She tried to pull away, but it was like trying to pull away from a black hole. She started to scream, but no sound came out—just a dry, hollow wheeze. She was feeling the "nothing" I felt. She was experiencing the absolute silence of a soul with no blueprint.

But I was reaching my limit. My ground was collapsing. The strain of holding both her identity and my own void was tearing my physical form apart. I could feel the "blueprint" of my 14-year-old body flickering, threatening to dissolve into raw data.

I looked at her, my vision blurring, and I did the only thing a "heartless bastard" could do to end a story that had gone on too long.

"Finish it," I whispered, not to Valeria, but to the air.

I leaned closer to Valeria, my forehead almost touching hers. I was done with the games. I was done with the info-dumping.

"You said I have no qualms for others," I muttered, a single, genuine tear of exhaustion tracing a path through the dust on my cheek. "So, prove it. Kill me, Valeria. Take the last of this ’nothing’ and end the script. If you want your legacy back, you have to kill the one holding the pen."

I let go of her wrist and stood there, arms open, an "empty vessel" waiting for the final blow. I didn’t look back at Selene. I couldn’t. Because if I saw her face one more time, I might actually feel like someone worth saving—and that would ruin the ending.

* * *

The silence of the corridor wasn’t just the absence of noise; it was a vacuum created by Kairi’s surrender. And then, the vacuum shattered.

"NO!"

The scream didn’t sound like Selene. It was a raw, jagged tear in the atmosphere, stripped of her usual sarcasm, her guarded observations, and her pretentious vocabulary. It was the sound of a sister watching the only anchor in her world cut its own rope.

I lunged forward, but my legs felt like they were moving through waist-deep mercury. The "Bio-cipher" distortion Kairi had unleashed was warping the gravity of the room, making every inch of progress an agonizing crawl.

"Kairi, you ABSOLUTE IDIOT—stop it! Get away from her!"

I watched in horror as Kairi stood there, arms wide, offering her life to a woman who had just been turned into a psychological mirror of Kairi’s own misery.

Valeria looked paralyzed, her face twitching as she choked on the "nothingness" Kairi had shoved into her soul. She looked like a puppet with its strings cut, yet her hand was still twitching toward the shard of energy she had been manifestng.

"Don’t you dare!" I screamed again, my voice breaking.

"Don’t you dare leave me with this! You don’t get to be the martyr, Kairi! You don’t get to decide the ending for both of us!"

The air between us began to crackle.

My magic, usually so structured and defensive, was reacting to my panic. It wasn’t emerald green anymore; it was a flickering, unstable white-hot heat.

How did I miss it?

The thought haunted me even as I screamed. I had been so focused on my own wounded pride, on being "the foolish one" who got deceived here, that I hadn’t realized Kairi wasn’t just fighting a villain. She was fighting her own exhaustion along with the nightmare herself. I just couldn’t believe how much of an idiot I was.

"Kairi!"

I reached out, my fingers clawing at the empty space between us. Valeria’s hand finally closed—not into a fist, but into a jagged, desperate claw. She was going to do it. Even hollowed out, even without her genius, the instinct to destroy the thing causing her pain was too strong.

I saw the purple-black light begin to pool in Valeria’s palm, inches from Kairi’s unprotected chest.

Everything slowed. I saw the single tear on Kairi’s cheek.

I saw the way her "tiny, innocent hand" had finally gone limp.

I didn’t care about the "equal payment" anymore. I didn’t care about Agatha Christie or the DNA of a legacy. I just wanted my sister to stop acting like she didn’t exist.

It’s quite suffocating, you know?

I was the one who brought her to life!

How couldn’t she be so grateful for herself at least once! It’s so frustrating!

I had to settle this... pay what she was doing for me.

If resurrection worths equally to breaking through this wall, then I had no choice.

And if this could prevent her from rewinding the time without any purpose.

I would do it forever.

Alchemistry... Symbolization!

I didn’t strike the wall.

Instead, I shifted the energy to symbolize this wall’s conceptual meaning.

I used my white-hot energy to catalyze a reaction within the Symbolization field.

I was looking for the "meaning" behind the armor, the variable that defined who the universe was currently protecting.

The barrier was currently protecting the tragic causality.

It was shielding the event, not the person.

I reached into the core of the stasis field and orchestrated it using a certain frequency.

I injected my own resentment—my "resurrection" debt—as a new constant into the equation. If Kairi was the "empty vessel," I would change her density.

I would make her "too significant to be deleted."

The Symbolization hit the barrier and introduced a destabilizing frequency.

The invisible dimension peeled away from the abstract concept of the scene, its structure forcibly reinforced.

I collapsed the stasis field around Kairi’s physical coordinates.

But I was way too reckless—so reckless I had drained myself to the brink of death.

My body was on the verge of losing control.

I was turning the universe’s own stubbornness into a kinetic shield.

The purple-black energy from Valeria’s hand made contact.

In a standard physical model, Kairi would have been atomized.

But under the law of Symbolization, the energy encountered a Refractive Index of Infinite Importance.

The attack didn’t just stop; it underwent for a underwent retrocausal inversion.

The "meaning" of the blow was rewritten.

The sound wasn’t a scream or a boom; it was the high-pitched whine of a hard drive crashing—the sound of reality failing to compute a contradiction.

The golden-white symbols bonded to Kairi’s skin at a sub-atomic level, creating a Hard-Light Quantum fueled by my own Alchemical exhaustion.

I finally fell to my knees, my internal mana-reserves flashing red, nearly bottomed out. But the calculation was complete.

"The variables have changed, Kairi," I panted, the air smelling of ozone and burnt logic.

"You aren’t a ghost anymore, Kairi. I’ve made you a complete equation."

I told her for the last time with a smile drawn into my face.

Soon after, a sudden collapse struck.

And all I saw was nothing but pitch black.