The sound of the world was gone.No clash of blades. No roars of demons. No desperate cries echoing across the torn heavens.
Only silence.
Zero floated in an endless sea of white—neither sky nor ground, neither light nor shadow. His breath didn't echo. His heartbeat was absent. His hands were translucent, as though they no longer belonged to him.
He looked down—and saw his body dissolving into countless motes of blue light, scattering upward into the void.
"Not again…" he whispered, his voice trembling in the weightless air. "Not this place…"
The white expanse rippled like water. The air fractured—and from that fracture stepped himself.
The version of him from Earth. Wearing the same gray hoodie, the same glasses, the same look of exhaustion that haunted him every day before Edolas had even existed to him.
"You're here again," his Earth self said quietly, voice calm yet heavy with warning. "You really shouldn't be."
Zero blinked, disoriented. "I didn't choose to come here."
