At this moment, the galaxy had become a desk. The past of the planet had turned into a story waiting to be written. And the Haouken Xross Saber was now a pen capable of rewriting everything from the ground up.
From this point forward, everything in that story—every fragment, every cause—would be rewritten anew.
Hoshigaki Sora held his pen aloft, sifting through the story's essential components. The first: the Lord Ravager, Zulo.
He needed to isolate Zulo's influence—and then erase it completely.
And so, he began crafting the new narrative of the planet before him.
But as soon as he realized the true scale of the task, he couldn't help but feel overwhelmed.
Aside from the earliest years—those rare, brief eras when life hadn't yet emerged and the planet lay in a simple, dead hush—everything else was wildly intricate.
And the moment life appeared, the complexity began to grow exponentially.
Once humans entered the picture, the unpredictability skyrocketed. Civilization came dangerously close to branching into entirely different paths, just based on individual whims.
To make it worse, the very thing Sora needed to remove was the foundation of this planet's creation—Zulo himself.
Put together, it was practically the same as rewriting the entire planetary timeline from scratch.
Realizing this, Sora paused.
Zulo-as-planet—a setting so deeply baked into the story's bedrock that it couldn't be avoided. It was a truth buried beneath everything, inseparable from the world's structure.
As long as Zulo existed, any human on the planet could at any time transform into a Void Soldier.
So if this world were to survive, by any reasonable standard, then Zulo could not exist here at all.
Unless...
Unless the power of the Hunt could suppress the Destruction Aeon's lingering force rooted in the planet's corpse.
Otherwise, all life born atop that ruin would remain a hopeless illusion.
It felt like a dead end—an impassable wall standing in his way.
He was trying to rewrite the very origin of the planet, and it simply wasn't working.
His omniscient power churned to full capacity, parsing through infinite possibilities.
What if life were born later? Delay the birth of sapience...
No good. Even if he shifted the timeline, the Fragments of Annihilation that had arrived here were beyond what any fledgling civilization could resist.
In other words, the birth of life was a fixed node. Push it earlier or later, and you'd create paradoxes—adding or removing lives that were supposed to exist.
Anna, Ouja, and the children—still aboard other ships—would all become data errors in this revised history.
And that... would mean the kids had no home to return to.
Unacceptable.
This story's timeline cannot be moved.
It was starting to seem like the story of this world's rebirth had fallen into an unsolvable bind.
He couldn't move the birth of life, nor alter the underlying cause of the planet's existence.
Anyone attempting this rewrite would find themselves crushed between these two immovable walls.
But Sora...
He had already grasped a different path—a simple one, yet precise.
And it began by believing in the will of the Hunt that dwelled within this world.
By trusting that, at the dawn of this planet's history, a new variable could be introduced:
The call for Lan's power.
This single addition could tip the scales—amplify the Hunters' strength just enough to push back Zulo's influence.
That way, even if life wasn't born of Destruction, even if it wasn't fueled by it, those lives could still survive—on this planet, and in the wider universe.
But... can it be done?
At the time of the planet's birth, the consciousnesses of the Hunt were fragmented—unformed and scattered.
Could such dispersed awareness summon the power of Ran?
Obviously not.
Even though Zulo was branded as an enemy of the Hunt, scattered consciousnesses couldn't draw down Lan's celestial arrows.
So there had to be something else—a force that could pull those fragments together and ignite them in unison.
That was the key.
And just as Sora reached this point in his writing—he froze.
There is a way.
A way to awaken those scattered wills and bring them into focus.
Even at the end, their identities had never changed. Even in death, they still wanted to fight—side by side—with partners they hadn't even met yet.
A smile crept across Sora's face.
He was thinking of someone.
Not a human—but a creature. Towering in size, yet cautious and gentle.
"Partner. It hasn't been long since we parted ways, but... I kind of miss you already."
Sora pressed his pen to the page and wrote:
At the moment the black hole expelled them, the fallen Hunters sensed that their nemesis still lived.
And so, they pushed themselves beyond death—offering everything they had to once more call upon the will of their Aeon.
Even if it meant becoming beasts. Even if it meant forsaking their forms. So long as they could annihilate their foe completely—this was their pride as Galaxy Rangers.
Thus, those remnants of will gathered together and fired a dim meteor into the stars.
A bullet too weak to catch anyone's attention. A final plea on the edge of extinction.
They hoped the Aeon would hear... but they didn't know when—or if—it would answer. And so they slept, wrapped in regret and hatred for their enemy...
Sora set his pen down.
What happened next... was beyond him.
If, across these thousands of years, the Hunt had noticed that tiny flare—then this new story could become real.
Just like the Hunters' bullets: it didn't matter when they were fired, or how far they traveled—what mattered was that, in that instant, they arrived.
That was no longer ordinary physics. That was observation in a quantum state.
All that was left now... was for the Aeon of the Hunt to act.
Whenever they chose to acknowledge this faint, flickering hope—their arrow would arrive at the precise moment it was needed.
"From here on out... I'll hold the line."
Sora raised the Haouken.
Before the Aeon's power arrived, he had to lock this world's new beginning in place—fix it as the best possible timeline.
Now, all that remained was to wait.
Lan... it's your turn now.
But before Sora could drive the blade down...
A radiant arrow shattered through the Day of Destruction's aura, rocketing toward him from behind!
—!!!
Omniscient foresight flared to life.
Sora barely dodged, tumbling to the side.
Even so, the arrow's edge grazed him—tearing his body apart.
But then—
The words he'd written took effect:
Before the final story is complete, Hoshigaki Sora cannot die.
In a flash, his body restored itself—whole again.
And as he looked toward the blazing arrow now embedded in the pages of the storybook—
Sora laughed.
"Lan!!"