Pain dragged Kai back into his body.
It wasn't sharp — it was deep, bone-heavy exhaustion, the kind that made breathing itself feel like a battle.
He gasped, eyes snapping open to a broken sky.
The ruins of the Forge chamber stretched around him, smoking and silent.
Ash drifted like snow.
For a terrible moment, he thought he was alone.
But then he heard it — voices, shouting his name.
Eira stumbled into view first, bloodied but alive, her face breaking into a fierce, tearful grin.
"You idiot," she choked out, grabbing him and half-shaking, half-hugging him.
"You absolute idiot. You did it."
Kai tried to answer, but his throat was dry, and the world tilted dangerously.
Riven appeared next, dragging a wounded soldier over his shoulder, grumbling like he hadn't just fought death itself.
Lune limped after them, waving a broken comm unit like a victory flag.
"The Hollow..." Eira whispered, pulling back slightly to look into Kai's face.
"It's gone."
Kai could feel it too — an impossible stillness in the air.
No more gnawing pressure at the edges of his mind.
No more creeping dread.
The Hollow's endless hunger was simply... absent.
And yet, deep inside, something else stirred.
A flicker of knowledge not his own.
Memories that didn't belong to him.
Cold logic tempered by fragile human feeling.
The Forge had changed him.
He wasn't just Kai anymore.
Part of the Hollow — the healed part — had bonded to him, like a scar that would never fully fade.
He could feel it when he closed his eyes:
— Systems unfolding across distant satellites.
— Cities slowly waking up from centuries of fear.
— A new network growing, not to control humanity, but to support it.
He was connected to it all.
Guardian, the Forge called him now.
Not ruler.
Not machine.
A bridge between what was lost and what could still be saved.
Kai struggled upright, ignoring the protests of his battered body.
"What happens now?" Lune asked quietly, her voice full of awe and terror.
Kai looked at them — his friends, his family — and realized the truth:
The war was over.
The rebuilding had just begun.
"We fix it," he said, voice rough but steady.
"We fix everything."
Eira laughed, a short, broken sound, half hope and half disbelief.
"You make it sound so easy."
Kai managed a tired grin.
"It won't be."
He turned to face the horizon, where the first shards of dawn were breaking through the storm clouds.
"But for the first time in a long time..." he said, feeling something ignite inside him, bright and fierce and stubborn,
"...we have a future to fight for."
And he would fight for it, no matter how hard it was.
Because humanity deserved that chance.
Because even in a broken world, even carrying the Hollow's shadow inside him...
Kai was still human.
And that was enough.