Epilogue for arc 3: In the Aftermath

The ground didn't catch her. It devoured her.

Hikari crashed beside Gyo's corpse like a discarded marionette—limp, twitching, drenched in a blood that wasn't all hers. Her lungs convulsed, dragging air through a windpipe carved with invisible razors. Each breath sounded like drowning in a broken mirror.

Her ribs had folded inward like paper. Her wrists hung at sick angles—splintered bone glinting pale through torn skin. Blood poured from her nose into her throat, a slow flood that tasted like rust and guilt. Her heartbeat was a sluggish, stuttering thing, like even her body wanted to stop remembering what just happened.

Her vision blurred into double-ghosts, then collapsed entirely into a red static tunnel.

But she was still here.

Still alive.

Somehow.

She didn't feel human anymore. She didn't even feel like a person. Just a collection of twitching nerves pretending to be someone. Pretending to be Hikari.

She let her head loll toward Gyo's mangled body.

Meat. That's all he was now. Shredded muscle, pulp, and ash. His face… wasn't a face anymore. Just… a memory of hatred carved into gore.

She should've felt something triumphant.

But all she felt was hollow.

Her thoughts trickled in, slow and disjointed, like something had snapped loose inside her skull and refused to settle.

(Thoughts)

Is this it…?

Is this the world I stepped into…?

You kill or you die. And then if you're lucky… you keep breathing.

That's it, right?

She wanted to laugh. Or cry. But her body didn't care what she wanted anymore.

The world swam again, and just before she blacked out, a splash of color shattered the bleeding gray. Movement. Light. Something bright and… too alive.

Lila.

Of course it was her. Bubblegum hair. Skirt like a rainbow tornado. Smile cracked with worry.

"Holy shit—Hikari! Are you—? Oh my god, you're—!"

Hikari's lips twitched. She tried to speak. Failed. Coughed instead. Blood spilled down her chin.

"I… I did it," she rasped.

Lila froze, kneeling close enough to touch but not quite daring to.

"Did what?" Her voice was small. Hollow.

She looked past Hikari.

Saw what was left of Gyo.

Her breath caught.

"You killed him…?"

Hikari's mouth moved before her brain caught up. "I killed…"

Her voice cracked.

"I killed him, Lila. I killed a human."

Her face crumpled. Her body followed.

"I'm a murderer."

The word hung in the air like a noose.

Lila shook her head. Too quickly. Too desperate. "No—no, no, you're not. Hikari, you had to. You didn't have a choice."

But that was the problem, wasn't it?

Hikari had made the choice.

Somewhere between mercy and survival… she had picked survival.

Her fingers curled against the dirt. Broken. Bloody.

And it still didn't feel like enough.

She didn't know what was worse—that Gyo was dead, or that part of her didn't regret it.

That part of her wanted to do it again, if it meant living.

She closed her eyes.

"I didn't want to become this," she whispered.

Lila didn't answer. Couldn't.

Because there was no comfort that would fit here. No words soft enough to bandage a soul.

Only silence.

And the awful, awful knowing.

Suddenly, a white-hot lance of agony tore through Hikari's core like a lightning bolt jammed into her spinal cord.

She didn't have time to scream at first. Her breath seized. Her throat constricted. Every nerve fiber lit up like a Christmas tree dipped in acid and dragged through broken glass.

Then it started.

Her body convulsed.

A sharp, seizing twitch—then another—until she was writhing on the fractured concrete like something caught mid-exorcism. Her back arched. Fingers clawed at the dirt. Her own broken bones scraped against each other inside her flesh like glass shards inside a sack of meat.

Then her wounds shimmered.

That same eerie cyan light pulsed through her veins—erratic, wrong. It flickered like a corrupted signal, buzzing beneath her skin, distorting her outline as if reality couldn't decide what she was supposed to be. Flesh rippled. Bones crunched.

Her body twitched again.

Then bent the wrong way.

A guttural, raw scream tore out of her, ragged and feral:

Hikari: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH—!!"

She couldn't even hear herself anymore. The pain was too loud. It wasn't healing—it was reconstruction. Violent. Forceful. Terrifying.

Her shattered ribs snapped outward, one by one, before violently retracting into their correct positions with sickening crunches. Her lungs inflated in fits and starts, struggling against the rebuilding tissue that strangled her from the inside as it tried to repair and reknit.

Her broken wrist twisted with a nauseating pop, bones grinding like wet stone, skin tearing and restitching in the same breath—like watching a time-lapse of a body dying and being born all at once.

And still it wasn't done.

Her spine jerked. Her stomach lurched.

It felt like her entire nervous system was being rewired while still plugged in—every thread of her being scraped raw, stripped of identity, rebuilt at a molecular level by something that didn't understand mercy. The cyan light flared brighter, veins pulsing like electrical conduits overloaded with pure psionic data.

Her skin flickered—literally. Patches of it vanished for a heartbeat, revealing twitching muscle and bone before snapping back into place like reality itself had glitched and had to reload her from memory.

Her eyes rolled back. Her brain was sizzling in its own skull.

And then—

Silence.

Stillness.

Her body stopped convulsing. The cyan light dimmed.

And the pain… faded.

Not like a wound being soothed, but like a fire finally running out of fuel.

She lay there, gasping, trembling, eyes wide and empty. Every muscle screamed in memory of what had just happened, even as her skin—clean, unscarred—showed no trace of it.

No blood.

No bruises.

Not a single visible wound.

Only her shallow, panicked breathing, and the distant, silent terror behind her eyes betrayed what had just occurred.

Lila: "Hikari… what did you just do?"

Hikari's breath hitched.

She stared down at her body, hands trembling as she touched her ribs—whole again. Skin flawless. No blood. No pain. Just the phantom echo of it all.

"I… I don't know," she whispered. "It's like my body reset. Like I died and something rewound the tape."

She hugged herself, arms crossing over skin that didn't feel like hers anymore.

"But the trauma's still there," she added, voice cracking. "It didn't fix that."

Lila didn't say anything at first. She just leaned in, gently—then wrapped her arms around Hikari and pulled her in tight.

Warmth.

Contact.

Something real.

Lila: "Then let me be the part that helps with that."

Her voice was soft. Too soft for this shattered place. She smiled, but it wasn't playful this time—it was real, raw around the edges. Hikari could feel Lila's heartbeat against her chest. Fast. Steady. Human.

Her own face flushed—hot, red, unmistakable.

In Lila's arms, the noise quieted. The guilt, the horror, the broken identity—all of it dulled under her touch. It felt like gravity reversed itself just enough to keep Hikari from flying apart.

Lila smelled like rain after chaos. Her embrace felt like safety pressed into skin. It was terrifying how much she needed this. Needed her.

Lila: "Feeling comfy~?"

That teasing lilt. That glint in her eye. It shouldn't have made her heart skip—but it did. Hikari felt the heat crawl all the way to her ears.

She blinked.

Snapped back.

"We… we should check on Katsuki. Lyra. Nami—"

Lila giggled and pulled back, brushing a bit of hair from Hikari's face with featherlight fingers.

Lila: "You're right. Hero time again."

She let go—reluctantly.

Hikari stood, legs shaky but solid.

Still alive.

Still herself… maybe.

But the way Lila looked at her—like she wasn't a monster, like she was still worth holding—that stuck. Harder than any wound.

[CUT TO]:

The northern edge of Tokyo was a cratered, charred ruin. Skyscrapers once proud now stood like broken teeth jutting from the earth, skeletal and silent. Ash fell like black snow, clogging the air with the acrid stench of scorched flesh and something worse—something chemical, metallic, and sterile. It was the scent of a world being rewritten.

Lila lifted her nose slightly, brow furrowed. "It smells like… burnt steel and chlorine. Like a sterile apocalypse."

Hikari didn't answer right away. Her gaze swept the street, landing on corpses—or what remained of them. Some were carbon shadows melted into the concrete. Others were half-vaporized, their bones fused with pavement, still clawing at the air in silent agony. A few had simply… unraveled, as if existence itself had given up on rendering their forms.

"This isn't a battlefield," Hikari muttered. "It's a warning."

And then—movement.

A lone figure stood amidst the devastation. "Nami?"

Relief flooded Hikari's chest as she ran forward. "Yo—Nami! You okay?!"

"Wait—Hikari!" Lila shouted, but the warning came a breath too late.

The figure turned.

It had Nami's face—at first. But the smile was wrong. Too wide. Splitting at the corners. The skin along her cheeks peeled back in ribbons, revealing rows of porcelain teeth that had no end. Her eyes—no longer eyes—were hollow sockets leaking strands of pulsating, violet mist, like thoughts made flesh.

"Ahh… so it's true. Selene wasn't just spouting poetry," the thing cooed, voice like honey laced with razors. "We've got two little Apostles~"

She extended one elongated finger, pointing lazily at Lila. "The apostle of the Nine-Tailed Mistress… illusion and fire." Her gaze shifted to Hikari. "And you… the child cradled by Kairyū~"

Hikari's heart seized in her chest. The world around her bent slightly—like gravity had shifted its allegiance. Her psychic energy swirled into a cyan storm, flickering like dying stars. Something ancient inside her stirred, like the echo of a name she had forgotten to fear.

Lila summoned dual daggers of psionic light, her stance tense. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about," she growled, "but if you hurt them—"

"Oh, your friends?" The mockery giggled, tilting its melting head. "The yokai boy of war and those other two little darlings? Mmm… I think Arcturus killed them already~"

As she spoke, her arm dislocated, bones snapping in reverse. Flesh bubbled and expanded as her forearm extended into a writhing, segmented tendril of exposed nerves and jagged bone, glistening with wet hunger.

Lila slashed the air—one clean motion—and the tendril screamed as the tip was sliced away.

"Ooh~ impressive!" the creature sang, retracting the tendril in a squelch of torn muscle. "You apostles really do know how to dance~"

Then, with a theatrical twirl, her form began to melt. Not in a grotesque collapse, but in a slow, deliberate performance. Her skin sloughed off like satin silk, revealing an ever-shifting lattice of muscle that pulsed like a living cathedral. Bone flowered from her spine in ornamental spirals before folding inward, reconstructing her body in real time.

Where "Nami" once stood, there now rose a woman of impossible beauty and unspeakable malice.

Her violet eyes shimmered with the reflection of countless broken souls. Her hair spilled down her back in streams of liquid moonlight, each strand whispering lies too subtle to hear. She moved with the grace of a falling feather, and yet the ground wept beneath each step.

"I do so love a proper entrance," she said, voice sweet and lazy. "Allow me to introduce myself—though, really, you should already know me. I am the Sin Archbishop of Lust, darling little sins incarnate…"

She licked her lips, and the air warped.

"My name… is Aphrona~"

She curtsied, and the shadows behind her rippled—like something was watching. Something that didn't breathe or blink, but waited.

In that moment, Hikari felt a pressure deep within her skull. Not pain. Not yet. But recognition. A primal hum in the marrow of her bones—like she had seen this woman in a dream she wasn't allowed to remember. Like she had heard her name whispered in the spaces between seconds.

Lila stepped forward, blades humming, her hands trembling. "What the hell are you?"

Aphrona tilted her head, smile widening unnaturally. "A sculptor of souls. A collector of broken hearts. A lover of agony. But most of all—" she leaned in, eyes gleaming like stars just before collapse, "—a fan of watching your kind shatter~"

Hikari said nothing. She was frozen—not in fear, but in familiarity. Deep down, she knew this wouldn't be the last time she faced someone like Aphrona.

The word "Apostle" lingered in the air like a curse.

And somewhere far, far above—beyond perception, beyond meaning—something stirred.

END OF ARC 3.