Rain had started falling — not heavy, not cleansing. Just there.Sky too tired to hold itself together.
The Crimson Communion crawled through the broken forest just outside Kyoto's barrier, where Father Asher had forced them to escape.
They didn't look like victors.They looked like wreckage that learned how to walk.
Flint collapsed under a hollow tree, coughing smoke and spitting up embers.
His fingers were still glowing — little licks of cursed fire twitching like dying nerves. Juno immediately kicked dirt on his hands.
"Stop burning the ground."
"I'm not doing it on purpose," he wheezed.
"You never do. That's the problem."
Spillglass was trying to make coffee using rainwater and a cursed Zippo lighter. It wasn't going well.
Junpei sat nearby, bandaging his own arm with a strip torn from his hoodie. His jellyfish spirit hovered behind him — deflated, but loyal.
"Did we win?" Junpei asked.
Spillglass stared into his boiling mess of regrets and herbs.
"…No clue."
Juno stood watch, vision flickering, her head wrapped in a makeshift bandage Thorne had applied while muttering something about seeing stars inside her pupils.
"I saw… futures," she said quietly.
"No sh*t," Flint grunted. "We all did. Some of us even lived."
"No. I mean—I saw all of us. Dying. Splintered. One future, Thorne—your Epitaph stabbed you."
He blinked, looked down at the remains of his latest cursed weapon — a bent, half-shattered blade still radiating grief.
"I believe it."
There was a silence between them. Not comfortable. Not dramatic. Just silence — the kind you sit in when your ears are still ringing and your lungs taste like war.
Spillglass finally broke it with the sound of explosive vomiting.
"Don't drink sacred wine next time," Juno said without looking.
"That wasn't sacred," he gagged. "That was—sacrilegious."
Father Asher didn't return that night.
The group camped out under cursed tarp and wet leaves.
The fire was dim. The ground was cold.
They passed around food in silence — until Flint coughed up blood and laughed, "We look like a damn cult."
"We are," Thorne said without flinching.
Spillglass raised his busted flask. "To the broken."
"To the stupid," Juno added.
"To the ones who didn't make it," Junpei said quietly.
They clinked cursed cans.Didn't drink. Just… clinked.
And as they fell asleep — one by one — the last thing any of them heard was the soft, distant echo of a hymn.
Not Asher's.
Not the Monk's.
Sister Marrow.
Miles away, loading her guns and muttering a prayer with rage in every word.