The smell of ozone lingered in the air, a sharp electric sting mingling with the faint iron of spilled blood.
Arata Hoshino blinked awake, sprawled across the floor of the shattered ruins where the ambush had taken place. Faint particles of azure light drifted upward from his chest before vanishing, like fireflies returning to the void.
"Arata!" Reiji's voice cut through the haze. "Stay still. That thing—it left a signature I haven't finished tracking."
"Karin..." Arata rasped.
She lay near a broken support pillar, her arm scorched, blood leaking from the edge of her mouth. Her blood magic had kept the others alive—but at a cost.
Daigo knelt beside her, shaking uncontrollably. His eyes were wide, panicked—but not frozen.
"I—I stopped it," he muttered. "I didn't run... I didn't..."
Reiji gave him a nod. "You did good."
The silence was unnerving. The Mirror Spire should've been a controlled environment. No unauthorized magic. No life-threatening engagements.
This hadn't been part of the curriculum.
The moment they stepped outside the ruin, two figures were already waiting.
One was clad in a uniform unlike theirs—black-lined with silver trim, badge shaped like an eye.
"Hinari Kurozawa, Tenryuu Second Faction," she said. Her gaze scanned them like a machine.
Beside her stood a tall boy with short dark-red hair, a scar beneath his lip, and eyes that held a perpetual calm.
"Takeru Nozomi. Also here to assist," he added quietly.
Arata frowned. "You got here awfully fast."
"We were dispatched as soon as the anomaly spiked," Hinari replied.
"More like you were already monitoring us," Reiji whispered to Arata.
They returned to Tenryuu under silence, none daring to speak the obvious.
Whatever had attacked them... had used Arata's mark to do it.
That night, Arata wandered.
He couldn't sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw himself—older, bloodstained, standing over his own corpse.
He passed the eastern courtyard.
Someone was standing there, back turned, reading under the moonlight. A girl in pale blue robes.
She turned.
Kohane Shiraishi.
She held up an ancient, scorched page.
"The Book of Burnt Echoes," she said. "It recorded something about you. Want to know what?"
Arata swallowed. "What?"
"It says... you already died."
She turned the page around. Symbols flickered across it, rearranging themselves into Japanese only Arata could read.
"Do not awaken him. The sleeper star must never blink."
Elsewhere, deep in Tenryuu's sealed Mirror Archive, a door that hadn't moved in centuries trembled.
Yuna Serizawa stood before it, heart pounding. Her crystal sigils were glowing uncontrollably.
Reiji had followed her there, warning her to stop.
But the door called to her. Whispered her true name.
A pulse of magic surged outward.
Reiji was thrown back.
Yuna screamed.
Behind the door, something blinked—something old.
A starless voice whispered:
"The fracture begins."
That night, Arata dreamt again.
But it wasn't a dream.
He stood in a field of corpses. All of them... him. Different ages. Different faces. Same dead eyes.
One rose.
"You shouldn't be here yet."
"Who are you?"
The other Arata smiled.
"The one who broke. The version of you that killed a god... and forgot why."
A blade appeared in his hand. Blood-red. Engraved with timelines.
He drove it through Arata's chest.
Arata woke with a start.
Pain surged through him. He ripped his shirt open.
A mark glowed there, the same one the Legion creature bore in Chapter 5. It pulsed like a heartbeat.
The door opened.
Yuna walked in.
Her eyes glowed void-black.
She spoke in a voice not her own:
> "You've opened the wrong memory, Arata. Now, we all burn."
A crack spread across the far wall of his dorm, not from structural damage—but from magic destabilization. The symbols on Yuna's arms, once serene and crystalline, twisted into jagged runes pulsing with unstable power.
Reiji burst through the door, his revolver drawn and enchanted. But the moment he locked eyes with Yuna, he froze. "She's... not possessed. That's not corruption. That's inheritance."
Yuna raised one hand slowly. Her voice layered in multiple tones. "This body remembers stars falling. It remembers every version of you that burned the world."
From outside, the sky cracked.
For a single heartbeat, the moon turned red—and screamed.