(Erased... her brother's memories of her? Her only relative, whom she had only just managed to reunite with?)
The shock brought by this speculation made her heart pound even harder than when Chinatsu destroyed the DEM forces, filling her with... an unspeakable sadness.
"Kotori? What's wrong?"
Shido noticed his sister's unusual behavior. He suppressed the turmoil in his heart and asked worriedly. Chinatsu's text message and Kotori's current reaction gave him an extremely ominous premonition.
Jolted by Shido, Kotori suddenly came back to herself. She lifted her head and looked at Shido, her eyes filled with an unprecedented mix of complex emotions.
— Shock, disbelief, and a profound sadness.
"Shido..." Kotori's voice was dry. She took a deep breath, as if needing immense courage to utter the next words.
"Just now... the Fraxinus detected... a brief, high-intensity Spirit energy fluctuation at the Koushi Residence... the identification code is... Phoenix-in Chinatsu."
Shido's heart sank abruptly.
Kotori continued quickly, speaking with a case-analyzing calmness that barely concealed the turmoil beneath:
"The fluctuation lasted for an extremely short time, vanishing almost the second after she appeared. However... in the remote vital sign and brainwave monitoring records we urgently retrieved for Koushi... we found a highly unnatural blank space and signs of reconstruction."
She looked up, staring directly into Shido's eyes, stating the chilling deduction word by word: "...Chinatsu... she just went 'home'."
"She... used the power of creation... on Koushi."
"And then... she is deleting all records of 'Phoenix-in Chinatsu' on the network."
"We speculate... she might have... erased all memories of her... from Koushi's mind."
"Wh...?!"
Shido was thunderstruck. He shot up from the sofa, and the phone slipped from his powerless hand, dropping onto the carpet with a dull thud.
Every word was like a heavy stone; the phone hit the living room floor, but the words struck Shido's heart.
After hearing this, Shido felt as if all his strength had been instantly drained. He stumbled backward, hitting the backrest of the sofa.
The phone he had been holding slid onto the carpet, its screen still illuminated with the two-word message.
(Erasing memories... deleting existence...)
(Is this... what you meant by 'Goodbye'?)
(To completely sever your ties with this world? To prevent anyone... especially us... from finding you?)
(Even the only brother who remembers you... you want him to forget?)
A huge, suffocating wave of grief and loss washed over Shido.
He had held onto a faint sliver of hope that perhaps he could see her again someday, perhaps clarify everything. But now, that hope was utterly crushed.
The girl who would blush around him, play water guns with him, cry in front of him, and confess to him... the one who left such deep marks—had she just... personally erased the proof of her existence within another individual's life?
Was it to completely sever her connection to the past? Was it to protect Koushi, who was a "normal person"?
Or was this... yet another determined ritual as she stepped onto that "lonely path"?
This was no ordinary farewell.
This was a cold, thorough, and absolute reckoning of the traces of her existence in the world.
It was the severing of everything past, and the complete closure of the future.
In her view, perhaps this was protection, atonement, or the necessary price for bearing her mission.
But in the eyes of Shido and Kotori, this was nothing less than a ritual of self-destruction, a complete goodbye to "life."
The living room fell back into a deathly silence, heavier and colder than before.
On the television, the news anchor continued to use a light tone to cover up the truth, while the real storm was unfolding silently.
Wiping the proof of a girl's existence from this world, bit by bit, yet incredibly quickly.
What remained for them was only that cold text message, a brother about to lose the memories of his sister, and a future filled with unsolved mysteries and heavy anxiety.
Phoenix-in Chinatsu, in the most absolute way possible, carved a scar in their hearts far deeper than any battle.
Kotori looked at Shido's distraught appearance, walked forward, and picked up his phone. The two words [Goodbye] on the screen were still glaring.
She placed the phone back into Shido's hand, her voice low:
"To you, she at least left a 'Goodbye'." This sentence was unclear whether it was comfort or a deeper sting.
Shido clutched the phone tightly, as if trying to reach the distant figure through the cold screen.
He knew that from this moment on, the name "Phoenix-in Chinatsu," for the vast majority of people in this world, might truly become a forgotten piece of history, a phantom that never existed.
But for him, that memory, that feeling, and that heavy weight—a mix of affection, worry, and countless mysteries—would forever be etched into the depths of his soul, impossible to erase.
As the night deepened, the only sounds left in the Itsuka Family living room were the irrelevant noise of television commercials and a heavy, suffocating silence.
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