Silence broke first. This silence had teeth — the kind that follows something being taken away, not the soft quiet of early morning.
The boy was running.
Grass brushed his ankles, cool and wet. Laughter spilled out of him, thin and unguarded.
Two figures walked beside him, faces blurred by light, edges dissolving whenever he tried to focus. One taller. One leaning toward him, like they were always listening for something he might say.
Their hands held his. Warmth on the left. Weight on the right.
He didn't know where they were going. He trusted the pull anyway.
The world glowed too bright. Edges softened. Detail flattened under the excess light.
They leaned closer. "Zekai," one whispered. "Zekai," the other echoed, smiling in a way he could feel but couldn't see.
He laughed and lifted his head. Above him, a flock of white birds crossed the bright sky, flying toward some horizon he couldn't name.
Beautiful. Free.
At their feet, blue flowers swayed in a warm breeze, spreading across the meadow like broken pieces of the sky itself.
The taller figure knelt and tucked one behind the boy's ear with a gentle smile. "Remember this flower." Soft. "It only blooms where promises survive."
He looked down at the tiny blossom, smiling without understanding a word of it.
Then—
somewhere, someone laughed. The sound came from everywhere at once, warm at first.
Then wrong. The birds scattered. The light dimmed. The dream kept going — then broke.
The hands vanished. The ground disappeared under him. His body pitched forward, fingers snapping shut around empty air.
Instinct fired before thought could catch up — reach, grab, hold — nothing there to catch.
He looked down. His arms remained. Nothing else did.
Dark pressed in close. Deliberate. Fabric drawn tight around something too fragile to survive the fall.
"Wait — Mom, Dad—"
No sound came out. The absence didn't frighten him right away. It confused him first — like a missing stair, gravity claiming him before his mind caught up.
Panic arrived late, after the fall already had him.
He opened his mouth — the light vanished — and he woke.
Zekai Krystan rolled hard onto his side, breath cutting short in his throat, heart hammering, still catching up to the dream.
The ceiling fan turned lazily overhead.
Click. Click. Click.
The sound anchored him. He counted three rotations before his pulse settled.
Same dream. Same fall. Same disappearance.
Coincidence doesn't repeat this many times.
"...Leave me alone," he muttered, eyes drifting shut.
The mattress dipped. Weight settled near his hip. Fingers gripped his shoulder, firm.
The dark closed tighter around him. He couldn't breathe. He reached out.
Nothing.
He groaned and rolled away, dragging the blanket over his head. "No."
Then, far off, a voice he knew.
Marcus. "Wake up."
He turned. "...Grandpa?"
Nobody there. Just dark.
The voice came again, louder. "Wake up."
His eyes snapped open. For one second—
"Ahh." A ragged breath. He checked his own hands, dragged his eyes over his body. "I'm alive?"
"How am I home?"
He sat up, breathing uneven, the dream still clinging to his skin like sweat.
"So all of that was a dream."
He looked around at the familiar walls. "Just a normal life, then."
"Thank whatever's out there. What a nightmare."
He climbed out of bed without thinking about it, bare feet crossing cold floor, the apartment dead silent around him. He stopped at the basin under the mirror and splashed cold water across his face.
One breath. Another. Another.
He lifted his head, slow, water still dripping off his chin.
His own reflection stared back at him.
"...Where's Grandpa?"
Nothing answered. Water kept dripping from the faucet.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Something sat wrong in the room. His reflection stayed perfectly still — too still.
The room shuddered, faint. The faucet rattled in its fixture. His grip tightened on the basin's edge.
The mirror vibrated once. Then again. Harder. The glass rippled like something had struck it from the other side.
CRACK.
One fracture split the surface. Then another.
"...What—"
CRAAASH!!
The whole mirror exploded outward, and in the same instant Marcus's voice tore through everything at once.
"WAKE UP!!"
It shook him down to the bone, like reality itself had screamed straight into whatever passed for his soul.
—
Zekai jolted awake for real this time, breath ragged. "Ahh." His hand shot to his own skull, pain flaring behind his eyes. "Ahhh."
"Origin Lord!" Nuke crouched beside him — full-grown now, a tall, lean-muscled wolf-shaped beast, voice rough with worry. "Are you alright?"
"Thank god. You're awake."
He stared at Nuke a beat, registering how much bigger the wolf had gotten. "So it was real. Not a dream."
He pushed himself upright. "How am I still breathing?" He checked his own body over, unfamiliar in some way he couldn't quite name yet. His eyes swept the room. "Where are we?"
Nuke opened his mouth. "We—"
The door burst open. A young man, maybe twenty-eight, ducked through and slammed it shut behind him so nobody outside could follow. Panic crossed his face the second his eyes landed on Nuke, then flicked nervously to Zekai.
Zekai frowned. "You are?"
The man's gaze stayed locked on Nuke as he spoke, voice slow and careful. "I'm William Grik."
Nuke's mouth curled back, a low growl building in his throat.
"You told us to keep this quiet. We'll kill you if word gets out."
William squeezed his eyes shut. "Please. Don't hurt me." His voice shook. "I just did what you asked — I brought him here."
"Twenty-one days I've had him sleeping in my house. I don't even know what I'm supposed to do with that."
Zekai touched Nuke's arm. "Nuke. Drop the transformation. Stop scaring him."
"Yes, Origin." Nuke shrank down, folding back into something closer to a pet.
"Twenty-one days?" Zekai's brow lifted. "Somebody explain what's actually going on here."
Nuke just blinked at him, unsure where to start.
— Earlier —
Zekai's vision had blurred. A circular portal split open above the road, spilling white light across the asphalt. Something stepped through it.
The figure froze the instant it saw the body lying beneath it. Its eyes went wide. "Origin Lord." The voice cracked.
Its body expanded — bone, muscle, armored plating surging outward as its true form returned. Within seconds the small shape had become massive, its shadow swallowing Zekai whole.
It stared down at him. Didn't move for one unbearable second.
Then its eyes found Null Drakular. The giant reached down and closed a hand around the black-red hilt.
It pulled. The blade resisted. It tightened its grip and wrenched — the sword tore free of Zekai's chest in one violent motion.
Blood spilled across the road. His body went completely slack.
The giant caught him before his skull hit asphalt, lifting him into its arms.
"Origin Lord." Quieter this time.
He gave no answer.
The Nuke looked down at him. Then—
A car came around the corner too fast. William saw the body cradled in Nuke's arms and slammed the brakes, tires shrieking, the car skidding to a stop just short of them.
Nuke didn't waste the opening. He blocked the vehicle's path and drove one clawed hand down onto the hood, denting steel. "Human — get out!"
William scrambled out screaming, hit the ground, and clawed himself backward on his hands. "Please — leave me alone! I haven't even lived my life yet!"
Nuke held Zekai up, snarling into William's face. "Save my Origin Lord. Or I end you right here."
William squeezed his eyes shut, terrified. "Okay — okay, I'll help!"
Nuke wrenched the door open, laid Zekai carefully across the back seat, and shrank himself down small enough to fit beside him. William climbed in and drove them both to his house.
— present —
Zekai rested a hand on William's shoulder. "Sorry for the trouble."
He looked around. "Where's my sword, Nuke?"
Nuke pointed to the corner of the room. "There, Origin."
He turned. Null Drakular sat embedded in the floor, wrapped in crimson-black energy thick enough to scorch the walls around it.
"There you are."
He crossed the room and pulled it free without effort. "You're still burning with rage. I can feel it coming off you."
The blade pulsed, molten fury barely contained.
"Don't worry. We'll end them. One day."
He held it steady. "Until then — hold onto that anger. Just calm down for now."
The crimson-black light dimmed, folding back into the steel — and the blade itself had changed. Where it had once gleamed pure white, it now ran black straight through.
"So you evolved along with me." A faint note of something like pride. "Black now."
He released his grip, and Null Drakular dissolved into drifting black ash, folding back into the Soul Armament.
Behind him, Nuke and William both stared, caught off guard.
He turned to William. "Can I borrow a shirt?"
William nodded fast. "Yeah — sure, of course."
"Origin Lord." Nuke's voice carried real confusion. "I could pull the sword off your body when I found you. Once it hit the floor, I couldn't touch it again. Why?"
Zekai thought it over. "Worthiness. It only answers to whoever it's decided is actually its owner."
Nuke had nothing left to ask after that.
William returned with a plain white shirt and handed it over, courteous despite the fear still sitting behind his eyes. Zekai pulled it on, catching a glimpse of his own frame in the process.
'How did my body end up like this? Lean muscle, fully reshaped!' Every wound, every death, every repair had rebuilt him into something stronger than what he'd walked in with.
Then, underneath it, colder: Twenty-one days I wasn't looking for you, Aron.
He pushed the thought down before it could take root properly. No time to drown in it. Not yet.
Something else nagged at him too — the last thing he remembered before the dark, that violent tear ripping him out of the sanctuary. Something had done that. Something that wasn't Nuke, wasn't William, wasn't anything he'd summoned himself.
"...Zero." He said the name to the empty room. Nothing answered. Of course not.
"Nuke." His voice leveled out. "We've got a lot ahead of us. Go on back to the Armament."
Nuke's ears dropped. "But Origin Lord — I want to stay close. If something happens again—"
Zekai laid a hand on his head. "Nothing left to lose that hasn't already been taken."
"Please. Stay safe." Nuke dissolved into light and folded back into the Armament.
He turned back to William. "Thank you for pulling me out of that."
William managed a small, nervous smile. "Just — take care of yourself, alright?"
He stopped in the doorway, a thought landing cold and sudden.
Twenty-one days.
His stomach dropped. The Reoccurrence clock — thirty days, ticking since the moment he'd failed that quest in the Wilds. He'd already burned through most of it unconscious, and he had no idea what "somewhere else, some other shape" actually meant until it showed up on his doorstep.
"...Nine days left." He said it out loud, like saying it made it real. "Great."
Zekai stepped through the door. Sunlight hit his face for the first time in what felt like forever.
✦ Chapter 74 — Broken Reflection ✦