"Yon… what happened?"
Each breath was a labor, even more so when he spoke. The thorns that had sprouted within his body slowed the effort of the scales working to mend him both inside and out.
Morning had arrived at some point during his struggle to return to the site where he last saw the others, though his only indication had been the jagged breakage he noticed in the direction he had flown through the moment he awoke, along with the signals flashing across the ADA watch still somehow strapped to his wrist.
Everything after he ran toward Red had become fragmented, and if the remaining pieces of memory served him correctly, he should have lost consciousness from blood loss. That made the distance he had been thrown all the more mysterious.
From what he could gather, the attacks from the amalgamation had been meant to kill. There should have been no reason for him to survive after passing out.
Yet those final memories also made his current state impossible to reconcile. Wounds as severe as his should have been fatal. In addition, he felt a sense of mild suffocation, as though his uniform jacket had grown heavier.
As he looked down at Yon, waiting for an answer that never came, frustration and concern pulled at him in equal measure.
"I was going to save her! I wanted to! It wasn't my fault… It was…"
Yon offered no coherent explanation. He continued voicing his grief at the center of the shallow crater.
From the appearance of the scene, the broken branch Tyson had just stepped over, along with the crater Yon now occupied, had resulted from Yon's attempt to break his fall after being launched off the amalgamation.
Of course, Tyson was relieved that Yon had emerged without physical harm. Nothing about the present situation altered that. Still, it was clear that the source of his distress was tied to his failure to save Blue and Rita.
"Do–"
Slow, heavy footsteps approached from the other side of the crater, each step dragging through foliage with no urgency.
When the figure emerged from the cover of the surrounding trees, they halted and looked down into the hole with a blank expression.
"Red… wake up. I found them."
Cosmo, shirtless, unsteady, and strangely numb in expression, lowered Red from his back with deliberate care.
The Captain's right arm looked overtaken by something foreign. Green veins coursed through it beneath the bandages he always kept wrapped around the limb, each entry point marked by a faint bloom of blood.
Red himself looked marginally better, though still drained and colorless.
As he tried to push himself upright, Tyson noticed the subtle tremor in his body and the uneven, strained pull of his breathing.
Before Tyson could ask anything, Cosmo stepped in and pressed a hand firmly against his wounded chest.
There wasn't pain, only the shock of the gesture, so abrupt that it stalled Tyson's thoughts.
"Don't move. This part's going to be rough."
A peculiar sensation flooded Tyson's body.
His veins prickled, tightened, then eased one by one before the feeling faded entirely.
Relief followed, warm, deep, and enough to blur the edges of his awareness. His muscles loosened. His eyelids threatened to sink.
"Stay awake for me," Cosmo murmured, voice dulled by exhaustion. "I need your nervous system responsive while I work."
His tone was off, flattened, heavy, drawn downward by something he hadn't yet explained.
"We're long past the point where anesthesia would matter. And I'm no miracle worker. I can't fix damage on this scale, not directly.
Your recovery is up to your body and the scales once I get this out of you."
He withdrew his hand. Tearing free with it came a bundle of thorned tendrils, dragging out from Tyson's chest cavity in a single wrenching motion.
The force of it knocked Tyson back, making him fall flat.
"Stay on your back," Cosmo muttered, drifting toward a nearby tree with slow, dragging steps. "Don't make this harder than it already is. I'm still missing eight hours of mandatory sleep, so… if you don't mind."
"I want to quit."
Yon's voice trembled from the center of the crater, where he still sat curled around himself.
"I'm just… not made for this. And I'm done pretending I ever was."
Cosmo didn't bother looking at him.
"Yeah, I don't have the energy for that conversation right now. Try again in a few hours. Until then, you three figure yourselves out."
He leaned back against the tree, closed his eyes, and within seconds slipped into unconsciousness.
"Yon… what did you see?"
Through staggered breaths and a dulled, drifting voice, Tyson had once questioned Yon, judging that he was finally lucid enough to speak.
Yet the answer he received was one he could scarcely reconcile.
"It'll kill us. That thing, it's gonna kill us. In the time it takes us to blink, it will wipe us out. There's nothing we can do."
He looked wholly persuaded by this dreadful certainty, his words spiraling into a kind of bleak absolution and becoming his deliverance.
As his voice drowned out every other sound reaching him, he clasped his hands over his ears, burying himself deeper in his own despair.
What had he seen?
What halted him when he'd prepared to cut Rita and Blue out of the branches?
It was an eye.
For everyone else, the amalgamation had taken them unawares, striking before they could react, before they could even comprehend it.
But for Yon, all it required was a single flash of an eye that radiated annihilation, and promised ruin.
It conveyed its intent through the likeness of a human eye, its hunger to seize, its will to destroy, and the futility of any resistance before its overwhelming power. All revealed to the one whose heart and soul would absorb that terror most completely.
In that instant, even if Yon possessed the nerve to act further, he would not have recognized himself as capable. Because, in that instant, his world had shifted into one where he was already dead.
Where Yonar Hathaway had perished the moment he raised his blade against the monster.
"I wish it just killed me first. I wish it got me instead. Maybe none of this would've happened if I was the only one…"
Roughly and painstakingly, Red dragged himself across the ground toward him, lifting his body inch by inch as he advanced.
"In the end… I couldn't do anything. I didn't do anything. She was in so much pain, and I just stood there. I might as well have been the one who–"
WHAM!
At last within reach, Red slammed his head into Yon's face, sending him sprawling.
Then, mustering every trembling muscle he had left, he forced himself over Yon and began striking him with everything he had.
It didn't matter what part of his hand landed, or how vicious the impact was.
All Red's blows did, and all they were meant to do, was make him bleed.
He didn't stop, even as the cracking and rattling of Yon's skull painted the dirt, even as Red's own skin split open from the repeated collisions with the fractured bone and loosening teeth.
Tyson wanted to end it. He wanted to wedge himself between them, even with his body in no shape for it.
But, strangely, he couldn't force himself to move an inch, because something in him insisted he shouldn't.
"Red, stop."
He did not heed the words Tyson hurled toward him.
"That's enough."
Nothing slowed. His blows continued, driven by a blind, consuming rage.
"Red!"
Then nothing else marked the air besides the Captain's steady, unconscious breathing and the rustling of leaves above, rustling that almost resembled the roar of a crowd.
And as if on command, they halted. The forest froze, the wind abandoning its last shreds of momentum.
"You went too far."
With his uniform deliberately set to standby, the scales offered no protection from the damage inflicted on Yon.
And as an artifact wielder, empty-handed, his current physique was nowhere near enough to stand on even footing with the others.
"Yeah, it's your fault." Red seized Yon's collar in a trembling fist, forcing the words through clenched teeth. "You couldn't save them when you had the chance, and you froze at the moment we needed you most. That means it's your fault my sister and Rita aren't here with us, right?!"
Yon's clouded eyes remained fixed on the hazy sky. He had never questioned why no rain had ever touched them, despite how long they'd wandered this boundary.
Yet now, as a single drop soaked into the pale trails left behind by his dried tears, he found himself widening his eyes.
It had to be rain. What else could explain the cold droplets waking him over and over each time he drifted into a trance?
"Then again, I'm the one who let go of the chain, just because I couldn't handle a bit of pain. That also makes it my fault, doesn't it?"
Red released him, and Yon collapsed flat onto the ground.
"Tyson tried his best, and he got hurt the worst out of all of us. And even then, he still couldn't stop it. That makes it his fault too, right?" Red pressed on. "And the Captain didn't make it back in time. If he'd been there from the beginning, maybe things wouldn't have ended like this. That makes it his fault as well, right?!"
One after another, every moment and every circumstance of that night circled through Yon's mind once again. Yet he couldn't pinpoint a single factor that could have redeemed any of them in the presence of that creature.
What could have changed? What should they have done instead? Nothing surfaced.
"Or does the fact that my sister wouldn't let go of Rita's hand make it her fault instead?"
'Yon… it's fine if you can't do it.'
The final words he heard from Blue insisted it was fine, that he was fine.
'Go back down and help everyone else instead. I have a gut feeling something else is coming.'
Even with the strain of Red's chains and her crushed arm trapped inside the amalgamation, she had given him a reason to move. A reason to retreat without calling it failure.
But none of it would have mattered. He understood that nothing could have happened to change the outcome.
"And what about Rita? Does the fact that it caught all of us off guard, swallowing her first, make it her fault too? Do you understand now, Yon?! Do you see how your words twist themselves into contradiction?!"
Yon heard it now. No matter how he tried to reconcile it, nothing he believed made sense, no matter how desperately he tried to mend it.
If there was truly nothing they could have done, then why did the weight of his regrets crush him so completely?
Yet he knew he couldn't pretend innocence. He knew he was entirely in the wrong, and he believed he deserved every cruelty that followed. So what was he wrong about? What could he do?
'Hey, Colonel Blanchard… it's raining again. I need your help.'