Three years.
Three years since that portal opened and swallowed everything. Three years since Arthur dragged Laura away by her hair, leaving her without the strength to fight or the voice to scream.
And from that day on, I never stopped. Not for a single minute.
Although hesitant to deploy patrols to the Obscure Galaxies, the Queen ultimately granted permission, and the search for Laura consumed Lavinsk entirely. It became a fever, a shadow falling over every realm, every star, every corner of the cosmos. Ancient gods—beings who had sat motionless on their thrones for eras—departed in search of her.
Some returned weary, eyes cast downward, claiming there was no trail, that she was a lost cause.
Others… simply never returned.
Rescue ships vanished into the void between stars. Search parties that crossed through portals failed to come back. What had begun as a rescue mission gradually turned into a one-way pilgrimage, as though something—or someone—was erasing anyone who drew too close to the truth.
The Queen bore that weight every single day. I saw it in her eyes whenever we met at the council or during patrol missions. It wasn't just concern. It was fear. A quiet, deep-seated terror that Laura wasn't merely lost, but was being used, hidden, kept alive as a key no one yet knew how to turn.
And us? Tsukumo and me.
We went on every patrol, even though we were forbidden from leaving Lavinsk's solar system. Every new sector explored, every planet that emerged—we were there. Not because we were ordered to, or because we were the only ones capable. But because deep down, we knew it was our responsibility. If only I had been stronger in that crater…
We spent entire nights flying between stars, speaking very little. Him with his golden eyes sweeping the void, me with my fist clenched tight around the hilt of my sword. Every planet we visited, every civilization we questioned… always yielded the same answer. No one had seen her. No one had felt her presence. It was as if she had ceased to exist.
Yet something inside me screamed that she was still out there somewhere, alive, waiting. And as long as a single corner of the universe remained unsearched, I wouldn't stop.
The two of us carried this debt together.
Though you might be wondering… how and why do I call Tsukumo an ally today? Or more than that: a friend?
Silver had also set out searching during those days. He would disappear for days, sometimes entire weeks, flying to distant realms, asking questions, following trails no one else could discern. And whenever he left… our training fell to Kânia.
Which meant only one thing:
Pure hell.
I always managed to forget, but she is the Goddess of War. No one knew better than her how to break someone down, how to push a body and mind to their absolute limits without actually shattering them.
And so, day after day, Tsukumo and I—who had once faced each other as enemies ready to reduce one another to dust—came to share the same ground, the same sweat, the same bone-deep exhaustion. There were simply two bodies being forged, bashing against each other until every rough edge was smoothed away, until only what truly mattered remained. All under the ruthless gaze of Kânia, who watched without blinking, demanding twice what we thought ourselves capable of giving. She placed immense emphasis on mutual trust, especially from me toward Tsukumo.
Every day began the same, long before the sun rose over the plains of Lavinsk: we ran.
Without stopping or slowing our pace. We traversed fields of celestial grass that shimmered at dawn, scaled mountain slopes that tore at our feet, and waded through icy rivers that cut off our breath like sharp blades. We only stopped when the sun vanished completely below the horizon and the sky filled with stars that felt close enough to touch.
And Kânia was always out in front.
It was discipline. It was learning that the body can push far, far beyond what the mind believes to be its limit. Every day at dusk, the two of us would collapse onto the ground, side by side, gasping, exhausted… and a little bit stronger than we had been when the sun rose.
It was there, amid blows, falls, and shared silences, that hatred slowly turned into respect. And respect… into something more.
On the days Silver took over, however, things returned to the cold, brutal severity of his regimen. Where Kânia focused on daily runs and overall physical conditioning, Silver trained us in combat and mobility.
We flew at the speed of sound, breaking through walls of wind with our chests, the air whistling so loudly it drowned out everything except his voice.
Silver pursued us high above, agile as a shadow and heavy as a world. He was a predator playing with his prey; if he caught us, a mere touch was enough to send us crashing into the dirt with the force of a falling star. The ground would shatter beneath us, and before the dust could even settle, he would be there again.
"Do you feel that?" Silver's voice boomed above the wind, cutting through like thunder. "That's the pain of weakness leaving your bodies. Now fly faster!"
My body gave out. The pressure, the speed, the exertion burning through every muscle fiber… I bent over and vomited, my stomach turning from absolute exhaustion, my legs shaking as though they lacked bones.
"Come on, Suki," I heard Tsukumo's voice beside me, breathless but steady. "Didn't you ask to make the training harder?"
I trembled all over, like a dog in the cold, my arms hurting too much to even lift. But then the memories flooded back—all those scenes I couldn't erase, everything I had lost, everything I had failed to prevent. That was the only thing that forced me back to my feet.
"Tsukumo… make the gravity heavier."
"Thirty times now."
It was a war unfolding dozens of meters in the air, with no ground beneath our feet and nothing to hold us up. Tsukumo and I clashed in midair, blow for blow, not out of hatred, but to train. To learn how to fly, to endure, to synchronize. Every movement was a lesson, every exchange of strikes a step toward becoming stronger together.
"COME ON, SUKI! YOU HAVEN'T MADE ANY PROGRESS WITH YOUR TRANSFORMATIONS IN MONTHS!" shouted Silver as he hovered nearby, observing every detail as if reading our souls.
Tsukumo had the advantage. His gravity, his control… he was far ahead of me.
"SHOW ME WHAT YOUR ADAPTATION IS CAPABLE OF!"
In that moment, those words struck me differently. I closed my eyes for a second, and when I opened them, the red and blue stripes of Force Transformation flared like living fire, burning brighter than ever before. The air around me trembled.
Stage 2 had arrived.
I charged forward without thinking and drove a direct punch into Tsukumo's stomach. With all that new strength roaring in my bones, the clouds scattered from the sky.
In that instant, I felt unstoppable. The power was overwhelming, my body denser, heavier, every movement carrying a pressure that made the air hiss. I thought I had finally made it.
Yet it wasn't enough. The very next day, both of us—me at the peak of Stage 2, him mastering his gravity with finer precision—were soundly defeated by Silver fighting seriously.
On many nights after that… Tsukumo and I would sneak away to train, fighting beneath the starlight in silence to see how far we could push ourselves alone. And always, without fail, Silver would materialize out of nowhere in different ways. On one specific night, he blocked both of our strikes simultaneously with a single hand. As if holding up the entire world with a finger.
"IF YOU'RE GOING TO FIGHT IN SECRET, AT LEAST DO IT RIGHT!" he said, impassive, without breaking a sweat.
There was one night I will never forget, perhaps the most important of all.
The wind hissed between the crystal slopes. The campfire burned low, illuminating the pale rock beneath the moons of Lavinsk.
"Was today enough?" Tsukumo asked. He turned a stick in the embers, his golden eyes reflecting the fire. "It still feels like something is missing."
"Something is always missing." I wiped the sweat from my face. "The day it stops feeling that way is the day we stop growing."
He nodded.
The fire crackled, and the sound of the world shifted.
It wasn't a footstep. The air pressure plummeted. Oxygen grew thin.
Tsukumo's hand froze in midair.
"Someone's here," he whispered.
My hand was already on the hilt of my sword. I stood up. The darkness at the edge of the camp distorted.
The space between us simply shrank; he was five meters away.
"Who are you?" I asked.
Tsukumo slid to my left flank, the ground beneath him cracking. His gravitational field armed itself, ready to crush.
The figure didn't turn his head.
He advanced.
My eyes couldn't track him. The space between us was ignored; the palm of his hand touched my chest, and my lungs emptied before my brain could even register the blow. Two ribs yielded. My feet left the ground, and my back collided with the slope, shattering the crystal. The taste of iron flooded my mouth.
Gravity weighed down on him, but the hooded man didn't even flinch. He raised an arm in a monotonous gesture.
The gravitational field broke. Tsukumo was hurled to the ground. The dry snap of breaking bone echoed through the clearing, followed by a gasp.
I tried to get up. The Force stripes ignited on my arms, unstable, flickering like dying lights. Blood dripped from my nose onto the stone.
The man stopped between us, the ground trembling under his boots.
Slowly, a black-gloved hand pulled back the hood.
Silver.
Silver looked down at us—both of us broken on the ground. His voice sounded low, cutting through the wind.
"If I were the enemy… Lavinsk would already be in ashes before you realized you were dead."
He turned his back, and then he was gone. The night swallowed him whole.
Silence crushed the clearing. We remained on the ground as our blood dried in the cold. Every breath pushed broken bone against my lung. Tsukumo rested his forehead against the rock, teeth grit tight.
Lavinsk would already be in ashes.
The sentence hung there, lingering over the dying fire.
Yet after a time, it was time to put our training into practice. The drills were merely the beginning—the forge, the hammer, the fire preparing us for what lay ahead. When Silver finally nodded, declaring us ready, he let us loose.
Not to cross entire galaxies in the far reaches of the universe. The boundary was clear: the nearby realms and the planets orbiting Lavinsk's solar system. Nothing beyond that. Not yet.
Even within those limits, however, lay an entire world of needs, dangers, and people requiring aid.
So we went.
Dozens of realms watched us pass, and I remember each one as if etched into my skin.
On the planet Vaeloria, where forests grow with fury and devour villages, a shadow plague had corrupted the Mother Tree. Tsukumo dialed up gravity until the darkness compressed into a single point, and I came down with a fist charged with Force—a blow that shook the earth and restored light to the leaves. We were greeted with flowers and songs, but as we walked back, Tsukumo only murmured softly, "They thanked us as if we gave them the sun, yet I still feel I could have done more."
I looked at him and saw no arrogant god; I saw someone who bore the weight of every life he couldn't save.
In the Crystal Oasis on the planet Lira, arcane storms were tearing the mountains apart. We sealed the rift feeding them, holding the void back with gravity while I guided the air currents to our advantage. We collapsed into the grass together afterward, breathless and covered in glowing dust.
In Krag, the City of Five Abysses, we sealed a rift that was transforming people into monsters. We descended together—him enclosed in a protective bubble of gravity, and me doing the same with wind, cutting a path through the shadows. We discovered the source stemmed from the maw of a massive dead beast deep within; a dark, radioactive mist spilled from between enormous teeth the size of buildings.
"What the hell is this?" Tsukumo asked.
"I don't know, but if closing the rift solves the problem, that's what we're going to do."
When we returned to the surface, the locals awaited us in silence, grateful beyond words. There, I felt we were no longer just two fighters tolerating one another. We were two who knew precisely what the other would do before they even did it.
We had a ritual. On every planet, in every realm, once the mission concluded and exhaustion finally set in, we would sit side by side atop a mountain or at the edge of a cliff, looking up at the moons. On Vaeloria, the moon was green and full; on Lira, two moons chased each other across the sky; on Krag, the moon shone so bright it felt like day.
And always, without fail, the conversation arrived at the same point.
"Do you think she's alive?" Tsukumo would ask, his voice quiet, as if afraid the answer might be no.
"YES, I know she is," I would answer, every single time. "And I'm going to bring her back. No matter where she is."
He would offer a faint smirk—one that few ever saw. "Together, then."
And so, between victories and searches, between fights and shared silences, between the weight of the past and the hope of the future… three years passed.
When the call finally came—a subterranean city in flames, people needing help—we went.
Not because we were heroes. But because someone was in need.
Deep down, there was always the hope that, somewhere out there, the person we were searching for was waiting to be found.