The air in the subterranean cavern was thick with metallic heat and the bitter scent of failure. Standing amidst the defeated, bleeding forms of the raid team was the figure known as Silence...Alfia.
She was the most powerful beauty to ever walk the battlefield, and her voice, though soft as ash, was a whip that cut deeper than any blade.
"Show me," she demanded, her eyes, eternally closed, holding an abyss of certainty.
"Show me a greater power. Show me proof I cannot deny. Show me will! Show me resolve! Show me justice! Show this evil what your light can do!"
No one could meet the challenge.
The team wore bitter scowls across their battered, bleeding faces.
Even Alise, the boldest, could only clench her fists in impotent frustration.
Ryuu was no different.
They all lacked the concrete power to teach the witch the error of her apocalyptic logic.
However…
A low, distant thunder traveled the impossible distance.
Rumble…
The deep-dungeon roof shook faintly.
A sound from the surface, spanning the abyss, as if to spur them on.
It shouldn't have been heard, yet it resonated…..the frantic howl of those who fought above.
Was it Warlord?
Braver?
Or perhaps the muffled, final dirge for those whose names would soon be forgotten?
It was the cacophony of a world struggling against oblivion, the desperate noise of those seizing the future and those seeking to destroy it.
Ryuu felt the vibration deep within her soul.
Planting a bruised hand on the stone floor, she fought the exhaustion and forced her battered body upright.
"Ryuu…!" Alise breathed, wonder replacing despair.
Alfia turned her head slightly toward the girl.
"Erebus's favorite," she stated.
"Do you have an answer for me?"
Ryuu gazed down at the deep wounds scarring her right hand.
"…No," she admitted, her voice barely audible.
"What?"
"Right now, in my current state, I cannot persuade you. I cannot even say for certain what true justice is."
Ryuu spoke the truth of her heart, laying her weakness bare without a hint of performance.
"I would be lying if I said your tale just now….of destroying Orario to save the world...didn't shake my faith a little."
Clair, looking up from the ground, saw the genuine pain in Ryuu's confession.
"Even now, I'm nothing but a lost traveler on an endless journey…" Ryuu continued.
Then, she clenched her right hand into a fist, the movement wringing a fresh surge of conviction from her core.
"But there is one thing I know for sure, Alfia! With your solution, that journey, that promise of justice, will never move forward!"
"What…?"
"You look only to the past! Not to the future, or even the present!"
Alfia's ultimate aim was the revival of antiquity, a retreat to the Age of Heroes millennia past. She sought not to step boldly forward, but to undo the progress of history.
This, Ryuu proclaimed, was unforgivable for one fundamental reason:
"You'll be casting away everything we've been given, everything inherited from our heroes!"
The sharp assertion startled Alfia.
It wasn't just her; Alise, Lyra...the entire team showed surprise.
Ryuu's gaze was fixed firmly ahead, not on the ruins behind them.
She refused to retreat from the fear and despair lying forward; she stood to oppose it.
"All their rights and all their wrongs….I carry every piece of it with me and reach for whatever lies ahead!"
Perhaps it was the naivety of youth, a blinding fire that allowed her to dream despite the impending horrors.
To someone like Alfia, who had personally witnessed the world's most brutal historical cycle, Ryuu's thoughts must have seemed a fanciful fiction, an impossible wish.
But Ryuu, too, had experienced despair.
She had tasted grief and crushing loss; she had seen the world's harshness and had refused to yield.
Her chin remained lifted, her eyes directed toward the unwritten future.
With that starlight in her eyes, she declared:
"That is my duty to those who came before me!"
Alfia froze.
She was still trying to internalize the concept, as if the notion of anything other than despair were an alien language.
Meanwhile, Ryuu's words ignited the dying embers in her teammates.
"…You said it, kiddo."
It was Neze, the animal girl, a grin stretching across her face.
Hearing the conviction from the Astraea familia's newest recruit, she slapped her knees and pulled herself upright.
"Hah. That's our baby sister for you. Such a simpleminded idiot," said Noin, climbing to her feet and wiping the blood from her cheek.
It was Alise, somehow now the most energetic of all, who leaped up and proudly jutted out her chest.
"I think Leon's onto something here!"
She beamed.
"Future! Yeah, that's right! Future! Just keep saying 'Future' and it sounds all justice-like! Now that's what I call justice!"
"...Oh, I forgot. We've got an even bigger idiot on the team…" muttered Nikolaos with a sigh.
"But it sounds like we've got our answer," Clair said, swinging her spear over her shoulder.
"Yes. Thanks to Ryuu," said Maryuu, the healer and actual eldest, already chanting her restoration spell, stitching the team back together with luminous magic.
"We've got to chase after the future, no matter how bad it gets," asserted Iska.
"Until the day comes when we return to stardust…" said Asta, the dwarf.
"…we'll all keep walking forward," Celty, the elf, concluded, the two of them sharing a fleeting smile that defied racial divides.
Alise looked around at her friends, her own smile bright and sunny.
"We follow our duty! We balance the scales! Until the day the stars claim us!"
Without any further prompt, the girls of the Astraea familia shared a collective nod, then erupted into their familiar, mildly embarrassing, oath pose.
Clair and Nikolaos, the Bahamut familia guests, looked around confused until Alise urgently gestured for them to join.
They had no choice.
"Like comets in the sky above, we leave our starry trails on this land wherever we go!"
Ryuu and the rest of the team completed the vow.
"This we swear, on the sword and wings of justice!!"
The ashen hair of Silence fluttered in the combined wind of their unified declaration.
"Not the past, but the future," she muttered under her breath.
"To look not to proven history, but the unknown and unwritten. Then to you all, I must seem a specter, bound to the past…or perhaps a dusty old memento of times gone by."
In that moment of quiet reflection, one might have sworn the witch's lips formed a gentle, mournful smile.
But the illusion was instantly lost amid the whirling sparks of unleashed power.
"Very well," she said, the gentle tone replaced by cold finality.
"This is the end…of you foolish children and your impossible dreams. I swear on my own life that I shall bury you all. There will be no salvation. There will be no mercy. All will be erased. You have brought your noise to me…and now you shall pay."
"Oh, we'll pay, all right!" chirped Alise, now fully charged.
"And we'll take you down!"
"This is it, Alfia!" Ryuu yelled, letting loose a gale of determination.
"This ends here!"
The scarlet flames of the witch raged, met by the combined storm of the team.
They rushed ahead, a unified torrent of light and youthful resolve, charging the agent of despair eager to extinguish their ongoing, defiant justice.
.........
"Future...? Dreams...?"
The very notions felt distant, abstract.
Amidst the magical glow, the bell of Silence tolled, signaling the start of a difficult battle.
A distance away, Vito observed the team, their recent exchange with Alfia still echoing in his mind.
"I don't understand," he muttered, his gaze fixed on the fighters.
"How can such hollow rhetoric ignite such defiance? How can they possibly face the sheer might, the crushing despair, of Silence?"
It wasn't their impassioned words themselves that confounded him; Vito had long grown accustomed to the comforting deceptions peddled in the name of justice.
But the conqueror, Silence, was an unassailable force, and no amount of fervent belief could alter that brutal reality.
Vito knew this intimately.
He still felt the cold dread of being utterly laid bare by Zald….a pure, primal terror, like encountering a being from beyond his dimension.
A being against whom all resistance was a futile, pathetic struggle.
Yet, these audacious 'pests' had somehow drawn strength from those very deceptions, confronting the witch with resolve.
What twisted sorcery fueled such fearlessness?
What perverse definition of "justice" could possibly allow this?
A burst of hysterical laughter shattered the tension, not from Vito's own throat, but from Kaguya, standing beside him.
"What's so funny?" he demanded, turning to face her.
"Oh, nothing," she replied, wiping a tear from her eye, a faint smile playing on her lips.
"It's just... I knew that girl was foolish, but not this foolish. Even for an elf, she's remarkably stubborn."
The smile deepened, imbued with a strange tenderness, as if she'd rediscovered a long-lost treasure.
"Look at her, defect. Look at that idiot. Look at that elf."
Vito's gaze followed hers to Ryuu, who fought with furious grace, an elven sword flashing in one hand, her friend's weapon in the other.
The trails of her blades shimmered with the brilliance of captured starlight.
"Isn't it beautiful?" Kaguya whispered, her voice laced with admiration Vito rarely heard.
He would normally have scoffed, but found himself too mesmerized to respond.
"Isn't it blinding? The blind faith of a moron who believes in hope. Someone who relentlessly strives for perfection, who courageously admits their mistakes, and who looks ever forward."
To merely exist, without effort, yielded nothing.
To ignore one's flaws was an error.
Anyone could ignorantly cling to hope, just as anyone could easily abandon the future.
But to actively take steps toward that hope, to tirelessly aim for that future…..that, to Kaguya, was something truly extraordinary.
That was where true justice resided.
"That," Kaguya declared, her voice firm, "is what we must fight for."
Her smile, then, softened into the tender, almost clumsy expression of an elder sister watching over a cherished sibling.
"Justice will endure. A lovely phrase, don't you agree? It means even my own sordid past is worth preserving, a part of the tapestry that continues."
Vito recoiled, his face contorted in disbelief.
"Those words are nothing but a comforting lie!" he spat, his voice rising to a yell.
"If justice holds such paramount importance, then what about me?!"
He sneered, a transparent attempt to mask the raw self-loathing that festered within him.
"I am the living incarnation of the world's imperfections! There is no future for me! No hope I can cling to, no justice I can ever pass on!"
"No justice to pass on?" Kaguya's voice hardened, her sharp gaze cutting his rant to ribbons. "That's because you chose never to listen to one."
Vito gasped, a strangled sound catching in his throat.
"You decided you didn't need to; you already knew what justice was. You were alone, you told yourself, and no one could ever understand you, and wasn't that just so terribly unfair? You surrendered yourself to madness and cruelty, conveniently disguising it as righteous anger. How could you ever hope to pass that on?"
Vito stood dumbstruck, but Kaguya's incisive words continued to flay him bare.
"You incorrigible fool. You are nothing but a bloodthirsty beast, hiding behind pathetic, tragic tales, utterly blind to the paradox that festers at your core. Truly defective."
Vito had no retort.
He couldn't counter her logic, yet he couldn't simply lash out with the violence and mayhem he craved.
The word 'defective,' a label he had once embraced as a badge of his unique misery, now felt like an inescapable curse.
"No matter what you claim," Kaguya asserted, her voice ringing with conviction, "we will preserve them. The ideas we've been given. The justice we've inherited."
She returned her trusty sword, Higabana, to its sheath with a soft click.
"We will prove to you... that there are things that will long outlive us!"
Her voice rose, vibrant with an almost sacred fervor.
"They will sing our heroic tales forever! Not out of a morbid fixation on the past, but as inspiration to relentlessly strive for the future!"
As she closed her eyes, a fleeting vision crossed her mind: a solitary girl once standing in twilight, then the faces of the nameless few who fought and died this very day.
Their hopes and sacrifices filled her thoughts.
With a subtle motion, she allowed just a sliver of Higabana's crimson blade to peek from its scabbard, a silent promise to cut down any obstacle in her path.
Vito's mind reeled, unable to grasp the conviction in her words.
"Heroic tales?" he shrieked, his voice cracking.
"That is the hope you pit against despair? What absolute nonsense! I won't accept it! That's utterly ridiculous!"
He screamed and cried, thrashing like a child in a monumental tantrum.
It was all he could do to stave off the crushing admission of truth that threatened to shatter him entirely.
"I must kill! I must destroy! It's the only way to make the world right again! Your 'justice' is nothing but fabricated lies! You're a fool to believe it!!"
"Enough." Kaguya's single word, sharp as a blade, sliced through his hysteria, silencing him instantly.
"I will put an end, here and now, to your ridiculous delusions. With my own tainted justice... the very art of my accursed Gojouno line."
The Far Eastern girl shifted her weight, aligning her body side-on and lowering her posture into a coiled, predatory stance.
There was no mistaking the deadly technique she was preparing.
Vito instinctively recoiled a few steps, fear flashing in his eyes, before he planted his feet, steeled his frayed nerves, and launched himself at her with a mad, animalistic scream. "Aaaaaarghhh!!"
Cornered by the harrowing realization of his own brokenness, the man resorted to the only action that promised him solace: plunging his knife through Kaguya's heart.
Yet, Kaguya's gaze remained rock-steady, utterly unfazed.
"Begone, twisted brute. Ill-omened flower of death."
She spoke her ultrashort chant, and her sword, Higabana, a blur of crimson, flew from its sheath. "Iai Strike: Five Lights!"
All at once, Vito's world constricted, narrowing to a suffocating sphere of crimson.
Five streaks, the exact shade of the spider lily, Higabana's namesake, erupted around him, trapping him within a cage of impossible light.
"Rgh...!" he choked, perceiving Kaguya in five positions simultaneously: before him, to either side, behind, and finally, directly above.
Her impossible blade-work had undeniably sealed his fate.
This terrifying art, which Kaguya herself so deeply despised, was a fusion of ancient magic enhancement and unparalleled swordplay.
Her former house, the Gojouno clan, had operated for centuries in the shadows of the Imperial Court.
They were the unseen hand behind arrests, executions, murmurings of murder, assassination, seduction...anything the higher echelons wished handled with discreet ruthlessness.
In the early days of the age of gods, the clan had uncovered a peculiar inheritance within their bloodline: the systematic transmission of specific skills and spells.
Much like how elves, dragon-kin, and some other ancient races possessed a common 'seed' that allowed similar abilities to manifest, the pure blood of the Gojouno line permitted the mass creation of assassins, all imbued with identical, pre-honed capacities.
Identical skills.
Identical spells.
Each generation subjected to the same horrifying training regimen, bred to be utterly replaceable, yet perfected over a thousand years, imbued with the founder's abilities.
The clan's ultimate technique, their highest art, was this: a paired skill and spell, both christened "Five Lights."
The spell itself was deceptively simple, merely conjuring five magical slashes at any desired angle.
However, it demanded a master-grade sword skill from the caster to elevate it, transforming simple slashes into something far greater: an inescapable coffin of blades.
Vito, fueled by sheer terror, dodged the first crimson slash by a mere hair's breadth.
His knife, clutched tight, parried the second blade on his right, the impact jarring his bones.
He sacrificed his left arm, allowing the third blade to slice clean through, even as the fourth carved a brutal gash across his back.
"Gaaaaaaaaaghhh!!" he screamed, a sound torn from the depths of his being.
After that, his desperate struggle concluded.
His luck, such as it was, had evaporated.
The fifth and final blade descended, aiming for his neck, carving deeply into his shoulder, poised to pierce his heart…then, inexplicably, it vanished.
For reasons utterly beyond his comprehension, Kaguya had dispelled her magic at the very last second.
But such a minute reprieve was far from enough to save Vito's life.
Perhaps, in truth, it was no mercy at all.
All around him, his own blood began to hang in the air, suspended like a flurry of crimson cluster amaryllis—the very color Vito most admired, yet now rendered only to him as a cold, inhuman gray.
"This is the end, defect. Lie there until you perish."
The sight of the crimson 'flowers' of blood, born from her repugnant, despicable art, sickened Kaguya.
She had grown accustomed to its grim beauty over the years, yet it disgusted her nonetheless. With a final, lingering revulsion, she returned Higabana to its sheath, then turned her back on the fallen Vito.
"Captain... wait for me! I'm on my way!" she murmured, her voice laced with weary determination.
Her destination, of course, was her friends, still locked in their desperate struggle against the Silent Witch.
She departed, clutching the wounds she had sustained.
"…Not…yet…! This…can't be over…yet…!"
The man she left behind burned with hate; hate for the world and everything in it.
He clung stubbornly to life, fighting to stem the waters of life flowing out of him.
"I need to… I need to…!"
Meanwhile, from his vantage point far away, the dark god looked down on his follower in silence, his face devoid of emotion.