Year 5, Month 3 inside the Dimension
He didn't know who he was.
He stood in a ruined temple, cracked pillars jutted like broken teeth. The sky above was a pressed, unnatural white — not sun, not cloud, not weather. It was the color of erased maps.
He looked at his hands. They were calloused, stained. The skin was familiar; the ownership of the hands felt right. The memories did not.
He did not know his name. He did not know why a sword lay cool in his grip. His chest beat with a cadence that expected war.
He turned, the soles of his boots whispering on ash. A distant voice slid through the fog, a thread finding purchase.
"Yuu."
It sounded like a key.
Somewhere deeper, something older answered — voice like rusted chain and half-forgotten threats.
"You have no name here. You are mine now."
The fog thickened until it had weight. It pressed against his face. The temple itself seemed to inhale.
From that living smoke the Eidol-Eater emerged.
It was wrong in geometry: a bulk of twisted muscle and exposed ligaments had no eyes but a hundred arms, each hand holding black parchment that fluttered though no wind blew. The creature's face was a raw hole ringed with useless teeth, a maw that whispered in circles. Wherever it breathed, memory bled out into the air like spilled ink.
Yuu drew in a breath and tried to pin a thought to it. A girl. Pink hair. Laughter—gone. The shape collapsed like a cut thread. He staggered, fingers seizing his temple.
"Who… am I?" he rasped.
The Eidol-Eater stepped forward. It did not look for flesh. It hunted mind.
From the edge of the collapsing world the Goddess spoke, voice distant as a bell. "That is the Eidol-Eater. It devours thought, emotion, memory. Not flesh; it is forgetting given form."
"How do I fight it?" he asked.
"You remember," she answered.
The beast charged. Sound bent around its limbs; time thinned like old paper. Tendrils of fog lapped at his ankles as ten arms reached for the same instant.
He had no name for the stance he used. He did not need one. Muscle remembered what mind had forgotten.
Steel sang into fog. Steel met something older than armor. Clang. His blade found purchase and slid, but the world tried to unmake the strike: a voice at the back of his mind whispering names, faces, the color of the rain. He watched them gray and fall away.
He ducked. He rolled. He slashed. Black ichor splashed on the stone and hissed in the air like the sound of melting brass. The beast screamed in a tone that made his teeth ache. It inhaled; memory punched out of him again, colder this time. The syllables of his own name frayed.
Blood slicked his lips; salt stung his tongue. He tasted nothing of shame. Pain came like measurement, and he answered it as one answers tide.
He swung until his arms burned. His strikes slowed under the fog's pressure. The Eidol-Eater's whispers would not stop: the patience of forgetting, the easy relief of not remembering. Its voice was a hand on his mind, pulling at threads. His sword blinked — for a breath it was unreal, the metal of a dream. He fell to one knee.
"Find your anchor. Or you'll drown," the Goddess said, harder now.
Anchor. He closed his eyes and reached for anything solid in the storm of loss.
He found a hand. Warm. Familiar. A laugh that was not sound but impression. A voice, his voice, sharp and certain: I don't fall. I adapt.
Images detonated — fire, clashing steel, tears that tasted like copper, a stolen kiss beneath a moon that had once been theirs. Memory came back like bone remembering itself.
He opened his eyes and screamed something that cut the fog: "My name is Yuu Yuhin."
The fog snapped like a broken wire. The Eidol-Eater staggered. The sword in his hand resolved itself: longer, heavier, an edge that drank light. A rune burned along its flat and spelled one word in the language of resolve.
He rose.
The Eidol-Eater lunged with fifty arms; the temple became a hurricane of limbs. He stepped into it — not to parry, but to become a pivot. He moved once, a single full arc. The blade ran through fog and silence together. The sound it made when it cut was like the world folding. The creature paused, cracked, and imploded inward. Black pages fell like rain.
He stood with blood down his chin, fingers trembling around the haft. His breath came ragged and precise. The Goddess landed behind him, quiet as a verdict.
"You remembered," she said.
"Only the things that mattered," he answered. His voice was flat. Calm measured.
She walked beside him, the robe of stars whispering. "That blade… it wasn't forged like Celestial Edge."
"No," he said. "This one wasn't born from dying. It was born from refusal."
She regarded the weapon in his hand as if cataloguing the next step. "What will you name it?"
He watched the pale silver veins threading the hilt, watched the rune glow faint. The name came not like choice but like recognition.
"Resonance."
She allowed something like a smile — a closing of a circle. "Then your second weapon is complete."
He sat on the fractured marble and let the temple's hush press close. Around him the fog receded into ragged threads. The air tasted of iron, not the pulpy details of anatomy but the clean, clinical weight of it — the aftermath, the proof.
He still did not know everything he had once been. He had, however, remembered enough.
He said to the void, to the blade, to himself: "I'm not done yet."
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