The knowledge that the Scholar had vanished—either by solving the puzzle or being instantly consumed by it—did not breed caution in Tradition; it bred contempt.
Contempt for the rules that had almost eliminated her through passivity.
Four remain.
The voice echoed like a countdown—cold, bureaucratic, and inhuman. The Library didn't care who lived, who died, or who broke. It simply observed.
Tradition was now standing on rocky, uneven ground, her bare feet pressed against the gray dust that pulsed faintly under the dim violet sky. The world felt hollow—as though she stood in the throat of a giant that had long forgotten how to breathe. Every sound, every footstep, every heartbeat was erased by the Isolation Rule. It was a field of suppression, a domain where even memory dared not echo.
She had tried humming once before—an unconscious act—and the air itself had bitten her. The world here punished sound. It was the Library's will.
And yet...
If sound is forbidden, then noise is rebellion.
The thought was almost sacred. A forbidden scripture whispered into her skull. The silence was no longer peace—it was tyranny. And if there was one thing the Katora Enmatsu bloodline had never done, it was obey tyrants.
Tradition closed her eyes. The silence pressed against her eardrums like a vacuum. Her heartbeat was invisible, her breath vanishing into the void. She could not even hear the grind of her own teeth.
Her Qi—the fire that carried her clan's legacy—was sluggish, almost resentful. It refused to move freely through her veins, its golden warmth smothered by the plane's alien rules. But Tradition smiled. There was something feral in that smile.
"I don't need flow," she mouthed silently. "I just need friction."
Her ancestors had used Qi to cleave mountains, to summon storms, to write laws into the bones of the world. But none of them had ever done what she was about to attempt.
She guided her Qi—not into her limbs, nor her heart, but into her throat. It was a suicidal maneuver. Qi was for combat, for life force, for will—never for speech—itbhas not been used for this. The body wasn't made to hold that kind of resonance. The energy coursed upward like molten light, coiling behind her tongue, swelling until her lungs felt as if they'd burst into flame.
Her new form didn't help. She had been remade—her voice higher, softer, a stranger's instrument—and now it had to bear the weight of her rebellion.
Then she opened her mouth.
And sang.
It wasn't a scream. It wasn't even a roar. It was a note—a single, pure tone so deliberate, so impossibly human, it violated the world's logic.
The note didn't echo. There was no echo in this realm.
It collided.
Reality bent. The air rippled like shattered glass in a slow-motion implosion. The black grass that covered the plain flattened into ash. Above, the passive, dead sky convulsed—silver lightning cracked against the horizon, and streaks of scarlet light tore across the void like bleeding wounds.
The world heard her.
Tradition staggered backward, coughing. Her ears rang—an impossible sensation in a realm that outlawed sound. Blood trickled down her neck, thin and silver like mercury. Her vision blurred, her Qi sputtered, but her heart—oh, her heart sang.
She had sinned against the System.
And in doing so, she had reclaimed herself.
Her defiance became the first true noise this world had known. The Library's write seemed to stop for a heartbeat— trembled. It was subtle, but she could feel it—threads snapping in the air, the data that governed this isolation struggling to process her existence.
But chaos always answers courage.
The ground ahead of her erupted.
Not with sound. The silence persisted—but the earth convulsed with violent, noiseless motion. Dust flew upward in graceful arcs, collapsing like ghosts of detonations.
From beneath the surface rose a shadow.
Pragmatism.
He burst from the soil like a spear of judgment, his crimson tunic shredded, his eyes reflecting no mercy. Dirt clung to his face, and blood streaked his temple, but his focus was absolute.
He hadn't heard her note—the Isolation Rule forbade it—but the world's reaction had thrown him from his calculated route. And that was enough. Someone had broken the one commandment that kept them all alive. Someone had dared to make noise.
His gaze locked onto her. The recognition was instant. The decision—immediate.
She was a liability.
Therefore, she must be deleted.
He moved without warning.
A blur of crimson and motionless fury. His steps didn't make a sound—his attacks were pure function, silent, efficient, terrifying. Pragmatism was everything Tradition despised and feared: a creature of order, of method, of inevitable logic.
Tradition pushed herself to her feet, her lungs still trembling from the sonic backlash. The world's air refused to cooperate—each breath felt like inhaling the memory of stone.
Her Qi burned unevenly, flickering, alive and unstable. Perfect for chaos.
When Pragmatism's blade—an obsidian strip of folded qi—cut through the air toward her neck, she twisted, the motion ugly but effective. Sparks of frozen light flared where his weapon grazed her sleeve.
The two collided like ideas, not people. Silence and noise. Logic and defiance.
The Library itself seemed to watch.
Pragmatism struck again, and again. Each move was the embodiment of purpose—clean arcs, minimal waste, a dancer of death with no rhythm because rhythm was outlawed. Tradition's responses were instinctive, jagged, born from a lifetime of stubborn survival. She had no elegance left, only rebellion.
Her mind, sharp even under duress, realized the truth: The Isolation Rule punished intent to make sound, not just sound itself. The moment she had created a tone, she had marked herself as an anomaly. The system would purge both of them if this fight went on too long.
So she grinned—blood on her teeth, dust in her hair.
"Come then," she mouthed.
Pragmatism lunged. His blade came down like a guillotine.
Tradition caught it—not with her hands, but with Qi still vibrating from her vocal cords. She released a second soundless note, internal this time, directing it into her muscles. Her body thrummed like a struck chord. The collision sent shockwaves through her arms.
The ground cracked beneath their feet. The black soil turned white-hot. A ripple of distortion radiated outward, like a pebble dropped into reality's reflection.
Neither could hear it.
But both felt it.
He struck again. She ducked. He swept. She rolled. Every movement was desperate, precise, alive. For the first time, Pragmatism hesitated—not from fear, but from confusion. Her style shouldn't work. She wasn't following any established rhythm or discipline. She was improvising.
She was making music.
And in that realization, he faltered. Just for a breath.
Tradition took it. She drew on the last remnants of her Qi, the embers flickering like dying stars, and funneled them once more into her throat.
Her neck glowed faintly. The same note as before—just a whisper of it—escaped her lips.
The Library reacted instantly. The sky flashed open like a wound, and the world convulsed again.
The Noise of Rebellion.
Pragmatism was thrown backward, sliding across the cracked ground, expression blank as the system recalibrated. Tradition fell to her knees, coughing blood. Her throat felt like shredded silk, but she was smiling through it.
She looked up at the bleeding sky, its colors still shimmering in defiance.
For the first time since entering this cursed test, she felt alive.
Around her, the rule of silence trembled, its perfect cage beginning to splinter. The Library's unseen voice whispered warnings, lines of code unraveling in the horizon.
Dark clouds rumbled and crackled with light.
The wind held it breathe in anicipation of what was to come after this.
Trees returned to their sentenry position as though the world was correct itself...
Tradition laughed—silently, but with her whole being. The space could rewrite all it wanted. The damage was done. The sound had existed.
Her voice, however brief, had reminded the world that obedience is just another kind of death.
And somewhere, beneath that shaking sky, in the fractured quiet that followed rebellion—
She could almost hear it.
A faint hum.
A response.
Another defiant heartbeat.
Someone else had heard her.
The plane would never be silent again.