"You will suffice."
That's what something whispered in Raizen's mind before a Nyx that slaughtered his village dissolved into shining ashes at his feet.

He doesn't know what spoke to him, or why it led him to an unconscious girl with no memory. All he knows is his parents are dead, his home is gone, and the only place that'll take him now is the Underworks - an undercity of rust beneath Neoshima's shining petal walls. Down there, Nyx hunters called Gravers scrape together coins for chipped Luminite and drag themselves back from contracts missing limbs… If they come back at all. 

Someone offers Raizen a choice: he can stay in the Underworks and survive on scraps like the rest, or train for the Lotus Academy - where Vanguards learn to shape Eon into techniques that bend what should be impossible.

But the voice that saved him hasn't spoken again. And the higher he climbs, a dark truth becomes clearer: the thing that saved him and the darkness that has haunted humanity for centuries...
Might just be the same thing.

The two halves lay on the dark cloth like dark bones laid out for examination.


Chapter 373 - Less Than a Heartbeat