The city didn't sleep anymore. It watched. It whispered.
Ash rained like forgotten prayers, soft and bitter, coating the broken skyline in a mourning veil. Streetlights flickered between worlds—one ruled by law, the other by something far older.
Kai stood alone on the edge of Sector 12, eyes scanning the smoke-laced ruins. His wings—no longer ethereal, but carved in fractures of obsidian—folded back as the storm inside him brewed deeper.
"You ever wonder," he muttered, "what dies first—your past, or your name?"
No one answered. Not Ryuu, who had vanished into the alleys trailing laughter and silence. Not Shin, who hadn't shown up since the eclipse carved its sigil into the sky.
But Kai felt it.
The pull.
A hum beneath his skin. Something ancient. Familiar.
He stepped forward, boots crunching over glass and guilt. As he passed the shattered reflection of himself in a storefront window, his eyes flickered—not blue, not silver, but something wrong.
Then—
CRACK.
A screech split the silence. From above, a ripple tore the sky open again. Not a fissure this time—but a door.
And from it… they came.
Pale figures, wrapped in static and sorrow. Sentinels of the Ash Protocol.
"Renshiro Kai."
Their voices spoke in perfect sync.
"You were never meant to survive."
Kai's hand twitched. Memory screamed. And from the rubble behind him, a figure rose.
Shin.
Cloaked in dust. Sword wrapped in blood-soaked bandages. Eyes wide—like someone who'd just seen a god fall.
"Don't listen to them, Kai," Shin said, stepping forward. "You're not what they say you are."
But the Wardens moved.
And Kai?
He smiled.
"I know," he whispered, before launching forward.