The city felt hollow under the fading light — like a dream ready to wake.
Ren and Yuki walked side by side, but not close enough to touch. The silence between them wasn't cold anymore. It was full of things they weren't ready to say.
They moved through familiar streets with unfamiliar eyes. The world they'd lived in — the school, the shrine, even the air itself — was nothing more than scenery in a story someone else had written.
And the author?
Him.
Ren kept glancing at her. The old ache returned — not guilt, not longing. Something more twisted.
Fear.
Not of what she might do.
But of what she might choose not to do.
They stopped outside the closed gates of the old library.
"The place where you died," Yuki said, voice flat. "First loop. Tenth day."
Ren nodded.
"And then you brought me in."
"I didn't want to," he said.
"But you did."
He looked away. "Because I missed you."
System Tsuki: Emotional stabilization faltering.
Memory fragmentation at 42%.
Loop fabric thinning.
"I still don't understand something," Yuki said. "Why did the system even allow me to kill you in the second loop?"
Ren hesitated.
"It didn't," he said. "That was… me."
She turned. "You let me?"
"It was the only way I could make you remember," he said, voice tight. "Pain echoes deeper than anything else."
Yuki stared at him for a long time. "You're not the person I fell in love with."
"I know."
"But maybe," she added, "you're finally becoming him again."
They climbed the iron fence — trespassing felt pointless now — and stepped into the garden behind the library. Overgrown, quiet, abandoned like the rest of the loop's edges.
And in the center, nestled beneath the roots of a twisted cherry tree:
A door.
Stone-framed. Ancient. Covered in seals neither of them could read.
"This wasn't here before," Yuki said.
"It wasn't meant to be seen by someone still inside the loop," Ren replied.
They knelt before it. Ren traced one of the markings.
"Do you remember the first time I told you I loved you?" he asked quietly.
Yuki blinked. "Yes."
"You were holding a dying cat. It had been hit by a car. You didn't cry. You just said, 'It doesn't want to be saved. It wants to be held.'"
Yuki smiled faintly.
"And I realized," Ren said, "that was how I felt. About you. I didn't want to fix you. I just wanted to hold on."
He looked at her, trembling.
"But in the end, I used every version of you like a lifeline. I never held on — I clung. And I called it love."
Yuki reached forward.
And touched the seal.
The door opened.
Behind it — a stairway, impossibly long, spiraling downward like the spine of the world.
A place untouched by memory resets.
A place outside Tsuki.
They stepped inside together.
Far above…
Mio stood atop the torii gate at the shrine, staring up at the pulsing red moon.
"They found the Path," Kaito said behind her.
"I know."
"Are we ready?"
Mio nodded slowly. "Ren's about to remember everything. When he does, he'll reach the heart."
"And then?"
Mio's eyes flashed.
"Then we see if love really can break the loop."