The Stardust Weaver drifted in the corpse-grey space between universes, a tiny island of color in an ocean of forgetting. Inside, the silence felt heavier than vacuum.
Netsudo lay in medbay, his breathing shallow. The fiery corona that usually wreathed him had diminished to a pale, almost translucent quality to his skin. Miryoku's diagnostic lights slid across him, finding nothing physically wrong, yet everything spiritually broken.
"He gave them parts of his fire," she whispered, her hands trembling as she wove another harmonic pattern over his still form. The light flickered and died, finding nothing to resonate with. "Not just the energy—the essence of what made it burn."
Shinji stood in the doorway, his prosthetic hand clenched. The vibration that had plagued it since installation was gone, but a new weight had settled in its place—the weight of leadership without guidance. Merus had entrusted him with tactical decisions during the last operation, deferring to Shinji's instincts when his own divine wisdom failed to pierce the Optimization's logic.
"Some wounds don't bleed," Shinji said quietly, his eyes never leaving Netsudo's exhausted form. He thought of Kagaya, missing somewhere in the void, rescued by an unknown hand. Another absence. Another loss. "The Optimization didn't just take his power. It took the chaos that made it his."
Miryoku's fingers stilled over Netsudo's chest. "Can chaos be... removed? Like pulling a thread from fabric?"
"Apparently." Shinji's prosthetic hand flexed unconsciously. The servo-motors whispered, and he felt the phantom sensation of fingers that weren't there. "They convinced it to leave. Like it decided being part of him was inefficient."
The comm system chimed—a priority channel encrypted with Hyachima's signature. Shinji accepted, expecting orders, guidance about the spreading threat.
Hyachima's face appeared on the display, emerald eyes sharp and assessing. His expression held its usual cosmic neutrality, but something in the set of his jaw suggested the situation was evolving faster than anticipated.
"The Optimization is spreading," Hyachima said without preamble. "Three more universes along the Rim have gone silent in the past six hours—the same conceptual erosion Merus detected at Aethros IV. Not destroyed. Silenced."
Shinji leaned forward. "What are they? Who's behind this?"
"We don't know. That's what makes this hunt unknowing." Hyachima's image remained steady, controlled. "Merus would have been better suited for this investigation. His creation energy could have traced the conceptual patterns, mapped the erosion vectors."
The unspoken reality hung between them: But Merus at ten percent divinity isn't the Merus who could do that.
Hyachima's gaze intensified, assessing. "You are the first and only line of defense against whatever this is. I'm stretched across forty-three universes managing the ancient evil's accelerating emergence. I need hands there."
The weight on Shinji's shoulders doubled. "Understood."
"One more thing." Hyachima's eyes narrowed fractionally—the only indication he'd give that something concerned him. "The Optimization appears to be adapting. Learning. Whatever you did to break through at Aethros IV, it's developing countermeasures. Be careful."
The transmission cut.
Shinji stood in the silence of medbay, watching Miryoku return to her futile attempts to harmonize Netsudo's depleted essence. Through the doorway, he could see into the common area where Merus sat motionless at a console, staring at navigation data his divine senses should process automatically but now required manual review.
*We're all diminished,* Shinji thought. *All broken in different ways.*
And yet they were all the multiverse had.
They gathered in the ship's lab—what had been Kuro's domain before his capture. His absence felt like a physical presence in the room, a ghost haunting the equipment he'd calibrated, the notes he'd written in precise, analytical script across half a dozen holographic displays.
"Show me the data from the Optimization," Shinji said, his engineering mind engaging for the first time since receiving his prosthetics. The familiar analytical focus felt like putting on an old, comfortable coat. This was something he understood—problems, systems, patterns.
Miryoku brought up the scans Merus had compiled during their escape from the collapsing Architect Construct—perfect geometries, mathematical purity, the absolute conceptual control that had turned vibrant Aethros IV into a grey wasteland.
"It's not technology," she said, her fingers tracing the patterns suspended in holographic light. "And it's not magic as we understand it."
Shinji leaned closer, his prosthetic hand resting on the console's edge. The cold metal against his palm felt more real than the phantom sensation of fingers that didn't exist. "No power source, no transmission medium, no mechanical logic." He highlighted a series of recursive geometries spiraling through the scan data. "But there's a pattern here. See this?"
Merus moved closer, his weakened divine senses struggling to perceive what his eyes could plainly see. "Fractal recursion. Self-similar at every scale."
"Exactly." Shinji zoomed in, then out, watching the pattern repeat. "It's like... a programming language written directly into spacetime. Not controlling reality—convincing it."
"Convincing?" Miryoku's eyes widened. "How do you convince reality?"
"The same way you convince anything." Shinji pulled up another scan—the moment of Netsudo's... extraction. The fiery spiritual energy that should have blazed around the boy's form simply wasn't there. No violence, no theft, no draining force. Just absence where presence should be. "You make a better argument."
He pointed at the energy readings. "Look at this. They didn't drain his power when he manifested it there. They didn't suppress it or absorb it." His prosthetic fingers tightened on the console's edge. "They convinced it to leave. Like it looked at itself and decided chaos was inefficient, and just... stopped being chaotic."
Miryoku's harmonic senses recoiled from the implications. "That's... that's not destroying anything. That's—"
"Persuading reality to be better," Merus finished, his voice hollow with ancient dread. "More efficient. More optimized."
The horror of that realization settled over them like a shroud. How do you fight something that doesn't attack but improves? That doesn't destroy but optimizes? That doesn't conquer but convinces?
Shinji straightened, his mind racing through engineering principles, system architectures, the fundamental patterns that governed how things worked. "Every system has failure points. Stress fractures. Places where the logic breaks down."
"This isn't a system," Merus said quietly. "It's a philosophy given form."
"Then philosophies have vulnerabilities too." Shinji turned to the others. "They broke against us at Aethros IV. Something we did—something we are—disrupted their logic. We need to figure out what that was before we face them again."
Merus's expression was grim. "Before we face them? Shinji, we barely survived the last encounter. Netsudo is—" He gestured toward medbay. "We're not ready."
"We're never going to be ready." Shinji's prosthetic hand clenched into a fist, the servos whining softly. "But we don't have the luxury of waiting."
Movement in the doorway made them turn. Netsudo stood there, one hand braced against the frame for support. His skin still held that translucent quality, but his eyes were open. Clear.
And deeply sad.
"It showed me things," he said, and his voice was steady—too steady. The usual tremor, the fearful catch, the way his words stumbled over themselves when any persona but Ignis spoke... all gone. He spoke with the calm of someone who'd seen the answer to every question and found it sufficient.
Shinji's prosthetic hand registered a drop in temperature, the thermal sensors built into the fingertips detecting a chill that had nothing to do with ambient air. This wasn't the calm of Ignis taking over, or the cold efficiency of his third persona. This was something else.
Something that smelled like the Optimization.
"What did it show you, Netsudo?" Shinji asked carefully.
The boy—no, not quite a boy anymore; something had changed in those calm eyes—moved into the lab with surprising steadiness. No stumbling, no nervous energy. Just smooth, efficient movement.
"While it was taking the fire," Netsudo continued, settling into a chair with mechanical precision, "it showed me why chaos was unnecessary. Why fear and fire and emptiness were... inefficient solutions to the problem of existing."
Miryoku knelt beside him, her harmonic light pulsing gently. "Netsudo, you're scaring me."
"Don't be scared." He looked at her with something that might have been affection, but processed through a filter of pure logic. "Being scared is inefficient too. It raises cortisol levels, impairs decision-making, creates unnecessary suffering."
"Netsudo—" Shinji began.
"It showed me the little girl from the grey universe," Netsudo interrupted, his steady gaze turning to Shinji. "Lyssa. The one who couldn't remember what sunshine meant." His head tilted with mathematical precision. "They showed me her future. Two timelines."
He raised one hand. "In the first, color returns. She remembers sunshine, remembers warmth, remembers love. She grows up, falls in love, has children." His fingers curled inward. "Then plague comes. Her children die. Her lover dies. She lives another forty years carrying that grief, and when she finally dies, her last thought is wishing she'd never loved them at all because the pain of loss was unbearable."
His other hand rose. "In the second timeline, the Optimization completes. She never remembers sunshine. Never loves deeply enough to grieve. The same plague comes, and people die, but she processes it as data. Acceptable loss. Survivable outcome. She lives ninety years in perfect peace, never once wishing she'd made different choices because she doesn't have the emotional capacity for regret."
Both hands lowered to his lap, perfectly symmetrical.
"They asked me which timeline was better." Netsudo's calm eyes found Shinji's. "And I couldn't answer them. Can you?"
The lab fell into silence. Somewhere in the ship's systems, life support hummed. Miryoku's harmonic light flickered and steadied, flickered and steadied.
Shinji thought of Kiyomi. Of the gaping wound her loss—her unmaking—had left in him. The phantom limb pain was nothing compared to the phantom sister pain, the constant awareness of an absence that should be a presence. Every morning he woke up and, for a split second, forgot she was gone. Then memory crashed back in, and the wound reopened, fresh and bleeding.
Would he trade that pain for never having loved her? Never having been her brother? For the peace of not knowing what he'd lost?
The answer came immediately, viscerally, from somewhere deeper than logic.
*No.*
"The second timeline isn't better," Shinji said quietly. "It's just... less."
"Less pain," Netsudo countered with infuriating calm.
"Less everything." Shinji's prosthetic hand moved to rest over his heart—the real one, still beating beneath titanium ribs that had been shattered and reconstructed. "Pain is proof we existed. Grief is proof we loved. Take those away, and what's left? An efficient machine processing existence but never living it."
"But isn't peace preferable to suffering?" Netsudo's question was genuine, uncolored by rhetoric. He was simply... asking. Seeking data.
"Not if the price is feeling nothing at all." Shinji met those too-calm eyes. "Netsudo, listen to me. You're not just your fear or your fire or your emptiness. You're all of it, tangled together, contradicting itself, making you... you. Complicated. Inefficient. Human."
For the first time since entering the lab, something flickered in Netsudo's expression. A hairline crack in the smooth logic.
"They made it sound so reasonable," he whispered, and his voice finally trembled. "So logical. And I'm so tired of being afraid. So tired of being broken into pieces. They offered to make me whole. One person. One calm, efficient person who didn't have to fight himself every day just to exist."
"But you'd be less than the sum of your parts," Merus said quietly. The God of Creation—diminished, fractured, barely a tenth of his former power—moved to stand beside Netsudo. "I know what it's like to lose pieces of yourself. To feel the absence of what you once were." His hands trembled slightly. "It's unbearable. But I'd rather exist diminished and real than be optimized into something that merely functions."
Netsudo looked up at him, the calm cracking further. "How? How do you bear it?"
"Poorly," Merus admitted with a sad smile. "But I bear it alongside people who see the broken thing I've become and choose to stand with me anyway."
Miryoku's hand found Netsudo's. Her harmonic light pulsed gently, not trying to fix or heal, just... present. "We don't want you whole. We want you you. All the messy, contradictory, inefficient parts of you."
Shinji watched the cracks spread through Netsudo's unnatural calm. The Optimization's logic, so seductive in its simplicity, couldn't account for this—for connection, for chosen family, for love that persisted despite inefficiency.
"Isn't it better?" Netsudo asked one more time, but his voice broke on the question. "To never feel pain? To never lose anyone?"
"No," Shinji said with absolute certainty. "It's just safer. And safety isn't the same thing as living."
Something broke in Netsudo then. The too-calm expression shattered, and suddenly he was sobbing—messy, inefficient, wholly human tears. Miryoku pulled him close, and he clung to her like a drowning man finding shore.
"I'm sorry," he gasped between sobs. "I'm sorry, I almost—they almost—"
"You didn't," Shinji said firmly. "You came back. That's what matters."
But as he said it, looking at Netsudo's shaking form, Shinji felt ice in his prosthetic veins. The Optimization hadn't needed force or invasion. It had simply... offered. And part of Netsudo—maybe a large part—had wanted to accept.
How do you fight an enemy that doesn't attack but offers peace?
They reconvened an hour later, after Netsudo had cried himself into exhausted sleep and Miryoku had settled him back in medbay. The lab felt smaller now, the walls pressing in with the weight of impossible choices.
Shinji pulled up Hyachima's report on the spreading Optimization zones. Three more universes silent in six hours. At this rate, the entire Rim would fall within days.
"We need to act," he said.
"Agreed." Merus studied the tactical display with the focus of someone compensating for diminished senses. "But act how? We barely survived the last encounter. Our power is fractional, our understanding incomplete—"
"And we're all we've got." Shinji's prosthetic hand moved across the console, highlighting the nearest Optimization zone. "Hyachima is managing forty-three fronts against the ancient evil. He can't spare resources for this. We're the first and only line of defense."
"Defense?" Merus's voice rose with uncharacteristic sharpness. "Shinji, we can't even protect ourselves. Netsudo nearly accepted optimization willingly. If they'd pushed harder—"
"But they didn't." Shinji turned to face him. "Something stopped them. Something about us, about what we are, disrupted their logic enough that they pulled back."
"Or they realized we weren't worth the effort." Merus's hands clenched into fists, trembling with frustration. "Have you considered that? That we're so obviously broken that even the Optimization looked at us and thought 'not worth optimizing'?"
The words hung in the air, bitter and raw.
"You don't believe that," Shinji said quietly.
"Don't I?" Merus gestured sharply at the data displays. "Look at us, Shinji. Really look. A god reduced to ten percent capacity who can barely sense cosmic threats. A Trascender with Act Six capabilities who got mutilated by someone he should have defeated easily. A boy so broken by trauma he fractured into multiple personas. A girl whose harmonious light failed to save anyone at Aethros IV."
His voice cracked. "We're not a line of defense. We're the walking wounded, pretending we're still capable of fighting a war."
Shinji let the words settle. Merus wasn't wrong—every point he made was factually accurate. They were diminished. They were broken.
"You're right," Shinji said.
Merus blinked, surprised. "What?"
"You're right. We're broken. Wounded. Operating at a fraction of our capacity." Shinji's prosthetic hand moved to rest on the console, the metal fingers splayed across tactical projections of spreading grey zones. "But here's what the Optimization doesn't understand: broken things can still be sharp."
He pulled up the scan of Netsudo's encounter. "They took his fire. Convinced it to leave because chaos was inefficient. But look what happened after—he didn't collapse, didn't stop existing. He adapted. Found a different kind of strength, quieter but still real."
Miryoku entered the lab, overhearing. "He's sleeping now. Breathing steadier. The personas are... talking to each other. I could feel it through the harmonics. They're not fighting anymore. They're... conferencing."
"Because losing the fire forced them to cooperate," Shinji said. "The Optimization thought it was taking his strength, but it actually forced him to discover a new kind of integration."
Merus studied him with ancient, weary eyes. "That's a generous interpretation of trauma."
"Maybe. Or maybe it's the truth the Optimization can't see." Shinji straightened, resolve hardening in his chest. "They optimize for efficiency, for logic, for the smoothest path. But smooth paths don't build calluses. Don't develop scar tissue. Don't forge strength through adversity."
"So your plan is to... what? Weaponize our collective trauma?"
"My plan is to remind them that efficiency isn't the same as effectiveness." Shinji's eyes found Merus's. "And that sometimes the broken things are what change the world, because they're broken, not despite it. Thought you'd get that better Creation comrade."
Merus opened his mouth to object, then closed it. His hands had stopped trembling.
"This is insane," he said finally.
"Probably."
"We're going to get ourselves killed."
"Maybe."
"Or worse—optimized."
"That's a risk Merus," Shinji acknowledged. "But waiting here while universe after universe goes silent? That's certainty. At least this way, we're choosing our fate instead of letting it happen to us."
Miryoku's harmonic light pulsed with determination. "When do we leave?"
Merus looked between them—at Shinji's prosthetic resolve, at Miryoku's luminous courage—and something in him finally broke. Not shattered, but... released. The desperate need to protect them, to be strong enough, to be the god he once was... it fell away, leaving something simpler underneath.
"You're sure about this?" he asked.
"No," Shinji admitted. "But I'm sure we have to try."
"All right." Merus moved to the navigation console, his diminished senses struggling to process the star charts that should have been intuitive. "Then let's at least try intelligently. Where are we going? Fourth Trascender?"
Shinji pulled up Hyachima's latest scan data. "The Chromatic Veil. Universe 847, Galaxy 3. It's next in the Optimization's path—they've made contact, but the conversion hasn't completed yet. If we move fast, we might reach it in time."
"In time to do what?" Merus asked. "We still don't know how to stop this."
"No," Shinji agreed. "But maybe we don't need to stop it. Maybe we just need to give people a reason to resist it. Show them what they'd be losing."
He thought of Netsudo's question, the terrible choice between peace and pain. The Optimization had made it sound so logical, so reasonable. Of course you'd choose peace over suffering. Only a fool would choose pain.
But they were forgetting something. Something fundamental.
"Pain is information," Shinji said, his engineering mind finally connecting the pieces. "It tells you something's wrong. That something matters enough to hurt over. The Optimization wants to remove that signal, but without it..." He trailed off, seeing it clearly now. "Without pain, how do you know you're alive?"
Merus stared at him. "That's... actually profound."
"Don't sound so surprised."
"I'm constantly surprised by mortals." Merus turned back to the console. "All right. The Chromatic Veil. We should arrive in approximately sixteen hours. That gives us time to prepare—"
"No." Shinji's voice cut through the planning. "Not sixteen hours. Push the engines. I want to be there in eight."
"The ship's quantum drive isn't rated for that kind of sustained acceleration—"
"Then unrate it." Shinji's prosthetic hand clenched. "Every hour we wait is an hour the Optimization has to convert more people. To offer more peace, more logic, more optimization. We push hard, we arrive while they're still deciding, while there's still a choice to make."
Merus studied him for a long moment. "Kuro would have a dozen technical objections to overclocking the quantum drive."
"Kuro isn't here." The words came out harder than Shinji intended. "He's trapped in Saganbo's domain, probably being tortured, definitely needing rescue. And we can't get to him until we handle this. So yes, we're overclocking the drive. We're pushing the engines past safety margins. We're taking risks, because playing it safe means watching universes die."
Silence filled the lab.
Then Merus smiled—small, sad, but genuine. "You sound like a captain."
"I sound desperate."
"Often the same thing." Merus began inputting commands into the navigation system, his reduced divine senses compensated for by careful manual calculation. "Eight hours to the Chromatic Veil. The engines are going to scream."
"Let them scream." Shinji moved toward the door, then paused. "And Merus? Thank you."
"For what?"
"For trusting me when I don't trust myself."
Merus's hands stilled on the console. When he spoke, his voice was thick. "That's what we're here for, isn't it? To believe in each other when belief runs dry, comrade."
Shinji nodded and left the lab, heading toward what had been Kuro's workshop. He needed to think, to prepare, to find the flaw in the Optimization's perfect logic.
And he needed to do it surrounded by the memory of the friend he'd failed to protect.
The workshop was exactly as Kuro had left it—tools arranged with mathematical precision, diagnostic equipment humming on standby, holographic displays frozen mid-calculation. Shinji moved through the space like a trespasser in a tomb, careful not to disturb the careful order.
His prosthetic hand found the workbench where Kuro had built the titanium-carbon limbs, where his analytical mind had solved the problem of integrating spiritual energy with mechanical systems. The surface was clean, organized, purposeful.
And there, on the primary display, a personal log entry still glowed softly:
Day 22 aboard Stardust Weaver:
Shinji asked me today why I prefer science to spirituality. Told him science is just the universe remembering how it works. Maybe we're all just trying to remember who we are.
A lot of Empty space was left till a final phrase caught Shinji's mind
I hope Shinji never needs to use it that way. But if he does...
It'll be the end of this world
- Okugami Kuro
Shinji read the entry twice, his prosthetic hand—the weapon against forgetting—resting motionless on the workbench. Haunted by that final phrase.
The prosthetic hand hummed softly, responding to the surge of emotion. Not the warning vibration from before, but something else. Something that felt almost like recognition before he tossed aside the thought.
Shinji closed his eyes and let himself remember. Not strategically, not analytically, but fully. Kiyomi's crimson hair catching sunlight in their family dojo. His mother's hands bandaging his scraped knees after a failed martial arts demonstration. His father's rare visits, the way his stern expression would crack into a smile when Kiyomi tackled him. The warmth of Earth, the sound of wind through trees, the taste of his aunt's cooking.
The prosthetic recorded it all, weaving spiritual resonance into essence-reactive plating, building a fortress of memory against the seductive silence of optimization.
"Ambiguous as ever, Kuro," Shinji whispered to the empty workshop. "I'd wish I can understand now."
He opened his eyes and began to plan.
The Stardust Weaver's quantum drive did indeed scream as Merus pushed it beyond rated specifications. The ship shuddered with the strain, reality bending around them as they carved through the spaces between universes at velocities that made local physics weep.
In the common area, the crew prepared in their own ways.
Miryoku sat in meditation, her harmonic light pulsing in complex patterns as she practiced weaponizing illumination. Hard-light constructs appeared and dissolved—spears, shields, nets, cages. Each one precise, each one potentially lethal. She'd learned at Aethros IV that harmony could be a weapon when wielded with purpose. Now she needed to master it before facing the Optimization again.
But her hands trembled between manifestations. The memory of her failures—the Null-Stone entity that nearly killed Wess, the people she couldn't save, the fact that her light had done nothing against the Architects' perfect geometry—haunted her practice. What if harmony couldn't fight logic? What if her entire power set was fundamentally unsuited to this enemy?
*Stop,* she told herself. *Doubt is its own kind of optimization silly! Don't let it smooth away your edges.*
She created another hard-light construct—this one a perfect sphere of crystallized harmony. It pulsed with her heartbeat, alive and chaotic and hers.
In medbay, Netsudo's three personas held conference while his body slept. In the metaphysical space of his fractured mind, they appeared as distinct entities:
Netsudo—small, scared, clutching a piece of burnt wood from his destroyed village.
Ignis—tall, confident, wreathed in flames that cast no shadow.
The Third—featureless, empty, a void in human shape that felt like the moment between breaths.
The Fourth—Hazy and Unclear.
They rarely manifested together like this. Usually one drove while the others slept. But the Optimization's offer had forced them to confront something uncomfortable: they needed each other.
"I wanted to accept," Netsudo admitted, his voice small in the vastness of their shared mind. "When they offered to make me whole, to integrate us into one calm person... I wanted it so badly."
"Of course you did," Ignis said, flames crackling with something that might have been compassion. "You've been afraid your entire life. Fear is exhausting."
"But I'm you," Netsudo said. "Without my fear, you don't exist."
"No." The Third's voice came from everywhere and nowhere, empty but not unkind. "Without your fear, we don't exist. All of us. The fear created me to survive it. The survival created him to fight it. The fighting created you to remember why we fight."
"So we're stuck like this?" Netsudo Prime asked. "Forever fragmented?"
"Or forever complete," Ignis suggested. "Depends how you look at it."
They sat with that for a while, three aspects of one traumatized boy, trying to remember why being broken might be better than being smoothly whole.
"The fire's gone," Netsudo Prime finally said. "They took it. Convinced it to leave."
"Not all of it." Ignis held out his hand, and a single ember flickered in his palm. Weak, fragile, but persistent. "This much remained. This much refused to be optimized."
"Why?" Netsudo Prime moved closer, watching the ember pulse. "Why did this piece refuse when the rest left?"
The Third answered, its empty voice somehow warm: "Because this piece remembered burning. Not just the how, but the why. This piece remembered our village. Our family. The fire that took them."
"That's trauma," Netsudo Prime whispered.
"That's memory," Ignis corrected. "And memory is inefficient. It holds onto pain, carries grief, refuses to let go even when letting go would be easier. The Optimization couldn't convince this piece to leave because this piece is made of refusing to forget. Tsk."
The ember grew fractionally brighter.
"So we rebuild from trauma?" Netsudo Prime asked.
"We rebuild from memory," the Third said. "From the inefficient, painful, beautiful act of remembering who we were and choosing to carry it forward."
The three personas looked at each other across the space of their shared mind, and for the first time in eight years, they smiled in unison.
In the cockpit, Merus manually calculated navigation adjustments his divine senses should handle automatically. The numbers swam before his eyes—not because they were complex, but because his fractured divine core struggled to process information that should be instinctive.
*This is what mortality feels like,* he thought. *Struggling against your own inadequacy. Compensating, Adapting And Accepting.*
It was humbling. Frustrating. And strangely... clarifying.
For eons, he'd relied on his divine nature to solve problems. Creation energy could heal wounds, divine wisdom could pierce deceptions, cosmic authority could compel obedience. He'd never needed to think about how to help people—he simply did, and his godhood made it possible.
Now, stripped to ten percent divinity, he had to actually work at being useful. Had to think strategically instead of acting omnipotently. Had to trust his crew instead of protecting them through raw power.
It was terrifying.
It was also the most alive he'd felt in eight hundred billion years.
"Navigation locked," he said to the empty cockpit. "Seven hours to the Chromatic Veil. Engines holding at 147% capacity. Hull stress within acceptable margins. We'll make it."
The ship groaned as if disagreeing, but held its course.
Merus leaned back in the pilot's seat and allowed himself a moment of weakness. His hands shook. His divine core ached with phantom pain, the empty spaces where vast power once resided now howling voids. He wanted to cry, to rage, to demand cosmic justice for the unfairness of being reduced to this fragile state.
Instead, he laughed.
Quiet, broken, but genuine.
"Look at me," he whispered to no one. "The God of Creation, manually calculating orbital mechanics. Thekia would be mortified."
The thought of his master—the true Goddess of Creation, hidden somewhere across the multiverses for reasons he still didn't fully understand—brought a fresh wave of longing. She could fix him. Could restore his fractured core, return his power, make him whole again.
But would she? And more importantly... did he even want that anymore?
*Who are you,* Merus wondered, *if you're not powerful? If you can't protect everyone, can't solve every problem, can't be the divine safety net you've always been?*
He didn't know yet.
But maybe that was okay.
Maybe figuring it out was its own kind of creation.
And in the workshop, Shinji stared at Kuro's notes and began to understand the true nature of the battle ahead.
Four hours into their eight-hour journey, something changed.
Miryoku felt it first—a sudden absence in her harmonic senses, like a musical note that should be there but simply... wasn't. She moved to the cockpit where Merus piloted, Shinji already standing at the viewscreen.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Transition point coming up," Merus said, his fingers dancing across the manual controls. "We're about to cross from Universe 1104 into 1089."
"That's not on our direct route to the Chromatic Veil," Shinji observed.
"It's not. But Hyachima's latest data update flagged this sector. I thought we shoul—"
The transition completed.
And everything became grey.
The change was abrupt, violent in its gentleness. One moment, the void between universes rippled with quantum foam and strange energies, reality's background noise singing in chaotic harmony. The next moment, they crossed an invisible threshold, and silence swallowed everything.
"Sensors aren't picking up anything," Miryoku whispered, her voice hushed instinctively. "No life signs, no energy signatures, no—"
"No chaos," Shinji finished, his prosthetic hand going cold against the viewscreen.
A planet hung in space before them, perfectly grey. Not the grey of shadow or absence, but the grey of optimization—every wavelength of color averaged out, smoothed away, made equivalent. Its orbit was mathematically precise, rotation locked at exactly the rate required for perfect tidal stability. Its atmosphere distributed with flawless efficiency, no storms, no weather patterns, no turbulence.
Cities covered its surface in geometric perfection. Hexagonal structures tessellating endlessly, each one identical in size and spacing. Roads that followed optimal path algorithms. Lights that never flickered, never varied in intensity.
And it was all, every single part of it, grey.
"Scanning for survivors," Miryoku said, her harmonic senses reaching out despite every instinct screaming at her to pull back. She gasped, recoiling as if physically struck. "They're... they're all there. Billions of them. Living, breathing, existing."
"But?" Netsudo had appeared in the doorway, drawn by the sudden silence.
"But they're not alive." Miryoku's voice trembled, her hands pressed against her chest as if trying to contain something trying to escape. "There's no resonance. No harmony. No discord. No... music. They're just... functions. Performing tasks. Optimally."
Merus's diminished divine senses could barely perceive the inhabitants, but what little penetrated the grey made his skin crawl with existential dread. "This is what we're trying to prevent."
"No," Shinji said quietly, his prosthetic hand pressed flat against the cold viewscreen. The memory storage Kuro had built into it recoiled from the absence below, finding nothing to record because nothing was—not in any meaningful sense. "This is what we're trying to reverse."
The implications hung in the air like a death sentence. They weren't just protecting universes from the Optimization. They weren't just trying to reach people before the conversion completed.
They were looking at universes that had already fallen. Billions of sentient beings reduced to efficient functions. And somehow, impossibly, they were supposed to save them.
"How?" Miryoku breathed. "How do you bring back something that's been optimized away? Color, emotion, meaning... you can't just pour it back in like water."
"I don't know." Shinji's prosthetic fingers curled into a fist against the viewscreen, leaving a brief impression of warmth that faded into grey. "But we have to try. Because if we can't..." He gestured at the planet below, at the billions of living-but-not-alive inhabitants. "Then this is the fate of every universe the Optimization touches. This is what failure looks like Miryoku! And we shouldn't be failing!"
They stood in silence, bearing witness to a kind of death that left the body alive.
"Keep going," Shinji finally ordered, his voice hollow. "Toward the Chromatic Veil. We can't help this universe. Not yet. But maybe we can keep the next one from becoming this."
Merus engaged the quantum drive. The Stardust Weaver fled the grey universe, leaving behind a world that had forgotten how to feel.
As they crossed back into the chaotic, vibrant void between universes, Shinji noticed something. His prosthetic hand, which had gone cold and still in the optimized universe, slowly warmed. The memory storage matrix, starved of anything to record in that grey wasteland, seemed to sigh with relief at finding chaos again.
Memory was inefficient. It held onto pain, carried trauma, refused to let go even when letting go would be easier.
And memory might be the only weapon they had against a philosophy that offered peace through forgetting.
Three hours later, they emerged from quantum-slip at the edge of Universe 847.
And nearly crashed the ship from sensory overload.
"WHAT THE—" Merus jerked back from the viewscreen, his hands flying up to shield his eyes from an assault that had nothing to do with light.
Colors that didn't exist in nature exploded across their vision. Not reflected light, but emotional resonance made visible. Planets swirled in patterns that defied physics, their surfaces shifting through impossible hues—colors you could taste on the back of your tongue, colors that smelled like childhood memories, colors that felt like music against your skin.
Nebulae pulsed with the rhythm of sleeping giants, their gases coalescing not based on gravity but on feeling. Angry reds gathered around sorrowful blues. Joyous yellows danced with contemplative purples. Every celestial body sang its own song, and the universe harmonized them into a symphony that made Miryoku weep with its beauty.
Stars didn't just burn—they felt. Their fusion reactions conducted like orchestras, atomic collisions creating melodies that could be heard in the soul rather than the ears. Binary stars waltzed in emotional resonance, their gravitational dance expressing devotion that transcended physics.
"They call this place the Chromatic Veil," Miryoku whispered, her own harmonic light trying desperately to synchronize with the overwhelming chorus. "The inhabitants experience reality as synesthesia—they taste colors, hear emotions, see sounds. Everything is... everything is alive here. Truly alive."
"My eyes hurt," Merus groaned, his diminished divine senses poorly equipped to filter the assault. At full power, he could have adapted instantly. At ten percent, it felt like trying to drink from a firehose. "There's too much... feeling."
Shinji's prosthetic hand buzzed with energy, the memory storage matrix going into overdrive trying to record the sheer presence of this place. He could feel it pressing against his consciousness—not hostile, but curious. The universe itself was aware of them, wondering what these new notes in its symphony might sound like.
"This is exactly what the Optimization wants to eliminate," Shinji said, his voice filled with awe and horror. "Pure, unregulated emotional expression. Chaos in its most beautiful form."
Netsudo pressed against the viewport, and for the first time since his fire was taken, something like wonder crossed his face. "It's... loud. But a good loud. Like everyone here is laughing at once. And crying. And singing. And all of it matters."
As they watched, adjusting to the sensory assault, they began to perceive the inhabitants. Not clearly—they existed in too many states simultaneously to be easily observed—but as impressions, emotional signatures, presences that flickered in and out of perception.
"Setting course for the primary inhabited world," Merus said, his fingers clumsy on controls he could barely see through the emotional noise. "According to Hyachima's data, it's called... well, it doesn't translate to a word. It translates to a feeling. Something like 'home-where-the-heart-remembers-itself.'"
"That's beautiful," Miryoku breathed.
"That's inefficient," Netsudo said, and his calm tone made everyone turn to look at him. He blinked, surprised by his own words. "Sorry. That was... they're still in my head. The Optimization. Whispering."
"What are they whispering?" Shinji asked carefully.
"That this is exhausting. That feeling everything all the time must be unbearable. That the inhabitants here probably want relief, even if they don't know it yet." Netsudo's hands pressed against the viewport. "And the scary part is... they might be right."
As if summoned by that terrible thought, they appeared.
Grey tendrils.
Not invading from outside the universe, but emerging from within it. Like reality itself was developing the grey the way a body develops a fever—an immune response to the overwhelming presence of emotion.
But these tendrils didn't attack. Didn't conquer. Didn't force.
They offered.
Shinji watched as one tendril approached a planet where the inhabitants' emotional resonance blazed like a supernova. The tendril touched the planet's edge, and the colors there... didn't fight back. Didn't resist.
They simply acquiesced.
As if recognizing a more logical way to exist.
The vibrant reds and furious oranges smoothed into gentle greys. The chaotic joy-yellows calmed into peaceful neutrality. And the inhabitants there—those whose emotions had burned brightest—felt the touch of optimization and sighed with relief.
"That's how it spreads," Shinji realized, his voice hollow with dawning horror. "It doesn't conquer. It doesn't force. It convinces. It offers peace to those drowning in feeling, and they choose it. Willingly. Gratefully."
"How do you fight that?" Merus asked. "How do you argue against peace? Against relief from suffering?"
Shinji's prosthetic hand clenched into a fist, Kuro's memory matrix pulsing with stored emotions—grief, love, pain, joy, all the inefficient chaos that made life worth living.
"We remind them," Shinji said, "what they'd be trading away. Not just the pain. Everything. The love that causes grief. The hope that invites disappointment. The passion that leads to heartbreak."
"Will that be enough?" Miryoku asked softly.
"I don't know." Shinji turned from the viewscreen, his prosthetic hand still clenched. "But we're about to find out."
"Setting down on the primary world," Merus announced. "Coordinates locked. Estimated landing in... ten minutes."
"Netsudo," Shinji said, turning to the boy. "You said they're still whispering. The Optimization. Can you hear what they're saying now?"
Netsudo tilted his head, listening to voices only he could hear. His expression grew troubled.
"They say..." He paused, struggling with the words. "They say we're too late. That the Chromians have already decided. That they've been trying to escape their own emotions for millennia, and the Optimization is just... giving them what they always wanted."
Shinji felt ice in his chest. "Are they right?"
"I don't know." Netsudo's eyes found Shinji's. "But I think we're about to find out what happens when you try to save people who don't want to be saved."
The Stardust Weaver descended through clouds that shifted from vibrant colors to muted greys, from overwhelming emotion to gentle calm. They were entering a world caught between chaos and optimization, between living and merely existing.
And somewhere below, an entire civilization was making a choice that would determine not just their fate, but the nature of the battle ahead.
They landed in what might have been a clearing, though "clearing" implied stable geography. The Chromatic Veil's surface shifted constantly, responding to emotional input like a mood ring the size of a planet. Where they touched down, the ground solidified into something like crystal—transparent, refractive, alive with inner light.
Shinji was first down the ramp, his prosthetic hand recording everything. The air tasted like nostalgia and smelled like hope. Sounds had texture—he could feel the distant calls of Chromian inhabitants like silk against his skin.
Miryoku emerged next, and her harmonic senses nearly overwhelmed her. This place was a harmony so complex it bordered on discord, every note perfectly placed yet constantly shifting. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. It was everything her power aspired to be, and she felt inadequate in its presence.
Netsudo stepped onto the crystal ground and felt something give beneath his feet—not physically, but emotionally. The planet was responding to his fractured psyche, trying to understand what he was. His three personas stirred uncomfortably as the Veil probed their boundaries.
Merus descended last, moving carefully, his diminished divine senses struggling to parse the emotional noise. "Stay close," he ordered, his tactical mind compensating for sensory inadequacy. "We don't know how hostile—"
A figure approached from the shifting landscape.
Not walking, exactly. More like becoming present, as if they'd always been there and only now decided to be observed. The being cycled through forms constantly—crystalline beauty that refracted inner light, turbulent storms of emotion made flesh, gentle warmth that radiated peace. Each form lasted seconds before bleeding into the next.
"You are the Rememberers," it said, and its voice was a cascade of musical notes that somehow formed words. "The Grey has told us of your coming."
Shinji stepped forward, careful to keep his emotions measured. The prosthetic hand buzzed—a warning, or recognition? "The Grey is called the Optimization. It wants to remove what makes you who you are."
The Chromian shifted to a form of pure logic—sharp angles, mathematical precision, geometric perfection. When it spoke, the musical quality flattened into pure information. "And what are we, if not inefficient patterns waiting to be refined? We are chaos embodied. We feel everything all the time. Every joy is exhausting. Every sorrow is overwhelming. Every moment is a war between conflicting emotions."
It gestured at the landscape around them, where other Chromians flickered in and out of emotional states. One being cycled through grief, rage, and ecstasy in rapid succession. Another split into three distinct forms, each expressing a different feeling simultaneously. A third dissolved into pure emotional energy, losing cohesion entirely before reforming with visible effort.
"Look at us," the Chromian continued. "We are drowning in feeling. The Grey offers peace. No more heartache when lovers leave. No more grief when generations pass. No more exhausting war between what we feel and what we think."
Miryoku's light flared with frustration. "But also no more joy when lovers unite! No more wonder at new generations! No more—"
"Peace," the Chromian interrupted, and its form shifted to something almost pleading. "Do you understand? We have known joy and wonder and love for millennia. We have felt every possible emotion in every possible combination. Perhaps..." The form wavered, uncertain. "Perhaps it is time to know something else. To know calm."
"NO!" The shout came from Merus, surprising everyone. The God of Creation—diminished, fractured, barely functional—stepped forward with the authority he could no longer back with power. "I have witnessed ten thousand civilizations rise and fall. I have seen species evolve beyond physical form, transcend mortality, reshape reality itself. And do you know what every single one of them had in common?"
The Chromian's form stilled, becoming a perfect sphere of contemplation.
"They felt," Merus continued, his voice carrying the weight of eons. "They hurt, they loved, they grieved, they celebrated. Pain and joy are not opposing forces—they are the same energy, expressing itself differently. To remove one is to lose both. And what remains..." His hands trembled. "What remains is existence without being. Function without purpose. Life without living."
The Chromian wavered between forms—logic, emotion, somewhere between. "The large blue one speaks with divine wisdom. But wisdom is not the same as relief. We are tired. So very tired of feeling."
"Then rest," Netsudo said softly, and all eyes turned to him. "Rest, recover, find balance. But don't amputate the parts of yourself that hurt. Because those parts are what make you you."
He moved closer to the Chromian, his three personas speaking in rare unison:
"I am broken into pieces because of trauma. The fear, the fire, the emptiness—they contradict each other. Fight each other. Exhaust me every day." His voice steadied. "And I would not trade them for comfortable wholeness. Because together, contradicting and fighting and exhausting me... they keep me real."
The Chromian's form flickered rapidly—emotion, logic, emotion, logic—as if processing something it couldn't quite categorize.
Then, from the grey tendrils that hovered at the edge of the clearing, a new figure emerged.
The Ambassador
The being that stepped from the grey was Chromian in origin, but transformed. Its form no longer shifted, no longer cycled through emotional states. It was locked in a single state: perfect, unchanging silver.
"I was like you once," the ambassador said, and its voice had lost all musical quality. It spoke in pure information, each word precisely weighted, perfectly efficient. "I felt the chaos. The pain. The constant turmoil of feeling too much, thinking too little, being pulled apart by every emotion that touched me."
It moved with mechanical grace, each step calculated for optimal energy expenditure. "The Grey showed me a better way. Not emptiness. Not death. But peace. Finally, after millennia of emotional warfare, I found peace."
Shinji studied the silver figure, his prosthetic hand recording every detail. "What did you lose?"
The ambassador's form wavered almost imperceptibly—the first sign of anything other than perfect stability. "Loss is an emotional concept. I... optimized away unnecessary attachments."
"Like your daughter?" Miryoku asked softly, her harmonic senses picking up the ghost of a memory clinging to the ambassador's silver shell. A resonance so faint it was almost not there—but almost meant it was still present. Still real.
The silver form flickered. For just a moment, a flash of color bled through—a child's laughter encoded in emotional resonance, a memory of warmth and joy and love so profound it had survived optimization.
"She was..." The ambassador's voice lost its perfect flatness, just for a second. "She was inefficient. Her emotional demands decreased my productivity by—"
"SHE WAS YOUR CHILD!" The roar didn't come from the crew. It came from one of the other Chromians, this one locked in a state of protective fury. Its form blazed with parental love, with the fierce irrationality that would burn down worlds to keep a child safe. "YOUR CHILD! And you optimized her away?!"
The ambassador's silver form cracked, revealing glimpses of the colorful being it had once been. Blues and reds and yellows bled through the perfect geometry, emotions forcing their way back through optimization's shell.
"The Grey warned me about you," the ambassador said, its voice breaking. "Said you would try to make me... remember. Said you would weaponize my inefficient attachments against me. Said—"
"We're not here to fight you," Shinji interrupted, approaching slowly. His prosthetic hand extended, not threateningly, but as an offering. "We're here to offer a choice. Not between efficiency and emotion, but between existing and living."
"They are the same thing," the ambassador insisted, but its form cracked further. Colors bled through faster now, memories surfacing like air bubbles from the bottom of a deep pool.
"Are they?" Merus asked gently. "Can you tell me your daughter's name?"
The ambassador opened its mouth. Closed it. The silver form flickered rapidly as it searched for data that should be there but had been optimized into absence.
"I... I don't..." The voice cracked completely. "Why can't I remember her name? I remember that she had a name. That she existed. That she was..." The form shuddered. "That she mattered."
"Because mattering is inefficient," Netsudo said softly. "When things matter to you, losing them hurts. The Optimization convinced you to stop caring so you'd stop hurting. And it worked. You don't hurt anymore."
"Then why..." The ambassador's silver shell cracked like eggshell, colors bleeding through the gaps. "Why does this feel worse?"
No one answered. Because the answer was evident in the way the ambassador's form was fracturing, in the way forgotten emotions forced their way back through optimization's perfect peace.
You can't optimize away love without losing the ability to understand why you loved in the first place.
And understanding that loss... that was its own kind of agony.
What happened next wasn't a battle. It wasn't an argument. It wasn't even a rescue.
It was a symphony.
Miryoku began weaving light—not to attack, not to defend, but to remind. Her harmonic senses reached out to the ambassador's cracking silver shell and found the ghost-memories clinging there. She gave them form, substance, presence.
A child's laughter, translated into visible light. The warmth of a parent's embrace, rendered as harmonious resonance. The bittersweet ache of watching your offspring grow, mature, eventually leave—all of it, every inefficient, beautiful, painful moment of parental love, woven into a tapestry of light that surrounded the ambassador.
"Remember," Miryoku whispered, tears streaming down her face as she channeled emotions that weren't hers but felt universal. "Remember why it mattered. Remember why you chose to love her, knowing one day you'd lose her."
The ambassador's form shuddered, silver cracking like a dam under pressure.
Netsudo stepped forward, and his three personas manifested simultaneously—a rare occurrence that made him flicker between three distinct states. "They took my chaos," he said, his voices overlapping. "Convinced my fire it was unnecessary. But they couldn't take this."
He held out his hand, and a single ember appeared—weak, fragile, but persistent. The piece of flame that had refused optimization because it was made of memory, forged from the pain of loss and the refusal to forget.
"This piece remembers burning," Netsudo said. "Not just the how, but the why. It remembers my village. My family. The fire that took them and the fire that kept me alive after. It's inefficient. It hurts to carry. But it's mine. It's real."
The ember drifted toward the ambassador, drawn to the cracks in the silver shell where forgotten emotions bled through.
Merus spoke next, his voice gentle with the wisdom of eons. "I lost ninety percent of my divinity. I can barely perceive cosmic threats, can't protect those I care about, struggle with calculations that should be instinctive. Every day I feel the absence of what I was."
He moved closer to the ambassador, his hands open and empty. "And I would not trade this diminished existence for optimized peace. Because this pain, this struggle, this daily confrontation with my own inadequacy... it reminds me that I am. That I matter. That my failures are proof I tried."
The silver shell cracked further, and the ambassador screamed—not with pain, but with the overwhelming sensation of feeling everything at once after millennia of feeling nothing at all.
And Shinji... Shinji remembered.
He closed his eyes and let the prosthetic hand do what they were designed to do. The memory storage matrix activated fully, and suddenly the clearing was filled with Shinji's past—not as data, but as lived experience, as spiritual resonance made manifest through his Spiritual Energy due to Act 3: Spiritual Energy Manifestation
Kiyomi's laugh as she pinned him during sparring, her crimson hair catching sunlight like fire.
His mother's gentle hands bandaging scraped knees, her voice soft with concern.
His father's rare smiles, the way his stern expression cracked when Kiyomi tackled him.
The warmth of Earth's sun, the taste of his aunt's cooking, the sound of wind through trees in their backyard.
And the pain. Gods, the pain of losing it all. The grief that threatened to drown him, the rage that burned in his chest, the phantom limb agony multiplied by phantom family agony.
All of it, every inefficient, beautiful, excruciating moment of being human, poured out of the prosthetic hand and into the clearing. Not as an argument, but as testimony.
This is what it means to be alive, the memories said. Not the absence of pain, but the presence of meaning. Not peace, but purpose.
The ambassador's silver shell shattered completely.
Heaven
For one glorious, terrible moment, the Chromian that had been optimized remembered everything.
Color exploded across its form—not cycling, not shifting, but layered. Every emotion it had ever felt manifested simultaneously. Joy and sorrow, love and grief, hope and despair, all of it crashing through its consciousness like a tsunami of being.
"I can feel again!" it cried, and tears of rainbow light streamed down its reforming face. "The colors! The music! The—"
It looked at Shinji, and its eyes—no longer silver, now a kaleidoscope of every feeling it had suppressed—held infinite gratitude.
"Her name was Lyn," the ambassador whispered, the word sacred on its tongue. "My daughter. She loved to sing. Made up songs about everything—the stars, the food, the way light refracted through the water. Inefficient songs. Nonsensical lyrics. But they were hers and they were beautiful and I loved her so much it physically hurt sometimes and—"
The ambassador's form began to fade.
Not violently. Not with pain or destruction.
Just... gently. Like a forgotten dream upon waking. Like morning mist beneath the rising sun.
"What's happening?" Miryoku started crying, her harmonic patterns finding nothing to anchor to, nothing to stabilize, just a presence growing increasingly absent.
"The Grey... it wasn't restraining us," the ambassador whispered as it dissolved into light, its form losing cohesion. "It was preserving us. We evolved beyond emotions millennia ago. Our species... we were becoming post-emotional naturally. The Optimization just... accelerated the process. Helped us complete a transformation that was already happening."
Its voice grew fainter, more distant. "Remembering... is incompatible with what we've become. You didn't save us."
The ambassador looked at Shinji with profound sadness, its fading form still managing to convey the weight of terrible understanding.
"You showed us heaven," it whispered. "Then sent us there."
And then it was gone.
Not dead. Not destroyed.
Unmade. As if it had never existed.
The clearing fell into stunned silence. Shinji stared at the space where the ambassador had stood, his prosthetic hand still buzzing with the memory it had shared, the love it had channeled, the life it had tried to restore.
"I just..." His voice cracked. "I just murdered them."
"Shinji—" Miryoku began.
"I was so sure I was right," Shinji continued, his words tumbling out in horror. "So certain that remembering was better than forgetting, that feeling was better than peace. I didn't ask if they wanted to remember. I just... I just made them. And now they're—they're—"
"Gone," Merus finished softly.
Miryoku slumped to the ground, her harmonic light flickering erratically. "I harmonized them out of existence. My light didn't heal—it destroyed. I thought..." Her hands shook. "I thought I was saving them. But I was just forcing my philosophy onto someone who'd evolved beyond it."
She looked at her hands as if seeing them for the first time—these instruments of harmony that had just committed a kind of murder she didn't have words for. "What if my entire power is wrong? What if harmony isn't always good? What if sometimes the most loving thing is to let people choose their own discord—or choose to have no music at all?"
Netsudo stood frozen, his three personas silent for once. When he finally spoke, his voice was small and lost: "I don't know what's right anymore. I thought chaos was good, that being broken was better than being smooth. But they chose smoothness. They wanted optimization. Who am I to say they were wrong?"
The grey tendrils, which had been approaching during the Remembering, suddenly stopped.
They didn't advance angrily. They didn't attack.
They mourned.
The tendrils moved with something like reverence, gently collecting the fading light of the unmade ambassador, carrying it away like a funeral procession. Other optimized Chromians emerged from the grey—silver forms moving with precision, but in their movements, something that might have been grief.
Then space folded, and Curator Seven appeared.
The faceless entity stood at the boundary between color and grey, its smooth white form somehow conveying infinite sadness. When it spoke, its toneless voice carried something that might have been sorrow—or the memory of what sorrow felt like.
"We tried to warn you," it said softly, its head bowed toward where the ambassador had dissolved. "Some transformations cannot be reversed. Evolution is not always forward. Sometimes a species reaches a point where regression is... incompatible with survival."
Curator Seven turned its featureless face toward the crew, and though it had no eyes, they felt its gaze—heavy with accusation and understanding in equal measure.
"You didn't free them," Seven continued. "You uncreated them. Made them remember a state of being they could no longer inhabit. It would be like..." The Curator paused, searching for metaphor. "Like teaching a butterfly to be a caterpillar again. The knowledge fits, the memory is real, but the form can no longer contain it."
Shinji opened his mouth to argue, to defend, to something—but nothing came out. Because Seven was right. They'd killed the ambassador with kindness, murdered them with love, destroyed them with the best of intentions.
Curator Seven moved to leave, the grey tendrils swirling around it like a protective cloak. Then it paused at the threshold where color met grey, and spoke one last time.
"Your compassion is your greatest weakness," Seven said, and there was no mockery in the words. Only observation. "And your most beautiful quality."
The grey tendrils continued their funeral procession, carrying away light that would never return. Other Chromians—those still cycling through emotional states, those not yet fully optimized—watched in silence. Fear, wonder, and terrible understanding played across their shifting forms.
"That paradox..." Seven's form flickered, as if the Optimization itself struggled to process what it had witnessed. "That paradox defies optimization. We cannot account for beauty that destroys. For love that kills. For mercy that unmakes."
It turned back one final time, its featureless face somehow conveying both warning and... was that respect?
"Perhaps that is why you will fail," Seven said. "Or perhaps..."
The words hung in the air like a benediction or a curse.
"Perhaps that is why you must try."
And then it was gone, taking the grey tendrils with it, leaving the crew standing in a clearing that suddenly felt like a graveyard.
The Stardust Weaver sat on the crystal ground of the Chromatic Veil, its crew hollow-eyed and silent. They'd returned to the ship mechanically, moving like automata themselves—optimized for basic function, feeling too much to feel anything at all.
In medbay, Netsudo lay curled in a fetal position, his three personas arguing in whispers that occasionally broke into sobs.
In the common area, Miryoku sat with her harmonic light extinguished, staring at her hands as if they belonged to a stranger.
In the cockpit, Merus gripped the controls with white-knuckled hands, his diminished divine wisdom offering no answers, no comfort, no way to process what they'd done.
And in the workshop—Kuro's workshop—Shinji stood before the memory storage readout on his prosthetic hand. It had recorded everything. The ambassador's joy at remembering. The love that flooded back through their consciousness. The ecstasy of feeling again after millennia of numbness.
And then... nothing. Absence. The moment when consciousness simply ceased to cohere, when the returned emotions found no vessel capable of containing them.
Heaven, the ambassador had called it.
Heaven that killed.
"We were supposed to be the good guys," Shinji whispered to the empty workshop, to Kuro's ghost, to whatever cosmic force might be listening. "We were supposed to save them."
The prosthetic hand buzzed softly, still recording, still preserving memory even when memory became unbearable.
Shinji looked at it—this weapon against forgetting—and for the first time since receiving it, wished he could forget.
Wished he could optimize away the memory of the ambassador's grateful smile as they dissolved into nothing.
Wished he could be smooth and calm and efficient instead of broken and hurting and desperately, painfully alive.
The comm system chimed. Hyachima's face appeared, eyes assessing.
"Status report," the God of Absolute Beginning said, his tone neutral as always.
Shinji opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at his hands—one flesh, one metal, both stained with good intentions that had led to something unforgivable.
"We failed," he finally said, his voice barely above a whisper. "We tried to save someone, and we... we unmade them instead."
Hyachima was silent for a long moment, his expression unreadable.
"I see," he said at last. "Then you've learned the first lesson of fighting the Optimization."
"Which is?"
"That sometimes," Hyachima said quietly, "compassion is indistinguishable from cruelty. And the only thing separating heroes from villains is which story you choose to tell about what you've done."
The transmission cut, leaving Shinji alone with that terrible truth.
Outside the ship, the Chromatic Veil continued its symphony—colors shifting, emotions blazing, chaos expressing itself in every possible permutation. And at the edges of this vibrant universe, grey tendrils waited patiently, offering peace to those who could no longer bear the weight of feeling.
Offering optimization to those tired of being alive.
And somewhere in that grey, Curator Seven processed an impossible data point: a crew that had committed murder through love, destroyed through compassion, killed with the purest of intentions.
A paradox that defied optimization.
A crew that might fail to save the world.
Or might be the only ones capable of trying.