Takumi's hand closed around Enju's small fingers like a promise. He glanced once over the ruined street — the broken billboards, the smoke-choked alleyways, the survivor clusters huddled behind barricades — then upward to the shimmering ring of the World Key portal he had hung over the city like a moon.
Behind him, the drones hummed: mapping, scanning, projecting paths, cataloguing children by name and approximate condition. The livestream he'd opened for the chat showed everything in crisp clarity: Akira-level reality filtered through Takumi's Herrscher-glass, annotated with pop-up health stats and a running list of rescue points. The group chat ran a constant, breathless commentary, equal parts panic and cheerleading.
Sagiri's sticker spam floated at the screen's edge.
Chika wrote in all caps, demanding status updates and safety guarantees fifty times over.
Bronya typed succinct tactical commands and drone calibration requests.
Himeko offered orbital recon if needed.
Zhongli's messages were calm notes: logistical suggestions, moral cautions, offers of future refuge.
Takumi ignored none and deferred to none. He had a workload that made management-level stress look quaint: collect the children, evacuate them safely, neutralize Gastrea threat vectors enough for transit corridors, shield their arrival signatures from hostile conceptual backlash — and do it without letting any world-destroying contagion leak through his gate.
He crouched and looked into Enju's eyes again. "Tell me where they are. Give me names. Tell me everything you can remember."
Enju whispered the names of three neighboring settlements. The girl's voice was thin but earnest; her teeth chattered from cold, not fear. "They hide in the old school. There's… there's a hospital basement where the little ones sleep." She added, "My sister's at the market with Mom. They said they would meet at the shelter but the shelter broke."
Takumi stood. "Okay. School first. Market second. We move in ten-second bursts — blink-and-vanish style." He flicked his fingers and the drones formed a protective moving lattice above the route, its nodes pulsing like slow heartbeat lights. The Void Authority brushed the air, a faint sensation of space thinning, and Takumi felt, for the first time since fusing with the Cocoon, a subtle hitch in how reality wanted to respond to him. The world's laws pushed back like a muscle resisting flex.
He didn't flinch. He had Reason. He had engineering that could think.
The Herrscher of Reason — Demonstration
Takumi extended both palms. Construction logic unfurled like code: load distribution, material matrix, microfabrication tolerances, biofilter curves, oxygen cycle—every variable he'd learned from the lost civilization compiled into a concise action. The drones melted into the air and reappeared as ribbon-strand assemblers. They grabbed rubble and hypertensile polymer out of Imaginary Space, braided them together, and in the space of a single breath a tunnel of reinforced shelter blossomed along the street, arching like an instant bridge between two unsafe zones.
The kids in the street stared. A collapsed bus was turned into a warm, lined transit capsule. Ventilation packs whirred to life. Tiny lights blinked on. A modular field hospital — assembled in minutes — hummed with a soft, homey odor that transcended the otherwise industrial smell of the place. Takumi's Reason didn't merely produce structures; it conferred meaning: a stairwell became a cradle, a cargo hold became a nursery, the thin metal sheath of an assembled dome contained a thousand calculated niceties you never knew you needed when sleep had been stolen from you by an endless fight.
"Get in," Takumi told the children, and Enju scrambled, dragging two smaller kids by their shirts. The drones sealed the temporary dome with a membrane that filtered the air and fed the assembly's waste into an internal recycler. Biological sensors lit up on Takumi's HUD tracking list with patient triage priorities. Babies were placed on warming pads. Someone sobbed with relief.
On his holo overlay a small readout glowed: Population transfer capacity: immediate 312 / sustainable 10,000 (scalable). He nodded. Enough. For now.
He felt the chat explode. Chika's text might have been forty exclamation points. Sagiri sent a shaky, happy "(〃▽〃)". Bronya asked technical questions about filter specs and control authority. Takumi answered in buffered commands and bullet lists; leadership, even benevolent leadership, had a cadence. People needed surety.
Extraction, Logistics, and Screening
Takumi's plan was precise: pick up children first, then trusted professionals, then—after screening—select adult caretakers who would agree to the rules. He would not import bad actors. He would not beggar his new world with corruption. The screening criteria were stark but fair: medical skill, engineering ability, willingness to contribute to civilization building, and no history of active abuse. For the cursed-children scenario, "no history" meant also not complicit in their oppression.
He read Miori's messages — the heiress had already begun liquidating assets; she and her family would be in transit to rendezvous. Bronya's downloading laptop hummed; she was compiling transport manifests for the Bunny and its security drone net. Himeko pinged: satellite pass ready in 20 minutes, will clear LEO corridor on your mark. Zhongli offered formal asylum frameworks should whole communities demand the move.
Takumi's only hesitation surfaced as a small, private worry: how to decide the fate of families who refused. He did not relish forcing lives to be uprooted. So he designed incentives; the first movers would receive full support—housing, healthcare access, education for all children, land rights, and the authority to start local self-governing councils. He'd make the landing attractive enough that leaving the ruined world would be a rational choice rather than coerced exile. But he kept the final word: if a guardian actively endangered children and refused relocation arrangements, Takumi would intervene.
He placed the first children into the teleportous capsules — micro-void-lattices seeded with Imaginary anchors that fit within his infinite dimensional storage. The storage, an interior that never quite obeyed Euclidean rules, accepted the children like a warm closet: safe, secluded, and temporally buffered. He used the Void to phase them a fraction of a second outside the travel stream and then pushed them through the World Key to his own planet.
On the other side — back in his empty world — the landing sites were already prepared: modular villages whose roofs caught the thin sunlight of this world, water recyclers hum, green hydroponics hugging walls, and a children's center whose walls were painted in colors Takumi manifested from memory banks of games and nursery programs he'd analyzed. Even the toys were designed to stimulate recovery — tactile, safe, and joyful. He had thought about these details because he refused to let the first impression be utilitarian coldness.
A child's arrival registered on his HUD. Enju — stable, hunger level low, psychological shock moderate. He felt the tug of something like parental satisfaction. This was not conquest. It was refuge.
The Political Slog: Resistance and Cleanups
Word traveled fast in the ruined cities. Some local militias were suspicious; a few arms dealers tried to declare the rescue sorties illegal, announcing fines for interference and threatening to 'reclaim' the paths. Those men were simple calculations: if Takumi tolerated them, his society would inherit their toxicity. If he crushed them publicly, the guileless might fear him.
Takumi chose surgical restraint: he used his Authority of Restraint in a narrow, procedural way. Small restraint fields dampened hostile abilities in those militia lines, neutralizing immediate threats and allowing him to cleanly extract children without bloodshed. He did not obliterate the men; he rendered their weapons inert then levitated them gently into containment pods for later judgment. The spectacle was raw theater: an invisible hand taking away guns while the culprits stumbled, frightened and humiliated rather than burned into ash. It served two purposes: immediate safety and a clear message that predation was unacceptable.
The media feed in other worlds — courtesy of Bronya's networks — captured the scenes in high-clarity. The group chat flooded with commentary. Some members fretted about civil rights and due process; others shouted their approval. Zhongli quietly reminded everyone of the importance of humane treatment. Takumi listened and scheduled tribunals — he would set up judicial processes on his planet to evaluate complicated moral dilemmas, involving leaders from multiple worlds if needed. He might be a god in power, but he did not want to be the sole arbiter of justice.
Tiny, Human Moments
Between rescue runs, Takumi sat on a bench inside one of the nursery domes and watched a small child build a tower from modular blocks he'd designed. The child laughed when the tower toppled and immediately started again. The sound lodged in Takumi's chest. His Herrscher crosseyes softened.
In chat, Megumi — the most silent of the group — typed a short line: "Thank you." It landed like a pebble on a placid pool. Takumi, who had earlier teased her about being invisible, read it and typed back three words: "Bring snacks, please." A small, absurd order from a god. Megumi replied with a dry, deadpan emoji that made both Takumi and Bronya smile.
Chika suddenly organized an online volunteer teaching roster ("I will teach board games!"), Sagiri proposed an art therapy program ("I'll draw with them!"), and Akeno offered to create enchantments for the domes' security rings that would not be harmful, only soothing. Everyone wanted to help.
Psychological Dissonance — The Burden of Godhood
But alone later, when the drones performed maintenance and the children slept in their modular cradles, Takumi walked the quiet paths he had just made and felt the smallest echo of doubt.
He could create cities with a thought. He could phase out weapons and condense water from mist. He could copy knowledge into his mind and then build entire food chains overnight. He could decide, with fewer constraints than any politician, who lived and who didn't. Power compressed him into two opposing poles: a clear, intoxicating receptivity to efficiency and an equally raw terror of becoming the kind of god who reshaped lives unasked.
He sat under a sapling he'd grown in an afternoon. Time in his world flowed differently — people who arrived would age and live within a different cadence, and he knew he could tweak temporal flow if necessary. But temptation tasted like quick breath: slow down discomfort, freeze grief, turn back pain. Where does benevolent intervention become coerced providence?
The thought settled into his chest like a cold stone. He resolved to give people governance and votes, to let their culture emerge rather than be scripted. He would be an architect, not an autocrat—though he would have the tools, if needed.
Then Enju toddled over, clutched at his sleeve, and asked in a whisper, "Are we safe now?"
Takumi's face, for once, held no irony. He picked her up, placed her on his lap, and said simply, "Yes."
It didn't answer the bigger questions. It was a start.
By nightfall he had evacuated five hundred children and three dozen selected adults, created four satellite villages, begun seed farms and medical hubs, neutralized a handful of predatory militias, and—most importantly—given the survivors a place where, for the first time in a long while, they could sleep without nightmares waking them.
Back in the chat, Himeko reported satellite clearance; Bronya posted an encrypted manifest; Zhongli quietly pledged to recruit archivists from Liyue for educational programs; Chika spammed celebratory confetti; Sagiri uploaded a picture book sample she sketched on a tablet and asked Takumi to print a thousand; Akeno joked about demons forming a neighborhood watch.
Takumi read them all and, with a degree of exhausted contentment, closed his eyes. The image of sleeping children, their cheeks flushed from safety, anchored him more firmly than any star-destroyer schematic ever had. He had designs and doubts, advantage and restraint—but for tonight, it was enough that someone had someplace to rest.
Tomorrow, the convoy would run again.
And Takumi — god, banker, architect, criminally bad presidential recruiter — would wake up and do it all over again.