Part one hundred seventy four — What She Chose

　Himari finally understood that Aeon's lateness to the actual Demon Lord meeting had been because he'd spent that entire stretch fighting her—though he'd arrived acting as though nothing at all had happened.

　Later, she finally met Kai properly in that timeline, his own memories of her still cloudy and incomplete. When he apologized—for never answering that old text, the one where she'd said she wanted to visit—something in both of them finally clicked back into place.

　For the first time, Himari believed she'd genuinely saved him.

　She had no idea, yet, what the God of Creation had already done in response.

　He erased her original save point entirely—the foundation everything else had been built upon. Without it, she could never again return to the moment she'd first begun this entire fight.

　Worse still: the original Himari, the one who'd created that save point in the first place, ceased to exist the instant it was erased. Only the evolved, future version of herself remained—carrying every skill, every scar, every hard-won piece of mastery, but none of the memories that had actually anchored the person she'd once been.

　Then came the Onmyō Order meeting.

　Null-Subconsciousness restricted Kai to fifty percent of his own power, warning that anything beyond it risked an overload capable of destroying not just the Order, but the entire world.

　The moment Aeon arrived at that meeting, he looked directly at Himari, and she understood immediately.

　She looked into the future.

　Kai was going to die against Kazuhiko.

　She tried desperately to reconnect to her original save point.

　It was gone.

　Permanently.

　The God of Creation's own interference was absolute.

　So she made an impossible choice.

　She sacrificed the last half of her remaining memories to forge an entirely new save point—but first, she separated her own consciousness from her body and let her future self explain everything to the new Himari who would remain.

　Everything about Kai.

　Everything about the years of fighting and dying.

　Everything about losing herself piece by piece to save him.

　Then the old Himari disappeared.

　The new Himari barely knew him at all.

　But hearing everything her former self had endured, she understood one simple thing.

I don't know who this Kai actually is to me yet. But if I went through all of this to save him, then he must be worth protecting.

　The battle against Kazuhiko began.

　Kai held his own for a while—but something was deeply wrong.

　Every passing moment, Kazuhiko's own abilities, skill, experience, and adaptability multiplied a thousandfold, far beyond anything a normal fight should have allowed.

　Kazuhiko killed him.

　Then tore his core directly from his body.

　Nyxara snapped entirely.

　In under two minutes, her rampage destroyed half the world before Divo was forced to kill her himself, simply to make it stop.

　Himari returned to her new save point.

　Two hundred and forty-five attempts followed.

　She wasn't yet fully accustomed to her evolved powers, but something strange kept happening—instinct and muscle memory from millions of years fighting Aeon returned to her body even without the conscious memories attached to them.

　Her soul, if nothing else, remembered how to fight.

　The two hundred and forty-fifth timeline became the worst of all—a full-scale war.

　The Onmyō Order, the Shimizu Empire, and Teorema.

　Vorath and Skorne against the Demon Lords, the Dynasty of Eternal Verdance, Fiorano, the Guild of Principality, and Horizoncrest itself.

　The entire world tipped toward total destruction.

　She understood, finally, that saving Kai alone wasn't enough anymore.

　The war itself had to be prevented.

　She approached Divo directly.

When Kazuhiko challenges Kai, interrupt them.

　Then Nyxara.

　Then Aeon.

　All three agreed.

　This time, Kai survived.

　The war never happened.

　She thought she'd finally won.

　Then she looked into the future one last time—

　and froze.

　Horizoncrest was still destroyed.

　She searched every branch after that. Every possible variation she could reach.

　The truth, when she finally found it, was the cruelest one yet.

　There were only two futures available to her.

　If Kai died, Horizoncrest survived—temporarily—but war eventually consumed the entire world regardless.

　If Kai lived, Horizoncrest fell.

　No perfect timeline existed.

　No version where everyone survived.

　She had to choose.

　She chose Kai.

　She let Horizoncrest fall—not because she didn't care about every person inside it, but because saving it at the cost of him would have doomed the entire world anyway, eventually, one way or another.

　That choice broke something in her that she never fully recovered.

　When she finished telling him all of it, Kai couldn't speak.

　He'd spent his whole life since reincarnation believing his sister had simply been living her own life somewhere out there, unaware of any of this.

　He'd never known she'd died hundreds of times.

　Thousands.

　Perhaps millions.

　Across a fight against a Time Dragon that had stretched longer than entire ages of the world.

　That she'd sacrificed her memories, her past, her very sense of who she was—and through every single loss, every reset, every impossible choice, she had kept choosing him.

　Himari began crying.

　"I'm sorry," she said.

　Kai said nothing.

　"I'm sorry, Kai."

　Again.

　"I'm sorry."

　She said it nearly a hundred times—for Eris, for Elaine, for every citizen of Horizoncrest she hadn't been able to save, for every timeline where he'd died anyway despite everything she'd given up trying to prevent it.

　Eventually, Kai stopped her, pulling her into his arms.

　He didn't blame her.

　He understood, finally, completely, that she hadn't failed him even once.

　She had been fighting for him this entire time.