The air felt different.
It wasn't wind, nor breeze, not even the tainted haze of the Twisted Forest. It was as if the world had held its breath… and Ryouhei had been caught inside that pause.
He took another step through the remnants of what once seemed like an improvised camp. There were still traces: a cracked pot, a piece of cloth with scorched edges, a ceremonial mask hanging from a dead tree. Nothing screamed danger… and yet, his ability—the one he barely dared to use—tingled beneath his skin like a silent warning.
Then, he saw it.
A fissure in the air. No bigger than a shattered mirror floating before him. A crack that didn't belong to the present, nor the past. An anomaly.
Three Moons Eclipse: Activated.
> Condition met: Fragmented Rewrite Presence.
Warning: High emotional charge detected.
The air tore.
And Ryouhei was pulled into the vision.
---
Rain. Black rain.
The scene was devoid of color. Only shades of gray. Ryouhei stood in a city he didn't recognize, with crooked buildings, screams muted by echo, and a hunched figure under a broken streetlamp.
A child.
Thin. Ragged. Trembling as he held a headless doll between his fingers.
—"Dad said he'd come back..." —the boy whispered, to no one.
Ryouhei felt like a ghost. Invisible, powerless. The scene moved like a dream… or rather, a nightmare remembered over and over.
A shadow emerged from the smoke.
Not a creature. A man. Tall, disheveled, wrapped in bandages and a patched-up coat. His steps were unsteady, as if the world weighed him down. In his eyes… there was nothing. Empty. Defeated.
Yet, when he looked at the child, he knelt. With tenderness. With desperation.
—"I tried, Kien. I swear I tried..." —the man whispered—. "But they don't hear us anymore. The gods have closed their eyes."
The boy didn't respond. He just stared. As if he didn't recognize him.
Then, his skin began to peel away.
Not the child's. The man's.
Like ash, his flesh slowly crumbled, revealing underneath a pit of shadows. The boy's face twisted into fear, then horror, then nothing.
—"Dad…?"
—"Don't look…" —the man pleaded—. "I don't want to scare you..."
Too late.
The boy screamed. Fell backward. The doll shattered against the ground.
And in that instant, the man… who once was human… collapsed into himself. His shadow stretched, devouring the scene, and the last thing Ryouhei saw was a pair of eyes shining from the darkness:
"I was someone."
---
Ryouhei awoke gasping. Sweating. The anomaly had vanished.
No trace of the child, nor the ruined city, nor that final lament remained.
Only silence. And a piercing certainty in his chest.
—"The Man Without a Shadow… wasn't born this way." —Ryouhei murmured, trembling—. "He was… stripped."
A victim before a monster. A father before a threat. And now, just an echo.
And yet, that didn't change the reality. The enemy was still out there, spreading errors in the narrative, rewriting history as if every memory were a lie.
But Ryouhei no longer looked at him with hatred alone.
Now, there was something else. A more complex fear.
Empathy.