Aria staggered back to the floor, hands flying to her face as her spiders snapped shut, sliding back into their sockets with a sickening rush. Her breath came ragged, uneven, as though she had been drowning in the sea and only now found air.

She pressed herself against the cold wall, trembling. She had seen too much.

Aria's hand clawed at her chest as if to hold her own heart together, tears spilling before she even realized they had formed. She wanted to close her eyes, to deny it, to tell herself it wasn't real, but the memory clung like ink to her veins. It was real. It was truth.

"He… lost everything," she whispered, voice fraying into the silence. "And still, he endured."

Bosch's grief pressed down on her like a mountain, suffocating in its weight. Yet even beneath the ruin, she felt something greater, a terrible, beautiful defiance that refused to break, even when the world had taken all it could.

Aria dragged her sleeve across her face, but the tears would not stop. Her whisper came again, hushed and trembling, part in pity, part in awe.

"No man should have carried that. And yet he did. He lived. He went on."

Her lips quivered, but she forced the thought into herself: 'What kind of strength survives the death of one's paradise?'

Aria's breath hitched the moment Bosch's body tumbled through the doorway of her Origin.

Her spiders reacted before she could think, as hundreds of legs and hundreds of eyes weaved and bound themselves into a living net to catch him before the marble could break his bones. Even so, when she reached him, it was worse than she had feared.

"Bosch!" The name tore from her throat. She dropped to her knees beside him, her trembling hands hovering uselessly before daring to touch him. Blood matted his white hair, pouring from the back of his skull in a sluggish but steady stream. His face was ashen, his chest rising with the kind of effort that spoke of lungs that had already given up.

And then she saw Sol, streaming out of him in visible waves, as though the core of his being had been cracked open. It wasn't strength pouring from him now, but life, seeping away with every shallow breath.

Aria's vision blurred. "No, no, no…" she whispered, voice breaking. She pressed her palm against the side of his head, trying in vain to stem the bleeding. "Stay with me. Please—don't you dare die like this!"

He looked so old. His skin sagged with the weight of years she hadn't seen before, his frame fragile beneath the robes, as though death had always been close and only now decided to claim him. She could feel him slipping even beneath her touch, the way his Sol flickered like a dying flame.

Her spider-eyes widened all at once, the swarm crowding around them. Her heart thundered, but her instincts screamed louder. Kaiser. He wasn't here. She couldn't see him.

Her hands shook as she cupped Bosch's cheek, her tears streaking onto his blood-stained face. "Forgive me," she whispered, her voice trembling, as though apologizing for what she was about to do.

Her command lashed through her spiders like a whip. Almost all of them broke away from her side at once, skittering down the endless hallway, thousands of eyes turning forward, deeper, searching. Every heartbeat they echoed her desperation: Find him. Find Kaiser.

A few she left behind—tiny things, clinging to Bosch's body, weaving silken strands across his wounds to keep him bound, their small bodies pulsing faintly with her own Sol in a desperate attempt to slow his bleeding.

Aria leaned over him, pressing her forehead to his, her voice breaking into a sob. "You're not allowed to die. Not like this. Not here. I can't… You don't deserve to die like this."

And then the air shifted. The change was not gradual. It was not something Aria eased into, nor something her mind could dismiss as nerves or fear. It came like the shudder of the world itself, a wrongness that pressed into her bones and told her she did not belong in its presence.

One heartbeat, it was only her and Bosch. The next, the world bent.

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It wasn't a sound, nor a sight, but a presence. A pressure that crawled into her bones and pressed her head downward without asking. The air thickened, heavy with an authority that had no name. She felt her chest tighten, her throat dry, her knees threatening to fold beneath her.

And worst of all, she felt unworthy.

Unworthy to breathe. Unworthy to stand. As though the very act of existing in this presence was arrogance. It terrified her—not because she understood it, but because she didn't. She had never felt this before, not from Celestine, not from the Saints she had met, not even from the illusion of the golden Hope. This was something else. Something that told her, in the marrow of her being, that she was lesser.

Then, slowly, the doors of her Origin began to disintegrate. Dust of Sol peeled away from the wood, rising in quiet streams of light until the frame itself was gone, leaving only a void that pulsed with the remnants of something vast and unseen.

And out of that void, he stepped.

Kaiser.

Her breath caught.

At once, he was familiar, and at once, he was not. His Sol burned brighter than she had ever seen, the orange so vivid it almost swallowed him whole. But through it, at the edges, bled bursts of blue, streaking across him in irregular flashes like lightning trapped in stone. Where before his Sol had flared freely, now it pulsed with deliberate rhythm, every flicker disciplined into patterns that did not belong to mortals.

And yet… he looked wrong.

His face was paler than she had ever seen. His steps, though refined, carried an exhaustion that seemed to pull at the edges of his body. He looked not wounded, but ill, as though even his immortality and regeneration could not touch what gnawed at him now. Aria's throat tightened. She knew she could not speak of it, could not even name it aloud, but the thought carved itself into her regardless: Kaiser looked sick.

Worse than that, he looked tired. Not merely weary, but bone-deep, soul-deep tired. A fatigue that sleep could never cure.

And still, when he walked, the air parted for him. His every step was precise, every movement honed until no excess remained. His confidence had always been unshakable, but now it was different. Before, it had been sharp, alive, burning with ambition. Now, it was colder, quieter, confidence stripped bare of warmth, of arrogance, of anything resembling joy.

Only two things lived in his eyes when she dared to meet them.

Rage.

And nothingness.

Aria's hands trembled as she knelt by Bosch, her spiders writhing restlessly around her, unable to decide whether to recoil from him or worship him. Her lips parted, but no words came. For the first time, she wondered if speaking in his presence at all would be a sin.

Kaiser walked.

Walked.

Walked.

Each step rang louder and louder, sinking into the marrow of the room. The weight of his passage bent everything toward him, as though even the stone beneath their feet had sprouted eyes just to watch. Her spiders, recoiled and shivered in their clusters, torn between scattering in fear and bowing in reverence.

Her throat worked, but no words came. She tried, tried to say his name once again, tried to ask if he was alive, if he was whole, if he was still him. But nothing left her lips. The air itself denied her. She could only clutch Bosch tighter, trembling, watching the man she loved transform into something she no longer understood.

Kaiser passed her and Bosch without so much as a glance. The spiders that moments ago swarmed protectively around her scuttled back on instinct, parting in eerie silence, their bodies pressed flat to the walls as if they too knew better than to stand in his path.

He came to Masamia.

Her body lay crumpled where he had pinned her, breath shallow, her blood trailing in green lines across the marble. The sword still protruded from her torso, sunk through with the precision of a man who had chosen not to kill. Kaiser stopped, knelt only enough to reclaim his weapon, and in a single seamless motion, slid it back into its sheath.

He turned from her, his expression unreadable, and began to walk towards that strange painting at the window.

That was when Masamia's fingers twitched.

The tremor was small, but her recovery was not. In an instant, her body blurred. She was on her feet with the velocity of a thunderclap, claws arcing forward in a killing stroke aimed for the back of Kaiser's head.

"KAISER!" Aria's scream tore free before she could think, all restraint breaking.

Kaiser did not turn. He did not draw. He did not even raise a hand.

His little finger twitched... And Masamia froze.

Literally froze—her body locked in a coffin of flawless ice, mid-motion, claws inches from his skull. The prison gleamed in crystalline perfection, every edge sharp enough to cut, every detail flawless as if carved by gods. Frost spread from her form in delicate veins across the marble.

Aria's breath shuddered out of her lungs. Her eyes widened, her mind clawing to reconcile what she had seen. That precision… that absolute control…

Kaiser's Sol had always been a storm. She remembered it well, the way it lashed and flared, wild and chaotic like fire torn from its hearth. That was what Sol was. That was how everyone's Sol was. Even Celestine's brilliance, radiant as it was, still burned with the unshaped chaos of a living flame.

But this?

This was not wild. This was not chaotic. This was Sol made into perfection, into a law that obeyed only his hand. Every pulse, every flicker of orange and blue refined into rigid rhythm, each pattern so precise it was as though the world itself was correcting itself to his will.

Aria could only stare, horror and awe battling within her chest.

"What… what happened to you?" she whispered, voice trembling against Bosch's blood-matted hair.

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