The idea was cold. It was dangerous. And it felt, in a way that terrified her, like coming home.
The Void inside her, the pinprick of darkness caged by Kael's golden light, was not just a wound. It was a part of her now. A poison, yes. But every poison has its purpose. Like recognizes like.
She could use the darkness to see the darkness in others. It was a horrible, intimate violation. And it was the only way forward.
Aiko pushed herself up from the pillar, her exhaustion forgotten, replaced by a chilling, razor-sharp focus. Her two allies, her two suspects, watched her, their own argument forgotten in the face of her sudden shift in demeanor.
"You're both right," Aiko said, her voice steady, cutting through the thick paranoia in the chamber. "And you're both wrong."
She looked at Zara. "Maybe you have a tracker on you. A psychic parasite attached to that distress call. It's possible."
Then she turned to Izanami. "And maybe the Guardian Paths aren't as secret as you think. Maybe after centuries, the enemy has learned to read their echoes."
She let her gaze drift between them. "And maybe, it was me. My connection to Kael. A beacon in the dark."
"We have three viable theories," Aiko continued, pacing the center of the room like a lawyer addressing a jury. "Three points of failure. And as long as we don't know which one is real, we are compromised. We are a liability to each other."
"What are you proposing?" Zara asked, her arms crossed, her eyes narrowed with suspicion.
"I'm proposing we find out," Aiko said. "Right here. Right now." "We can't fight an enemy we can't see. We can't trust each other if we're all pointing fingers in the dark."
She stopped pacing and faced them. Her heart was hammering, a frantic bird against the cage of her ribs. This was the moment. The gamble.
"Izanami, you said the Grimoire speaks of arts to cloak the binding," Aiko began, choosing her words carefully. "Complex arts. Dangerous ones."
Izanami nodded slowly. "It does. They require a deep level of psychic integration. A harmonization of essence between the caster and the subject."
"Perfect," Aiko said, a sharp, brittle smile on her face. "And Zara, you said I need to learn control. To become the eye of the storm. To guide my power instead of just letting it explode."
"You do," the Reaper affirmed, her expression unreadable.
"So let's kill three birds with one stone," Aiko declared. "We're going to perform a ritual. A trust exercise. A diagnostic test."
She looked from Zara's suspicious face to Izanami's knowing one. "I am going to connect with each of you. One at a time." "I will open myself to you, and you will open yourselves to me. We will harmonize our essences, just for a moment."
"If there is a foreign entity on any of us—a tracker, a parasite, a psychic hook from the Architect—this process should reveal it. A discordant note in the harmony." "At the same time, it will be my first real lesson in control. To connect without losing myself. To touch without being consumed."
It was a plausible lie. Wrapped around a terrifying truth. She would be connecting with them. But she wouldn't be listening for a discordant note. She would be using the Void within her as a lens, actively searching for the taint of its master.
Zara's skepticism was a palpable force. "You want to what? Form a psychic cuddle puddle?" she scoffed. "You, the girl who is a walking cosmic beacon, want to deliberately link your mind with ours? That sounds like the worst tactical decision I have ever heard in my entire life."
"It is also the only one we have," Izanami countered, her dark eyes fixed on Aiko with a new, profound intensity. The old woman knew. Aiko was certain of it. She knew what Aiko was truly proposing, and she was not stopping her. "The child is right. We are blind. This may be the only way to see."
"This is insane," Zara muttered, but she didn't refuse. The logic, however flawed, was inescapable. They were compromised. This was a potential solution.
"Who goes first?" Zara asked, her hand resting on the hilt of her blade, a clear sign that she was still ready for this to be a trap.
Aiko took a deep breath. "You do."
She walked toward the Reaper, her heart pounding. "I need you to lower your mental shields, Zara. All of them. I need you to trust me."
Zara let out a short, sharp laugh. "Trust you? Kid, I don't even trust my own reflection right now." But as she looked into Aiko's eyes, she saw the desperate sincerity there. The terrifying, unwavering focus. With a grim sigh, she nodded. "Fine," she gritted out. "Let's get this over with. But if I feel anything even slightly like mind control, I will sever your head from your shoulders. Understood?"
"Crystal," Aiko replied.
She stood before the Reaper. She closed her eyes, not reaching for the golden light of Kael's love this time. She reached for something else. She reached for the cold, quiet, pinprick of darkness in her chest.
She didn't embrace it. She didn't let it consume her. She used it. She focused her consciousness through it, like focusing light through a shard of smoked glass. The world of emotions she usually felt—the bright, chaotic colors of souls—faded to grayscale. But in that grayscale world, one color would stand out. The absolute black of the Void.
"I'm ready," she whispered.
She placed her hands on Zara's shoulders. And she pushed her senses forward.
The connection was a jolt. Zara's mind was a fortress. A structure of pure, disciplined steel. Her emotions were locked away in neat, orderly compartments. Grief here. Fury there. Betrayal in a sealed vault, too toxic to touch. It was the mind of a perfect soldier.
Aiko pushed deeper, past the discipline, past the walls. She was looking for the taint. The discordant note. The shadow.
And she found it.
It was tiny. A microscopic thread of cold, gray static wrapped around the core of Zara's essence. It was dormant. Asleep. It wasn't controlling her. It wasn't influencing her. It was just… there. A listening post. A tracer bug.
Izanami had been right. The distress call had been compromised. Zara was a carrier, completely unaware. But she was not a traitor. Her will, her fierce and broken loyalty, was entirely her own.
Aiko pulled back, severing the connection with a gasp. The intensity of the focus was draining.
Zara stumbled back, her eyes wide, her face pale. "Gods," she breathed. "I felt… cold."
"I found it," Aiko said, her voice quiet. "It's on you. A parasite. From the distress call. It's dormant, but it's there."
The look on Zara's face was a terrible thing to see. The final, crumbling piece of her faith in her own systems, her own purity as a Reaper, turned to dust. She looked violated. Contaminated. But beneath the horror, there was also a flicker of relief. She was not the traitor. She was a victim.
"Can you… can you remove it?" Zara asked, her voice barely a whisper.
"I don't know," Aiko admitted. "Maybe. But not now. Trying to pull it out might activate it. For now, we just know it's there."
She turned to her grandmother. "Your turn."
Izanami regarded her with those ancient, unreadable eyes. There was no fear in them. No suspicion. Only a deep, calm acceptance. "I am ready, child."
Aiko approached her. This would be different. Harder. Zara's mind was a fortress of steel. Izanami's was an ocean, vast and deep and older than time.
She placed her hands on her grandmother's shoulders. The skin was like dry parchment over a core of immense, quiet power. She closed her eyes and pushed her senses through the Void-lens again.
She fell.
She fell into an ocean of memory. Centuries of watching, of waiting. The grief of a thousand lost battles. The fierce, burning love for a family she could not protect. The cold, hard hatred for the Council, a hatred that had been nurtured for thirteen long years. It was all there. A vast, complex tapestry of sorrow and strength.
She searched for the taint. The lie. The shadow of the Architect. She searched every current, every depth. And found nothing.
There was no corruption. No foreign entity. Only the deep, profound, and utterly pure essence of a Tanaka Guardian. Her sorrow was her own. Her anger was her own.
She was not the traitor.
Aiko pulled back, the psychic weight of her grandmother's long life leaving her breathless. She opened her eyes. "You're… clean," she said, the relief in her voice palpable.
Izanami simply nodded, as if the result had never been in doubt.
So it was true. It had been her. Her connection to Kael. Her desperate, foolish broadcast of love had been the beacon that led the enemy to them. The guilt, which had been momentarily forgotten in the tension of the test, came crashing back down.
"It was me," she whispered, her voice breaking. "It was me all along."
"Perhaps," Izanami said, her voice gentle. "But we do not have the full picture. There is one more test you must perform."
Aiko looked at her, confused. "What test? There's no one else here."
"You are wrong," Izanami said, her dark eyes filled with a sudden, intense meaning. "There is one more connection in this room. The most powerful one of all." "The one you have been using as your anchor."
Aiko's blood ran cold. "No."
"You must, child," Izanami insisted. "You have tested the subjects in the room. Now you must test the line itself." "You must establish a baseline. You must know what a clean connection feels like. You must look at the binding. At your connection to the Reaper Kael."
The thought was a violation. To turn this cold, suspicious lens on the one pure, sacred thing she had left? To look for the taint of the Void in the golden light of his love? It felt like sacrilege.
"I won't," Aiko said, shaking her head. "It's the only thing that's real. I won't taint it."
"You will not taint it," Izanami said, her voice firm but kind. "You will simply look. You must be certain. For your own sake. For his."
Zara, who had been silently processing her own violation, now looked at Aiko, her expression grim. "She's right," the Reaper said quietly. "We have to know. We have to eliminate every variable."
Aiko felt trapped. They were right. The logic was inescapable. But it felt like a betrayal.
With a heavy heart, she closed her eyes. She didn't reach for her allies. She reached inward, to the golden cord that was woven into the very fabric of her soul. The binding.
She found it instantly. It was warm. Strong. Humming with his distant, desperate fight. It was the most beautiful thing in her world.
And she was about to treat it like a crime scene.
With a deep, shuddering breath, she activated the lens. She shifted her perception, looking at the golden thread through the cold, gray filter of the Void.
She expected to see pure, untainted gold. A perfect, shining baseline of what a clean soul felt like.
But that is not what she saw.
The cord was still golden. Bright. Powerful. But woven into it, so subtly she had never noticed it before, was a single, thin, cold thread. A thread of gray static. Identical to the one she had found on Zara.
It was wrapped around the golden cord like a parasite. A listening post. A hook. It wasn't just her broadcast that had led them here. The line itself was tapped.
And then she saw something else. Something that made her soul scream.
The gray thread was not just wrapped around the binding. It was leading somewhere. It was leading into the core of Kael's essence. And at its heart, buried so deep he would never have felt it, was a tiny, sleeping seed of darkness.
It was the Architect's corruption. It had been there all along. Planted, perhaps, during his original fall from grace. Or maybe it was a newer infection, from the chaos of Heaven's fall. She didn't know.
All she knew was that he was compromised. He was fighting for a Heaven that had already fallen, unaware that the enemy was already inside his own soul. The corruption wasn't just influencing him through dreams or doubt. It was a part of him.
He was not a traitor. He was a victim. But he was, without a doubt, a catastrophic security risk. And the very love that connected them, the love she had used as her anchor, her weapon, her hope…
Was the enemy's direct line to her heart.