His next words fell like a curse etched into the marrow of the world.
"When the prayers to the lords are ignored... when the cries of the broken go unanswered... when the gods turn deaf and the heavens turn blind—those voices travel."
He paused.
Not for breath, not for drama.But because the truth needed space.
And when he spoke again, it was quieter—yet heavier than death.
"A path forms in that silence. A black trail stitched through forgotten screams and discarded hope."
His voice lowered to a hush, almost reverent.
"And at the end of that forsaken path..."
Loki's eyes gleamed—dim and cracked like a star on the verge of collapse.
"He is."
Silence slammed down, thick and absolute.
Hiroki hiccuped, the sound sharp and sudden in the still air.Beside him, Bird clamped a hand over his own mouth, eyes wide with something between awe and fear.
Loki didn't look at them.
He stared off toward the horizon—toward whatever hell still had room left for a boy like Shotaro.
"That child you call 'brother,'" Loki said, his tone stripped of mockery now, left only with quiet devastation, "He is both the result... and the cause of everything."
No one spoke.
Because how do you speak after hearing that someone you love isn't just part of the story—
He is the reason it exists at all.
Somewhere on the moon—not this moon, not your moon—but one among the infinite fractures of possibility, a different orbit under a different sky in a different truth—
Two figures burst into existence, tearing into reality like stray thoughts invading a dream.
"Woah!!" Amayae! she shouted as her boots skidded across the white dust. She dropped to her knees, clutching her chest, gasping. "I—I can't breathe—I can't breathe!"
She writhed for a moment, hands pawing at her throat in full panic. The desolate, silver landscape offered no comfort—no atmosphere, no clouds, no sound.
Just stillness.
And Shotaro.
He stood nearby, utterly calm, staring up at the pitch-black sky as if it were a ceiling he'd seen too many times.
He gave her a single side glance. Flat. Unbothered.
Then he took a long, deep breath.
Not through a helmet.
Not through an oxygen tank.
Just air.
A normal inhale, as if the laws of physics had simply chosen to take the afternoon off.
"We're in a world," he said, "where the moon has oxygen."
Amaya froze.
Her hands hovered mid-panic as her lungs caught up.
And then she realized—She was breathing.
The air was clean.Thin, but breathable.No pain. No suffocation.
Her eyes went wide.
"What... the actual fuck?" she breathed. "How am I breathing here on moon Mugyiwara Sho---
[Shotaro: journey of a hero that kept moving forward]
That doesn't make any sense."
Shotaro let out a small, quiet exhale, like someone tired of explaining math to a god.
"Yeah," he said, "you're still thinking with rules."
He knelt and picked up a handful of moon dust. It floated between his fingers like fine ash, undisturbed by gravity or sense.
"Rules don't mean much when you're outside the timeline you were born into. This isn't the universe as you understand it. This isn't even your reality." He looked up at her. "We're in a splinter branch of a branch of a false timeline. One where lunar colonization happened 20,000 years ago. One where nature compensated for atmosphere the way water carves a path through stone."
Amaya blinked. "You're saying... this world shouldn't exist?"
"I'm saying that by most systems of thought—causal logic, cosmology, physics—it doesn't. But that's the problem with impossibility."
He stood, brushing lunar dust from his coat.
"In the long run, 'impossible' doesn't exist. Not when you accept that every world, every timeline, and every truth is real somewhere."
He turned, eyes glowing faintly in the pale moonlight.
"There are universes where oceans float in the sky. Where gravity flows upward. Where the dead are born first and live backward toward the womb. There are timelines ruled by thought alone. Timelines where language doesn't exist, where stars are sentient, where betrayal is currency."
He gestured around them—at the soft shimmer of the cracked stars above, at the impossible breeze brushing the moon dust like breath.
"This is called wiggly woglly timey whimey stuff. Infinite possibility doesn't just mean everything could happen—it means everything has. Somewhere. Somewhen. In some broken or blessed shape."
Amaya stared at him, the pale lunar light catching in her wide, disbelieving eyes.
"This place," Shotaro continued, gaze lifted to the shimmering stars above, "isn't supposed to be. But the multiverse doesn't care what's supposed to be."
He let the silence breathe, let the weight of those words stretch between them.
"There are endless worlds," he said, his voice low, distant, "that follow the rules we call logic—our laws of gravity, of time, of cause and effect. Archetypes. Structure. Foundations that feel safe."
His eyes drifted to the horizon, where the earth was just a faint blue ghost in the sky.
"But there are more," he said, softer now, "riddled with contradiction. Worlds where fire freezes and death is birth. Realities shaped by dreams, nightmares, or things even thoughts can't hold. Not just what we can imagine..." He paused. "But what we can't."
Amaya opened her mouth.
Then shut it again.
For once, the girl who always had a sharp word or cynical quip found herself unable to speak.
And finally—quietly, a little shaken—she asked, "So... you just teleport people to moon timelines now?"
Shotaro gave the faintest shrug.
"No," he said. "I just wanted to talk to you in a world that didn't hurt us."
That silenced her again.
Around them, the stars twisted in strange, silent patterns—alive but watching, like old gods curled behind glass.
She didn't know how long she stood there, breathing air that shouldn't exist, feeling oddly safe in a place that defied all reason.
And then—"Since when can you travel into other timelines?"
Shotaro glanced at her, a glint of something unreadable in his crimson eyes.
"Spatial Step," he said, calmly. "It's just movement—at an infinite velocity. I ignore distance. Cross space instantly. That's the basic form."
She frowned. "That doesn't explain the moon."
He nodded. "Because that's not normal, Spatial Step."
"When I use a certain kind of step," he continued, his tone dipping lower, more precise, "time also moves at an infinite speed, so when I use this technique, essentially, I move beyond space and time entirely. Slip past the edges of causality. I ride along the branches of Yggdrasil—the world tree itself. And if you know how to navigate it..." he paused, the wind brushing his coat like a whisper, "you find doors. Into other worlds. Other timelines. Other truths."
Amaya looked up at the stars again.
They didn't look the same anymore.
Their light felt… off. Less like distant fires and more like eyes—some dim, some burning too bright, all of them watching from behind a veil she hadn't realized was there.
Nothing around her felt familiar now.
Not the stars.Not the ground beneath her boots.Not even the boy standing beside her.
And deep in her chest, she realized—
Neither did he.
Shotaro Mugiwara was not who she thought he was.
She opened her mouth, unsure why this question came out of all possible questions:
"Then why didn't you prevent 9/11?"
Shotaro raised an eyebrow.
A slow exhale left him half amused and half exhausted.
"Because it wouldn't matter," he said flatly, a flicker of sarcasm in his voice. "It would just create an infinite number of timelines branching off from that point. One where it never happened. One where it was worse. One where it happened but with dragons instead of planes. You don't fix the flow of time by picking at it like a scab."
Amaya stared, nonplussed. "That's… comforting."
Shotaro ignored the tone.
"We hit divergence points all the time," he said. "Moments where choice fractures the timeline. Could be something small. Could be something world-ending."
He gestured with one hand, casually.
"Let's say you walk into a cake shop. Three options: chocolate cake, red velvet, and pineapple pastry. That moment—your decision—is a divergence point."
Amaya raised a brow. "I like chocolate more."
"Me too," he said without skipping a beat. "But that's not the point."
He looked at her then—eyes steady, strangely quiet.
"Let's say you're having a shit day. The kind of day where everything you hate about yourself feels ten times louder. You walk into that shop already carrying your own weight. And for some reason—maybe you're punishing yourself—you choose red velvet."
A pause.
"And in that moment, a new branch of reality is born."
She blinked. "Over cake?"
"Over everything," Shotaro replied. "Because from that decision point, other timelines bloom. One where you chose chocolate instead. One where you picked pineapple. One where you dropped dead of a heart attack before choosing. One where the cake exploded and a dinosaur climbed out. One where you weren't even born to choose at all."
He turned back toward the strange lunar skyline, the stars coiling subtly above them.
"The logical timelines—the ones that make sense to us—are limited by cause and effect. That makes them finite and predictable. But the illogical ones?" He gave a humorless smile. "They multiply faster. Grow stranger. Because they aren't bound by rules. They're shaped by chaos. By imagination. By all the things we insist can't happen."
Amaya was quiet for a long time.
Amaya looked up at the stars again.
They didn't look the same anymore.
Their light felt wrong—less like distant fires, and more like watching eyes. Some dim. Some burning far too bright. All of them fixed on her from behind a veil she hadn't known was there until now.
Nothing around her felt familiar anymore.
Not the sky.Not the pale ground beneath her boots.Not even the boy standing beside her.
And somewhere deep in her chest, buried under all the sharp, cold armor she'd built—
she realized something that made her breath catch:
Shotaro Mugiwara was not who she thought he was.
Her lips parted, searching for something meaningful to ask. Something profound.
What came out instead was—
"Then why didn't you prevent 9/11?"
Shotaro raised an eyebrow, a slow, disbelieving sigh leaving his lungs. His expression hovered somewhere between deadpan and tired amusement.
"Because it wouldn't matter," he replied flatly. "It'd just create another infinity of timelines branching out like cancer. One where it never happened. One where it happened worse. One where dragons flew the planes instead of humans."
He shrugged. "You don't fix time by picking at it like a scab. It just bleeds somewhere else."
Amaya stared at him.
"That's… comforting," she muttered.
Shotaro ignored the jab. His voice took a quieter turn, though still as sure and unwavering as before.
"We hit divergence points constantly. Every choice is a fracture. Some barely ripple. Some split reality like an axe."
He turned slightly, gesturing into the void above them.
"Imagine a cake shop. Three options: chocolate, red velvet, pineapple pastry. That's your divergence point."
"I like chocolate more."
"Me too," he said without pause. "But that's not the point."
He looked at her again—eyes steady, unblinking, glowing faintly in the blue lunar wash.
"Let's say you're having a day. A bad one. The kind that makes you want to disappear from your own skin. And for whatever reason—anger, self-loathing, just pure instinct—you choose red velvet. Something you don't even like."
He paused.
"And right then, another world is born."
She blinked. "Over… cake?"
"Over everything," Shotaro said, voice calm and low. "That one moment? It shatters the narrative. In another timeline, you picked chocolate. In one, you left before choosing. In another, you never walked in. In yet another, the cake exploded and a dinosaur climbed out and devoured everyone."
He looked back toward the sky.
"The logical timelines—what we call 'real'—are limited. Rules, order, cause, effect. But the illogical ones?" His lips twitched into a humorless half-smile. "They multiply faster. Breed chaos. Because they aren't bound by physics or philosophy. They're made from imagination. And the imagination doesn't care what should happen."
Amaya said nothing for a long time.
Then—"So we're just walking through an infinite tree of cake-flavored universes?"
Shotaro gave the faintest nod.
"Pretty much."
She breathed out a small laugh, a tired sound wrapped in wonder. For a moment, the immense strangeness of it all didn't crush her.
It made her feel like there might be room to exist in it.
But something heavier still coiled in her chest.
Shotaro saw it.
He didn't speak right away.
Instead, his voice came softer. Not gentle, but careful. Like placing something sacred on a broken table.
"About your past," he said. "The abuse. The pain. If you ever want to talk about it... I'm standing here."
His gaze drifted across the silver horizon.
"This world—this particular branch—we're in one where the archetype of hunger was never born. You won't feel thirsty. You won't feel tired. Time won't push you forward. You can sit here for as long as you need."
Amaya stared at him.
And then, wordlessly, she sat.
Not in fear.Not in weakness.But with the full weight of everything she'd never been allowed to put down.
She sat.And stared at the sky.
For hours.
For days.
Shotaro didn't leave.
He didn't press her.Didn't lecture.Didn't ask again.
He just stood nearby—watching the horizon. Guarding something delicate without touching it.
And somewhere around the seventy-second hour, as starlight twisted slowly above them like drifting thoughts—
Amaya finally spoke.
Her voice cracked.
"It was never about men," she said.
And for the first time in what felt like eternity—her voice didn't sound like a blade.
It sounded like truth.Raw. Unarmored. Unafraid of being broken.
Shotaro sat beside her, the pale dust of this impossible moon world shifting beneath them. Above, the stars churned slowly in the black velvet of outer space—indifferent, endless, listening.
Amaya didn't look at him when she continued.
"I was thirteen when my mother finally left my stepfather," she said, her voice low. "Him and his sons—gone in a single night. No goodbye. No explanations. Just the silence afterward."
Her hands curled into her sleeves.
"I should've felt free. I was free. But all I remember feeling was this... hunger. A slow, deep burn. Hatred with nowhere to go. And it started growing in me. Quietly."
Shotaro stayed silent, only listening.
"I tried to fix it by falling in love. Or maybe just distracting myself. I had a girlfriend. She was kind. Beautiful. But I think I clung to her for the wrong reasons. I thought..." She exhaled. "I thought if I couldn't trust men, maybe I'd be safe with girls."
Her voice wavered.
"I told myself I might be gay. That maybe that's who I was. But it never worked."
There was no bitterness in the confession.No shame.
Just the dry honesty of someone tired of carrying pieces that never fit.
"So you were pretending to be gay as a kind of... coping mechanism?" Shotaro asked. There was no mockery in his tone. No judgment. Just clarity.
Amaya gave a half-laugh, barely audible.
"Sounds too absurd, right?"
Shotaro looked up at the impossible sky, where stars curled in patterns no mortal eyes could decode.
"Nothing's too absurd in this world," he said simply.
And in that silence, under the watching stars and silent moonscape, something wordless passed between them—not pity, not romance, not apology.
Just understanding.Quiet and sharp, like a blade placed gently on the ground instead of drawn.
Amaya's voice returned, quieter now—like she was walking barefoot through a room filled with glass.
"She was kind… gentle in ways I didn't know how to be. She could paint like she was remembering something from before she was born. Her hands always smelled like turpentine and wildflowers."
She paused, her eyes fixed somewhere far off—across timelines, across pain.
"But she had... problems. Diagnosed, but never really understood. Some rare, unstable branch of schizophrenia. The kind that made reality feel like a suggestion."
Shotaro didn't move.
Amaya's voice tightened. "She used to paint a boy. Always the same one. Silver hair. Red eyes. Skin like porcelain kissed by fire. Never older than seven."
Shotaro blinked.Something in his chest shifted.
"Wait," he murmured, more to himself than to her. "That's… me."
His hand twitched unconsciously."I wore glasses until middle school," he whispered, as if remembering a ghost wearing his own face.
Amaya didn't hear him.
She was lost in the memory now, caught in it like a thread she couldn't stop pulling.
"She said he saved her," she went on. "That he flew—flew—across a street and knocked her out of the way of a bus. She said he had laser eyes. That he looked like a dream… or maybe something she wasn't supposed to remember."
She gave a bitter smile.
"Everyone called her crazy. They said she was hallucinating, making it up. They laughed at her. Labeled her. Pushed her out like trash for believing in something too impossible to be real."
Shotaro's jaw tensed. His eyes were wide, unreadable, staring into a memory he didn't remember living.
Amaya pulled her knees to her chest.
"And maybe they were right," Amaya said, her voice hollow. "Maybe that boy never existed."
She let the silence linger, carried by the stillness of the strange lunar wind.
"But I believed her." Her tone sharpened—less fragile now, more certain. "Hell, I know you're him—the boy from the sky, aren't you?"
She turned her head, meeting Shotaro's gaze without flinching. "I knew it the moment I saw you. Your first day."
Shotaro didn't respond at first.
Then—
"Did you save her?"
"... … …"
"... … …"
"Yes," he said finally, unapologetically. "I did."
He didn't blink. Didn't waver. His voice was flat, certain—like he'd made peace with the ripple he'd caused in someone else's life long ago.
He studied her a moment longer, then added, almost offhandedly, "Let me guess—she ended up getting hurt by someone with a Y chromosome, and it pushed your distrust into hatred. Classic narrative loop."
There was no mockery in his tone. Just the weary knowledge of someone who'd read too many stories with the same ending.
Amaya's expression didn't crack. But something in her voice did.
"She tried to abuse me," she said quietly. "A year ago. She was breaking—mentally—and she snapped."
Her hands curled tightly around her knees.
"She tied me to the bed. Pulled out... vegetables. Toys. Anything she thought would keep me still for her game." She paused, the weight of it all pressing in like stone.
"It was her brother who found us. Pushed her aside. Saved me."
The silence that followed wasn't empty.
It was suffocating.
"As they took her away—dragged her to the asylum—she told me everything. How she'd been doing things behind my back. How she tried to become someone a boy might want. A boy she'd never seen again, but swore looked like you."
Amaya looked back at him. Not with accusation. Not with fear.
With the exhausted calm of someone who had finally emptied a long-sealed wound.
"One man broke her. Another saved me. But the trauma—the betrayal from the one I trusted—burned so deep it blinded me. Made me hate all of them. All men."
She laughed once, low and bitter.
"That's how I became a parody," Amaya murmured, her voice almost lost in the starlit stillness. "A label. A bitter, man-hating goth girl with a scythe in her heart and no one to swing it at but shadows."
Shotaro didn't move.
Didn't interrupt.
He simply let her speak—because sometimes, listening was the only kind of mercy that mattered.
The silence stretched for a moment longer before he finally spoke.
"This is absurd," he said quietly.
Amaya looked at him, expression unreadable.
"You said there's no such thing as absurd," she replied.
"I did." Shotaro's eyes didn't waver. "But still. You should've coped by hating me—not half the species."
Amaya gave a dry, empty laugh. "I was aware how broken it was. How irrational. How... retarded, really." Her voice didn't carry shame—just the hollow echo of someone naming their own spiral. "But I still did it. Because I had to hate something."
Her gaze dropped to the moon dust beneath her fingers, letting it sift through her hands like time.
"It was the only way I could keep the shape of myself intact."
And Shotaro, staring at her across a world that had no hunger, no time, no cruelty but what they brought with them—
said nothing.
Because he understood.
More than he should have.
Amaya turned toward him, eyes dark beneath the strange sky.
"Mugiwara," she said quietly, "I want to ask you something—and I want the real answer. No riddles."
He nodded once.
"Why did you save her?" she asked. "Before any of the moral reasons. Before heroism. What was the real reason?"
Shotaro blinked. Then—he laughed.
Not a small chuckle.
A full-bodied, teeth-bared laugh that echoed across the hollow landscape like something broken inside finally exhaling.
"Moral reason?" he said, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. "Neither Hiroki, Bird, nor anyone else I've ever pulled out of hell has asked me that. No one stops to ask if I'm a good man. They're just glad I showed up."
He leaned back slightly, arms resting behind him in the dust.
"The truth is—" he said, tone shifting to something colder, quieter—"I'm an immoral bastard who just likes playing the good guy."
Amaya tilted her head, brow furrowing. "So you're not a good person?"
He smiled without warmth.
"'Good' and 'bad' are ideas society built to sleep at night," he said. "What actually exists—what matters—are the selfish and the selfless, neither worse, nor greater."
She looked at him for a long moment. "So… you're selfish?"
"No," Shotaro said, his voice barely more than a breath. "Because a selfish person cares about gain and loss."
He turned toward her, the alien stars painting strange reflections in his crimson eyes—eyes that looked like they'd stared too long at truths no one should see.
"And I don't believe either has meaning."
Amaya said nothing.
The quiet between them stretched, long and silver like the dust underfoot.
Then Shotaro spoke again.
"Let me tell you a story," he said, his tone changing—slower, almost like a parable unraveling through his teeth. "It's about two cats and a dog."
Amaya rolled her eyes faintly. "I know it. Two cats fight over a fish. A dog watches, waits. When they're too busy clawing each other, the dog swoops in, snatches the fish. Moral of the story: conflict weakens, opportunism wins."
"Sure," Shotaro said, his lips twitching slightly. "A pragmatic tale. The cats bled for nothing. The dog gained everything. That's where most people stop."
"But they don't tell you the rest."
Amaya turned to look at him.
Shotaro's eyes gleamed darker now, voice like the edge of something sharp.
"The dog ate. Belly full, triumphant. Tail high. But as it licked the last bones clean—something moved in the grass."
His gaze drifted toward the edge of the moon's glowing horizon, as if seeing it play out.
"A tiger stepped out of the shadows."
He said nothing for a moment.
Then added, quiet and cold:
"Fast. Silent. No growl. No mercy."
Amaya's breath caught.
"It tore him apart," Shotaro continued. "Crushed his ribs. Broke his spine with one paw. Dragged him into the bush and left nothing but red smears in the dirt."
"Then after a while the Tiger fell into an empty well, his bone crushed as the ground rose to meet him, he died a slow agonising death in a well that neither gained anything or lost anything from the Tiger's death, it was a empty well devoid of reason from the begining anyways"
Silence.
He looked at her again.
"And at the end of it all—the fish, the fight, the blood, the gain, the loss—none of it mattered."
Amaya swallowed hard.
The story had sunk into her like a slow-burning poison—quiet, but cold and final.
No lesson?" she asked softly.
"There's always a lesson," Shotaro said.
His voice was low, steady—like a blade drawn not in anger, but in truth.
"But it's not always a comforting one."
He looked up at the sky, where the stars hung like the frozen eyes of dead gods, watching without judgment.
"Any way of thinking," he murmured, "even systems built on gain and loss... collapses, eventually. The dog got the fish. He played the game right. Outsmarted the others. Won."
He paused, then added with cold finality:
"But it didn't matter. Not to the tiger. Not to the dirt soaked in blood. Not to the bones he left behind."
His voice darkened.
"No matter how much money you make, how much power you grow into... hell, even if you cheat death and stand above the world forever—eventually, you'll come to hate the infinity of your own nature. That's what immortality tastes like after the first few centuries."
Shotaro turned back toward her. His eyes, sharp and silent under the moon's pale glow, seemed to cut through pretense and into marrow.
"That's why you grow up," he said, "and choose your own good. Your own bad. Not someone else's idea of it. Not the world's."
Amaya watched him.
And when he spoke again, his voice dropped low, like an oath spoken over a grave.
"I have my own definition of right and wrong," he said. "You develop your own interpretation of the idea."
"Not someone else--let alone dead strangers from past & present to do it for you."
He paused.
Then, with the dry detachment of someone quoting a forgotten scripture:
"Go ahead—create a god. Act in a way you think will earn you paradise.…"
He leaned in slightly, the moonlight catching the edge of his expression—neither cruel nor kind, but something deeper. Something forged in long nights and longer silences.
"Evolve even if it's meaningless to revolt against the world's absurd nature," he said, voice quiet but unshakable,"grow in a way that if you ever stand before a mirror—one that shows you the person you used to be—"
He paused, his gaze steady, as if daring her to meet it.
"—all you see staring back... is an ape."
The words landed with the weight of prophecy.Not meant to hurt.Meant to break open.
Because evolution wasn't growth.
It was survival.And survival meant outgrowing everything—even the version of yourself that once begged for love,or vengeance,or meaning.
Amaya kicked a loose rock across the pale lunar dust, her frustration cracking the silence.
"Then why bother even growing," she muttered, "in a meaningless, blank world?"
Shotaro didn't answer immediately.
When he did, his voice was calm. Steady. Like someone reciting something he'd had to learn the hard way.
"The world is beautiful because it's meaningless," he said.
He looked out at the vast, silent moonscape—empty, endless, and uncaring.
"It's an infinitely large carcass," he continued, "where we're born screaming and leave in silence. And in between... we spill paint across it."
Amaya tilted her head. "Paint?"
He nodded. "Colors. Moments. Rage. Laughter. All of it. And yeah—compared to the size of it all, our paint seems pointless. Small. But even a drop carries the weight of oceans, if you know how to see it."
He stepped forward, the dust barely stirring beneath his boots.
"My way to live is simple," he said. "Keep moving forward. Do the meaningless things. Grow—especially because they have no meaning."
He looked at her now, fully, and there was no mockery in his eyes. Only the quiet certainty of someone who had stood at the edge of the void more than once.
"To grow in a formless void is to revolt against its absurdity," he said. "And to do it with a smile… that's defiance."
He exhaled, slow and sure.
"If you're going to keep throwing water into a fire that never dies," Shotaro said, "you might as well do it smiling."
"So why do you even do good, huh?" Amaya asked. Her voice was sharp, not out of anger but desperation—a need to pierce the contradiction. "Why did you save her?" she pressed. "If everything's meaningless, like you keep saying, then why?"
Shotaro didn't react right away. He just stared at the dust between them, as if watching echoes swirl in it.
"I already told you," he said quietly. "You keep going. You grow. Despite the void. That's the point."
He looked up, his expression unreadable.
"But fine," he added. "You want a straight answer? I'll give you one."
He straightened, the stars casting long shadows across his features.
"I could burn the world," he said, calm as ash. "Rip it apart. Watch it scream. In the long run, it would all fade just the same."
His tone didn't shift. It stayed steady—almost frighteningly so.
"Or I could choose to do something else. Something I'd call 'good.' Not because it is good—there's no universal rulebook. No divine scoreboard."
He stepped forward, slowly.
"But if I had made the world… that's the kind of good I would've wanted to exist in it. So I choose it."
He shrugged lightly, like he was stating the weather.
"Both are meaningless. Destruction and compassion. Fire and mercy. They're weightless in the grand scheme."
Then he looked at her—eyes clear, burning red under the infinite dark.
"But if I have to pick between the two… I'd rather live in a bubble of my own making. One where I do what feels right. One where I act in a way that keeps me sane. That makes me feel—" he paused, choosing the word carefully "—whole."
He turned his face away, voice softening.
"And for me, that's choosing to be selfless."
Not because it was rewarded.Not because it mattered.
But because, in the silence of eternity—it was the only echo he could live with.
Shotaro's gaze lingered on the stars, as if daring them to disagree.
"Choosing to give to others when I have the power to take everything... that's what I think real selfishness is," he said. "Because it's my choice. Not obligation. Not fear. Just what I decide to offer this meaningless, indifferent world."
Amaya didn't speak.
He turned to her again—eyes steady, voice low.
"That's why it's your call too. You can keep carrying your hate—dragging it like a blade through everything that reminds you of what broke you. Or... you can strive for meaning. Not find it. Not prove it. Just... strive."
She stared at him, breath caught in her throat.
"Both paths are meaningless," he continued. "But the second one? That's revolt. That's standing inside a cold, uncaring universe and saying: 'I will create warmth anyway.'"
He took a step closer, not imposing—just present.
"We're all born into this blank canvas. This void wrapped in space-time. No rules. No author. No promised ending."
He paused. His voice dropped into something softer—something that trembled on the edge of vulnerability.
"So you treat the world," he said, "like you created it."
Not with arrogance.But with ownership.With mercy.With intent.
Amaya's throat tightened. The silence between them felt sacred now—not empty, but full of the weight they'd carried alone for too long.
And somewhere, under the painted stars of a world that shouldn't exist, two broken silhouettes sat in defiance of a universe that offered them nothing.
And chose to give something back.
"To revolt against the meaningless bubble of indifferent plane of absurdity we call our home is to laugh at the face of it's nonexistent reason" He told her