A sharp sound. Abominable. As if someone had placed an emergency tone directly inside the skull and left it ringing with no intention of turning it off.
That was the first thing.
Then came the throbbing — unmistakably different from anything felt before. My heart was beating too fast, with an urgency that didn't belong to waking up but to something that was still processing what it had seen. It wasn't normal. That thing reflected by the blue wasteland — everything it showed me — was inside me in a way no dream had ever been. As if I hadn't witnessed the vision but lived inside it.
I sat up.
And the only thing that surfaced was helplessness.
So much of it that it barely seemed logical — the kind that doesn't fit inside your chest and finds no way out either.
"Auren?" Conrad interrupted without taking his eyes off the panel. "Are you okay?"
He didn't wait for an answer. It was more of an acknowledgment that I had come back than a real question.
"I suppose it was too much for you," he continued. "That, honestly, gives me quite a lot to think about." A pause. He turned slightly. "It goes without saying that we don't even have the technology to send it to another dimension." He let out something resembling a humorless laugh. "Ha. As if that little story were so simple."
"And on top of that," he went on, with the cadence of someone who has been turning something over for hours and finally says it out loud, "the conjecture that Neura is a god. What did this Arthur or Hiroshi expect us to do against that? Why do I even ask. They did the most human thing in the face of a problem: ignore it or deflect it. And the rock was going to fall on us again centuries, millennia from now. But again."
He stopped. He ran a hand over his face.
"The truth is I don't know what to make of all this. But we can't just sit with our arms crossed. We can't use one option from the past again — that much is clear. We'll face this with whatever trick we can find." And with that sentence he sounded more resolute, though the resolve still seemed freshly built. "And one small lead comes to mind. The only weapon that could wound Neura is that one, right? The blade forged from the woman's heart. If that wasteland was supposedly the Earth millennia ago, then it must be somewhere. We just need to locate its last known position and search for clues in the surrounding geography. I'll keep working on that."
Then he looked at me differently — with something I hadn't seen in him before, a confidence that almost seemed forced, as if he himself wasn't entirely sure it would work:
"But Auren, night has already fallen. I recommend you rest and don't think too much about this. We'll figure something out. That's what adults do, isn't it?"
"I understand," I replied. "I suppose that would be best." I paused. "Conrad. Don't overwork yourself. You're not the only one who needs it."
A brief silence — the kind that happens when someone receives something they weren't expecting.
"Thank you very much for your consideration," he said at last. "I'll try, as much as possible."
I left.
◈
The hallways had their own sounds.
The streets of the United States never went fully quiet — there was always something: engines, distant voices, the echo of a city that has no idea what is happening a few meters from its traffic lights. But they didn't sound like people. They sounded more like a broken record, like the specific whistle that the absence of noise produces when the ear searches for it and doesn't find it. That sound pulled me out of whatever was left of my thoughts.
I went into my room.
Something knocked against the furniture. Things fell in uneven succession.
Why?
A single question that passed over the entire current situation like sandpaper. It was genuinely unimaginable. All those beings — surely stronger than several mechas combined, I mean, there was no comparison, they were extraordinary, completely beyond any scale I could calculate — and yet they were slaughtered by Neura. Why hasn't he finished us off yet? There must be something. I refuse to believe he is something like a god.
Because if he were, helplessness would belong to the human engram permanently. As if it were already settled before even trying. How would ordinary people ever find out about this? How would they be expected to react? Are we supposed to wait for this so-called god to purge us?
Never. That word didn't sound beautiful or noble. Much less coming from something that ordered the killing of everyone who represented any threat, no matter how small.
Because of him, Lilian. Because of him, I couldn't.
And that was it. That was the root. The point where helplessness stopped being philosophical and became personal and physical and concrete — the kind of thing that cannot be reasoned with because it no longer lives in the part of the mind that reasons.
I swear I will kill him. Even if my body gives out. Until my heart can no longer go on — let all my past effort be spent if I need strength now. I will find Phaedra. I will run you through as many times as it takes. For having killed my only reason to be someone ordinary. Someone free.
If I did it.
If I... did it.
If...
What would be left for me if something like that happened?
What Will I Do After?