

The world swam, doubled, tripled, then stitched itself back together in a shaky frame: the ruin of the clearing, the gouged earth, the scattered branches where she’d been thrown.

Her pastel jacket — all soft pinks and whites that always made her look like she’d stepped out of a college dorm instead of a war zone — was torn open along one side. The sleeve was shredded. Dirt smeared across the bright fabric like someone had tried to dim her color with their hands. Her skirt was scuffed, socks sagging and stained. One of her hair twists had come loose, curled against her cheek, as if it had given up too. 

She looked awful. She felt worse.

But she was alive. Barely.

A soft, horrified whimper broke out of her when she remembered — and she forced herself upright, clutching a tree trunk, ribs screaming as she pulled to her knees.

“Jones?”

Nothing.

“Night Rose?”

Silence.

She turned toward where she last saw Hope — only to find the ground churned, empty, as if Hope had been plucked straight out of the world. 

Jade’s breath hitched. 

“Hope...?”

No answer. No body. Not even a trail. 

For a heartbeat she didn’t know what it meant. 

Her first thought was obvious:

He took her.

Her second — sickening, colder — was:

Or the loop reset.

Either possibility made her stomach drop through the earth. 

But the third one was the one she hated most:

You don’t know.

Her fingers dug into the moss. Panic rose in her throat, thick and choking. But behind it — colder, harder — sat the memory:

If Daigo cannot be turned, he must die.

The Night Rose’s voice — severe, merciless — cut through her panic.

Hope’s voice followed, softer, breaking:

He’s still in there… but if I fall asleep, that’s it. No more loops.

The uncertainty hollowed her out. But staying here wouldn’t change any of it. Doing nothing meant letting the worst answer become true. 

Jade swallowed hard. Not knowing didn’t matter. 

She forced air into her lungs. 

Whether Hope was alive, dead, taken, or lost to the loop — Jade had to move. 

She had to find out. She had to try. 

She pushed herself to her feet. Her legs wobbled violently; she steadied herself by gripping her torn sleeve, grounding herself with the sharp sting of scraped skin.

Her eyes landed on something half-buried in the debris.

Hope’s Lock-On Pistol.

It must’ve been torn off her somewhere in the struggle. Jade stumbled toward it, dropping to a knee so fast her vision blacked out for a second. She grabbed the weapon with both hands, fingers slippery with blood and dirt.

It felt too heavy for her. Too final. Like it belonged to someone braver. But no one else was left.

Her breath quivered as she forced herself upright.

The forest waited, still and expectant. There was no clear path — only signs that the world had been moved through. Bent branches. Scuffed moss. Places where the ground dipped, as though something precious had been lifted and taken away.

Jade tightened her grip on the pistol until her knuckles whitened beneath the grime.

“I can do this,” she whispered — not because she believed it, but because she needed to hear it.

She took one step. Pain flared in her side.

Another.

And another.

Then she was running — not fast, not graceful, stumbling over roots and bracing herself against trunks as she pushed deeper into the forest. Her breath was ragged, ribs screaming, tears streaking down the dirt on her cheeks.

She didn’t know how long she’d been unconscious. 

Didn’t know how far ahead he was. 

Didn’t know if Hope was alive.

She only knew one thing, repeating in her head like a drumbeat:

If Daigo cannot be turned… he must be killed.

She ran anyway.

Because Jade didn’t know how to kill her brother.

But she knew what happened if she didn’t try.

 

By the time Jade burst through the last line of trees — lungs stabbing with every breath, ribs screaming — she already knew she was too late.

The forest dropped away beneath her feet — a sharp decline of slick stone and torn earth leading down to the shoreline. Wind slapped her across the face the moment she cleared the canopy, cold and wet and charged with something that felt older than the storm. Like walking into a different world. 

For a heartbeat she just stood there, catching herself on a jut of rock, vision swimming.

Then she saw it.

The portal.

A great bloom of impossible light hovered above the narrow spit of gravel stretching into the shallows — not open so much as exposed, like a wound peeled back to raw dimension. Pink radiance pulsed from its center in slow, thunderous beats. Each wave rippled across the water, staining the surf in ribbons of living color, the water bruising pink beneath each pulse. The air hummed around it, vibrating faintly in her teeth.

Daigo stood before it.

Still as a statue. Mask gleaming with soft, alien light, every molten fracture etched into sharp relief. 

And, at his feet…

Hope. 

Her body lay on the gravel in a posture too still to be anything but wrong. Blue hair fanned across the stones like she’d been set there deliberately. The portal’s light washed over the side of her face that was visible, making her skin appear waxen, pale — not dead, not alive, suspended in some spellbound hush between the two. 

Jade’s breath left her in a broken sound. 

Everything else fell away — the storm, the ocean, the impossible glow. All she could see was Hope lying there, face down and limp, carried to this place like an offering. 

Her knees nearly buckled. She braced herself against a leaning trunk, forcing balance into her bones. 

Something tugged at the back of her mind. Not memory — not quite. More like the shape of one, a contour without substance. A whisper of recognition with no context to hold it.  

Why does this feel like — ?

The wind shifted. And the sky split. 

Not loudly, not at first. A thin seam of glaring white carved across the low storm clouds, brightening the world in a sudden, surgical flash. Then another seam tore open behind it. And another. Streaks of burning comet-embers spilled across the horizon, leaving jagged trails of fire and smoke that cut through the heaving gray. 

Probe droids. More of them.

The tiny falling stars she’d once mistaken for meteorites. 

But now — now she could see them. 

The angular shapes of their pods. The brief flare of corner thrusters fighting the wind. The shell plating burning away in long, incandescent ribbons. 

They weren’t stars. They weren’t omens. They were the Empire — coming down like judgement. 

A deep hum rolled over the water. Low. Vast. The sound of a world tightening around its hinge. 

Jade’s heart slammed painfully against her ribs. 

She’d heard that sound once before. Only once. 

Right before everything ended. Right before the loop reset. 

Ice crawled its way up her spine. 

Hope can’t reset it this time. 

She can’t wake up. 

She can’t do anything. 

Jade’s pulse hammered in her throat. 

She lifted the Lock-On Pistol. Hands shaking, breath shallow. Vision narrow to a single point: the back of Daigo’s mask — the last human shape left on him.

The weapon beeped softly — a confirmation tone she barely registered. The scope flickered as the targeting computer locked onto his heat signature, mapping his silhouette in trembling lines of silver light. 

He did not turn. He did not react. The mask might as well have been carved from the storm itself. 

Her finger tightened on the trigger. 

Her voice broke on the whisper: 

“I’m sorry. Daigo… I’m so, so sorry…”

Her throat closed. 

She should shoot. Now. Before anything else could happen. Before the world ended. Before the Empire arrived to watch her fail. 

But she didn’t. Her finger froze on the trigger. 

Because, at that very moment, a flicker of shadow crossed the shore.

 

Daigo stood before the portal like a pilgrim before an altar — one shaped from the nightmare that had called him here.

The thing pulsed — slow, tidal — a bloom of impossible light suspended above the gravel spit, breathing in rhythms older than storms. Pink radiance throbbed through the air, bending space in soft distortions, pulling the world toward its center as if gravity itself had remembered a truer master. The stones at Daigo’s feet shimmered with a reflected glow, each pulse crawling up the seams of his mask like something anointing him. 

Hope lay behind him in the gravel, deathly still. Sea spray beaded in her hair. Her stabbed arm sprawled limply behind her, palm half-curled as though she’d fallen asleep reaching for a hand she no longer remembered. She looked small here. Small against the water. Small against the sky. 

Small against the end. 

Daigo did not kneel. Did not crouch. Did not touch her. 

He only watched the portal. 

And somewhere deep inside the cage of his ribs, the boy watched too — but as a passenger, not as a participant. Whatever awe might have flooded him months ago — whatever relief, whatever terror or triumph — the Presence had hollowed it all out. Only the mask glowed. Only the seams brightened. Only the thing riding his body felt the significance. 

He had done it. 

He had reached the threshold. 

But he could not feel his own victory. 

Above him, the storm roared in approval. 

Comet-embers streaked across the clouds. Probe droids plummeted in burning arcs, their pods shedding sparks as they punched through the clouds. Lightning fractured the horizon in stark, white-cracked ribs. The sky reenacted the final moments of a loop ending — the exact choreography he’d witnessed in the crater. 

And still Hope did not stir. 

Daigo stepped forward — one deliberate, reverent step toward the portal. 

Behind him, the water rippled. 

He didn’t turn. 

He didn’t notice. 

He couldn’t. 

Because suddenly —

KRSSHHHK—FSSST!!

A red blade burst through Daigo’s chest. 

It punched cleanly through his back, through armor and bone, erupting out of his sternum with a molten hiss that split the air. Light spilled across the gold of his mask in branching fractures, turning every soldered seam into a burning vein. 

Daigo inhaled sharply — a single, startled, human gasp. 

Two voices layered in the sound:

Daigo’s.

And the Presence’s.

Both breaking. Both dying.

The Emperor’s Apprentice stepped closer behind him, her mask hissing its steady rhythm — a mechanical inhale of synthetic drugs, a wet exhale like a creature breathing through metal teeth.

“Thank you,” she whispered against the back of his bowed head. “The Emperor will be very pleased.”

Her voice was a rasp — filtered, unnatural, frayed by whatever toxin-laced vapor fed through her respirator. But the satisfaction threading it was unmistakable.

Daigo’s legs gave way. He staggered forward, boots scraping gravel, and collapsed onto the shore beside Hope. The lightsaber slid free from his body with a wet, tearing hiss.

His mask struck the stones with a hollow clink — rolled once, twice — and came to rest face-up in the sand. The glow drained from its seams. Every vein of molten gold dulled to lifeless metal. The Presence — that patchwork parasite, that half-born godlet wearing his skin — guttered out like a candle plunged beneath water. 

Daigo’s drew one last breath. Human. Small. Almost bewildered, as though he couldn’t understand how he had finally reached the threshold only to fall short of crossing it.

His fingers twitched toward Hope. Not for help. Not in warning.

Just reaching.

Then stilled.

The Apprentice stepped over the body without slowing — without hesitation or reverence. Her cloak brushed his shoulder; he didn’t move.

She crouched, plucking the fallen mask from the gravel. Slowly, deliberately, she turned it between long gloved fingers — studying each fracture, each line of gold solder, each ancient mechanism humming faintly within the shell. 

A quiet, pleased sound rumbled through her respirator.

“The key,” she murmured. “At last.”

Before her, the portal throbbed brighter — as if recognizing a rightful heir, bowing to the hand that would deliver it to the Empire. Veins of pink radiance unfurled away from its center, revealing a thin corridor of stillness drawn toward the mask in her grasp. 

An invitation — reserved only for the one who carried the key. 

 

The Apprentice lowered the mask. 

Her attention drifted — not to Daigo’s corpse, not to the portal’s beckoning corridor — but to the other small, still shape at her feet. 

Hope.

A faint tilt of her head. A minute narrowing of the tinted lenses. Not pity. Not hesitation. Recognition. 

She crouched, boots sinking into the wet gravel, and reached out a gloved hand. Her fingers closed around Hope’s wrist — clinical, efficient — and she rolled the girl onto her back in one smooth motion. 

The sea hissed behind them. The portal pulsed once, twice, like a held breath. 

Hope’s eyelids fluttered. Barely. A thin, wavering thread of awareness slipping through the cracks of exhaustion. 

The Apprentice leaned in, breath rasping through her respirator, studying the girl’s face up close. 

That was when she felt it. 

A weight beneath her palm. A faint vibration hummed against her glove — steady, patient, like a second heartbeat buried beneath Hope’s ribs. A rigid shape, strapped tight under the shredded hoodie. A shape that did not belong to a helpless body. 

Her gaze dropped. 

Straps — burned, fraying. They belonged to a compact satchel, buckled tight — wedged against Hope’s ribs, half buried in grit. Its indicator light — steady, merciless, blinking at a slow, inevitable cadence. 

Armed. 

Active.

Waiting. 

The sound snagged inside the Apprentice’s respirator, skipping once in alarm. Her other hand darted toward the clasp — 

But a hand closed over hers — weak, trembling, and still enough to stop her cold. Hope was already looking at her. Not fully awake, not fully alive. Just awake enough. 

Her lips curled — faintly, painfully — into the smallest smile the world would ever see from her. 

A knowing smile. 

A tired smile.

A victorious smile.  

“… Guess we’ll both have to try again.”

Her eyes closed. 

And the world ignited. 

The detonation bloomed outward — a brutal sphere of fire and sand that swallowed Hope, the Apprentice, Daigo’s body, the gravel spit, the very air around them. A shockwave thundered across the shoreline, drowning even the roar of the portal — shredding trees, pitching stones into surf, silencing everything in an instant. 

Light. 

Heat. 

A final breath of defiance. 

The loop snapped. 

And the world died with them.