Lian held the Tick Tack gently against her chest, its trembling form nestled within the stillness of her arms.
There was no fear in her touch, no trace of revulsion toward the warped Resonance pulsing beneath its skin. Only silence, and a sorrow so deep it seemed carved into her very being.
Her eyes, quiet as deep lakes, fluttered shut as a faint stir of Resonance pulsed within her—restrained, yet echoing with the sovereignty of something far vaster.
"Let go of your fears," she whispered, her voice barely brushing the air. "Your time has already arrived."
The Tick Tack shifted faintly, and from deep within its fragile core, a ripple rose—soft, tentative—and the moment it brushed against Lian's presence, her Resonance answered in kind.
She looked upon the TD—not merely with sight, but with a gaze that pierced the veil between presence and absence. In that one glance, she saw beyond the twisted form before her and into the hollowed echoes of what it once had been.
Fragments flickered in the air, and time itself began to shift—no longer behaving as it should.
To Lian, time was never a river flowing forward. It was a geometry—an eternal pattern etched in light, unfolding in recursive spirals, like Mandelbrot fractals woven into the very fabric of her being.
Her Resonance did not impose upon reality; it deciphered it, bent through it, and wove among its filaments.
To her, the present was not a fleeting now. It was a nexus—where memory lingered and possibility coalesced, where the past might be grasped and the future already glimpsed.
Even as she held the deteriorating Discord-child, Lian did not see a monstrous distortion. She saw a girl. Who she had been. Who she might still become.
Her Resonance ability—Recursive Photon Displacement—stirred, prompting the space around her to shimmer as photons unspooled from her very being, unraveling in fractal spirals across the spectrum.
Visible and invisible light danced like the wings of unknowable insects, their patterns luminous, shifting, encoded.
Each spiral she summoned did not merely glow—it remembered. And through those luminous memories, Lian reached backward, restoring what had been lost: the child's Resonance, long fractured, now beginning to hum again with forgotten light.
The transformation, it occurred naturally—like mist folding into memory. Midnight-blue hair spilled down her back, threaded with glimmers of starlight. Her skin bore a soft, moonlit pallor, and within her wide violet eyes, innocence settled gently.
Curved horns, dark as the void and laced with nebular hues, arched from her head. Wisps of resonance drifted from her fingertips, and the robe she wore—pale blue and lavender—shimmered like constellations etched into silk.
She stood nestled in Lian's arms, between the silent onlookers—until Yangyang broke the hush with an irrepressible outburst: "So cute!"
But soon, around the little girl, an iridescent aura shimmered to life—semi-translucent, spherical, and close-hugging.
It glowed with a soft, living light that shifted between pale gold and silvery white, like sunlight dancing across liquid metal. The surface rippled gently, fluid and rhythmic, as if breathing with her—each pulse catching the ambient light in delicate arcs.
Yangyang drew a sharp breath. "Is she... a Tacet Discord?" The words slipped out, barely more than a hush, her eyes wide with something between awe and disbelief.
That radiance—those shifting veils of gold and silver—was no ordinary trick of the light. It belonged only to Tacet Discords of the highest target, a phenomenon so rare it was a topic of mystery and envy.
Whenever such a light crowned one of their kind, it signified a single, immutable truth: the TD once defeated, would yield an Echo, without fail.
Yet as Yangyang regarded the girl cradled in Lian's arms, the notion seemed almost profane.
She could not reconcile the thought of violence with the fragile, almost ethereal innocence before her—unable to fathom raising a weapon against something so heartbreakingly gentle, so unguardedly cute.
The girl looked up at Lian, eyes wide with quiet trust. Yangyang stood frozen observing, her breath caught—tethered by fear, and hope.
She had expected Lian to melt at the sight of such otherworldly innocence, as anyone would. But just as that moment seemed to settle, the air shifted. A ripple of black cards circled around Lian and the child—sharp, humming with lethal intent.
"Scar!" Yangyang cried out, her voice cutting through the stillness.
Scar offered no reply. His eyes locked onto the child—not with hostility, but with glacial intent, calculated and unreadable.
The resonance this human TD radiated was an impossibility: neither fully human nor Tacet Discord, but a seamless convergence of both. An aberration. A cipher. The kind of living paradox the Fractsidus would cross worlds to claim.
Yet before the black cards could close in, they flickered out of existence—displaced in a blink.
In the next instant, the cards hung motionless in the air, arrayed before Scar himself, as if time had faltered—looped, or quietly rewritten around him.
'Her Resonance Ability... does it control time?' Scar wondered, echoing the silent question in the minds of all who watched—everyone except Rover.
From what he had seen, Lian's power didn't manipulate time in the way one might assume. It wasn't time she bent, but something far more elusive.
To him, it felt as though she moved along the hidden seams of the world, stitching moments together—or quietly unravelling them.
She didn't command time to halt or reverse. Rather, she slipped between the fractures of reality, gently reshaping possibility with a touch—light itself the raw material, the breath of her ability.
Where others mistook her power for the bending of time, Rover realized that Lian had simply utilized another path—one where the world was rewoven with every luminous touch, drawn from the past, the present, and the yet-to-be.
Still, it was a terrifying ability—far more so than his own, which could only partially suspend the photons within animate beings, freezing them briefly before triggering a temporal collapse.
'Who exactly is she?' Rover wondered, the question flickering in his mind like a half-formed flame. But there was no time to dwell on it.
Lian raised her hand—and from the space above her palm, an axe began to take shape. It manifested not with a clang, but with a whisper of Resonance, coalescing into a weapon three times her size.
The blade shimmered with silent menace, towering over her slender form, making her appear less like a warrior and more like a child wielding a weapon far too vast for her frame—a deadly toy gripped in delicate hands.
Scar instinctively shifted into a guarded stance, his eyes narrowing, expecting an attack. That same apprehension rippled through the others—tense, silent, waiting.
But Rover felt something different. Unease, yes—but not fear of violence. A quiet certainty that this woman had never acted in line with anyone's expectations.
And he was right.
The axe did not swing toward Scar.
Its edge—gleaming and impossibly sharp—tilted downward, toward the frail, quiet form of the Tacet Discord.
"Ahh—!"
Yangyang's scream tore through the silence, raw with disbelief and horror, as the child's tiny head rolled to the ground, its eyes still wide with lingering trust.
The human TD's body collapsed a breath later, shattering like glass—scattering into faint particles of golden light.
A hush followed. Deafening. As if the world itself recoiled.
Where the child once stood, only a radiant sigil remained—an Echo, suspended in a gentle, flickering halo, golden and hollow.
Lian stepped forward without flinching, her expression unreadable, her silhouette drenched in the falling light. She raised her Terminal, and the Echo was absorbed like a final breath.
"Your new journey has but just begun," she whispered, the words barely audible, more prayer than promise. "And I'll walk it with you… to the best of my abilities."
Her voice trembled—just once.
Rover moved before he knew it, disbelief contorting into something sharper, something bleeding between anger and grief.
"Why?" he asked, his voice cracking as he approached her, searching her face for guilt, for regret, for anything human.
But what he saw instead was a flicker—a sorrow so deep it caught him off guard, human in its intensity, carved into her soul like a wound she had long since learned to live with.
And then—it vanished. Folded behind her composure like the last page of a book closed too soon.
"Why kill her," Rover demanded, "when even you hesitated?"
His voice was low now, trembling. "When even you—felt it; sorrow?"
"Esteemed guest of Jinzhou," Lian said softly, addressing Rover with a helpless smile that didn't quite reach her eyes.
"That Tacet Discord was fated to die, even after I restored her Resonance," Lian said, a plaintive smile brushing her lips. "The amalgamation had already taken root. She was unraveling from within. No matter what I did… her end was already written."
Scar stepped forward, voice edged with suspicion. "You speak as if you can see death."
Lian turned to him, her expression unreadable—somewhere between joy and mourning.
"Death," she echoed, her voice distant, almost reverent. "What a beautiful thing."
The air shifted. Scar's spine prickled, and a thin sheen of cold sweat broke across his back. He didn't know why—but in that moment, under her gaze, he felt it. Death.
Not as a specter. Not as fear. But as something real. Watching. Breathing.
"It terrifies," Lian whispered, eyes still on Scar. "But after, it frees you—from pain, from memory, from everything that binds."
Her voice fell to a hush. "To die is not always to be destroyed. Sometimes… it's the first mercy one is allowed."
"But… was it necessary?" Rover's voice wavered with confusion. Perhaps he wanted to be angry—maybe even furious—but when he looked at her, at the pain etched across her face, the anger simply dissolved.
Lian didn't answer immediately. She exhaled slowly, gaze distant.
"Impermanence," she murmured, "is one of the laws of reality. Change follows time like shadow follows light. You may mourn, you may grieve, but tell me…"
She turned, letting her gaze sweep across the onlookers. "How long will you grieve for?"
A silence followed—uneasy, brittle.
"Days? Weeks? Months? A year, perhaps?" Her voice curved strangely—a sardonic blend of contempt and understanding.
"Jinzhou lost its soldiers, and people wept. But didn't they return to their routines the moment the pain dulled? Didn't life go on?" She looked at them—at all of them—as if peeling back a truth no one wished to admit.
"So tell me… why do they cry?" Her voice had begun to shift, softening into something eerily foreign—like it no longer fully belonged to her.
Then, with a chilling composure, she spoke: "Perhaps you imagine I wept within as the axe fell. That I grieved for the loss of something so achingly pure."
She inclined her head, almost imperceptibly. "But no."
Her gaze found Rover's—unblinking, implacable. "When the blade descended, I felt nothing. Not sorrow, not relief. Only apathy was present in my heart."
To be continued...