Chapter 10: The Last Echo
Part 1
The classroom was silent.
No students.
No teachers.
Only a broken sky.
Cracks of light spread across the heavens like veins—spiderwebs of pressure building.
Aoi, Rina, and Kureha stood at the window.
Outside, people still walked the streets…
But their reflections were gone.
Kureha tensed, her voice tight.
—"The Threshold is collapsing…"
—"…but not from the inside. It's unraveling here."
Aoi's voice was hollow.
—"What happens when there are no more reflections?"
A voice echoed through the air.
Not from a mirror. Not from a body.
Just… everywhere.
Nagi's voice.
—"What was always meant to happen… Silence."
---
Part 2
The Final Threshold.
A desert of floating fragments.
The last region of the Mirror World.
Suspended in the center was a massive obsidian mirror—pitch black, eternal, unreflective.
It showed nothing.
Not even the one standing before it.
Nagi.
A cloak of broken reflections draped over his shoulders like dead memories.
He didn't look angry.
He looked… complete.
—"Humans aren't born whole," he said.
—"They use reflections to patch the holes they never understood."
Kureha stepped forward.
—"That's why Echoes exist!"
—"To integrate! Not erase!"
Nagi tilted his head.
—"Integration brings pain.
The Pulse will erase that privilege."
---
Part 3
A memory, sharp as glass.
Kureha.
In a hospital bed.
Alone. Machines breathing for her.
On the other side of the mirror:
Her reflection.
A little girl, singing a lullaby no one else remembered.
—"If no one hears your heartbeat," it whispered,
—"Then I'll be the one to listen."
Back in the present—
Kureha blinked away tears.
---
Part 4
The mirror pulsed.
Nagi raised his hands.
A wave exploded from the obsidian—
And everything around them shattered.
No reflections.
No shadows.
Just emptiness.
The three Resonants fell to their knees.
Their stethoscopes screamed—
Three frequencies, struggling to stay alive.
Aoi gasped.
—"You can't silence what still beats!"
Nagi smiled.
—"But I can make sure no one ever hears it."
The battle wasn't physical.
It was memory versus forgetting.
Aoi's attack—
Yui laughing as he held her close.
Kureha's—
Her own voice as a child, laughing in sunlight.
Rina's—
The fear of being invisible. Of being left behind.
Nagi responded with silence.
Void.
Absence.
Erasure.
---
Part 5
Then—
The obsidian mirror opened.
A portal.
No reflections.
No past.
No pain.
Anyone who stepped through it would be free.
But also… empty.
Nagi beckoned Kureha.
—"You want to save them? Then do it."
—"But if you cross… you lose your echo too."
Silence.
Rina shook.
Aoi reached for her.
Kureha smiled.
Softly. Sadly.
—"I'd rather be someone broken…"
—"…than no one at all."
She threw her stethoscope—
It spun—
Struck the obsidian—
And with the sound of a single, human heartbeat—
It cracked.
---
Part 6
Dawn.
The Threshold dissolved.
Mirrors returned to the real world.
Not perfect.
Not pure.
But present.
Aoi stood in his room.
His reflection stared back—
And finally moved in sync.
Rina smiled quietly.
Kureha opened her eyes.
No echo.
But for the first time…
She heard her heartbeat without help.
---
Part 7
Aoi :
"The reflection was never the enemy."
"It's what we leave behind…"
"…so we can move forward."
---
Preview of Next Chapter:
One year later.
Aoi returns to the house where Yui vanished.
But something is waiting—
in the only mirror that never broke.