Back on Nicron
The fog had not lifted. It moved through the streets in slow, unnatural currents, curling between buildings that had once burned with vibrant blue light — Airious's light, the kind Nicronians used to swear couldn't be extinguished. Now half the towers stood dark, and the fog pooled in their shadows like it belonged there.
The Champions walked through it quietly, boots scuffing against ash-pale stone.
They had come expecting rebellion. Maybe betrayal. Instead they found something messier: people who were angry, people who regretted leaving, people who were relieved to be gone, people who wanted the Champions out of their city, and people who still loved the traditions they'd abandoned — sometimes all five, in the same family, in the same house.
That was the part that stayed with Aminator.
He walked several steps ahead of the others, his golden armor dulled almost gray by the strange air. When he finally spoke, he didn't turn around.
"They weren't lying."
Victoria caught up to him. "About what?"
"Their loyalty. They really believed in Airious." He stopped at a corner where a shrine had been pulled half down, its blue lanterns dark, offerings still fresh at its base. "So why leave?"
Nobody answered right away. Vericane finally broke the quiet, arms crossed, voice flat with the particular impatience of a man who liked problems with clean edges. "Then it doesn't make sense. Loyal people don't walk."
"Maybe we've been asking the wrong question," Aminator said.
Elitor drifted lower, robes pooling around him like he was still deciding whether to touch ground. "Then what's the right one?"
"Not whether they were loyal." Aminator looked back at the shrine, at the offerings nobody had come to collect. "What their loyalty was actually for."
That landed harder than it should have for four words. Every Champion in that street had fought something inside themselves to get here — fear, pride, anger, the hunger to be proven right. None of them had been handed their conviction. They'd earned it the slow way, sometimes more than once. So the idea that a whole civilization's faith could simply run out wasn't foreign to them.
It was familiar. That was what made it uncomfortable.
Ronda looked down at the broken cobblestone. "They endured for generations."
"Until they couldn't," Cration said, quiet enough that it almost got lost in the fog.
Victoria's arms stayed crossed. "So the tradition wasn't enough."
"Maybe it was never supposed to be enough on its own." Elitor's eyes tracked the horizon, where the last of the blue towers flickered like a dying pulse. "A tradition tells you where you came from. It doesn't promise that where you came from still fits who you've become."
Kate's ears twitched, and despite everything, a small grin found its way onto her face. "That's annoyingly philosophical, even for you."
"You're welcome."
Jake spun his gun once, lazy, the way he did when he was thinking harder than he let on. "So they weren't loyal to the tradition. They were loyal to whatever they thought the tradition was giving them."
"And when it stopped giving them that," Aminator said, "they went looking somewhere else."
Nobody laughed. It was exactly what had happened.
Androsha hadn't walked into Nicron and talked an entire civilization out of its god in an afternoon. She'd spent years here — being ignored, being dismissed, being told to leave and quietly refusing to. And then she'd come back with something the shrines couldn't offer: results. A different way of understanding themselves, backed by something that actually worked. Devia hadn't needed to break their loyalty. It only had to find the hairline crack that was already there and wait.
Victoria's jaw tightened. "That's what makes it dangerous."
"Devia?" Ronda asked.
"Not because it forces anyone into anything." Victoria stared into the fog rolling off the dead towers. "Because it never has to. All it does is ask one question — are you still getting what you need from this? — and whatever happens after that belongs to the person, not to Devia."
Kate's grin was gone now. "That's a much harder thing to fight than a sword."
"A sword can be blocked," Aminator said. "A ghoul can be destroyed. A rebellion can be put down. But what do you do against someone who just quietly stops wanting what you're offering?"
Nobody had an answer. They kept walking instead, past a house where the door hung open and a child's shoes still sat by the threshold — someone had left in a hurry, or hadn't come back at all.
It was there, at the edge of the district, that Aminator saw him again.
Oudre stood alone at a burned-out fountain, not moving, not hiding — just watching the water that no longer ran. In his hands was a page torn from an Airious scripture, and beside it, held with the same care, a Devia field manual. He wasn't reading either. He was holding them side by side, like he was weighing something only he could see the scale of.
He noticed the Champions and didn't flinch. Didn't approach, either.
"You're still here," Aminator said.
"So are you." Oudre's eyes didn't leave the two pages. "Everyone keeps asking me which one I'm going to pick."
"And?"
"I haven't found anything wrong with either of them yet. That's the part nobody wants to hear." He finally looked up, and there was nothing defiant in it — just a stillness that unsettled Aminator more than any weapon would have. "I think that's why you're worried about me. I'm not choosing a side. I'm checking if the sides are even real."
He turned and walked into the fog before anyone could answer, the two pages still held together in one hand.
Elitor watched him go. "That boy."
"Oudre," Aminator said.
"He hasn't chosen the way we expected him to."
"Maybe he doesn't care about sides," Kate offered, but it came out less certain than her usual shrug-off tone.
Aminator kept his eyes on the fog where Oudre had disappeared. "Or maybe he's the first person on this planet actually checking whether either side deserves to win."
They walked on. Behind them, Nicron stayed divided — a city of people who had endured, until they couldn't, standing beside people who still believed enduring was the whole point. Ahead of them was the Free Abyss.
And somewhere in the fog between the two, still holding both pages, Oudre was still asking his question.
Which, of everything they'd seen on Nicron, was the one that stayed with Aminator the longest.