He had no thoughts.

For the first time in his life, there was genuinely nothing going on in his head; no calculation, no plan, no next step.

Just that feeling underneath everything.

Old. Heavy. The kind that didn’t have a name because it predated language entirely.

It woke up.

The sky outside went black.

Not gradually either; just black, clouds rolling in from every direction at once, swallowing the afternoon whole. The wind followed, violent and angry, slamming into the building hard enough to crack windows and rip doors clean off their frames.

The ground shook.

His eyes changed; he knew because he could see the purple light they were throwing onto the floor in front of him.

Then the aura came.

Every armed man in the hall left the ground simultaneously; none of them understood what had lifted them before they were already hitting walls, ceilings, each other.

Every student in the room made the very smart decision to stay down.

He walked forward.

Past all of it.

Stopped beside her.

Brushed the hair back from her face.

Stood up.

And the sound that came out of him wasn’t anything human.

---

After, he found out they worked for Obsidian.

The same organization that had approached him months ago with their clean offices and their talk about humanity’s future; the same people he’d turned down.

Apparently declining them had been classified as a problem.

Their solution had involved a school full of students and a girl with dark hair.

So Leon went to them.

The organization was funded by the world government; which meant the world government sent soldiers.

Thousands of them.

Leon didn’t care.

He never cared to begin with; not about the politics, not about the flags on the uniforms, not about what any of it meant in the grand scheme of things.

They were in the way.

So he went through them.

Thousands upon thousands of military soldiers, every world army force that could be scrambled and pointed at him, and Leon walked through all of it and kept going until there was nothing left to go through.

When it was over he went back to where Mira was.

Sat beside her.

Didn’t move for a long time.

Then he died there too.

---

His spirit didn’t pass on.

’Of course it didn’t.’

Most spirits pass on; that’s the whole arrangement. You die, you move on, the universe handles the paperwork.

Leon’s spirit looked at that option and wasn’t interested.

He was still looking for her; it didn’t matter that she was gone, that stubborn unreasonable part of him that had never once accepted something just because the world said so was still running on empty and refusing to sit down.

Then something grabbed him and dragged him downward.

Hell.

He arrived, took one look around.

Then started breaking things.

Hell had rules; not the written kind but the understood kind, enforced by beings that had been around since before most of existence figured out what it was doing. Power was the currency. Fear was the language.

Leon spoke neither.

He went through that place the same way he went through everything else; the demons that came at him stopped coming after a while. He kept going deeper until he found one of the kings sitting on his throne like existence owed him something personally.

Asmodeus.

Leon dragged him through the mud.

Literally.

When he was done with Hell he left it significantly worse than he’d found it and kept drifting; still looking, still not finding her.

Eventually he hit something; the edge of one universe pressing against another, thin enough that something as stubborn as him could push through.

So he did.

And on that was how he ended up in Novaria, of he had not defeated asmodeus he wouldn’t have been able to leave hell.

---

The scene ended.

Leonis stood there, staring at the two figures before him.

He had remembered.

All of it.

And honestly, he thought remembering would feel like something good; like a weight being lifted, or at the very least some kind of clarity.

It didn’t.

It just felt like sorrow.

"Do you understand now?" Leon said; his amethyst eyes were fixed on him.

Leonis said nothing.

"We are one and the same," Leon continued; his voice was calm, almost too calm. "We had the strength to change things. We always had it." He paused. "And yet, look at what happened. It would have been better if we never hid it to begin with. That was why we failed."

’...He’s right.’

As much as Leonis didn’t want to admit it, he couldn’t exactly argue with himself.

"Just like what is happening right now," Leon added.

The white space shifted.

The blank formless void peeled back like a curtain and what replaced it made Leonis’s chest tighten immediately.

Everett.

Arlott was there, S rank aura blazing, cutting through a battlefield that had completely lost any sense of order. Devils everywhere. Monster hordes pouring in from every direction. The Everett forces trying to hold a line that was visibly, rapidly, falling apart.

Lena was there too; rapier in hand, armor stained red, still fighting.

’This is bad.’

No, bad was an understatement.

This was a disaster.

...

It had been six days.

Six days since her master had closed his eyes and hadn’t opened them since.

Yuki sat beside his bed, elbow on her knee, chin resting on her hand, watching his face with the particular patience of someone who had centuries of practice waiting for things but was finding this specific wait considerably harder than usual.

’He’s fine,’ she reminded herself; his breathing was steady, his mana was stable, there was no immediate danger.

It didn’t help.

Not being able to hear him complain about training, or watch him eat an entire plate of meat while pretending the vegetables didn’t exist, or listen to him tell her to stop standing outside his door for two hours—

Six days of none of that was, frankly, unbearable.

She reached out slowly and brushed the snow white hair back from his face.

Then the door burst open.

Two guards, urgency written all over them, practically falling over each other to get through the entrance.

"What’s the matter," Yuki said; her voice was calm but her ears had already angled forward.

The guard in front, catching his breath, thrust a folded paper toward her.

"Lord Nine Tails, Captain Lark told me to deliver this immediately."

She took it.

Opened it.

Read it.

’...Of course.’

The beasts were on a rampage; not the ordinary kind, not the random territorial aggression that Beastglade produced on a regular basis. This was organized. Coordinated. Moving in groups and formations that beasts had no business moving in without something directing them.

Lark’s speculation at the bottom of the report was short and to the point.

A Monster Horde had likely already hit the nearby capital.

Yuki folded the paper slowly and looked at her master’s face.

He was peaceful in sleep; younger looking somehow, the usual weight behind those sapphire eyes gone for now.

’He’ll be disheartened.’

If he woke up and found out his home had been razed to the ground while he was unconscious in another world entirely; she already knew exactly what that would look like on his face and she had no interest in seeing it.

’So I’ll handle it.’

Simple as that.

She stood, straightened her robes, and turned to the guards.

"Nobody enters this room," she said. "Nobody."

She placed her hand over his sleeping form and a barrier materialized around him, soft and absolute, the kind that didn’t announce itself but would make whoever tried to breach it deeply regret the decision.

Then she opened a portal.

The violet edges of it shimmered in the dim room, casting light across his face for just a moment before she stepped through.

And just like that she was gone.

...

The calamity fox; the being that had twice reduced human civilizations to ash, that had burned two kingdoms in a single campaign five centuries ago and leveled a capital three centuries after that.

Was going to help the humans.

’My master would probably find this funny,’ she thought, somewhere in the portal between worlds.

She stepped out the other side.

And Everett came into view.