Part Thirty-Two — What Wore My Face

Back to where I left off. The clearing. The two of them, gone. Whatever was happening behind my own eyes, already further along than I could follow.

　I don't remember the first ones arriving.

　I've had to piece this part together entirely secondhand, the same way I eventually pieced together everything else that happened while I wasn't the one steering.

　The voices I'd heard from the treeline, right as the writing finished crossing my vision — those belonged to the same group that had killed Doran and Fenrik hours before. They'd left to regroup, apparently, and come back for the actual reason they'd been sent in the first place.

　Me.

　They found me standing exactly where I'd been left, motionless, unresponsive, an easy collection waiting to happen.

　It wasn't.

　What happened next took less time than it takes to describe it.

　No fight. No exchange.

　Just five trained operatives closing the distance toward something they believed was helpless, and then, very simply, not existing anymore.

　I don't know what it looked like. I've chosen, more than once, not to ask the one presence that would actually know.

　Hours passed, I'm told, before the second group arrived — a different unit entirely, dispatched separately, expecting to link up with the first and collect their prize together.

　They found corpses instead.

　Five of their own, scattered around a boy who hadn't moved an inch, script still crawling faint gold behind his open, unseeing eyes.

　There was a pause, apparently — the specific pause of people recalculating an entire mission in real time.

　Then, predictably, anger.

　"What in every god's name—" one of them started, before a woman beside him, sharper, colder, cut him off.

　"Confirm the target's still alive first. Questions after."

　They didn't get their questions.

　One of them — impatient, or simply unlucky enough to act first — raised a hand already glowing with condensed light-mana, and threw a bolt of it directly at the motionless boy in front of them.

　It never landed.

　It simply ceased to exist a hand's width from my skin, extinguished the way a candle goes out in a vacuum, no drama to it, no visible effort spent stopping it.

　And then I spoke.

　Except it wasn't me.

　The voice that came out of my mouth used my exact register, my exact tone — and belonged to something else entirely, something that had never once needed to sound afraid or angry to be terrifying.

"Interference with evolution detected. Elimination protocol engaged. Compliance is not required."

　I'm told none of them had time to run.

　I woke up sometime after that — how much later, I still don't know — gasping, disoriented, my body aching in ways that had nothing to do with any wound I could find on it.

　I didn't recognize where I was at first.

　Trees I half-remembered from a childhood that felt, in that moment, further away than my old life in Tokyo ever had. A wooden frame, collapsed, one wall still standing at the same stubborn angle it had held since I was eight years old.

The Horizontal Line.

How. How am I—

　I didn't get to finish the thought.

　Something behind my eyes, still faintly warm from whatever had just used them, opened up entirely, and every second of what I hadn't been present for came flooding in at once — not remembered, exactly.

　Given.

　Placed into me like something being handed over rather than recalled.

　I saw the binding take hold before I'd even fully woken, that first night.

　I saw Doran meet the first attacker head-on, saw exactly how outmatched he'd been against people who'd trained for precisely this.

　I saw Fenrik try to reach him, too late, already too far gone himself to make it the last few feet that mattered.

　I saw the end of both of them, in full, in a clarity I'd give almost anything to trade back for the mercy of not knowing.

　I saw all of it.

　Every second the binding had stolen from me the first time, delivered back all at once, all together, with no gentler way to receive it than exactly like this.

　I came back to myself on my knees in the dirt of my parents' ruined home, screaming a sound that didn't feel big enough to hold what had actually happened to me, twice now, on two different worlds, in two different lives.

Everyone. Everyone I let myself love. Both times. Both worlds.

Why. WHY does it keep being me.

　Nobody answered.

　There was nobody left to answer.

　Just me, and the ruins, and a decision — somewhere underneath the grief, cold and absolute and entirely my own this time — that was already starting to take shape.