— MEI!
Tekio's scream tore through the air like a projectile. Everything responded for an instant: the echo raced through the ruins, the dust particles trembled, as if the world itself had drawn a sharp breath. He ran in a straight line toward the horizon where the Veil stretched—each step a cut of pain through his entire body, each step a broken promise.
Dan and Stella stood motionless for a second, the sight of their friend plunging forward startling them. They had never heard Tekio scream like that. They had never seen him move from pure, unadulterated desperation.
When they reached him, they realized, with a cold shock, the extent of what had happened.
They hadn't noticed it at first.
But now, without that crimson aura, it was clear...
— Tekio… what happened to you? — Stella murmured, her hand trembling.
Tekio's left eye was sealed shut, the eyelid caked with dried blood; not just a scratch: it looked like a puncture that had consumed part of his vision. His clothes, in tatters, stuck to his wounds. Old and recent marks overlapped—cuts, bruises, burns—like a map of battles his body should not have survived.
Even so, he tried to continue. Even so, the only direction he knew was that one: the dark line of the Veil.
Karmore lay fallen a few meters behind, her breathing irregular. She didn't look at him with hatred or pity—she merely observed. It was an absent, detached gaze, like someone watching a curious and inevitable phenomenon.
Tekio tried to continue, but his body could no longer support itself.
Dan and Stella caught him before he could collapse. He let the weight of his body fall onto them; their friend's body seemed to have passed through a steel wall and come out the other side, shattered.
— You won't make it like this — Dan said, firmly, but his voice carried dread.
Stella laid Tekio against a destroyed low wall, her hands on his chest and stomach. The healing energy flowed out, warm, slow, and methodical, closing the most urgent cuts, soothing the bruises that threatened to suffocate his lungs. While the healing did its work, the healer's mind was already racing to understand what needed to be explained.
Dan, looking toward the horizon where the Veil burned with shadows, cut through the air with the question that caught everyone off guard:
— What happened here?
— Did beings emerge from cocoons?
— Where are Aisha and Akira? And why are you so worried about Mei?
Tekio did not answer immediately. Akira's name seemed to pierce something inside him; his gaze was lost beyond the line where the Veil covered the city.
— That power… isn't it Akira's? — Dan continued, looking at the Veil on the horizon, trying to fit the pieces together.
It was Stella who first noticed the subtle change: a tremor that crossed Tekio's body upon hearing "Akira." The red in his eyes grew denser, as if something ancient had bitten him from within.
When Tekio spoke, his voice came low, heavy, and the words fell like stones:
— …Dante has possessed Akira's body.
The statement sucked the air from the space. Dan and Stella felt the name like a freshly drawn blade. Dante—the demon who had marked them all with losses and scarred memories.
The one who had killed, destroyed, and traumatized.
The origin of all this chaos.—had resurfaced in that simple sentence.
— No… that's a lie. We saw it, the whole world saw it: Mei finished him. — Dan said, more to himself than to Tekio, clinging to the memory like a raft in the sea.
Tekio raised his eyes. There was no lie there; there was a weariness that words could not contain.
The silence that followed was a weight. Dan and Stella turned their faces toward the Veil; the presence of that black mantle now pulsed differently, as if the very air within it had been saturated by something ancient and hungry.
— And Aisha? — Dan asked, his voice shrinking.
Tekio lowered his head. He didn't need to say anything. The gesture closed the sentence like a lid on a freshly opened coffin. Aisha was no longer among them.
The reality burst in their chests, cold as glass: Dante was back and Aisha was not breathing. Too many words to process at once.
Dan began to look at the clouds, his reasoning had already frayed; even fighting as warriors, their minds were still human, too fragile.
They weren't so calloused as to absorb this information without showing some illogical reaction.
Yet in the middle of a war, even with sadness or pain, losses—none of it was an excuse, not for them, it couldn't be. This was a burden that belonged to a single name.
Sif.
And knowing that, they both already saw the path ahead, even if they were to die, they had to continue.
For everything and everyone who was no longer there, or who had been lost.
Stella tried to reason within the chaos, piecing things together as if she could reassemble a map:
— If Dante has possessed Akira… then Mei might be trapped in that Veil. She must be inside it — her hand pointed, trembling, toward the wall of shadow.
Tekio merely confirmed with a nod. A dry affirmation. The world around them seemed to reduce to the sound of a heartbeat, to breathing, and to the Veil in the distance.
Soon after, Tekio stood up again.
Stella tried to make him stop. — Lie down, Tekio. Just a few more minutes and I can accelerate your body's regeneration rate.— she pleaded, while increasing the flow of energy to speed up his recovery.
But Tekio's will was faster than his flesh would allow. He pushed Stella's hands away with a gentle violence, rising like a castaway who refuses the lifebuoy because he sees someone else adrift.
— If I don't go… Mei will die. — The phrase came out through clenched teeth, each word a nail in the coffin he imagined.
Dan took a step forward:
— Then let me go. I'll try, I'm in much better condition than you. — he said, with determination.
— NO! — Tekio exploded, his voice cracking at a point where reason met despair. — It has to be me. I'm the only one who can cut through that Veil. I know it.
His gaze fractured. Behind the impetus was something older than guilt: a promise he felt had been torn from the body of someone who would never return.
Do not hesitate...
Karmore was rising a few meters away, her knee still hurt but seemed to be recovering. She observed the trio, especially Tekio. With eyes that now seemed clear. A nearly inaudible whisper escaped her lips:
— Yara…
It was as if the word were a thread pulled between her memories and the present, a small, sad invocation.
Then the Veil reacted.
First came fissures—lines of light that cut through the darkness like cracks in black glass. The shadow was not impenetrable; it was cracking. Shards of darkness fell like splinters, the sound a dry hiss. It came with a muted roar that made Tekio's very guts clench.
Everyone looked toward the point where the Veil was cracking. The horizon was dissolving into fragments, as if the sky were being skinned alive, piece by piece.
Tekio felt something in his throat—a certainty he didn't want to put into words.
— Mei… — he whispered, more to himself than to the others. The voice carried no hope; it carried the weight of a loss already seen in his eyes.
The thought that crossed his mind was cruel in its simplicity: what if she was already dead? The Veil was breaking, so Dante had finished the job.
The world seemed to let go of its last thread of light in that instant. The sun, metaphorically, went out in Tekio's chest: the air grew thicker, the warmth fled, and everything condensed into a silence of stone.
Tekio let slip a word that died before it existed:
— Mei…
And in that breath, for him, the sun truly went out.
Mei was dead.
To be continued…