Zack didn't remember deciding to drop to one knee.
One second he was standing, staring at the seam in the scaffolding where the retrieval claw had dragged Sephiroth away like cargo, and the next his body folded like it had finally run out of lies to tell itself. The Buster Sword's tip hit the gantry with a dull metallic kiss, and he leaned on it because it was the only solid thing he trusted anymore.
His hands shook.
Not the clean tremor of exhaustion. Not the aftershock of adrenaline.
The kind that came from watching a person choose the worst possible door and realizing you couldn't stop them because they'd stopped wanting you to.
The refinery's alarms had found their voice at last. They blared in layered waves—high, harsh, insistent—trying to pretend this was a malfunction, a containment event, a problem with fixable parts. The sound bounced off steel and scaffolding and the cathedral walls and came back at Zack like accusation.
Too late. Too late. Too late.
Down below, the mako still roared through open channels, bright enough to bleach the color out of everything else. It surged against containment walls in thick luminous waves, turbulent and violent, like stormwater forced into a pipe too narrow. Heat distortion rippled up in sheets, making the world look unreliable, like reality itself had taken a hit and was buffering.
Above—far above, out past the core chamber and the sealed doors and the beautiful lie of "this is just a reactor"—Nibelheim burned.
Zack could smell it even down here, smoke threading through filtered air like the refinery couldn't fully scrub the consequences out of oxygen. He imagined roofs collapsing. He imagined people screaming. He imagined troopers moving like puppets because he'd seen them moving like puppets. He imagined the town's neat little windows going dark one by one.
He should've been up there.
He should've stayed.
He should've—
The word should is a cruel tool. It shows up only after the damage is done and pretends it would've been useful earlier.
Zack's throat tightened until swallowing hurt. He pressed his forehead briefly against his own knuckles, eyes shut, as if he could squeeze the image out of his mind through sheer pressure.
Sephiroth falling.
Sephiroth not falling—choosing.
Zack's hand out.
Sephiroth's look, offended by mercy.
Then the claw. The grip. The drag into darkness.
Claimed.
Zack inhaled and the air tasted like metal and grief. He forced himself to breathe again because collapsing completely would mean the refinery won. Would mean whatever was in the hum got to watch him break.
His comm crackled once—static, thick and ugly—and Zack jerked his head up like a drowning man hearing his name.
Nothing intelligible came through. Just the same patient, low vibration beneath it, the refinery's hymn threading through the interference like it owned the channel.
The hum.
The same sound that had haunted the town, tightened in the archive, sharpened on the gantry, and finally howled when Sephiroth vanished into the glow.
Zack had treated it like background for too long.
Now it felt like a voice that had been speaking the whole time, waiting for the moment he couldn't pretend he wasn't listening.
He looked at the sealed panel where the retrieval aperture had closed. The metal was pristine. No scorch marks. No dents. No evidence that anything had happened at all.
That was Shinra, too. Always clean at the scene. Always tidy in the aftermath. Always making sure the violence looked like an accident, or a procedure, or a "necessary cost."
Zack's fingers tightened around the Buster Sword's hilt until the leather creaked. He could feel his pulse in his hands. He could feel the tremor in his forearms. He could feel anger trying to stand up inside grief like a spine.
Because he wasn't just grieving.
He was realizing.
This wasn't a tragedy contained to one town. This wasn't an "incident." This wasn't a soldier going rogue and everyone calling it shocking in the press.
This was the moment the world tilted into the shape it was going to keep.
The moment the war stopped being a collection of battles and became a storyline.
A timeline you didn't get to opt out of.
Zack stared down into the core chamber until his eyes burned. The mako's light painted the underside of the gantry in sickly green, turning his shadow into a jagged thing. The channels below churned and surged, and for a heartbeat the turbulence arranged itself into a shape that made his stomach drop—an arc of brightness, a flare of shadow, something that looked almost like a wing if you let your brain make patterns out of terror.
He hated that his mind went there.
He hated that it fit.
The alarms kept blaring. The scaffolding kept shuddering. Somewhere above, structures groaned under heat. Somewhere above, people died. Somewhere above, the sky reflected orange firelight off green pipes like a molten sunrise.
And here, at the center of it, the planet's blood kept running through Shinra's teeth.
Zack's eyes stung. He didn't wipe them. He didn't get that luxury. He had to remember. He had to hold onto the shape of this night because if he let it blur, Shinra would rewrite it, and if Shinra rewrote it, then Sephiroth would become a monster in headlines instead of a man who'd been assembled and then handed a voice that promised him freedom.
Zack swallowed again. His voice came out as a whisper, scraped raw.
"I'm sorry."
He didn't know who he was saying it to. Sephiroth. The town. The planet. The version of himself that had still believed he could fix things by being good enough.
The hum answered him, steady and patient, like it had been waiting for apology and didn't care whether it was sincere.
Something slid into Zack's thoughts—not his voice, not his words—just that same layered presence that had spoken through the gaps in sound and called Sephiroth mine like ownership was a lullaby.
Satisfied.
Certain.
Now the galaxy will learn what you are.
Zack flinched as if the sentence had been spoken right behind his ear.
The mako river below churned brighter for half a second, and the heat shimmer turned the entire chamber into a mirage, as if reality itself was bending around the promise.
Zack stayed on one knee, shaking, the Buster Sword braced like a grave marker between him and the glow.
Above him, the alarms kept screaming.
Below him, the planet kept singing through turbines.
And somewhere in the refinery's hidden arteries, something newly claimed was being carried away into darkness—toward a future that no longer included rescue.
The hum held steady, prophetic as a heartbeat you couldn't stop hearing.
Then the light surged.
And the world went black.