The sky, when they finally saw it again, was the wrong color for how long they'd been gone. Mori tried to sit up to get a better look at his surroundings.
⠀
"Easy, easy! Don't sit up yet."
⠀
A woman in a Viscoso Coalition coat pressed him back down onto a cot that had been set up somewhere in the shadow of Scrapyard Heap's gate, half a dozen identical cots lined up around him, most of them occupied. Mori turned his head and found Yuhuan two cots over, a physician frowning at the smooth, scarred stumps where three fingernails hadn't yet finished growing back, and Saoirse beyond him, both puppets propped on her chest, arguing quietly with each other.
⠀
"...We made it," Mori said to himself.
⠀
"Some of us made it further than others," Jianhuan said, from somewhere off to the side, his voice carrying that clean, clipped formality he had before they had fallen into that inferno. "I understand congratulations are in order. Ryunosuke."
⠀
Kopf Dirigent found him not long after, stepping through the loose crowd of medics and cots with the same unhurried calm he'd worn duel-side a lifetime ago, though something in his eyes, when they landed on Mori, carried more weight than politeness allowed for.
⠀
"You're a difficult man to kill, Ryunosuke," Dirigent said. "I'm told you very nearly were."
⠀
"You heard already?"
⠀
"Cembalo's been reading the others' reports as they come in. Piecing together what he can." Dirigent inclined his head, something almost like respect in the gesture. "It takes a lot of nerve to use a power like yours the way you did down there, Mori Ryunosuke. Most people spend their whole lives running from the worst thing inside them."
⠀
"Thanks, Mr. Dirigent," Mori said. "I guess I just got a bit angry in there, heheh..."
⠀
"That's what survival sounds like." Dirigent straightened, glancing toward the gate, where a small knot of Scrapyard Heap workers had gathered to stare at the strange, hollow-eyed group that had finally, improbably, walked back out of a hole nobody who'd gone in before had ever returned from. "For what it's worth, you've been gone a month and a half. We'd stopped expecting to see your faces again."
⠀
"...A month and a half," Mori repeated, and something cold settled in his chest at how easily the number rolled off Dirigent's tongue, like it wasn't nearly as long as it felt from the inside.
⠀
Antollio and Gluttony arrived together, an hour or so later, stepping out of a shimmer of gold light that made every Viscoso doctor within twenty feet flinch and reach for something that wasn't going to help them at all.
⠀
"There you all are!~" Antollio said, beaming, hands clasped behind his back like he'd simply come to collect a package that had run slightly late. "Goodness, look at the state of you. Very beautiful, in a tragic sort of way."
⠀
"Traumatic," Gluttony corrected, though she was smiling too, scanning the row of cots with the fond, distracted air of a woman checking off a shopping list rather than a woman looking at three people who'd nearly died repeatedly for over a month. "Armor, darling, you've lost weight. Leopold, is that a limp?"
⠀
"It's fine," Leopold said, flatly. Explaining anything further to Gluttony rarely improved the conversation.
⠀
Roby sat up on his cot, indignant despite the ache clearly written across every part of him. "That's it?! We were down there for a month and a half! We got stuck in a loop that lasted... I don't even know how long, but it was longer than I got numbers for! People DIED down there, and you're just—!"
⠀
"You're all alive," Antollio said, mild, not unkindly, though there was something underneath the mildness that made even Roby's protest die halfway out of his mouth. "That's rather the entire point, isn't it? I'll admit, I hadn't expected quite this much drama out of a simple retrieval, but here we are, and here you are, breathing. I'd call that a success!~"
⠀
He crossed to Mori's cot without waiting for further argument, crouching down to Mori's eye level with the same easy, unsettling warmth he always carried.
⠀
"Good job," he said.
⠀
Just that. Two words, delivered like they cost him nothing and settled everything.
⠀
"...That's it?" Mori asked, echoing Roby despite himself. "Good job? Do you even know what happened down there?"
⠀
"I know a great deal, actually. More than you'd probably like, if we're being honest with each other." Antollio's eyes flicked, briefly, to the small golden shape Mori still held clutched against his chest, half-hidden beneath the hospital blanket. "May I have what I came for, please?"
⠀
Mori's fingers tightened around it on reflex.
⠀
"What is it?"
⠀
Pallas, three cots down, sat up sharply at the question, and Mori realized, belatedly, that none of Pallas's group had actually heard the full story yet, that everything he'd survived on floor one still lived only in his own head.
⠀
"What happened down there, Mori?" Pallas asked, "On floor one. You never got the chance to tell us. We only found out you were alive when the walls opened up."
⠀
So Mori told them.
⠀
He kept it short, shorter than it deserved, because he didn't have the strength left in him for the full weight of it: the photographs, Paradiso, the note on the dead man's desk, the video. He told them about Alighieri, about the claymore, about him firing his ninth bullet, and the nursery.
⠀
By the end of it, Saoirse was crying openly, both puppets forgotten in her lap. Jianhuan had gone very still. Even Yuhuan, who thought he'd already braced himself for whatever Mori had to say, looked like something in him had cracked quietly open somewhere in the telling.
⠀
"That is just one of the Hundred Eyes of Argus," Antollio said, once Mori had finished, nodding at the small golden shape in his hands. "An old thing. Older than the Ring itself, if the stories are worth anything. It grants a single wish to whoever holds possession over it, both figuratively and literally, and once that wish is spent, it settles into whatever shape best suits the world it's just reshaped."
⠀
"Prospero wished to become Paradiso," Mori said, quiet, understanding arriving slow and heavy. "That's what it was doing... Merging with him."
⠀
"So it would seem." Antollio's expression, for once, lost some of its easy brightness. "An AI raised to watch the worst of humanity for eternity, offered a single wish powerful enough to reshape the entire Ring in its own image. I imagine, from where it stood, that must have felt like a mercy."
⠀
"He wanted to fix things," Mori said. "In his own way..."
⠀
"Most of the worst things in this world start that way," Antollio said. "That's rather the trouble with anything that takes on a human shape, Mori. ARCHs. ARCHtypes. The moment something like that starts thinking the way we do, it starts wanting the way we do, too. And humans, given enough power and enough certainty they're right, very rarely know how to want something small." He straightened, holding his hand out, patient, unhurried. "The Eye, please."
⠀
Mori looked down at it a long moment, then held it out.
⠀
Antollio took it with a gentleness that felt strange coming from him, tucking it away into some fold of his coat that seemed, briefly, deeper than the coat had any business being.
⠀
"Thank you," he said, and the warmth came back into his voice all at once, like a light switching on. "You've all done something rather remarkable, whether any of you feel remarkable right now or not. Rest. Truly rest, this time. I'll expect full reports once you're capable of holding a pen again."
⠀
He straightened, glanced once more around the row of exhausted, hollow-eyed Fixers, and smiled the same easy smile he always wore.
⠀
"Very beautiful work, all of you."
⠀
Mori opened his mouth to say something else, some question about the Overseer, about Paradiso's remains, about what exactly had happened to the rest of the facility now that its last two occupants were gone, and found he simply didn't have the strength left to shape any of it into words.
⠀
The world tilted, gently, and went dark before he hit the stretcher.
⠀
He woke to white ceiling tiles and the low, steady beep of something monitoring his heartbeat, the usual sterile hush of the Viscoso Coalition hospital in the 4th District settling around him.
⠀
Pallas sat in the chair beside his bed, badge turning slowly between his fingers, the way it always did when he was thinking about something he hadn't fully decided how to say yet.
⠀
"...You're awake," Pallas said, setting the badge down. "Good. I wanted to talk to you properly before Antollio got the chance to send you back out."
⠀
"...How long was I out?"
⠀
"Three days. The doctors say that's fairly reasonable, given everything."
⠀
Mori pushed himself up slightly against the pillows, wincing at muscles that still ached in places he hadn't known could ache. "You wanted to talk about something?"
⠀
"I did." Pallas was quiet for a moment, choosing his words with the same careful precision he chose everything. "What we found down there... What you found, on that last floor. It's given me a clearer way of looking at my own work at Adjunct-94 than I've had in years." He turned the badge over once more, then set it down for good. "I spent a long time believing the cruelty I helped build was simply the cost of understanding something dangerous. I told myself... decent people did indecent things down there, and that made the indecency survivable, if not forgivable..."
⠀
"And now?"
⠀
"...Now I've watched what happens when someone builds cruelty and tries calling it hope instead. And I've watched a boy your age walk into the middle of that, and choose, at every single opportunity, to be gentler than the people who built the whole nightmare he was standing in." Pallas's voice caught, just slightly. "I don't know if I've earned forgiveness, Mori. I'm not certain that's a thing a person earns at all. But I think, for the first time since I left that badge in my coat pocket, I might actually be able to give it to myself. And I have you to thank for that, whether you meant to hand it to me or not."
⠀
Mori didn't quite know what to say to that, so he settled for the truth. "I didn't do it for you."
⠀
"I know," Pallas said, and something in his face, for the first time since Mori had met him, looked almost peaceful. "That's rather the point. You didn't do any of it for anyone's benefit but the people standing in that room. I think that's the only kind of good that's ever actually worth anything in the Ring."
⠀
"..."
⠀
"You're a good kid, Mori. I didn't really have much faith in you before, but... I guess I was proven wrong."
⠀
He stood, straightening his coat, some of his old composure settling back over him.
⠀
"You have a visitor," he said. "Waiting outside. I told them I wanted to speak with you first, but I imagine my window's closed."
⠀
"Yuhuan?" Mori guessed, already smiling despite the ache in his ribs. "Or Saoirse? Please tell me it's not Roby..."
⠀
Pallas's mouth twitched, the closest thing to a real smile Mori had seen from him in weeks. "Neither, actually."
⠀
He left without elaborating, the door easing shut behind him.
⠀
The door opened again a moment later, and Mori's confusion only deepened.
⠀
Armor stepped into the room, still in full plate, greatsword absent for once, and said nothing at all. He crossed to the center of the room and simply stood there, silent, the way he'd stood at the edge of every conversation for the entire descent, watching Mori with an intensity that had never once, in all their weeks together, fully explained itself.
⠀
"...Armor?" Mori said, uncertain. "You okay? You're being weirder than usual."
⠀
Armor didn't answer.
⠀
Instead, slowly, deliberately, he reached up and unclasped the first piece of his gauntlet, letting it fall to the floor with a heavy, deliberate clang. Then the other. The pauldrons followed, one at a time, each piece hitting the tile with the same unhurried finality, until the armor that had shielded him through every fight since the hundredth floor lay scattered in a rough circle around his boots.
⠀
Mori sat frozen, not understanding, watching as Armor's hands finally rose to the helmet itself, fingers finding the clasps at either side with the ease of long, worn-in habit.
⠀
He lifted it away.
⠀
"No way..."