Only when you are truly inside a situation do you know what choice you ought to make.
Most of the time before this, she had simply been carried along by events.
And now that the choice had finally fallen into her hands—
Robin made the decision she needed to make without a moment's hesitation.
"Go treat your injuries properly, then come back and defeat my brother fair and square at full strength."
That was what she said to Sora.
Sunday and her were brother and sister.
In these past years, she had not remained by his side, but that did not mean her understanding of his nature had drifted far from the truth.
Sunday was broad-minded. He had governed Penacony with tremendous magnanimity.
During his time in charge, everyone in Penacony thought highly of him.
But in some matters, he was also deeply stubborn.
Robin knew exactly what her brother was like when he became fixated, and she knew just how far that fixation could go.
But after everything she had been through, Robin had come to understand one thing.
A dream, no matter how beautiful, will always have a day when it ends.
Those immersed in a beautiful dream can never truly move forward, nor can they ever cross beyond despair.
So now, no matter what it took, she had to wake the person lost in that beautiful dream.
"I'll wait for your return as the anchor that lets you enter the dream again."
She believed Sora would never let her down.
And that made what Robin had to do painfully clear.
She would become the nail that shattered the beautiful dream, waiting here for the hammer to come crashing down.
The moment Sora returned to the dream would be the moment to wake up.
"You think a mere baptism of ORDER can stop me?"
Robin smiled with complete confidence. "Who do you think I am?"
She was a galactic superstar who had escaped death countless times, faced a PROPAGATION larva head-on, and lived through the Swarm Disaster!
A mere beautiful dream of ORDER meant to drag people into corruption was nothing in her eyes!
In the end, Robin boarded the returning train alone.
The sight of her waving from beside the train as she said goodbye remained vivid in his eyes.
That body, which looked so delicate, had somehow become a wall of bronze and iron, strong enough to shield others from the wind and rain.
No one knew what she had gone through while growing up.
But one thing was certain—a discordant note had appeared within ORDER's beautiful dream.
Sora watched the train disappear from view.
Robin vanished with it.
He said nothing about it, and instead turned his curiosity toward the other two beside him.
"You two spent all that time laying the groundwork and steering her back to Penacony. What exactly are you after?"
Or rather—who exactly were these two people working behind the scenes?
Ever since he entered Penacony, they had been influencing him and this beautiful dream of ORDER in one way or another.
"Our goal is very simple. We've never hidden it."
The trash can stood before the Clockie statue and spread its arms.
"For the sake of the true Penacony."
Even though he could not see its expression, Sora could still hear the weight of feeling in those words.
But the trash can quickly reined itself in again.
"Now isn't the time for that. Go back to reality. Someone's waiting for you there..."
Sora frowned in confusion.
But soon, he saw the trash can take out a pocket watch and press the button on top.
In the next instant, a dizzying sensation hit him.
His dream-body began to float upward, slowly rising and drifting farther and farther away from this place.
"Remember, you only have four days in reality..."
The moment those words ended, Sora's vision went dark, and he lost consciousness completely.
The faint light on the Clockie statue gradually began to fade.
The trash can stood there for a very long time without moving.
Only after quite a while did she let out a long, drawn-out sigh.
...
Robin boarded the train called the Compass once more.
Unlike the lively ride over, on the way back she had an entire car to herself.
But though no one else was beside her, Robin did not feel the slightest trace of loneliness.
Because her heart had long since been tempered into crystal, and would no longer waver over such things.
After some time on the journey, she finally returned once more to Penacony.
But not long after leaving that hidden station, she saw a familiar figure standing at the end of the road.
Sunday stood with both hands behind his back. A faint smile rested on his face as he looked at Robin returning.
"So in the end, Robin, you still chose to come back here..."
Seeing his sister return, Sunday's heart filled with relief.
Just as he had thought—even after things had come to this between them, the bond they shared as siblings was still the closest relationship in the world.
He had believed Robin would understand the difficulties he carried as her brother.
But just as he was about to send Robin back to the safe room to wait there—he suddenly noticed the power of HARMONY surging around her.
In that instant, he understood many things.
"I see. So you came back as a discordant note."
A desolate chill spread through Sunday's heart.
In the end, his sister still had not chosen to walk the same path as him.
He had expected as much, but facing it directly today still stirred emotions he could not suppress.
When Sunday was in the midst of accepting ORDER's divine seat, Gopher Wood had once told him something.
Before ORDER ascended to become an AEON, IT had once walked the universe in the form of twins.
But later, the twins turned against each other. One drowned, while the other placed a crown upon their head.
No one knew which of the twins had died.
People only knew that in the end, only one stood upon the AEON's throne, singing ORDER to the universe.
And so the twins of ORDER—one becoming nourishment to help the other ascend to godhood—seemed to have become some kind of curse.
And here in Penacony, Sunday, one half of such a pair, had already walked far enough down the path of ORDER.
So there was no need to say who would be the one to ascend.
The reason he had never wanted to drag Robin into any of this before was precisely because of that.
But now Robin had come back, and within this beautiful dream of ORDER, she was still trying to use the power of HARMONY to oppose ORDER.
Wasn't that laughable?
So Sunday grieved. So Sunday ached.
"Robin, you don't need to do this. Just come back with me, and we can pretend none of what happened before ever happened."
Gopher Wood had been right.
When the next cycle came, Robin would forget everything.
There would be no more crack between the siblings.
So long as Robin simply admitted her mistake to him as her brother, he could forgive her discourtesy.
He did not want the twins to turn on each other.
Nor did he want his sister dragged into this matter.
But reality seemed not to match what he had hoped for.
"Brother, I've already made my choice."
Even within this beautiful dream of ORDER, where the power of HARMONY had been weakened to a pitiably frail degree—she still stood there, unflinching.
"Why put yourself through this?"
There was no way your tiny bit of HARMONY could withstand ORDER's assimilation.
Never mind the fact that there were still four more baptisms to come.
Robin might be a discordant note, but against the vast symphony of ORDER, she was insignificant.
These cycles were like an enormous musical work, rehearsed over and over again.
At first, there would naturally be discord, wrong notes, disruptions—but the farther the rehearsal went, the smoother and more perfect it would become.
Robin truly had no need to do this.
"You only need to live freely in this universe as my sister."
"You can still sing the songs you love. The songs you write will still be heard by even more people."
"Isn't that... your dream?"
So why are you acting so irrationally?
From Sunday's words, Robin could feel the care her brother still held for her.
And because of that, she could not help remembering something from their childhood.
It had been the first concert she had ever held.
There had been no dazzling lights, no gorgeous makeup or costume design—only a stage built by one child to encourage another child to chase a dream.
It was something she would never forget.
And precisely because of that, she had to stand here.
And precisely because of that, she had to oppose Sunday's fixation.
"Brother, that may be my dream, but my dream should never be built on taking away other people's dreams."
Robin's answer was gentle, yet it carried a will that could not be turned aside.
She had already chosen her path, and she was willing to be crushed to pieces for it.
"But the world you dream of simply cannot exist."
If the world you longed for could truly be realized in this universe, then why would so many people still lose themselves in Penacony?
"Then we can't just stop moving forward and keep drowning in the past forever, can we?"
At that, Robin's tone softened.
"Brother... do you remember what happened when we were children?"
"You mean that little Charmony Dove?"
At the mention of that subject, Sunday fell silent in rare fashion.
After their mother's death, the two of them had been adopted and brought to Penacony.
And there, they had once found a Charmony Dove with an injured wing.
Its wing had been hurt, so it could no longer fly.
The two siblings took in that injured Charmony Dove and nursed it back to health.
But when the final moment came, a point of disagreement arose between them.
That question was...
"Can a bird with broken wings fly again?"
Back then, both of them had given their own answer.
Sunday knew just how many dangers existed in the outside world, so he had chosen to place the bird in a cage.
That way, even if it could not fly beneath the blue sky, it would at least be safe.
Robin had chosen to release it, because a Charmony Dove could only truly be a Charmony Dove when it was flying in the sky.
But nature held too many dangers.
Whether a Charmony Dove with an injured wing could escape the claws of predators was still an unknown.
"And yet the facts already proved that my choice was the correct one."
This time, Sunday let the pity fade from his eyes and looked at his sister head-on.
When they had been children, he had chosen to defer to Robin's choice, and together they had watched the Charmony Dove take flight into the sky.
"What you never knew was that in the end, that Charmony Dove collapsed once more outside your window."
That was something he had always kept from Robin.
"After receiving our care, it had already lost the ability to deal with dangers in the outside world. It had become dependent. It had grown used to the shelter we gave it."
That was why, in the end, the Charmony Dove had flown back to the window, seeking to return to the place where it could simply enjoy food without having to think about anything.
That, too, had been one of the earliest seeds of Sunday's beautiful dream of ORDER.
Robin bringing this up would never shake him.
If anything, it only made Sunday more certain of the path he had chosen.
"That is why I should become the god who shelters all living beings."
"But Brother, there are birds too that, after suffering pain, endured the tearing winds of the storm and kept flying through them."
Anna had already proven that.
Back then, everyone on Planet Promia had been like birds with both wings utterly broken.
And yet through repeated failures and repeated pain, she had honed the skill to pass through storm and gale—and in the end reached the dawn of tomorrow.
"And what good are those isolated examples?"
Sunday frowned and refuted her at once.
"Then wasn't the Charmony Dove we met as children an isolated example too?"
Robin's rebuttal left Sunday briefly at a loss for words.
But he quickly countered with another possibility.
"What you're saying is far too idealistic. The pain of broken bones and the destruction of one's spirit wear away the will. Most birds simply cannot endure that many setbacks!"
Those people, the ones who staggered through life and abandoned everything just to hide themselves inside a beautiful dream—were they not the best possible proof of this?
Was it that they had never thought of trying again?
Was it that all of them had simply been crushed by a single setback?
Of course not.
It was precisely because they had endured countless setbacks and blows that they had finally been driven to flee reality and lose themselves in a beautiful dream.
And to keep such things from happening again, Sunday had chosen to remain awake and bear those torments and setbacks from reality himself.
Those who struggled needed only to sink into the beautiful dream and feel contentment. That was enough.
"Some birds grow so used to pain that they torment themselves until they are covered in wounds, with nothing left but a broken shell."
"Some birds, trying to flee the pain of their broken wings, lose their faith after falling again and again, until in the end they lie in filthy mud and die there without illness or injury..."
Sunday had seen too many such things to count.
And yet his heart had not gone numb.
He was still searching for a way to save them.
And that was why he had found a method that could solve all of this.
He turned on his sister and demanded sharply, "And you, Robin?"
"What solution do you have for this? If you do, then say it and argue me down!"
Just as he had done when facing Sora earlier.
If you chose to stand against me—if you truly could create a better paradise—then show it.
Come at me head-on and break me!
Only then would he, this stubborn saint who loved all beings, acknowledge your beliefs.
"I..."
Robin's voice faltered.
Sunday caught that hesitation immediately.
"You know nothing. You can solve nothing. So why stand against this beautiful dream?"
Your power is inferior to Sora's, so you cannot defeat me.
Your experiences are not as vast as mine, so you cannot argue me down.
If that is the case, if you can do nothing at all, then why stand against me?
As he said that, Sunday's tone softened again.
"ORDER is the only way to build a paradise. Robin—walk this road with me."
Even now, Sunday still wanted to give his sister one last chance.
Robin fell silent.
She stayed silent for a long, long time.
In a clash of arguments like this, Robin was no match for him.
Come with me, and sink together into ORDER's beautiful dream.
And just as Sunday began to feel that victory was certain—
Robin suddenly raised her head.
The expression on her face caught him off guard, because there was not the slightest trace of confusion in it.
"But even so, Brother—you've never once denied that a bird with broken wings can fly again."
Sunday had said so much, had given so many examples.
But deep down—he had never denied the possibility that a broken-winged bird could take to the blue sky once more.
"Even if after countless pains all that remains is an empty shell, even if they fall into filthy mud, they still never abandoned their dream of flying into the blue sky."
"So then, Brother—why do you want to take away their future?"
Sunday's eyes widened before he could stop them.
Looking at the sister before him, he suddenly felt that she had become strangely unfamiliar.
For the first time, he felt Robin's growth had gone beyond his control.
"Brother, you believe they can fly too—because they are birds, because the blue sky belongs to them, because rising upward is their instinct."
"All they need is a wind at the right moment. A wind that can briefly lift them, support them, and let them rest."
"With that, they can cry out in the sky with voices that belong to them alone."
Now it was Sunday's turn to fall silent.
Now it was his turn to be unable to speak for a long time.
Robin's rebuttal had truly gone beyond anything he had expected.
And in that instant, he suddenly realized something.
The younger sister he had always kept behind him, always protected so carefully, had somehow gained the right to stand at eye level with him.
But it was not enough.Still not enough!
"You mean to say that 'you'—HARMONY—can become that breeze that briefly lifts them?"
Sunday remembered that once, he too had been as naive as Robin.
He had once sought answers from the three-faced divinity:
[If the power and wealth of the strong can cover over their crimes, who can pass judgment upon them?]
[If the weak must pay any price just to keep living, who can guarantee their survival?]
[If even the purest and kindest souls can still commit wrongs, who can comfort them?]
And in the end, the answer he found in that three-faced divinity was this—power.
A being that stood above all life—an AEON!
Only upon reaching that level could one pass judgment upon the strong, ensure the weak could survive, and grant comfort to souls that had erred...
Even the breeze Robin had just spoken of, the one that could lift those broken-winged birds for a time, could only be provided by an AEON.
Without power, who could resist threats from outside?
Without power, how could one make others believe in hope for the future?
Without power, how could one shelter countless living beings and keep them from being influenced by other existences?
Could HARMONY become such a thing?
No.
HARMONY only gathered everyone into the Family, but did not truly govern them.
PRESERVATION cared only for building walls and gave little thought to other matters.
The HUNT pursued YAOSHI, and yet was itself one of the culprits behind the destruction of civilizations.
No matter how he turned it over in his mind, only ORDER could truly satisfy everything Robin had just said.
And so Sunday wanted to hear his sister's answer.
"Then when do you think that wind will blow?" Which AEON are you choosing?
"I..."
Robin spoke, drawing Sunday's full attention.
But what he had not expected was the answer she gave.
"I don't know."
Sunday froze.
He could never have imagined that his sister would choose to stand against him for the sake of such an unreliable answer.
"But I know that person will come in the end."
Robin said it with utter certainty.
"Because I believe in him. And because the whole world is waiting for him!"
Disappointment.
Disappointment.
Too great a disappointment!
"You're waiting for Hoshigaki Sora? You think someone who has already fled Penacony aboard a ship is really worthy of bearing your hopes?"
Looking at Robin, Sunday felt disappointment spreading up from the very depths of his heart.
How had his sister become like this?
How had that man, who had chosen to run away, become enough to make his sister turn out this way?
And Robin's answer was simple.
Wrapped in the power of HARMONY, she said quietly,
"The world is waiting for him. And the world believes in him too."
No more words were needed.
All she had to do was make her stance clear.
She did not stand on the side of ORDER.
After those words, the siblings fell into a long silence.
Time flowed quietly around them, and the two simply remained there, facing one another without making a move.
No one knew how long passed before Sunday was the first to break that hard-won silence.
"I understand."
He turned and walked away, making no further move to persuade the sister behind him.
"Then cling to that hollow ideal of yours and drown in ORDER's cycles."
...
When Sora opened his eyes again, he had finally returned to reality.
He tore himself free from the dream-entry pool filled with Memoria, the pain in his arm urging him to go get treatment at once.
He quickly pulled on his clothes and prepared to find some place where starlight could shine on him.
But after coming outside, he discovered that the entirety of Penacony was already wrapped in Memoria. Not a trace of sunlight could reach the planet anymore.
And just then, a beam of brilliant light shone down on him from afar.
The light flashed twice, then shut off completely, letting Sora finally see what had produced it.
A silver hull. A sleek, streamlined silhouette...
"Silver Radiance? How did you launch from the docking bay?"
That was right—the thing that had just shone on Sora was his ship, the Silver Radiance.
"Obviously because of me."
Just as Sora stood there puzzled, the screen beside him suddenly switched to a new face.
Sora nearly jumped.
But when he looked closely, he realized that the one on the screen was actually a robot.
"Who are you?"
Sora was sure he had never seen a robot that looked like this before.
So why was this thing acting so familiar with him?
"Waaah, it hasn't even been that long since we parted and you've already forgotten me..."
The robot's expression was incredibly lively. It covered its face and pretended to weep, looking terribly wounded.
But very quickly, it revealed the feature that made it unmistakable.
Several long mechanical arms extended from behind it, and with its original pair of hands included, it looked exactly like some kind of eight-limbed octopus.
The moment Sora saw that, a light suddenly flashed in his eyes.
"You're the takoyaki vendor?!"
No wonder that guy hadn't looked the least bit flustered controlling eight arms back inside Penacony. Turns out his real body was a robot.
"Of course it's me. Who else would it be?"
The robot grinned, then quickly steered the conversation back to the point.
"I've already replenished your ship's energy. Not that it really needed me to do it—but now it's definitely ready to blast straight out of this planet."
As it spoke, another notification popped up on Sora's phone.
"Unfortunately, the defenses on your ship's mainframe are way too good. Otherwise I'd have already preset the destination for you."
The robot sounded genuinely regretful.
It had never before encountered a ship's core system this hard to crack.
Even the toughest AI defenses usually felt like paper in front of it.
But the Silver Radiance had been like running into a solid wall.
"So I've already sent you the coordinates. You'll just have to head to the vicinity of the star in the Asdana system yourself."
Penacony was wrapped in Memoria. There was no sunlight anywhere.
If Sora wanted to bask in the sun, he had to leave the planet.
Seeing how thoroughly the other side had prepared everything, Sora could not help nodding.
But just as he was about to board the ship, the robot suddenly called out to him.
"Before you go, let me remind you of something. One cycle in the dream only amounts to a single day in the outside world."
"What do you mean by that?"
Sora glanced at the current time and immediately realized something was wrong.
From the first day he entered the cycle until now, four or five days should already have passed for him.
And yet reality showed that only a little more than two days had gone by.
Linking that to what the robot had just said, a very bad thought immediately occurred to him.
Which meant one cycle in the dream equaled one day in reality.
The reason two days had passed was because he had gone through two cycles inside.
And in the third cycle, he had escaped in less than a day, which was why only a few extra hours had passed.
"Bingo! The cyclical dream of ORDER has less than four days left in reality before it's complete."
"If you can't make it back in time, then we're all completely screwed."
The robot gave Sora an encouraging look.
"So hurry up and heal your injuries. You don't want to come back only to find a newborn AEON waiting for you, right...?"
Its tone was a little strange, but the danger it described was perfectly clear.
"I see. Got it."
There was no time to waste anymore.
The moment he finished speaking, Sora launched the Silver Radiance and shot toward the distant star.
...
"You really aren't going to stop her?"
Gopher Wood, in the form of a crow, spoke beside Sunday's ear.
The "her" it referred to was naturally Robin, off in the not-so-far distance doing something of her own.
Though separated by some distance, neither Sunday nor Gopher Wood could make out exactly what she was saying.
But the posters in her hands were enough to tell them her decision and her defiance.
She meant to spark the prelude to resistance, and so she was using her identity to try and hold a musical evening.
Under normal circumstances, if Robin personally came out to promote something like this, she would surely draw plenty of people eager to attend.
But before people who had already gone through three baptisms of ORDER, very few passersby would willingly accept the flyers she was handing out.
By the third round, the signs of ORDER had already begun to show clearly, permeating nearly every facet of Penacony.
Under ORDER's influence, those passersby were even less likely to do something sudden or unexpected.
So even though Robin was handing out flyers here, the pace was painfully slow.
No one would have guessed that she was once a singer whose name was known across the galaxy.
Now she could barely even hand out all the flyers for a single concert.
But Gopher Wood knew this was only the beginning.
The farther things progressed, the fewer beings there would be capable of responding to Robin at all.
As ORDER continued to strengthen, all living beings would eventually fall under its governance.
Robin's stubborn resistance was nothing more than a fool's dream.
And so it asked Sunday whether he intended to stop her pointless actions.
Unfortunately, Sunday answered with action rather than words.
His fingers tightened slightly, but he still spoke with unwavering firmness.
"There's no need."
My little sister—since you insist on becoming a discordant note in the score, then I will watch and see just how long you can hold out.
"And how goes the usurpation of Dominicus, the Harmonious Choir?"
Sunday shifted his attention to other matters.
"Rest assured. Once the next cycle of ORDER ends, Dominicus will become ORDER's incarnation—and far stronger than before!"
Seeing that Sunday did not want to say more about Robin, Gopher Wood naturally did not bring her up again.
Instead, it reported on the work currently underway.
"After mixing that blood with the seven-colored light, Dominicus's power has surged by who knows how many levels!"
Gopher Wood's voice brimmed with pride.
"When we light it this time, the ORDER AEON born from it will absolutely be even stronger than before!"
And the blood they had collected, together with that blended power, also seemed capable of giving rise to something even more special.
Gopher Wood opened its beak as if to continue, but after seeing Sunday's absent-minded expression, its eyes shifted, and it decided not to say the rest.
Having witnessed that kind of power, it seemed to have developed some other ideas of its own.
Sunday truly was not paying attention here.
Out of the corner of his eye, he continued watching Robin stubbornly hand out flyer after flyer.
The suffering you endure will only make you understand even more clearly that the path I chose is right.
Little sister—only after passing through hardship can one attain true resolve.
I'll be waiting for you at the end of the road...
---
T/N: OUGHHHH QUICK SORA HEAL UP!!!!