In the dead of night, Elyra's voice reached our heroes no more, and her existence came to an end. The ship's crash produced a sound of devastating intensity, followed by a massive explosion of fire that rose hundreds of meters into the sky, visible for kilometers in every direction around Paris. After that, nothing remained but a gigantic blaze caused by the impact, consuming everything in its path and filling the cold night air with a violent, unbearable heat.
The sound of the fire was the last thing our heroes heard through their bracelets before communication went silent for good — for the very last time. The bracelets fell quiet, cold against their wrists, as if something had just departed from them, never to return. Leaving the heroes in complete silence, surrounded by debris and flames in the heart of Paris, alone in a way they had not felt in a long time.
Now that the ship had been destroyed, the enemy would be able to reclaim their positions and resume the fight. Harris, Aria, and Shinrei had only a few moments before the army descended upon them again.
Yet none of them said a word or moved. They were all broken. Shinrei sat in the rubble, his gaze completely empty, staring at an invisible point before him as if the world had ceased to exist around him. Aria, tears flowing freely down her cheeks, had collapsed entirely to her knees on the ground, her shoulders shaken by silent sobs she no longer tried to contain. Harris remained standing, but his fist was clenched so tightly that his knuckles had turned white, holding back his tears with the same stubbornness he poured into every fight. They were thinking of the moments shared with Elyra, of what she had meant to them, of the brutal reality that had just struck them without warning.
Harris turned and walked toward Aria. He placed his hand on her shoulder with gentleness, and murmured in a slightly broken voice. "We need to pull ourselves together. They'll be here soon."
No one answered. The silence stretched on. Harris turned his eyes toward Shinrei and continued, choosing his words with care. "If we don't react quickly, we'll be joining Elyra. And that's not what she would have wanted."
Shinrei, still staring blankly ahead, his eyes red, responded after a long silence, his voice hollow and exhausted. "What's the point of fighting if we can't protect the ones we love?"
Harris took a deep breath, let the silence settle for one more second, then answered him in a calm voice, after careful thought. "If we fight, it's above all to reach out to those who need us. What is happening right now is exactly what we risk losing." He paused, his eyes lowered to the debris-strewn ground, then continued. "But we already knew that, and we made our decision with full awareness of it. The only thing we can do right now is fight so that Elyra's efforts and hopes are not in vain."
Aria wiped her tears with the back of her sleeve, her eyes still glistening, and slowly straightened up. She composed herself and regained her calm, then approached Shinrei, crouched down in front of him to meet his empty gaze, and spoke to him calmly, in a soothing yet firm voice. "You know the other two well. They must be completely shattered wherever they are right now — and yet they manage to get back up and keep moving forward even in this situation. They keep fighting. And we must do the same." She extended her hand toward Shinrei and added softly. "Once all of this is over, we'll pay proper tribute to Elyra."
Shinrei stared at Aria's outstretched hand for a moment, the muscles of his jaw clenched, his eyes bright with tears he refused to let fall. Then, after a deep breath that seemed to empty and fill something within him at the same time, he took it and allowed himself to be pulled up. Together, despite the shock that had not yet fully passed, despite the pain that still weighed heavily in their chests, they rose to their feet and regained their composure. They were ready to fight in honor of Elyra's last wishes.
At the foot of the Eiffel Tower, Nozomi and Kael stood with their eyes fixed on the sky, in shock. A torrent of emotions overwhelmed them simultaneously — the crushing sorrow and dull ache brought on by Elyra's death, but also a cold, visceral fear in the face of Reimu's true power, a power they had witnessed with their own eyes. They were frozen, paralyzed, awestruck before something that surpassed them entirely.
Kael murmured to Nozomi, his voice cracked, barely more than a breath. "Bro… Elyra, she's gone…" He didn't finish his sentence. He didn't need to. Nozomi had understood.
Nozomi answered simply, his throat tight. "Yeah… she's gone." They said nothing more. After a few moments of charged silence, Nozomi moved closer to Kael to comfort him, placing a hand on his shoulder. But Kael, his eyes still moist, straightened slightly and said in a low but resolute voice. "Let's finish this. Afterward, we'll gather together to pay tribute to Elyra."
Nozomi looked at him for a moment, surprised. Then a quiet smile, heavy with pride, spread across his lips. Kael had grown. He no longer needed someone to lift him up in order to move forward. Nozomi answered him with a simple smile, without a word. Unfortunately, they had no time to continue before Reimu returned, descending calmly and silently from the sky, his feet touching the ground with a lightness that contrasted absurdly with the destruction he had just caused.
The instant Kael saw Reimu land, something exploded inside him. A burning rage and a power he had never felt at that intensity flooded his entire body at once. His scars shot upward, covering his arms to his shoulders in deep, luminous lines, and elemental aetherium emanated simultaneously from his arms and his feet — a deep, dense azure glow pulsing in rhythm with his quickened breath. His gaze was that of a man enraged, yet absolutely determined.
Reimu met Kael's gaze and, in a fraction of a second, read him with unsettling ease. He murmured to himself, almost pensively. "That machine must have held an important place for you." He raised his voice so that Nozomi and Kael could hear him clearly. "It's completely futile to grow attached to a machine. That's just like heroes — getting attached to anything and everything. I was like that, once."
The two watched him in silence, analyzing every micro-movement Reimu made, searching for an opening. But suddenly, without warning, Reimu pointed at Kael with an almost insulting nonchalance. "You — your gaze is interesting. I want to see what you're capable of up close." He turned toward Nozomi, his gaze cold and indifferent. "For now, you no longer interest me."
The next second, before anyone saw it coming, a stone spike erupted from the ground with sudden violence and struck Nozomi squarely in the abdomen, cutting off his breath entirely, before sending him flying dozens of kilometers from the Eiffel Tower at a terrifying speed. He crashed into buildings, tearing through one facade after another in a chaos of concrete and shattered glass, before coming to a halt and losing consciousness.
Kael spun around, his eyes wide for a fraction of a second, and charged directly at Reimu, his voice torn apart by rage and anguish mixed together. "Don't touch my brother!"
He lunged forward, elemental aetherium overflowing from his fists like a blue flame crackling in the air. His scars had deepened further, broader and more pronounced than before, coursing up his arms to his knuckles. Kael radiated a raw power he had never unleashed at this magnitude.
He charged at Reimu and unleashed a frantic series of punches. Reimu simply sidestepped or retreated a step with each blow, toying with him with contemptuous ease, clearly not taking him seriously.
Yet Kael did not let up. He infused elemental aetherium not only into his arms, but into his entire body — every muscle, every joint, every step. This allowed him to gain speed, striking faster, but also to reinforce his body against Reimu's potential counterattacks, turning his flesh into a living armor that vibrated with energy.
Despite the fact that Reimu was still not fighting seriously, Kael's combined and increasingly rapid attacks were beginning to find their mark. Reimu was finding it less and less easy to dodge, forced to react faster and faster with each assault. Kael managed to land several blows so swift and precise that Reimu had no choice but to absorb them, his head dipping slightly under the impact.
Kael's will wore Reimu down. Increasingly cornered, Reimu decided to strike back. His fist ablaze, he aimed for Kael's face. But Kael had been waiting for exactly this moment from the very start.
The instant Reimu attacked, with a single fluid motion of his left hand, Kael deflected the arm that was aimed at his face off to the side. In his right fist, held tight, aetherium crackled against the air, dense and unstable.
Thanks to the deflection of Reimu's arm, he was fully exposed, his flank left open. Kael seized the opportunity without a moment's hesitation and struck him squarely in the middle of the abdomen with every ounce of force in that fist. Then, giving him no time to retaliate, he immediately followed up with a spinning kick from the left that connected with Reimu's ribs, followed by a kick to the face, then a rising uppercut that briefly lifted Reimu off the ground.
Reimu stepped back a few paces, his brows furrowed slightly, taken aback by the tactic and precision of the blows Kael had just delivered. Blood trickled slowly from his lip and his nose, drawing a thin red line down his chin. He studied Kael with a cold, calculating gaze, then activated his Imperial Armor. That gesture said more than any words could: he now regarded Kael as an opponent worthy of being faced with his true capabilities.
The battle between the two took on a new dimension. Tension mounted as the blows grew more powerful on both sides, each impact resounding like a thunderclap through the devastated streets. Reimu relied solely on close combat to face Kael, but even if he didn't show it, Kael's fighting style — the speed, the precision, the absolute will that drove every blow — did not leave him entirely unmoved.
On the other side of the city, Nozomi regained consciousness in the rubble of a gutted building. He got to his feet immediately, his muscles aching, a sharp pain radiating from his abdomen where the spike had struck him, his breath still uneven. He looked outside, assessed the position of the moon in the sky, and understood he had been unconscious for a few minutes. Without a second's hesitation, he set off toward the Eiffel Tower to come to Kael's aid, who was fighting alone against Reimu.
He moved as fast as his legs would carry him, crossing the devastated city at full speed, vaulting over rubble-strewn streets and torn-open buildings left in the battle's wake. Every second counted. With every second that passed, Kael could be suffering more — or worse, losing his life if Nozomi didn't hurry.
While the battle raged on every front, Shion Hikarizuki had disobeyed orders and slipped through the portal, landing right in the middle of the warzone.
He was completely lost, no longer knowing what to do. He had crossed through that portal with clear goals and ambitions. But seeing the full scale of this battle and what it had wrought — the colossal material destruction, the lives collapsing one after another, the wounds appearing on the bodies of soldiers from both sides — something inside him seized up.
Shion was utterly at a loss. He no longer knew what to do, or even why he had come. The images and scenes unfolding before him turned his stomach and filled him with a deep, heavy sorrow. To him, what was happening in front of his eyes was senseless and pointless.
Hidden behind debris, he watched it all in silence, his gaze empty, his arms folded tightly against his chest as if to shield himself from what he was seeing. He turned away and decided to leave, to abandon the purpose for which he had come and go home. But just as he was about to go, something passed through his senses like a sudden shiver. He recognized a familiar presence — something he would have recognized among a thousand.
He rose to a higher vantage point and searched for where the presence was coming from. It didn't take him long to find it. Leaping from building to building with agility, he drew closer, and once he arrived, he saw his younger brother, Kuro Hikarizuki, in the midst of a massacre.
Kuro was destroying everything in his path, including allies who happened to be in his way. A smile on his lips, his eyes glowing with an almost childlike joy, he seemed to feed on the destruction itself, each explosion and each body sent flying bringing him an intense and obvious satisfaction. Shion observed from a distance the smile on his brother's face, his frantic gestures, and the way he moved through the chaos with undisguised pleasure. Dismayed and with a heavy heart, Shion understood once again with pain that it was only in destruction that Kuro found a reason to live.
Suddenly, Shion noticed that Kuro was stealthily creeping up behind a young woman who was fighting, completely unaware. Setting eyes on her, Shion found himself involuntarily struck by her magnificent hair and the natural elegance with which she fought, each movement precise and fluid. But even under that involuntary impression, he was not blind — he recognized that this woman was a hero fighting against his father's army, and therefore an enemy.
Yet despite that reality, Shion could not bring himself to let his younger brother attack someone from behind, even if that person was an enemy. It was a line he could not cross.
Just as Kuro was about to spring like a predator from his ambush onto his prey, Shion threw himself at him, slamming into his younger brother with full force and sending them both into the facade of a building before crashing through it in a cloud of dust and debris. Once Kuro came to his senses, he opened his eyes and found his brother above him.
His eyes wide, his face already flushed with anger, he cried out in a furious, disbelieving voice. "You! What are you doing here?"
Shion remained silent, not answering the question. Instead, he said simply, his voice neutral. "Nothing. I was leaving anyway."
As Shion turned to go, Kuro stopped him by seizing his shoulder with a firm hand, his grip tightening with increasing pressure. In a deep, threatening voice, he demanded. "Why did you stop me? I was about to kill her — the one who's done so much damage to our army."
Kuro's grip tightened further, his fingers digging into Shion's shoulder, betraying an irritation that was turning into fury. He was beside himself, completely undone by the fact that his own brother had thrown a wrench into his plans in front of the enemy.
Shion took a slow, deep breath without letting the pain in his shoulder destabilize him, then turned gently toward his brother. He was going to answer him and try to defuse the situation, not wanting to fight with him or create tension within the family.