The room fills with an air of Tenacity.
⠀
Mori felt as though he could hear a choir of the souls reaped by the maliciousness of this facility singing to him in that moment. Another tear streamed down his cheek.[1]
⠀
Somewhere beneath the ruin of rainbow rug and shattered plastic furniture, beneath four unconscious bodies slumped against a hidden door none of them had opened in time, the floor itself seemed to fall away into something vaster, something that hummed with the low, aching resonance of Tribulation and Trepidation braided together, blue and green, grief and dread given a key signature.
⠀
Mori raised the revolver.
⠀
Eight rounds left in the cylinder. He'd fired the first into the television in what felt like a lifetime ago, in a version of this exact room that had still, however briefly, pretended to be a nursery.
⠀
Eight more after that, he thought. The ninth is the one that matters. The ninth is the one I have to aim. I could just fire them all now, but I shouldn't let him know my tactic. I've gotta play this cautiously if I want to keep everyone safe...!
⠀
Alighieri moved first. The claymore of light came down in a wide, unhurried arc, and Mori threw himself sideways, scarf snapping out ahead of him to catch the worst of the shockwave, the floorboards behind him splitting open in a molten seam.
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"You don't have to do this!" Mori exclaimed, scrambling upright. "Prospero! Whatever's left of you in there! You don't have to become the perfect specimen he wanted either!"
⠀
"I'm not becoming what he wanted." The voice came out layered, a boy's uncertain treble threaded through with something colder, unmistakably its own. "I'm correcting it. He built a weapon that would take far too long to reshape this dull world. I'll just do it myself. Stronger..."
⠀
The claymore swept low. Mori vaulted it, scarf coiling tight around his forearm as a makeshift guard, and fired twice into Alighieri's shoulder on the way past. Both shots sparked off skin that had stopped being only a child's skin the moment the golden eye split open behind it, deflected wide in twin arcs of gold.
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Two.
⠀
Three.
⠀
"You can't hurt him," Alighieri said, almost gently, the blue eye tracking Mori with a patience that had nothing childlike left in it at all. "At least, not with that. I am every subject who ever failed to bond,every non-viable line on that board upstairs, every debt this facility ever collected and never once repaid."
⠀
"Then I'll owe you one more," Mori said, and fired a fourth time, aiming for the eye itself.
⠀
It didn't land. The claymore caught the shot mid-air, light devouring light, and the backlash threw Mori into the far wall hard enough to crack the plaster behind the last surviving butterfly.
⠀
He got up. He always got up now; something in him had stopped knowing how to stay down, somewhere between the loops and the catwalk on floor forty-four.
⠀
"You keep saying he," Mori managed, breath ragged. "Prospero... Not we... You're still in there fighting yourself, aren't you?? Even now!"
⠀
Something flickered across the boy's face, red eye blinking once, slow, uncertain, before the blue one steadied it.
⠀
"Semantics," Alighieri said, and swung again.
⠀
Mori didn't dodge this one so much as ride it, scarf wrapping tight around the flat of the blade an instant before impact, redirecting the worst of the force sideways into the wall instead of through him. It still hurt. It still threw him half the length of the room. But he came up on one knee instead of flat on his back, and fired his fifth round into the gap between the claymore's guard and Alighieri's grip.
⠀
The blade wavered, just slightly, just long enough for Mori to see something almost like surprise cross the boy's face before the light steadied and swallowed it again.
⠀
Five.
⠀
"You're keeping count..." Alighieri observed. "...Interesting habit for a boy who used to be terrified of that toy."
⠀
"I wasn't terrified," Mori corrected. "I just stayed careful."
⠀
"You want to know the worst part?" Mori said, circling now, keeping the low table's ruined leg between them, buying seconds. "He didn't even trust you to do it right. That's what the note said. "Last hope." He'd run out of other options."
⠀
"Careful, Mori," Alighieri said, and the blue eye flared, hot and sudden.
⠀
"You already know it's true. I heard your voice when the video called you a failed experiment. That wasn't some kind of programming mistake... That was you!"
⠀
The claymore came down like judgment. Mori barely got the scarf up in time, embers screaming against pure light, and this time the force of it drove him to both knees, arms shaking, blood beading fresh along one split knuckle.
⠀
He shoved back, hard, breaking the lock, and both of them staggered apart, breathing hard, the space between them briefly, unexpectedly, quiet.
⠀
"Why do you even want it?" Mori asked, lowering the revolver an inch, chest heaving. "The Ring... Peace... Whatever he was trying to hand you... You could just... stop. Let him stay dead. Let this room stay closed... Forever..."
⠀
Alighieri didn't answer right away. The blue eye dimmed, thoughtful, almost human in its hesitation.
⠀
"Because I remember being told I wasn't enough," he said finally, quieter than before, the boy's voice bleeding back through for just a moment. "And I would rather be too much than that again."
⠀
"That's not the same as being right. You aren't some savior!"
⠀
"No," Alighieri agreed. "But it's the only thing I have left now..."
⠀
Mori's throat tightened. For one unbearable second, he wasn't sure he could raise the gun again at all.
⠀
Then the red eye flickered toward the door where his friends still lay, unmoving, and the decision made itself.
⠀
"Then I'm sorry," Mori said, and meant it, and raised the revolver anyway.
⠀
The fight resumed like something breaking loose.
⠀
Mori moved the whole engagement sideways, step by grinding step, scarf flaring low to screen his footing, drawing Alighieri's swings wide and away from the corner where Saoirse and the others still lay. Every strike he took, he took at an angle, letting the wall behind him crack instead of the door behind them.
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Six.
⠀
Seven.
⠀
Eight.
⠀
One round left.
⠀
Alighieri's swing went wide, overextended, and Mori finally saw the opening he'd been herding both of them toward the whole fight: the boy's small frame, thrown briefly off balance by a blade too heavy for the body wielding it, exposed for half a heartbeat directly in front of him.
⠀
He lunged.
⠀
The revolver's barrel pressed flush against Alighieri's chest before either of them had time to think better of it, and for one long, suspended moment, neither of them moved at all.
⠀
Mori looked up.
⠀
The blue eye met him first, and in it, unmistakably, he saw something he hadn't expected: not fury, not vindication, but a kind of exhausted acceptance, the calm of something that had spent infinity alone with nothing but its own thoughts and had finally, quietly, run out of reasons to keep running from this moment.
⠀
The red eye met him second, and in it, softer, smaller, he saw a child who understood, in whatever limited way a borrowed grief let him understand anything, that this had always been the shape the story was going to take. No fear in it. Only a tired kind of relief.
⠀
Alighieri smiled.
⠀
"I'm sorry," Mori said, voice cracking. "Both of you. I don't think either of you ever really got to choose who you'd end up being..."
⠀
"Neither did you," Alighieri said, and it might have been Prospero saying it, or the boy, or some kind of final agreement between the two of them. "Finish it. Please."
⠀
Mori pulled the trigger.
⠀
The ninth bullet left the barrel wrapped in black and crimson flame, and where it struck, gold met it head-on, the Eye of Argus flaring one last, blinding time, light and fire and grief all detonating outward at once, swallowing the ruined nursery whole in a silence too loud to survive inside.
⠀
The light died slowly, in layers, the way dawn arrives on a day nobody was sure would come.
⠀
Where Alighieri had stood, there was nothing left but settling dust and a single, small, unclaimed shape, folding gently down into the wreckage of a room built for a childhood that had never once been allowed to be real.
⠀
Something small and golden dropped free of the collapsing light, spinning end over end through the settling ash.
⠀
Mori caught it without thinking, the Eye of Argus warm and impossibly light in his open palm, and stood there a long moment in the ruined nursery, alone among his fallen friends, breathing hard, crying harder, holding the last piece of two people who had never gotten the chance to be anything but what somebody else had built them to become.
⠀
As he sat there, clutching the Eye of Argus to his chest and crying, a wall panel emerged, revealing a button labeled with a single phrase.
⠀
Release Paradiso Failsafe
[1] Readers are encouraged to listen to Mili's song "Not My Paradiso" while reading this chapter, preferably on loop. (https://youtu.be/5Jfiucqd3Po)