Real chapter name: The Descent to Yggdrasil's Roots
They met at dusk in the east garden, where the wards were thick and the ground didn't complain when reality bent.
Rias and her peerage waited in formation. Sirzechs stood behind them with Grayfia. Venelana and Zeoticus watched from the steps. No speeches. Just a lot of eyes that said come back without asking for the impossible.
Hespera checked each of her three: Nyx, Kuroka, Ophis.
"Last call," she said. "Anyone want to stay home and make soup?"
Nyx rolled her eyes. "You'd burn water. You can't cook, and we all know it."
"That's... accurate," Hespera said. She tapped Kuroka's nose. "You?"
Kuroka's tail thumped once. "You run, I chase. That's the deal."
Hespera turned to Ophis. "And you?"
Ophis met her gaze, steady. "Where ever my Silence goes. I go. Dangerous when left alone."
"Who? Me? Hehe, thanks mom. I do try~," Hespera said, pleased.
She drew a thin line in the air. Space peeled back like a seam, revealing a vertical slit of cold dark. The smell that rolled out was old sap and metal. Down there, the Dimensional Gap pressed against the roots of the world. Down there, Albion waited.
Rias stepped forward. "We hold this point. No one follows you in. If something comes out, we stall it or die trying."
Hespera smiled like that was adorable and insane. "If something gets past me, stall and run. Don't be noble about it. Such a silly princess you are."
Rias scowled. "You don't get to give orders here. And I'm not silly!"
"I do when I like you," Hespera said, sweet voice, sharp eyes. She completely ignored Rias's last part. "Try not to make me regret that. It would be such a shame to ruin that tight ass of yours."
Akeno chuckled at the startled squeal Rias gave. Her friend's reactions to Hespera's teasing is always so amusing. "We'll try not to be martyrs."
"Good," Hespera said. "If I'm not back in a day, go into Rias's room and burn all the porn magazines I didn't have to switch with anything less boring. I mean, damn that red princess is pervy. Who would have thought~?"
Said red princess was now trying to attack Hespera, her face was almost as red as her hair. Akeno was laughing, as she was trying to hold back her best friend from attacking her aunt. Such fun!~
Koneko grabbed Hespera's sleeve, interrupting Hespera's fun of watching her favorite plaything, eh princess. "Don't be stupid and get back soon, kay?"
"I'm always stupid," Hespera said, patting her head. "I'm just good at it. But sure kitten, I'll be safe."
She looked once at the gathered devils, then stepped through the slit. Nyx followed. Kuroka slipped in after, ears low but eyes steady. Ophis closed last, sealing the cut behind them with one tap.
The sound of the estate vanished. The Gap took over—low hum, no wind, no air, just pressure and distance stacked in wrong directions.
Roots hung like black rivers through empty space, each one thicker than cities, pulsing with dim light. Between them, gray nothing. Far below, the trunk: a column so large it bent perspective, wrapped round and round by a white dragon whose wings looked like broken moons.
Albion.
"Stay tight," Hespera said. "If you drift away from me, I'll drag you back by your ankles."
Kuroka floated beside her, touching the back of Hespera's coat like a tether. Nyx walked on nothing as if it were marble. Ophis didn't pretend; she was a line in the void, straight and unbothered.
Hespera led them down along a root veined with slow, ugly black. The rot. It crawled against the current like frost in reverse, scabbing over light, trying to seal it shut.
Kuroka grimaced. "It smells wrong."
"It is wrong," Hespera said. "Don't breathe it in. It's corrupted air. It will slowly corrupt the insides of your body, starting with your lungs."
Nyx glanced sideways. "You tested this?"
"On a priest once," Hespera said. "Long ago. Before that idiot brother of mine started the war. The priest forgot his dog's name. Cried for three days. I admit, it wasn't my best work."
They reached a knot in the root—a bulge where the rot had thickened. It pulsed. Each beat pushed a shimmer of black motes into the Gap.
Hespera extended her hand. Twenty-four translucent feathers slid out of her wrist and fanned into a ring, each one etched with tight lines. Not pretty. Practical. She pushed the ring into the bulge and squeezed. The rot hissed and recoiled.
"Good news," Hespera said. "It doesn't like me."
"It's alive," Nyx said. "Not just a curse."
"Parasite," Hespera said. "Cross-realm. Whoever seeded it wanted a slow choke, not an explosion. Boring choice."
Kuroka watched the black veins slither away from Hespera's ring. "Can you burn it?"
"If I burn it, the root scars. Then the trunk bleeds. Then we get a forest of problems." Hespera flicked two feathers loose and pinned the bulge from either side, like spearing a bug. "We do this surgical."
She looked at Ophis. "Buffer me."
Ophis lifted one hand. The hum of the Gap went flat, like sound cut in half. The rot stopped spreading.
Hespera slipped her other hand into the bulge. No flourish. No chant. Just fingers through living bark and into the thick.
Kuroka tensed. "Careful—"
"I am the most careful disaster you'll ever meet," Hespera said. Her voice went calm and clinical. "There. See that? It's not feeding on divine power; it's feeding on forgetting. It's erasing the tree from the tree."
Nyx's jaw tightened. "Memory-eater."
"Yep," Hespera said. "Someone hates continuity."
She closed her fist. Magenta light snapped down her arm and into the rot. The black pulp convulsed, then turned to ash. The knot collapsed. Light pushed back through the wound.
Kuroka let out a breath. "One down."
"Three hundred to go," Hespera said. "We're early. Good."
They moved. Root after root. Knot after knot. Hespera's pace never changed. Insert ring. Pin. Extract. Convert to ash. Seal. She didn't grandstand. She didn't glow. She did the work.
Nyx watched her hands. "You're gentler than you used to be."
"I'm tired of breaking," Hespera said. "Fixing is harder. I like hard."
Kuroka snorted. "You like chaos."
"That too."
They were halfway to the trunk when the rot tried something new. The next bulge split open into a flower of blades and teeth. It lunged without noise, all angles and slick black, trying to swallow Hespera's arm and head.
She didn't flinch. She let it close, then smiled like someone had brought her the wrong drink.
"That's rude," she said, and bit back.
Her teeth sank into nothing that made sense, yet the parasite jerked like it hurt. She yanked her arm free, shoved the ring into its throat, and snapped her fingers. The teeth folded inward like a bear trap closing on itself. The thing shredded, nerves popping like wet twine.
Kuroka stared. "Did you just chew a dimensional parasite?"
"It started it," Hespera said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She looked at Kuroka's worried face and softened her voice. "I'm fine. Don't get attached to monsters. I'm jealous."
Nyx shook her head. "You're impossible."
"That's why you love me."
They kept moving. The roots grew denser. The rot grew smarter. Soon, the bulges weren't bulges; they were nests, each with little tendrils reaching from one root to another, trying to lace a web around the trunk.
Hespera stopped on a ridge of bark, looking down. Albion's white coils filled the void below like mountains laid on their sides. His body wrapped the trunk in layer after layer, his scales cracked and scarred, his wings pinned as braces holding rotten roots apart. Every breath he took shook the entire section.
Kuroka's ears flattened. "He's… huge."
"And stubborn," Hespera said, almost fond. "Hold position."
She cupped her hands around her mouth and raised her voice, not with volume but intent.
"Albion! Wake up. Stop pretending to be a statue."
A blink passed—long, slow tilt of time—then one massive eye opened. Pale blue light stared up through leagues of airless space. Recognition hit like a drop in pressure.
His voice rolled through the Gap without sound. Eveningstar.
Hespera smiled small. "Hey, idiot."
The giant head shifted a fraction, careful not to jostle the layers of root pinned under his jaw. You took your time.
"I was busy killing gods," she said. "Also napping."
You smell like endings.
"Compliment accepted."
A low rumble shook the roots. Not a laugh. Something like approval.
Hespera scanned his coils. Dozens of dark lesions pulsed under the scales where rot pressed in against him. It wasn't just the tree that was infected anymore; the parasite had decided to eat the dragon pinning it. Of course it had.
She pointed. "Nyx, take the east lesions. No theatrics. Night pressure only."
Nyx's aura darkened, a clean slice of black over black. "Understood."
"Ophis, hold the Gap steady. If this field wobbles, everything unhooks."
"Already holding," Ophis said. The hum went flatter.
"Kuroka," Hespera said, and her voice gentled. "I need you on my back. Regulate my output. If I spike, you slap me."
Kuroka blinked. "That's your plan?"
"That's always my plan," Hespera said. "Come on."
Kuroka hopped up, arms around Hespera's shoulders, legs hooking at her waist. Hespera's hands slid to Kuroka's calves, anchoring her.
"Comfortable?" Hespera asked.
"Warm," Kuroka said, trying not to blush. "Also, dangerous."
"Good," Hespera said, and moved.
They worked in a vertical spiral, coil by coil. Nyx pressed her palms to each lesion. Night pooled over the wound, cooling it, starving it, no glow, no mess. Ophis kept the entire corridor of the Gap locked like a vise. Hespera did the surgical burns and extractions, cutting the parasite out of the dragon without nicking the scales.
At the third lesion, the rot learned another trick. It mimicked voices. Not random voices—theirs. Hespera heard Kuroka whisper "leave me" in a voice Kuroka had never used. She heard Nyx say "she's not worth it," flat as a knife. She heard Ophis breathe "child, enough" with soft worry meant to slow her down.
Hespera didn't pause. "Don't listen," she said. "It's trying to buy time."
Kuroka's arms tightened. "I know your voice. I'm fine."
"Good girl," Hespera said. It wasn't condescending. It was praise meant to land fast and stick hard.
They reached the mid-coils. The rot there wasn't lesions; it was architecture, black scaffolding grown into lattice, trying to lock Albion to the trunk so it could drink both at once. Hespera squinted at the anchors.
Nyx clicked her tongue. "These aren't random. Someone keyed them."
"Yeah," Hespera said. "Signature's buried, but the weave is deliberate." She put her palm on one beam. Her eyes went silver-black for a second. "There.
's pattern, blended with a tool she didn't understand. She helped seed this without knowing what she was inviting."
Nyx's mouth went thin. "She's already paid."
"Not arguing," Hespera said. "We cut it anyway."
She slid Pandemonium Noctis out of nothing and drove it into the lattice. The blade didn't glow. The lattice did. It screamed without sound, shuddered, and cracked. Ophis seized the moment, crushing the Gap tighter so the break couldn't slip away and heal somewhere else.
They moved faster. Hespera stopped counting knots. She counted breaths now—hers, Kuroka's, Albion's. In, cut, out. In, seal, out.
At the final turn before Albion's head, the rot made a last play. It peeled off the trunk, knitted itself into a man-shaped figure, and walked toward them on the air.
It wore a face Hespera knew too well: her own—but soft, human, unwinged. The voice was perfect.
"Stop," it said. "You're tearing the weave. Heal me another way."
Kuroka hissed.
Nyx's eyes went cold. "Do I kill it or do you?"
Hespera smiled at her copy. "Cute."
"You're hurting him," the copy said, nodding at Albion. "You always hurt what you touch."
Hespera tilted her head. "You think I haven't heard worse?"
"You think you deserve them," the copy said. "You don't fix things. You possess them. You chained the world. Even now you talk about anchors, and what do anchors do?"
Kuroka bristled on Hespera's back. "Don't."
"It's stalling," Hespera said. Her voice didn't rise. "It copies in order to get permission. If I argue, it wins."
She stepped forward, kissed the copy on the forehead like she was blessing a child, and whispered, "I know what I am."
Then she drove Noctis through its chest.
The copy's face didn't change. It dissolved from the wound outward, turning to ash that smelled like old paper. The remaining lattice shivered and died with it.
Kuroka exhaled. "That was creepy."
"I left the creepiness on," Hespera said, amused. "Saves time."
They reached Albion's head at last. His jaw was set. Two thick black bands wrapped his neck like leashes, sunk through scale and into muscle. The flesh around them was gray-white, refusing to heal.
Hespera touched one band. The pain in it punched through her arm like a spike. She didn't flinch.
"These are the anchors," she said. "The last ones. If we pop them wrong, they slam shut on the trunk."
"Can you lift them?" Nyx asked.
"Yes," Hespera said. "But not alone." She looked at Ophis. "I'll separate the band from his tissue. You grab the band's concept and hold it open. Nyx, you press night into the gap. Kuroka, you feed me if I dip."
Kuroka blinked. "Feed you how?"
Hespera glanced back with a small smile. "Literally."
Kuroka flushed. "Now?"
"Now."
Hespera bit the inside of her wrist. Magenta blood welled. Kuroka caught her hand, eyes locked on Hespera's, and drank. The effect was instant. Kuroka's aura flared—cool, sleek, steady—then bled into Hespera's like water into dye.
Nyx watched with a raised brow. "Jealousy later," she said to herself, half-smiling, then took position.
Ophis lifted her hand. Now, her eyes said.
Hespera slid her fingers under the first band and spoke to it in the language the parasite used—no words, just authority. The band loosened a hair. That hair was enough. Ophis snatched the gap and froze it. Nyx poured night into the seam to keep it from remembering how to close.
Hespera forced two feathers under, then four, then all twenty-four, bracing them like jacks. The band creaked. The rot in it screamed in that voiceless way.
"Push," Hespera said.
They pushed. The band lifted. Hespera wrenched it up and off in one clean drag. It twisted in her hands, trying to slip into the Gap. Ophis shut the exit. Nyx smothered the memory. Hespera crushed the band into a tiny black bead and popped it into her mouth like candy.
Kuroka stared. "Did you—"
"Waste not," Hespera said, chewing. "Disgusting. Second one."
Albion's eye closed and opened—pain sliding out of it like a tide. Finish it.
They repeated the process on the other side. This one fought harder. It tried to merge with Albion's spine. Ophis held the spine's concept separate with two fingers as if she were pinching a string. Nyx wrapped the parasite with a shape like a bag. Hespera ripped the band loose and ate that one too, grimacing.
She wiped her mouth. "If I develop a taste for this, stop me."
Kuroka cupped her cheek. "I'll hit you with a broom."
"Perfect."
Albion sagged. The gray at his neck flushed back to white. The cracked scales began to knit.
Hespera put both palms on his snout and leaned her forehead to the cool scale. "Breathe."
He did. The Gap shook with it. The tremor rolled down the trunk, through the roots, and out into the void like a deep drum.
The rot responded in the only way it had left. Every remaining thread ripped itself free and lunged from every direction, making a black tide around them.
"Here we go," Nyx said, voice calm.
Ophis didn't move. Pressure snapped outward from her like a ring—no flash, no sound—turning the tide into a still black wall. The parasite hung mid-lunge, frozen but straining.
Hespera's eyes went bright. "My turn."
She opened her hand. A small, cold star appeared above her palm—compact, ugly, purely functional. Not magic. Authorization. She had used it once to end gods. Now she used it to end a fungus with delusions of grandeur.
"Erase," she said, friendly and final.
The star pulled. The tide collapsed. The remaining threads unspooled into thin lines, then dust, then nothing. The sound was a vacuum being satisfied.
The quiet that followed wasn't holy. It was practical. The job was done.
Albion uncoiled one measure from the trunk. Roots flexed, testing their own strength. Light moved again through channels that had been clogged for too long.
Hespera exhaled. Sweat beaded her temple and vanished as it formed. Kuroka slid off her back and checked her stasis-thin pupils.
"You good?" Kuroka asked.
"Hungry," Hespera said. "I ate two dimensional choke-collars. They tasted like regret."
Nyx touched the nearest root. "The infection's not gone everywhere. But it's broken. The tree can heal now."
Ophis lowered her hand. "The Gap is steady."
Albion's eye watched them. It wasn't gratitude; it was acknowledgment. You chose repair.
"I'm trying new things," Hespera said. "Don't make me regret it."
You won't, Albion said. Not here.
"Good," Hespera said. She patted his snout once, light like you'd pat a dog who could end a city. "Rest. If anything twitches, bite it."
He huffed. That was as close to a laugh as he got.
They rose along the trunk in silence, checking for leftovers. There were a few thin threads they missed. Nyx cut them like sewing stray stitches. Kuroka scraped residue off with her nails and flicked it into Hespera's palm, where it turned to ash. Ophis measured the field until her expression relaxed by one millimeter.
At the last shelf above the trunk, Hespera stopped and sat on the edge, legs dangling over nothing. The world-tree's slow pulse thumped under her. It wasn't romantic. It was a machine starting back up.
"You're thinking," Nyx said, easing down beside her.
"Dangerous habit," Hespera said.
Kuroka sat on her other side and leaned into her shoulder. "What doom thought now?"
"Not doom," Hespera said. "Next step."
She held up her hands. Lines of thin magenta light ran across her palms, branching like veins: system marks. They weren't pretty. They were precise.
"I'll need to anchor you three before the System tries to draft me," she said. "I don't trust it not to scrub our ties for 'clean exit' reasons."
Nyx nodded once. "What do you need?"
"Consent," Hespera said. "I stitch a thread through your essence signatures. It doesn't control you. It just keeps you in my reach even if a universe tries to forget you exist."
Ophis spoke without hesitation. "Do it."
Kuroka held out both hands. "Tie me up."
Hespera grinned. "Later. For now, hold still."
She pricked each of their thumbs with a feather-tip. Three beads of blood hovered, steady. Hespera added one of her own—black-silver, bright. She pressed the four together. They didn't blend. They interlocked, snapping into a simple knot that made the Gap twitch.
"Brace," she said, and pressed the knot to the inside of Nyx's wrist. Light flickered under the skin, then settled into a faint sigil: a small, ugly star with a thread looped through it. She did the same to Kuroka, then Ophis, then finally pressed the knot's echo to her own wrist.
The Gap hummed like a wire tightened to pitch, then eased.
Nyx flexed her fingers. "Any side effects?"
"Shared dreams," Hespera said. "Sometimes shared emotions in extreme states. If I go full apocalyptic, you'll feel like you want to kiss or kill something. Try to aim."
Kuroka smirked. "I always aim."
Ophis looked at her wrist, then at Hespera. "This is permanent."
"Yes," Hespera said. "You asked to supervise me. Congratulations. Lifetime appointment."
Ophis nodded once, satisfied.
Nyx leaned her shoulder into Hespera's. "When do we leave?"
"Not yet," Hespera said. "We give the tree a day to prove it can breathe alone."
Kuroka yawned. The sound bounced weird in the Gap. "Then we go home, eat everything Akeno makes, and sleep."
Hespera stood. "You read my mind."
They rose away from the trunk, leaving Albion to his guard. He watched until they vanished back among the higher roots, then closed his eye and tightened one last loop—habit, not fear.
Halfway up, Hespera paused. The root beside her quivered. Not rot. Not parasite. Something small, new, and shy. A tiny sprout poked out of old bark and unfolded a leaf no bigger than her thumbnail.
Kuroka spotted it. "Baby tree?"
"Regrowth," Hespera said. "Good sign."
She didn't touch it. She didn't bless it. She just nodded and moved on.
They reached the seam they'd cut to enter. Hespera looked through. On the other side, the garden lights of the Gremory estate glowed warm. Voices carried very faint. Safe.
She glanced at her lovers and her mother. "House rule after we step through."
Nyx lifted a brow. "I'm afraid to ask."
"No talking about apocalypse at dinner," Hespera said. "Anyone breaks it, I erase dessert."
Kuroka gasped. "Monster."
Ophis considered. "Acceptable."
Hespera smiled—small, calm, and a little dangerous. "Let's go home."
She sliced the seam open, and the four of them stepped through into night air that finally smelled like clean stone and bread. The cut sealed behind them with a soft click.
Above, the sky didn't crack. Below, the world didn't tremble.
Yggdrasil kept breathing.
And for one more night, so did they.