Among the great factions, their names were rarely spoken with awe. There were others far grander, far more terrible, beings whose mere presence could darken stars or bend the order of worlds. But when such heights pressed too hard upon creation, when the pillars of law began to creak and the seams of existence threatened to part, these were the figures already waiting in the silence, stern and thankless, keeping the whole from slipping into ruin.
Those were the peacekeepers.
"Why are you here, Messenger of the Gods?" Val asked, one brow lifting slightly. "The Crow of Light. Keeper of Secrets."
His gaze narrowed.
"And why disguise yourself as a defect?"
A faint smile touched his lips, though it carried no warmth.
"No, not a defect. A god." He paused, then his tone sharpened. "Though even that word is too generous. Gods are petty things. You are no true God, only a member of a higher order assigned to govern this world."
"Hah."
Nuez's laugh was short and full of contempt.
"This bastard."
The white fog over his eyes thickened slightly.
"The same could be said of you. A Peacekeeper. The weakest among them all. And even within that pitiful faction, you are among the lowest."
Leon and El stepped forward.
"This is rather surprising," El said, raising a hand to his chin.
Leon gave a slow nod beside him.
Val let out a quiet sigh and looked at the two of them with open disappointment, as though he were watching children interrupt matters far beyond their station.
Then he waved his hand.
At once, the space darkened.
The light dimmed without fading. The air grew thin. Existence itself seemed to tense and harden, as though the world had suddenly remembered how fragile it truly was. A suffocating stillness descended upon everything. It was not mere pressure, but subtraction, as if life itself were being quietly drawn out of the space around them.
Then Val extended his hand.
A world appeared above his palm.
It was small enough to be held, yet complete enough to inspire dread, a miniature reality suspended in his grasp, turning in silence beneath his fingers like a captive law.
With a single motion, he swept his hand across it.
And time stopped.
The stillness that followed was absolute.
Then the world in his hand began to turn backward.
Time itself started to rewind.
The dimmed space shuddered as causality bent in reverse, the flow of moments dragging itself unwillingly toward what had already been, everything on the verge of being pulled back into an earlier state.
Then a voice spoke.
"No."
It was El.
Time stopped again.
This time, not as an effect, but as a refusal.
The halt was deeper. Sharper. More complete. Even the concept of reversal seemed to seize in place. Though life had thinned and the world had been caught in stopped time, El still raised his hand.
And with that simple movement, the rewinding ceased.
What had begun to turn backward was forced still, then returned to its original point, as though the flow of time itself had been corrected by command.
"I do not like the direction this is taking," Leon said.
He stepped beside El.
His voice was calm, almost indifferent, but the calmness was misleading. There was something else beneath it now, something crowded, something that had reached a conclusion of its own.
Then he folded his hand.
And space collapsed.
There was no explosion.
No grand cry.
Only a sudden and unbearable folding, as though the structure around them had been gripped by an unseen force and crushed inward. Distance lost meaning. Form bent. The surrounding world drew in upon itself like paper pressed into a fist.
El turned at once.
For the first time, genuine shock broke through his composure. His eyes widened. His jaw parted slightly.
"Are you surprised?" Leon asked.
He stood in the ruin of collapsed space with an eerie stillness, his tone quiet, almost detached.
"You are not the only one with power, master."
El frowned.
Then he ceased time entirely.
Not slowed it. Not hindered it.
He ended its motion.
The moment became fixed. Absolute. Total.
And in that motionless instant, his voice descended, grave and edged with something darker than anger.
"How?"
Leon smiled.
"While you had only just received your powers, I too performed a ritual to grant strength to this facet."
His smile deepened, touched by quiet satisfaction.
"And I succeeded. I gained a wondrous power."
Then Leon lowered his gaze and checked his status window.
== <<[| STATUS |]>> ==
Name: Leonardo da viscins
Age: 20
Titles: Ciel | Man of swords | Disciple of the sword emperor and King of information
Talent: Swordsmanship
: ?????
Unique Aspect: ???
Existence classification: Higher Human
Dominion: ?????
Physique: The Paradox vessel
Origin: The unwritten
Path: The Equilibrium Sovereign | ???
Alter Ego: Null Paragon
Flaw: The Burden of Indeterminacy
Power: Balanced Nullification | harmonic Reversal
Realm: Mortal | Rank: CCC | Level: 3
== <<[|====|]>> ==
Since then, Leon had kept his abilities hidden.
Not once had he been given a true chance to reveal them. Not in passing. Not in private. Not even during the war between the White Castle and the Black Castle, when blood had flooded the earth and the fate of castles had been rewritten beneath ruin.
He let out a slow sigh.
Just now, he had used the power of Balanced Nullification.
It was a power that did not destroy in the ordinary sense, nor suppress by force alone. It drew all things toward equilibrium. Whatever leaned too far into excess would be corrected. Whatever rose beyond its rightful measure would be pulled back toward balance. It was not merely interference. It was a principle. A law clothed in power.
And if all things were subject to balance, then time itself could not stand outside it.
It too had to be made to kneel before equilibrium.
El looked at him.
"Why did you not tell me this sooner?"
The edge in his voice had softened. His frown had eased, and the tension in his brow loosened by a fraction, yet his eyes remained fixed upon Leon with the same dark intensity as before. Those depthless pupils seemed less to look than to enter, as though they could pass through flesh, through thought, and into the bare interior of a soul.
Leon met that gaze without retreat.
"Master," he said, almost lightly, "I am yours, and you are mine. I gained power. Should that not be good news to a man who already holds power in his hands?"
A faint smile touched his lips, touched with humour, though there was still something solemn beneath it.
"Power added to power only becomes more power, does it not?"
El shook his head and turned his gaze toward the frozen figures before them.
Then his eyes narrowed.
To his surprise, Val had already broken free from the spell.
So had the Crow, though not completely. A stiffness still clung to him, as though time had not fully released its fingers from his throat, but enough of him had awakened to make the air itself feel tighter.
Leon stepped forward.
"Do you not owe us an explanation?"
His voice was calm, but it carried a firmness that had not been there before. Something in him had changed. The hesitation that once lived in his speech had thinned. What stood in its place was not arrogance, but a gathering certainty, the quiet gravity of a man who had begun to understand that power, once possessed, demanded shape.
His eyes settled on Val first.
"Though you are my teacher," he said, "I did not expect this."
He paused, as though discarding the softer form of what he truly wished to ask.
"No. This is not the time for half-words."
His voice lowered.
"Who are you?"
His gaze travelled over Val's transformed body with cold precision.
"Two wings. Golden feathers laced with steel. Increased height. Two jagged horns rising from your forehead with the pride of something that has never once bowed to mortality."
Every feature only deepened the unreality of the sight. Val no longer resembled the refined and smiling guide who carried a cane and spoke with polished calm. He looked like a law made visible, a fragment of celestial judgment given flesh and will.
Leon's eyes sharpened.
"The reason you can command time within this space is because this is your domain, is it not?"
Then he turned toward the other.
Toward the Crow.
Toward the being in the black trench coat, with the fitted shirt, the curved cane, the white gloves, the fog-smothered eyes, and the black smoke that leaked from his body like the breath of a sealed grave.
"And you."
Leon's tone grew quieter.
"A man dressed in mourning, with mist where sight should be and silence wrapped around you like a second skin."
His gaze did not waver.
"The reason you can interfere with time even within his domain is because you are tied to something greater than this place."
A pause followed.
"Because you are the son of this world's Time God."
The words fell heavily into the suspended atmosphere.
Then, with final clarity, Leon asked:
"What are you?"
For one brief moment, nothing answered.
The stillness that followed was immense. It was not the stillness of peace, nor that of hesitation, but the strained silence of forces too large to reveal themselves carelessly. The kind of silence in which the world seemed to hold its breath, aware that the next words might widen the crack in reality beyond repair.
El watched the exchange in silence.
And inwardly, he sighed.
Leon's meaning was clear enough, yet the manner of his speech wandered dangerously close to chaos. It was the sort of questioning born from a crowded mind, where instinct, suspicion, revelation, and urgency all fought for the same tongue at once. The result was understandable, but only barely, a tangle of sharp perceptions struggling to emerge in orderly form.
Even so, the truth remained.
He had asked the right question.
What are you?
Val drew a small breath.
It was not the breath of a man preparing to explain, but the breath of one about to open a door that should perhaps have remained closed.
When he began to speak, his voice was calm, yet the calmness carried a strange and solemn weight, as though every word had already been measured elsewhere long before it entered the world of sound.
"This world crawls with men and with corruptions, both walking openly beneath the same sky, both feeding the same invisible chains.
Upon the surface of this earth, sin ripens like fruit left too long in the sun. Greed takes root in the bones of cities. Calamity is nursed in the hearts of households. This world has become a vessel of appetite, of ruin, of every disaster man dares mourn after first giving it birth. And still, the children of the earth do not rebuke their father. They inherit his sickness. They name it life.
Everywhere, there are masks.
Masks for kindness. Masks for grief. Masks for righteousness. Masks so old that those who wear them have forgotten where the face ends and the falsehood begins. Men clothe themselves in identities as though cloth could sanctify corruption, as though titles, duties, and sacred names could wash clean a polluted soul. Yet beneath each persona lies another self, and beneath that, another prison. Alter egos. Facets. Fitted versions of the same captive thing.
While the old bend their backs to rule and toil, while the young run laughing through green fields and sing songs too pure for the age that awaits them, something else stirs below.
Something patient.
Something that has always been there.
The corruptions are one part of it.
We are another.
You are another.
You.
Yes, you.
You ask why the world has become desolate, why heaven seems to have turned its face away, why the soil remembers blood more readily than rain. But it is by your hand, and by ours, that the sacred was made barren. It is through our desires that great disasters entered the world. War, famine, weeping, cities turned to graves, all of it first took shape in the unseen chambers of the human heart before it ever reached the open air.
Corruption did not descend upon us from some distant star.
It began within us.
It was fed by us.
And in time, it learned our names so well that it became us.
'These corruptions are the wrath of gods,' says the blind man.
But the wise man answers him softly, 'No. The blind do not merely fail to see, they worship darkness when it speaks sweetly enough. They call their chains divine because they are too afraid to admit they forged them with their own hands.'
History turns, and turns, and turns again, like a blade being slowly twisted into an old wound. Men speak of learning from it, yet kneel before the same appetites, commit the same cowardice, open the same gates, and call the result fate. They do not flee madness. They preserve it. They inherit it. They pass it down like an heirloom, and when it flowers once more into catastrophe, they lift their eyes to the heavens and ask who has cursed them.
And who repeats this mistake the most?
You.
You.
You.
Us.
We.
All of us, pieces of a vaster design, fragments scattered across a world that itself may be no more than dust beneath the nails of greater beings. We transcend, and call ourselves more than men, yet what are Transcenders but men granted sharper wills and heavier burdens? We are creatures standing knee-deep in the night, struggling against the destinies laid upon us, warring against the rot in the mind, the stain in the heart, the whisper that tells us to yield.
Amon.
El.
At the sound of the name, the air seemed to tremble. Or perhaps it was only his mind. Perhaps the chamber had begun to blur long ago, and only now had he noticed.
Val's voice grew distant, as though it were crossing a vast sea, as though it had to pass through dream, memory, and grave-soil before it could reach him.
'You are destined for...'
'I don't want...'
The words broke against one another like waves in a storm, unfinished, drowning before they could become whole.
Then Val lifted his gaze, not to the ceiling, but to something higher, something hidden.
'The threads tied to our lives ascend into the dark above, to where a man, or something that only resembles a man, watches from behind the veil of shadow. He observes each soul as it walks its appointed path. He measures. He waits. He knows the names of all who move beneath the heavens.'
Val's face tightened. His eyes trembled with a sorrow too old to belong to one life.
'But he cannot see yours.'
For a moment, silence followed.
It was not an empty silence. It was the kind that comes before a kingdom falls, before the first trumpet sounds, before the sea draws back to reveal the teeth of what sleeps beneath it.
Then Val spoke once more, and his voice was little more than a failing light.
'This world is destined to perish.'
A tear slid down his cheek.
'Ragnarok has begun.'
The name did not feel spoken. It felt remembered. Like an ancient wound reopening somewhere beyond the edge of thought.
'Please, El,' Val whispered. 'Do not choose them over this world.'
His breath shuddered. His form had already begun to dim, as though existence itself were gently withdrawing its claim upon him. The outline of his body wavered like something seen through rain, or through tears, or through the uncertain mercy of a dream.
'The first choice will soon be taken,' he said. 'And when it is, humanity may perish by your hands.'
He closed his eyes.
For an instant, he seemed not like a man, but like the last candle in a cathedral after midnight, burning before a god who would never answer.
Then, with the tenderness of farewell and the grief of prophecy, he spoke his final words.
'Goodbye, my friend.'"