Night had fallen like a shroud over the makeshift camp. Shadows danced, trembling across the tent's fabric, pushed by a fire that was already beginning to die. Sera was asleep—or pretending to be—her back turned to Ryouhei. He, on the other hand, sat motionless, eyes fixed on an undefined point on the ground, as if answers might be hiding there.
The air was thick, heavy with unsaid words. The silence between them had been growing for hours, like a seed watered with every stifled breath.
"You're not going to talk to me, are you?" Sera's voice broke the stillness—soft, but edged with steel.
Ryouhei blinked. He didn't turn around. His voice came out muted:
"About what?"
"About what's happening to you." Sera slowly sat up, wrapping her cloak around her—"It's not just what I saw in the anomaly. It's what you haven't said since then. What you're trying to bury."
Ryouhei clenched his fists. He felt something vibrating inside him. A pressure behind his eyes. A tide that had been rising for some time.
"I'm fine."
"No, you're not," she replied, firm—"Do you know what scares me the most? It's not the cracks in the sky, or the Shadowless Man, or even the system falling apart. It's how you're becoming opaque. Like something inside you... broke, and you're covering it up with ashes."
Ryouhei finally looked at her. His eyes were red—not from fatigue, but from the constant effort of keeping up the facade.
"I don't want to drag you down with me," he confessed in a whisper.
Sera moved closer, closing the short distance between them.
"And you think I wouldn't follow? That just because you can walk alone, you should?"
"You didn't see what I saw," he snapped, raising his voice—"You didn't feel it... his void. His pain... like an echo that keeps ringing inside me every time I close my eyes. And do you know what's worse? Part of me understands it. Part of me justifies it."
"And that scares you?" she asked gently.
"No. What scares me is not being scared."
The words hung in the air. Sera took his hand, firm.
"That doesn't make you weak. It makes you human. And you're not alone, Ryouhei. Not anymore."
He looked down. The tears that hadn't come when he saw the Shadowless Man's past finally slipped down his cheeks. There were no sobs—just a quiet collapse. Like a tower that, after years of standing, finally decides it's had enough.
Sera embraced him without asking, without words. Just the warmth of two bodies trying to survive in a world that's falling apart.
At that moment, the system flickered.
A minor anomaly.
A line of code blinked at the edge of the tent—unseen by both.
[EMOTION DEVIATION ALERT]
Log: 0047_██. Subject 9,387 has exceeded emotional instability threshold.
Risk: Interference with the original narrative path.]
Silence.
Then the whisper of wind.
As if something else had been listening.