Later, while the others drifted into sleep, Yui climbed onto Ren's lap during watch duty. "Papa, look!"
She pointed to a hairline crack in the concrete overhead, where the day's last light fractured through dust and shimmered along the wall in bursts of soft color.
"Rainbow stars," she whispered.
Ren wrapped his arms around her. "Beautiful."
"Like Mama's necklace." Yui nestled into his chest. "She's still here, right?"
He didn't answer right away. Just watched the rainbow light dance in her eyes. And for the first time in a long, long time, he let himself believe it.
"Always," he said.
When the fires dimmed, Ren opened Aiko's old journal and wrote by candlelight, each word a vow more sacred than any oath he'd spoken in a lab coat:
I will not let her become a weapon.
I will not let my sins define her.
I will grow sunflowers in the dark.
Yui stirred beside him, clutching Ami's doll, the firelight kissing her golden eyes.
He pulled the blanket over her shoulders and tucked the journal into his coat.
This time, he would bury the past.
Not her.
*****
A year had passed.
A whole year, grinding away like a merciless millstone, devouring everything humanity had once built.
The Earth—no, this broken husk—was no longer the planet its people had known. Civilization had vanished as if snuffed out by a careless god. Progress crumbled into dust. History itself seemed to mourn in the silent ruins, weeping for the lost centuries that had built mankind's fleeting dream of freedom.
What had taken millennia to nurture—the rights, the laughter, the music, the art—all of it had been torn apart in a single, brutal year.
Hope, once shining like embers in countless eyes, had dulled into ash beneath the relentless boot of the occupiers.
In the Argwan territories, even the simple act of humming a tune was a crime punishable by death.
Technology? Gone.
Books? Burned.
Freedom? A memory.
Only forced labor remained—an endless, grinding misery.
Above the wastelands that had once been Tokyo, the Argwan Citadel reared like a monstrous tumor, its black spires twisted with pulsating violet biomass.
Inside, beneath a ceiling of living tendrils and withered banners, Emperor Ryo paced before a flickering holographic map, his every step making the very floor thrum with latent power.
He was no longer fully human—his flesh fused with Argwan essence until he resembled a nightmare given form. Gilded horns curled from his brow. His skin gleamed like onyx carved by ancient gods, veins aglow with faint violet light.
Across from him, kneeling with rigid formality, was his younger brother, Kaito—the Supreme Commander of the Argwan Legions. Kaito's mutations were subtler: jagged violet plates cresting his shoulders like a cruel mockery of armor, and eyes that burned like smoldering coals under heavy brows.
They were both monsters now.
But only one of them still remembered being a boy.
A speaker grafted into the biomatter wall crackled alive, releasing a voice that chilled even the thick, humid air.
Mei's Voice:
"Your failure is an insult to my patience, Ryo. Bring. Him. Home."
The speaker snapped silent, leaving only a bitter static crackling in the quiet.
Ryo's clawed fist slammed into the holographic map, shattering it into a cloud of flickering, broken light.
"A year," he hissed, pacing faster. "A whole cursed year, scouring every rat-hole, burning every nest—and still your men stumble like blind dogs!"
Kaito rose slowly to his feet, head bowed in controlled deference. His voice, when it came, was low but steady.
"Our men. Your orders," he said, each word a careful needle. "Ren's not some fugitive hiding in the alleys. He's a ghost. Even the soil forgets he was ever there."
Ryo turned sharply, his eyes blazing brighter than the citadel's dim bioluminescence.
"The soil obeys," he snarled. "It is you who have grown soft, little brother."
He leaned forward, breath hissing.
"I felt his heartbeat in the Hollowing's pulse just last night. He's alive. Hiding like a rat. Clinging to that pathetic child like some broken relic."
Kaito's gaze flickered—almost imperceptibly—toward the massive mural looming on the throne room's far wall: their mother, depicted as a towering figure wreathed in Argwan vines, her hand crushing the Earth like a ripe fruit.
It was the smallest of tells. But Ryo caught it.
"You know something," he said, voice dropping to a silky, poisonous whisper.
Kaito stiffened, the air between them sharpening like drawn knives.
"Rumors," he said, flatly. "Human whispers from the labor camps. A girl with golden eyes… and a man who walks through walls."
Before the last syllable faded, Ryo crossed the space between them, his claws wrapping around Kaito's throat.
He lifted him effortlessly, Kaito's boots scraping against the ground.
"And you didn't burn them out?" Ryo's voice was almost curious.
Kaito, choking, forced out words through gritted teeth.
"They're children's tales," he rasped. "You think Ren would hide among slaves? He'd rather die than kneel."
With a roar, Ryo hurled him across the chamber. Kaito slammed against a pillar, leaving a spiderweb crack in the living stone.
"He'd rather watch the world die," Ryo seethed, stalking forward, "than face me. Just like Father."
A tense, ugly beat of silence passed.
Kaito wiped black blood from his split lip, then—recklessly, recklessly—smirked.
"Father's bones feed the roots beneath this throne," he said, almost laughing. "You're becoming him, brother. All fury, no vision. Pathetic."
For a moment, Ryo froze, the muscles in his shoulders twitching.
Then his hand shot out, backhanding Kaito with a wet crack.
"I am perfection," Ryo hissed. "The Hollowing's will made flesh. And when I drag Ren here, Mother will finally see—"
"She'll see what she always sees," Kaito cut in, voice sharp with old wounds.
"Her favorite son. The one who couldn't even protect her precious heir."
The lights of the citadel guttered, the living walls shuddering as if recoiling from the force of unspoken memory.
For a moment, it wasn't Emperor Ryo who stood there, but a boy again—small, overlooked, watching from the shadows as their mother tenderly brushed dirt from Ren's knees after he fell, while Ryo bled unnoticed into the dust.
A long, broken silence stretched between the brothers.
Finally, Ryo's voice slid out, soft as poison.
"Find him," he said. "Or I'll plant you in the garden instead."
Kaito bowed low, his face hidden in the shadows. He did not speak. He did not rise immediately.
When he finally did, his hand, slow and careful, drifted to a hidden pocket sewn into his uniform.
From it, he drew a cracked datapad—a relic of the old GHU days, battered and worn. Its fractured screen glowed faintly, lines of encrypted data scrolling like dying stars.
One line shone brighter than the others:
[SUBJECT Y: GOLDEN EYE ACTIVITY DETECTED - SECTOR 9]
Kaito's mouth curved into a thin, dangerous smile.
In the end, perhaps even the soil could not bury the truth forever.