Atsal looked at them and said simply, "It is time for you to return."
Nobody argued.
Ozair raised his gauntlet hand and grinned. "He's right. Our parents must be losing their minds."
He flexed his fingers inside the Nyro, already comfortable with it, already making it his.
Elina turned to Toviro. "Are you feeling okay?"
Toviro looked at her and smiled.
It was a new thing, the smile, and it sat on his face with the slight uncertainty of something being used for the first time.
"I'm fine. I just need a little time to settle into this form."
Ozair walked over and tapped him on the back. "You look way better, honestly. I wonder how it feels in there."
Aryan stepped alongside them and looked at Toviro with something that was close to warmth.
"People won't be surprised when they see you now." He paused. "Or afraid."
Elina laughed softly. "He's right. You're like us now."
They stood together, side by side, their weapons and gifts present without being held, the cave light steady around them.
Ozair looked at Aryan and said, "We're like superheroes."
Aryan said, "We are."
Toviro stepped forward toward Atsal. "As you said. We must go."
Atsal was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Before you do, I have one more thing."
He raised his hand.
A light gathered in his palm slowly, and from it he drew a small glass bottle.
Inside it, a brown-red liquid moved like something alive, thick and glowing faintly, swirling without being stirred.
He handed it to Toviro.
"This is for Mayo."
Toviro took it carefully, his new fingers closing around the glass, his eyes fixed on the motion inside.
"What is it?"
"It will calm the storm inside him," Atsal said. "Pour it into his mouth and he will find the strength to take control of himself. Then you will get your Mayo back."
He studied the bottle for a long moment, then looked up.
"Thank you."
Elina pressed both hands together.
"Thank God. We finally have something to help him." Her voice was bright with relief.
Ozair grinned. "That fool. He has no idea what's coming."
Aryan smiled calmly and said nothing.
Behind Atsal, across the cave, a massive gate opened—more portal than door, wide and certain, its light different from the cave's light, pointing somewhere else entirely.
They looked at it and this time none of them flinched.
They had walked through enough impossible things.
Atsal's voice rose to fill the space.
"Train with everything you have. Through training your abilities will grow beyond what you can currently imagine."
He looked at each of them.
"Foes await beyond this door. Beasts twisted by the merge. Worlds bound by laws you have never encountered. You will face trials, chaos, and fear. But do not give up. When you gather the Returner Shard, everything can be restored."
He paused.
"Do not forget, you are not alone. You carry the hopes of many. And the power to bring back balance."
Ozair rolled his shoulders. "Time to crack some mountains."
Elina nodded once, eyes calm. "We'll bring peace."
Aryan said nothing. He looked at the door.
Toviro held the bottle up slightly toward the light, then lowered it.
He looked at Atsal.
"Thank you. For everything."
Then he turned to the door.
Atsal watched them go.
In the quiet of his own mind, he said what he didn't say aloud.
You have to become strong enough to face what lies ahead, and to take back what waits for you there.
Sometimes this world can be cruel in ways that leave marks you cannot see, and it can demand more from you than you ever thought you could give.
Those paths, the heavy ones, the ones that feel too much, are not placed before everyone.
His gaze deepened.
God does not give such burdens to just anyone. He places them in the path of those He loves the most… Those He knows can carry them, even when they feel like they cannot… Those who can break, and still choose to stand again.
They walked forward together, and just one step before the portal, they stopped.
They turned back one last time, looking at Atsal, a quiet smile passing between them, filled with the promise of everything that lay ahead.
Then they turned, and stepped through.
In the next moment, mud pressed beneath their feet.
Cold rain struck their faces before they had even finished arriving.
The portal closed behind them and the world fell on them all at once, heavy curtains of rain, thunder rolling somewhere near, the sky above so dark and thick that noon looked like the end of something.
The smell hit next.
Wet soil and smoke and something underneath both of those things that none of them had a word for immediately.
They stood still for a moment and looked around.
The playground.
Their playground.
The familiar swings moving in the storm, the slide slick with water, the same ground they had stood on a hundred times before.
But the colors were wrong.
Everything was dull in a way that weather alone couldn't explain, flattened, as if the light itself had changed its relationship with this place.
"It all looks the same to me… I thought things would look different," Ozair said.
"How is this possible?" Elina asked. "We went so far."
"This isn't just our world anymore," Toviro said. He turned to look at the horizon, his new eyes reading what was there with the same precision his old ones had but feeling the weight of it differently.
"Our Earth is now part of the first Unitedverse. The merge has begun. Perhaps it's nearly finished." He looked at each of them.
"We didn't enter another world when we came through. It's all one now. This place, our street, our city, is part of something vast."
Ozair's fists tightened. "Then Mayo—"
"Is still here," Toviro said. "And we can still reach him."
They ran.
The rain hit their faces and soaked through their clothes immediately and they ran anyway, their feet finding speed that they hadn't had before the cave, the First Marks giving their bodies something extra that they hadn't yet learned the full shape of.
The streets were familiar and they followed them from memory, turning where they always turned, expecting what they always expected.
Then they slowed.
Then they stopped.
The street ahead of them was wrong.
Not changed the way streets change when construction reroutes them or weather damages them.
Wrong in the total, final way of something that has been acted upon by force and has not recovered and won't recover on its own.
Houses that had been standing that morning were gone, reduced to their own rubble, ash still rising from the places where they had been.
A road that had been flat was buckled upward in the middle, the asphalt split and pushed aside by something that had come through it from below.
Streetlights lay across the pavement like fallen things.
A car was on its side against a wall and the wall had given way around it.
Not one sound of life.
Only the rain, hitting all of it equally, indifferent.
Their eyes moved without them deciding to move.
They couldn't help it.
The details came whether they were ready or not.
The roadside drain ran with water that wasn't clear, wasn't rain-fed or clean.
It moved dark and slow, and the color was wrong, not from mud, not from shadow.
Something had passed this way, something that bled into the current and left its stain behind.
Red.
Soft and terrible, like a promise broken.
And they all saw it at the same moment, their breath catching in their throats, their feet rooted to the wet asphalt.
No one spoke.
No one had to.
Because some truths don't need names, they just sink in… and change the way you see everything.
Then the bodies.
Not one.
Not a few.
Everywhere they looked, the rain fell without distinction, over the living and the fallen alike.
Bodies lay against walls, in the middle of the road, on doorsteps, and out in the open, where they had fallen before they could reach safety.
A small girl face down in the mud, her shoes still on.
An old woman against the base of a lamppost, a heavy rock on her back.
One hand still raised, as if she had been reaching for something when she stopped.
A teenager with a bag still across one shoulder, lying on his side, the bag's strap pulled tight.
Elina's hand went to her mouth.
Her feet didn't move.
Her eyes moved from face to face, and what was in them was not crying yet, it was the thing before crying, when the mind is still trying to refuse what the eyes are telling it.
Ozair's face turned away, his teeth pushing together so hard his jaw trembled.
He couldn't speak.
Aryan's eyes closed slowly. Behind his lids, the girl, the old woman, the boy with the bag were still there.
He let them stay.
Toviro touched his chest, right where his heart was, and whispered, "Why does it hurt so much?"
After a moment, Ozair, Aryan, and Toviro stepped forward.
Toviro went to the girl.
He crouched beside her and put his staff beside him on the pavement.
Then he turned her gently.
And saw it.
A wound across her chest, deep enough to end everything.
Blood had spread around it, too much of it, as if all the blood in her body had poured away and nothing was left to come.
Toviro's eyes sharpened.
Then he put his hand near her face.
Nothing.
No warmth of breath against his skin.
He held the position for a moment anyway, as if staying long enough might change the answer.
It didn't.
He raised his head and looked at the sky and the rain came down on his face and he let it.
Ozair went to the old woman. The rock was still resting on her.
He looked at it for a moment, then stepped forward and raised his right hand.
He closed his eyes and said slowly, "Come on, Nyro. I need you."
He opened his eyes, and the gauntlet snapped into place around his hand in an instant.
"Thanks, Nyro," he said calmly.
He lifted his head and looked at the rock, then brought his right foot back—the same stance he used in free fighting.
He punched as hard as he could.
Nothing.
The rock didn't move an inch.
But he didn't give up.
He lowered his hand and steadied himself, adjusting his stance as he drew in a slow, controlled breath. His feet set firmly apart, his focus narrowing, everything else falling away.
Then he raised his hand again, deliberate this time, holding it out with a clear space between him and the rock.
For a moment, nothing moved.
Then he pushed his hand forward.
The rock lifted a little, floated.
Ozair's face turned red from the weight, but he pushed harder.
Finally, the rock rolled away.
His hands were free, but he was breathing hard.
He knelt beside the old lady in the mud, the water soaking through his knees immediately.
"Grandma—" The word came out before he could stop it.
He saw what he already knew. He sat back on his heels and said nothing for several seconds.
Aryan moved through the street slowly, scanning as he went, checking doorways, the gaps between buildings, every place something could be waiting.
His jaw was set, his hands still at his sides, his attention sharp and controlled.
He took everything in, not reacting, not hesitating, placing each detail exactly where it belonged, in that quiet part of him where things were understood, and where decisions were made.
From somewhere far away, a sound came through the rain. Deep and structural, the long, falling groan of something enormous giving way.
It built for a moment and then resolved into a concussive thud that moved through the ground and up through their feet.
And a column of dust lifted into the dark sky far to their right, pale against the storm clouds.
Rising from somewhere in the direction of the taller buildings.
A building had come down.
They turned toward it together.
The dust rose and spread, and the rain began to push it down.
They stood in the street surrounded by the dead of their city and watched the sky.
Where something had just ended.
Ozair's voice was low and tight.
"We should go there. We need to find out what happened to these people. Who did this?"
His hands had become fists.
"Someone answer for this."
"First we go home. First we go to Mayo," Toviro said.
Ozair looked at the column of dust, then at the girl in the mud, then at the old woman.
His gaze shifted to the drain, its water running dark.
His jaw tightened, working as if he had something to say and no words strong enough to hold it.
Every part of him wanted to go toward where the building had fallen and find what had done this and make it face what it had done.
Aryan placed a hand on his shoulder.
He said it quietly. "Let's go to Mayo."
Ozair stood there one more moment.
Then he turned away from the dust, and the four of them moved through the rain, leaving the ruined street behind them, carrying the weight of everything in it.