Location: Lumeris City — Lower DistrictsTime: Two days after Echo Garden / 19:43 hoursCondition: heavy rain • air-sirens active • network jammed
The sky bleeds.Not metaphorically—real red mist, seeded from the cloud deck like poison pollen.The first droplets stitch the dusk and hiss when they touch concrete, leaving pitted, smoking freckles in the alleyway.
Ren and I watch from a cracked apartment window. The pane is spidered with old impact scars that turn every passing ambulance light into a shattered halo.
REN: "Is it chemical?"KANA: "Worse. It's signal-based."REN: "The Academy?"KANA: "They call it Purity Rain. Anyone who breathes it forgets."
A siren yawns down the boulevard. A child laughs once and then forgets why.
On a dozen storefront screens, a white glyph blooms: a stylized lycoris overlaid with scripture-thin text.
BLOOM DIRECTIVE: PHASE TWO — MEMORY CLEANSINGFORGET THE HERETIC.
The heretic is me.
REN: "They'll erase everyone just to get you."KANA: "They're not erasing me. They're erasing us."REN: "Then we stop it."KANA: "There's only one transmitter."REN: "Where?"KANA: "Above the city—Cathedral Spire."
Lightning unbuttons the clouds. Decision made.
Internal Channel — Reactivation
Persona Sync: initializingCore Load: 163%Limiter: OFF
TACTICAL ANGEL: "Urban entry confirmed. Optimal route: service stairwells, northeast quadrant."CRIMSON DOLL: "I miss heels."HEARTBREAKER: "Bring an umbrella—it's raining apocalypse."SHADOW GHOST: "Noise in every band. Assume total surveillance."DOLLMAKER: "We save them."SCARLET SAINT: "And damn the rain."
I exhale. The handle on the fire door is cold. When it turns, the building's breath rushes up the stairwell like a confession.
KANA: "Move."
We do.
Assault on Cathedral Spire
Elevators are dead. The power grid stutters in scarlet. We climb.
Rain knifes through broken stained glass; the once-holy mosaic gazes down in bleeding shards. Below, the city glows like a wound that refuses to scab.
Every other landing is an ambush. Security drones yaw from alcoves, optics pulsing with rain-reflected code.
Angel runs the geometry.
ANGEL: "Two o'clock—predictive sweep—counter with ricochet."
A broken chalice becomes a mirror, becomes a bullet's second thought. The drone implodes without drama.
Haz-suited priests surge behind riot-script shields, chanting in a language designed to sound like absolution. Doll flutters a smile.
DOLL: "Gentlemen, your devotion looks itchy."
A powder-kiss to the visor—her lipstick charges spiderwebs, plex, and knocks the faithful senseless. Heartbreaker lands from a rope of unraveling bell cord, heel first, laughter riding the thunder.
HEARTBREAKER: "Welcome to the floor show."
Shadow Ghost moves between lightning flashes, a subtraction rather than a person. Each time the storm blinks, a problem is gone.
On the sixty-third floor, the glass lift cage is a lung full of rain. Ren coughs. Dollmaker covers him with a trembling, threaded light—an umbrella sewn from memory. His breath steadies against my shoulder, warm, mortal, present.
We meet her on the last interior balcony: violet coat, bare head in the weather, eyes the color of a bruise that learned to speak. The seventh that escaped beneath the bridge.
Violet. Director class. Garden-born, garden-bitter.
VIOLET: "You destroyed our garden."KANA: "You grew weapons in it."VIOLET: "And now you are the bloom that kills."
The bell ropes heave in the wind like throats. We fight between them—Angel's math against Violet's choreography, Heartbreaker's improvisation against doctrine drilled into bone, Ghost's hush against scripture shouted in rain. Dollmaker holds Ren and the rail at once. Saint steps through the weather, lit from within.
SAINT: "Kneel."
Violet does not. She almost does. Then the storm decides to be a judge and swings its gavel. Lightning welds a fissure down the transmitter housing beyond us; the smell of ozone is a cathedral's last candle going out.
I take the opening.
Scarlet crosses through me—literal, luminous—and the wall separating us from the core fails like a prayer that realizes it was never for God.
The chamber yawns open, round as an eye.
The Choice
At the center sits the broadcast heart: a crystal engine contracting and releasing, white-bright with captive signal. Drops of red rain hang in the air around it, unfalling, vibrating at the frequency of orders.
Angel runs the outcomes in a breath.
ANGEL: "Destroy the core: citywide retention, lethal overload. Absorb the core: citywide retention, host rewrite."HEARTBREAKER: "Translation: smash it and they die; swallow it and you forget."DOLLMAKER: "Or we all break and keep breaking."
Ren's hand is on my sleeve, rain-cold and shaking.
REN: "There has to be another way."KANA: "There isn't. Someone has to carry it."REN: "I can."KANA: "You feel too much. It would kill you first."
He understands. That's what hurts.
I step forward. Rain needles my hair, paints it scarlet under lightning. The core hums louder the closer I am, the way a mouth hums when it recognizes the word it's about to say.
REN: "Kana— you'll forget me."KANA: "Then remind me."
My palm meets the crystal.
Internal Sequence — Crimson Rain Protocol
The world slows until every drop is a planet with gravity, until sound has edges.
The six gather in a ring of light; the storm holds its breath.
ANGEL: "This will erase us."CRIMSON DOLL: "Or save her."HEARTBREAKER: "Either way, make it look amazing."SHADOW GHOST: "Silence accepted."DOLLMAKER: "Good-bye is just repair in reverse."SCARLET SAINT: "Then let us be holy one last time."
They reach for me, and I for them. We don't collide. We close—like petals around a sun we decide is our own.
Light expands, more color than white: scarlet for wrath, violet for longing, gold for logic, gray for mercy, pink for play, white for the part that will not lie.
It floods the spire. The red rain stutters, clears. The city's screens blink from scripture to black. The command in the cloudbank forgets the word it was built to say.
I hear Ren once—the sound of my name as if it were being taught to a throat that just learned how to pray.
Then everything goes out.
After the Storm
Hours later, Lumeris is a dream, waking up. The emergency sirens die in embarrassed throats. People stand in the rain and cry at its ordinariness.
On the spire floor, I am breathing.
I am not here.
Ren kneels in the wreckage, soaked through, hair pasted to his forehead, eyes raw. His palms cradle my face like he's convinced the world can be negotiated if he negotiates perfectly.
REN (hoarse): "Kana… It's me."
I look at him. His face is a photograph I did not take. He is young and beautiful and awful with hope.
KANA (quiet): "Who… are you?"
He laughs once, a shattering thing, and decides—grief is a window, not a wall. He takes my hand and places it over his heart. The rhythm there is a stubborn metronome.
My fingers twitch on instinct—searching for tempo like a dancer who has forgotten the choreography but not the music.
Ren bows his head to our joined hands.
REN: "Someone who refuses to be forgotten."
Lightning is gone. The rain, unremarkable, learns how to be water again.
We stay until the city hums instead of screams.
Diary Fragment (Recovered)
[Fragment Log #23 — Crimson Rain]Objective: neutralize signalResult: city preserved / host memory lost
Handwritten note found in Ren's notebook:She stood under a red sky and chose to forget me so the world could remember itself.If love is memory, then I'll keep enough for both of us.
One Week Later
The rain finally stops.
I sit on a bench by the river and feed birds I don't remember naming. The world smells like wet stone and mango peels from a vendor cart. A child races past, trailing a paper fish on a string. His grandmother calls him back by a name that sounds like home.
Footsteps approach, hesitant.
REN: "Mind if I sit here?"
I measure him without knowing that's what I do. He is tall enough to block the late light and careful enough to try not to.
KANA: "Free country."
He sits. We watch the river invent the same surface again and again.
REN: "You like coffee?"KANA: "I think so."REN: "Then let's start there."
There is a moment—a hairline shine between breaths—where something inside me leans toward a memory it hasn't earned yet.
My shoulder curves, almost a nod. He smiles, not triumphant, only patient, like someone willing to memorize a book by reading the spine one letter at a time.
Somewhere deep, where the cathedral used to be and the garden refused to die, a soft choir answers. Six voices, familiar as heartbeat, hum in a key I know in my bones.
They do not speak my name.They sing it.
I stand. He stands. The river keeps its promises badly but tries.
We walk toward a kiosk with a crooked sign and a barista who will misspell a name I haven't learned to keep.
I decide I will not correct her.
End of Diary #23 — "Crimson Rain."