"...Cough!"
"Keok!" His eyelids fluttered open, the sound a dry, rasping thing that scraped his throat.
For a moment, he just froze. Then he looked at the hand in front of him, completely bandaged. He noticed the blanket draped over him.
'An infirmary?'
He let out a breath of relief, dropping his head back to the pillow.
He stared at the ceiling for a long time as his eyes adjusted, letting his vision clear little by little. He shifted his head to the side, taking in the faint scent of dust and sunlight hanging in the air. Beyond a window, morning light spilled across the floorboards, drawing soft lines across the room. Two birds fought each other for a worm before one flew away. The scene was so lively, a rare sight in his daily life.
Shiro began observing his surroundings, the window, bed, simple table, and the carved beams on the ceiling. Then he froze as his thoughts raced with questions.
A cabin? Wait...
"Where am I?" A hoarse voice escaped his throat.
"Ohh, you're awake?" A voice followed, bright with relief.
This was not an infirmary. It did not even have the stench of antiseptic, and it was awfully quiet. He pushed the thoughts aside as he turned toward the unfamiliar voice, but the figure in front of him did not match the voice.
He raised his hand to rub his eyes. Instead, his fingers brushed against rough cloth covering half of his vision.
He moved his hand around his head until he found the edge. The figure shifted slightly, as if trying to warn him not to take the bandages off.
Slowly, he pulled.
The bandages unraveled, falling away in loose coils. The pressure on his face eased as the world widened.
Shiro forced his vision to focus once again. The blurry edges sharpened, revealing a young man dressed in a plain white long-sleeved shirt, with long platinum-white hair that fell past his ears. His face was too soft, too delicate to be called masculine. He stood by the window, arms crossed, posture steady. His eyes were shut.
"You know, you're quite lucky to have survived those injuries," the young man stated. His tone was a peculiar blend of genuine amusement and blunt, unvarnished honesty.
Shiro pushed himself upright with both arms, ignoring the protest of his muscles.
Then realization struck him all at once as memories came rushing back, the moment he lost his arm and leg, the pain, the blood, the unbearable sensation of his body being torn apart.
Slowly, he lowered his gaze.
Both his left arm and leg were there, completely intact.
For a moment, he could only stare.
'Was it a dream?'
Yet it couldn't have been. He could still remember the sensation. The agony. The feeling of his arm exploding remained vivid in his mind, even though there wasn't a trace of the pain left in his body.
His eyes shifted toward the young man.
"You don't sound like you look," Shiro said.
"Yeah, I get that a lot," the young man replied, scratching his head. "You seem to be recovering rather well. Try moving your fingers first."
Shiro swung his leg off the bed, then walked to the entrance, which streamed with sunlight, his body protesting every movement.
"Easy there. Your injuries haven't healed," the young man protested.
But Shiro did not pay him any mind as he stepped outside. The air was cool and clean in his lungs. He looked up, and his breath hitched in his throat.
The sky was vast and clear, the same sky he had heard his comrades talk about when they looked at the sky he knew. But hanging within it were two moons, their surfaces differently visible in the daylight. One was smaller while the other was larger. In the eyes of Shiro, it seemed like another planet was closer.
"How is this possible...?" he muttered, staring at the two moons in awe.
Shiro's mind reeled, his thoughts refusing to settle.
'Am I wearing a VR headset?'
This was the sort of thing Lloyd would set up when they were slacking off between raids, a distraction to calm the nerves before the real fight. A game. Not reality.
Then his gaze dropped to his body. The upper half of his torso was wrapped in fresh bandages. The fabric was clean, tightly secured around wounds that should have still been bleeding.
Slowly, he clenched his fist with enough force to draw blood. The pain was real. The injuries were real. Even his memories of the battle were real.
But there was a question that had been weighing heavily on him ever since he first opened his eyes.
"...Where am I?"
The young man's expression froze.
"What?"
"What is this place?" Shiro repeated, his voice steady despite the haze in his mind.
The young man studied him for a moment in bewilderment, his brow furrowing as he noticed the confusion written across Shiro's face.
"Man..." He rubbed the back of his neck, letting out a heavy exhale. "You must've hit your head pretty hard."
His playful demeanor faded, replaced by a quiet gravity suitable for the situation.
"You're in the Wilderness territory," he said at last. "East of the Vaelrhion continent."
"I see." Shiro didn't react immediately. The names meant absolutely nothing to him. Or worse, they represented a reality his mind flatly refused to accept.
He just looked at the sun, which had sunk lower, dyeing the wilderness in hues of golden purple while the two pale moons in the opposite direction became brighter and more visible.
****
Shiro jolted awake.
He stared blankly at the familiar red sky stretching out above him, then down at the scorched ground and the skeletal ruins of the buildings ahead.
'A dream.'
His eyes slowly followed a thick trail of blood leading down to where his left arm should have been. A bitter, internal laugh escaped his throat, mixing with the tears blurring his vision.
"I knew it. There's no way a peaceful place like that actually exists."
Shiro reached his trembling hand to his hair before dragging his palm down his face until it covered his mouth and nose. Peering through the gaps between his splayed fingers, his dark eyes lingered on the ruined battlefield, where dozens of human and monster corpses lay mangled across the ground, as he struggled to steady his breathing and compose himself.
"I need to find a way out of here before this dimensional rift completely collapses."
Eventually, he grunted, forcing himself to his feet. He took a step forward, then another.
'I almost completely lost myself in that dream. A few moments more... and I doubt I would've been able to tell illusion from reality.'
Suddenly, his next step froze in mid-air.
The ground beneath him was gone. In its place was an infinite crimson sea. Yet somehow, he remained standing on its surface. Ripples spread across the crimson sea behind him, their faint tremors reaching his feet.
"..!?" Shiro slowly turned around.
The dark sky and the battlefield were gone, swallowed by the crimson sea. In the next moment, the corpses that had lain motionless began rising stiffly from the deep water, sending ripples toward Shiro.
The corpses of his allies, Lloyd, Misuzu, and the others, walked toward him, their eyes glowing like phantoms through the haze, still bearing the exact same fatal injuries they had suffered.
"Captain... Lloyd."
Suddenly, their mouths twisted as they began to scream at him in their own familiar, agonizing voices, the voices Shiro remembered from the moment they died.
"Why you, Shiro?!" one cried out, its head tilting unnaturally. "Why did you get to survive?!"
"We gave everything!" another shrieked, pointing a mangled, bone-exposed arm directly at his chest. "Why are you still breathing while we rot?!"
The accusations pelted him from every direction, a chaotic chorus of raw, agonizing betrayal.
"W...what is this?" he muttered under his breath. "Tell me... tell me this isn't real."
Before he could yell, the words caught in his throat as an ice-cold hand gripped his leg.
His breath hitched.
Slowly, he lowered his gaze. Kneeling at his feet was a fragile figure with long black hair covering most of its face, completely out of place amidst the battlefield carnage, wearing nothing but a faded hospital gown.
"You promised me," it whispered.
"This... this cannot be." Cold sweat formed on Shiro's forehead as his body grew heavy.
Without warning, a massive pillar of water erupted into chaotic, turbulent waves churning outward.
Amidst the spray, massive fingers rose from the depths of the crimson sea, curling slightly upward around him like the bars of a cage. Yet the streams of crimson continuously slipped through the fingers.
He was not on a crimson landscape. Instead, he stood at the center of a colossal hand.
Then from the darkness, two enormous, luminous white eyes snapped open, pulsing with ancient, weary intellect.
A multi-layered voice fell upon Shiro, as though countless beings were speaking at once.
"You should have surrendered to me when you had the chance... but now..."
The terrifying weight of the overlapping tones paralyzed Shiro's muscles, locking his body in place as if the sound itself had bound his limbs.
As the two enormous eyes slowly closed, the massive fingers curled inward, threatening to crush him into pulp at any moment.
And this time, they did.
The overlapping voices spoke again, but this time they melted away, leaving only his own voice echoing through the darkness.
"...it begins."
In the next moment, Shiro shot upright in bed, a cold sweat drenching his body, his breath coming in ragged gasps. His hand gripped the blanket so tightly his knuckles turned white.
The pale, dual light of the twin moons streamed through the cabin's single window, painting the room in an eerie, silver glow.
He then stood and walked to the water basin.
For a moment, he just stared at the mirror in silence. His reflection stared back at him. The face was his. But for some reason, Shiro couldn't shake the feeling that the person staring back wasn't entirely him.
The reflection staring back at him felt unfamiliar. It was tired, empty, and dead.
"What are you looking at?" he muttered under his breath.
His fingers slowly tightened around the wooden frame, the sheer pressure causing fractures to spiderweb across the glass.
"Does the promise I made even matter anymore?"
Shiro had failed to eliminate the Calamity. He had failed to protect the world they so desperately wanted to save. Deep down, he knew he should have died alongside them. Yet here he stood, still breathing while countless others were gone.
His eyes lowered.
Against his better judgment, a small part of him refused to completely give up. He still clung to a sliver of hope that this world was nothing more than another dimensional rift.
Maybe there was still a way back.
Even if escaping a dimensional rift without a proper eruption was considered impossible, he couldn't stop searching. Not after everything they sacrificed. Not after the promise he made.
He lifted his head, locking eyes with his reflection once more.
"I've made up my mind." His resolve hardened into a single, desperate point.
"I cannot stay here."
With the first hint of dawn lightening the sky, Shiro left the cabin to search for signs of a rift near where Yuki had originally found him. A pang of guilt struck him. Leaving Yuki without a proper thanks or goodbye felt wrong, but Shiro couldn't drag anyone else into his burden. He had to face this alone.