He could still see it.
The brutal afterimage of that slash lingered before his eyes. The weight behind it was like a pale wind that could wear away stone, piercing into his body inch by inch, then deeper still, into his heart, his soul, and every part of him. The blade had left its sheath for only an instant, yet the pain it left behind twisted his sense of time until that single moment felt endless.
His vision sank into darkness.
A deep, boundless black, sudden and absolute, like the bottom of an abyss he could never escape.
Before those dazed eyes, he could see nothing.
Only the slash from a moment ago remained tangled in his memory.
It hurt. It hurt as if he had been torn beyond recognition, as if something were chewing him apart until he wanted to vomit up his own soul.
Satoru could not understand that blade.
He could not even reach it.
At the very edge of what he could grasp, he faintly saw a desolate land where corpses slept, a wind that had blown through blood, and the resentful roar of someone standing on the verge of death. Ahead of him, there was nothing. Behind him, white bones crowded the earth. It was like the cycle of a nightmare, and that blade had come with the nightmare rolling behind it, eroding him through one horrific vision after another.
Ultimate Intent.
Under the Fluctlight, all the pride and arrogance he had felt at the threshold between human and divine was killed in a single instant.
And yet, he let out a long breath.
This pain, this weakness, this sense of being small and lowly, finally allowed him to find a trace of Satoru again.
Eyes that could see nothing.
Eyes that saw only darkness.
Those were human eyes.
Those were... his eyes.
Only like this could he recover a heart that still knew fear.
The most merciful thing about this world was that the human mind could not connect everything it held into one complete whole. People lived on a calm little island called ignorance, surrounded by an endless black ocean, and perhaps they had never been meant to sail far from shore.
...
No.
If the lighthouse he longed for stood beyond that distant black sea, then even without a direction, even without knowing how long the search would take, even after losing all that pride and arrogance, even while feeling this fear called the unknown, he still had to cut through the deep black water and head toward that gentle amber light.
His eyelids twitched as if scorched by karmic fire, revealing his original eyes, now extinguished.
He could no longer see that flawless white realm.
The illusory figure standing on the border between black and white was gone.
So was the terrifying blade that had come for him.
Only, for an instant, something like a phantom dream remained.
Heavy armor was locked around his thin body like shackles, like a cage. Every step seemed to demand that he endure the loneliness inside him and the emotions he had forgotten. Over that sealed armor hung a snow-white robe, spotless and pure, as if mocking him by dressing him as some holy guardian.
The soft hem of the robe dragged across a crystal-clear floor without a single speck of dust.
He knelt in obedience before the throne.
The narrow slit over the helmet's eye sockets was like a skylight in his prison, allowing him to glimpse only the smallest thread of light from outside. Wherever his gaze moved, everything remained blurred. Beneath the burning white radiance, he could just make out a graceful figure seated there.
"...!"
As if salt had been poured into a fresh wound, he snapped his eyes shut.
His heart seized.
Not from fear.
Not from the pain that had swept through his soul.
But from sorrow.
How many ships had set sail for what they sought, carrying hope with them like starlight scattered across the night?
They wandered over the sea without knowing what hardships lay ahead. Even the way home vanished behind them. Once they had passed, the currents rippled, settled, and left no trace. There was no road back to find. Only loneliness grew day by day, and perhaps one day, that loneliness would become stronger than the one hope they still clung to.
Ships drifting on the black sea were either swept away by waves or swallowed by the beasts beneath the water.
Even if they escaped disaster, even if they survived the harm caused by other people, each ship still held only one person. When they finally turned back, the thing that destroyed them might be themselves, already hollowed out by loneliness.
Satoru turned his head in a daze.
It was still a vision.
A dream.
An emerald-tinted dream.
High in a garden of flowers, surrounded by bright color, stood a clean, unblemished figure seen from behind. Her golden hair shone in the sunlight. She stood there, gazing into the distance. He could not see her face from behind, but he thought she must be smiling.
The wind blowing past her carried her scent to him.
Satoru instinctively tried to raise his hand.
But it was no longer the right arm he knew.
It was a hand beneath a white robe, beneath dense black armor.
The self inside the armor, the gaze from within it, began to turn. He must have turned around, giving his back to the girl bathed in light outside, and stepped once more into the dim corridor. The only thing accompanying him was the heavy clang of metal striking metal around his body.
By then, those movements were no longer something Satoru could control.
The torn wound deepened.
His vision was already blurred. Not only the phantom afterimages, but even the black world itself began to break apart.
As if something were being peeled away, gouged out from somewhere deep inside, the black world shattered piece by piece.
That terrible pain, and that old sorrow that did not seem to belong to him, filled his entire body again.
Transparent tears flowed from his hollow eye sockets.
The pain from that torn place spread through him in an instant.
A voice reached him through the collapsing dark.
"You may not even understand."
"What meeting her meant to you."
"That guidance, toward a stretch of time so long it would grind even an ordinary person into stone."
"After all those years, would you still be the person you once were?"
"The one chasing a phantom?"
"The one chasing an answer?"
"I never saw the end..."
"I only faintly remember."
"There was once a boy who, just that once, did something unlike himself."
"He drew his sword and saved her."
"His smile that day was beautiful."
"Aaaaaah!"
His roar, tangled with every kind of emotion, echoed through the darkness as it collapsed around him.
This was the true power of that slash.
It was a question and an answer.
A blade of the heart that could not be avoided.
Ultimate Intent.
It was not something as cheap as the pain he felt while fighting under the Fluctlight.
It placed an entire life onto a single blade.
The Sword Skill he had once possessed, the one that survived by gambling on death, One Blade, Heart Eater; the battles where he had truly fought with his life on the line; his redemption, his rescues, all of it seemed childish and laughable beside this.
He could almost feel it now.
What kind of darkness he would meet on that black path toward the gentle lighthouse.
What kind of bone-deep cold awaited him there, far deeper and more brutal than the wound left by this slash.
Even with fear as his wings, he might not be able to cross it.
They might snap halfway.
But even so...
"I already... made a promise."
He murmured the words under his breath.
Struggling, he clenched his hand.
He let the blade of the heart pierce him until he was torn to pieces.
Something had certainly been cut away.
Killed.
Perhaps it was the irrational arrogance he had carried inside that realm.
He was still afraid.
Still terrified.
Just like the person he had been before meeting her, using a show of strength as armor to protect himself.
Someone who wanted to reach her side did not truly become stronger.
He only gained another weakness.
Even so, he had also gained strength.
His extinguished pupils flickered again with a dim pale-gold light.
But what came with it was no longer the uncontrollable frenzy from before. The thing constantly drawing power from him no longer demanded a senseless price. What accompanied that color now was awe born from staring into the distant, unknown black ocean, and...
A resolve with no road back.