The underground holding facility reeked of despair.
Concrete walls, painted once in pale gray, were now smudged with fingerprints, scratches, and the stale dampness of too many bodies confined too long. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, flickering faintly, as if mocking the captured scientists who once commanded the brilliance of laboratories and equations but were now reduced to animals behind iron bars.
Some of the prisoners sat silently on their narrow cots, shoulders slumped, eyes glazed with resignation. Others wept openly, breaking down into incoherent murmurs that echoed through the corridor. A few cells remained eerily empty, the shadows inside seeming deeper than the others, as if swallowing the silence whole.
But in one corner of the cell block, behind iron bars and rusted hinges, a man sat differently.
He wasn't slumped, nor was he curled into despair. He sat with his back pressed flat against the wall, legs drawn up slightly, arms resting loosely on his knees. His brown hair was messy, strands falling over his forehead, and his eyes—deep, brown, but sharp with suppressed fire—glowed faintly in the dim light.
He was young compared to most others here, no more than his early thirties. His height, about 169 centimeters, made him neither imposing nor weak, but in that cell, posture and aura mattered more than stature. His stillness was heavy, not passive. Like a blade kept sheathed, waiting.
His name was not whispered yet among the prisoners, but his presence was felt.
And his thoughts burned.
---
Why?
The word pulsed in his skull with every heartbeat.
Why had it come to this?
The faces of Guren and Kuro floated unbidden into his mind—two figures who had once stood at the forefront of their research, admired, feared, obeyed. He had trusted them, obeyed their directives without hesitation. He had believed that together they were unraveling the greatest mystery of their age: the nature of Eclipse, the abyssal power hidden beyond the reach of ordinary human understanding.
But then, two nights before the raid, they were gone. Just like that.
Disappeared. Vanished. Not a single word left behind for those who remained.
He clenched his fists, nails digging into his palms until pain lanced up his arms. His eyes narrowed.
"Why didn't they tell us…?" he muttered under his breath, voice hoarse, almost animal. "Why didn't they share the location of the new lab? Why… why leave us to rot when they knew what was coming?"
The thought replayed endlessly, like a needle caught in the groove of a broken record.
---
He remembered the night of the raid vividly.
The lab, once alive with the hum of machines, the whisper of running equations, the murmurs of debate, had been suffused with an unnatural silence when he stayed late. He had been buried in his work, hunched over stacks of data that refused to align with his theories. His obsession with the "vessels" had consumed him for weeks—how much strain could a body handle before Eclipse tore it apart? Could artificial organs bear the load? Could an altered nervous system stabilize the flow?
He had been on the brink of something. He knew it.
Every line of formula, every failed experiment whispered that he was close to rewriting what mankind thought possible.
Then—footsteps.
Boots against tile. A ripple of unease.
The doors had slammed open, and uniformed officers stormed in like a wave of inevitability. They shouted, brandishing weapons, knocking papers to the ground, scattering fragile prototypes that had taken months to assemble.
He had stood, trembling, clutching a file of notes like a shield. He asked,
, "W-Who are you? What do you want with me?"
The leader of the squad stepped forward, badge glinting under the harsh fluorescent light. His expression was grim, almost disgusted.
"We're the police," he said coldly. "And we're here to jail you for inhuman experimentation."
"I… I haven't done anything," he had stammered, his voice strangled. "I was working under Guren. I didn't choose this. I didn't…"
It hadn't mattered. Hands had seized him, dragged him out of the sterile brightness of the lab into the suffocating cold of the facility's van. His protests echoed uselessly. To them, he was no different from the others: a criminal conspirator, a mad scientist meddling with forces that should remain untouched.
And perhaps, they weren't entirely wrong.
But still—why had he been left behind, betrayed by the very ones he idolized?
---
Back in the cell, he pressed the back of his head harder against the wall, as though the rough surface might anchor his spiraling mind.
The others mourned their freedom. He mourned something else.
The loss of his science.
He had been a maniac for it, they used to say. A zealot. A man who smiled only when presented with an unsolvable equation, who laughed only when data defied logic. He had once thought himself incapable of rage, too consumed by obsession to feel anything so raw.
But now—now that he sat powerless, stripped of access to labs, stripped of notes, stripped of the very tools that gave meaning to his existence—something unfamiliar and venomous swelled inside him.
Anger.
No, deeper.
Hatred.
Directed not at the guards, nor at the faceless authority that had arrested him, but at Guren and Kuro. The men who had abandoned him. The men who had treated him and the others as expendable pawns in some greater design.
---
The clanging of footsteps pulled him from his thoughts.
A guard appeared outside his cell, carrying a dented metal tray. The smell of plain rice and watery stew wafted from it—an insult masquerading as nourishment.
The guard slid the tray under the bars with a grunt.
"Eat," he barked, already moving on.
But the young scientist didn't look down. Didn't flinch. Didn't acknowledge it at all. His eyes remained locked forward, unblinking, as though he could burn holes through the concrete.
His hunger meant nothing.
Food meant nothing.
Only his thoughts mattered.
His calculations, his memories of formulae, the flicker of Eclipse equations etched into his mind. He replayed them feverishly, again and again, terrified of forgetting them in this tomb of silence.
But layered over all of it was his growing fixation.
Revenge.
Not the crude revenge of fists and knives, but something greater. Scientific revenge. To tear down Guren and Kuro not with emotion, but with intellect sharpened into a weapon. To outpace them, outthink them, and in the end, to crush their ambitions with his own creation.
That thought alone kept him awake.
---
The night stretched endlessly.
He did not close his eyes once. Instead, he sat in that same rigid posture, replaying memories, weaving scenarios.
In his mind, he reconstructed the lab. Every corridor, every chamber, every machine. He recalled the hum of centrifuges, the spark of Eclipse converters, the cold touch of containment glass. He imagined the projects left unfinished, the experiments abandoned. He imagined what Guren and Kuro must be building in their hidden lab—what truths they had stolen from him.
His nails dug into his arms as he whispered to himself, voice cracking.
"They think they can leave me behind. They think I'm useless. But they're wrong. They're wrong."
He could feel it: the storm rising inside him.
He was no longer merely a scientist. He was something else now, forged in betrayal, tempered in captivity.
And as the others in their cells wept, prayed, or surrendered to exhaustion, he sat awake in silence—eyes burning, chest tight, mind alive with fury.
The fluorescent light above flickered again, casting his shadow across the wall. In that warped silhouette, his hunched figure looked monstrous, less like a man and more like the very vessel he had once sought to create.
---
The night was long.
And in that long night, a resolve was born.
He would not forgive.
He would not forget.
When the time came—and he knew it would come—he would carve his vengeance not with blades, but with science.
And the names of Guren and Kuro would be buried under the weight of his wrath.
"Meanwhile, in another place"
Darkness.
That was the first thing Kaito became aware of. Not the gentle darkness of sleep, nor the comfortable dimness of a room with closed curtains, but a suffocating void that pressed against his skin as if he had been submerged in tar.
For a moment, he thought he was still dreaming. His body felt weightless, his breath shallow, his heartbeat slow but echoing in his ears like a drum. He couldn't move. Couldn't speak. Only drift in that ocean of black.
Then—light.
It didn't come gradually but burst forth in a sudden flood. The world around him snapped into clarity, so violently that his eyes stung. His first sensation was heat. His second was the smell. Burning wood. Burning flesh. Smoke searing his throat.
He gasped, coughing, stumbling backward.
The void had given way to chaos. Before him stretched a town swallowed by fire. Houses collapsed into charred rubble, screams pierced the air, figures ran through the smoke engulfed in crimson flames. The fire wasn't natural—it clung to them, gnawed at them as though alive, consuming not only flesh but soul.
Kaito staggered, heart hammering, struggling to breathe. He looked down at his hands. Perfectly intact. No flames. No ash. Why?
Behind him, something massive loomed. Slowly, he turned.
A tower rose into the blackened sky, taller than any structure he had ever seen in Viace. The stone surface cracked and weathered, yet imposing, casting its shadow over the burning town. On its face, inscribed deep into the stone, glowed words like molten iron:
17th August, Era Year 172.
His mind jolted. Era Year 172. But he lived in Era Year 192. That was twenty years ago.
The Black Age Rebellion.
He had read about it in fragments of textbooks, but the words on brittle paper had never felt real. A rebellion sparked by the Amerians—once enslaved under Catherine rule—who rose to reclaim their place. A war soaked in blood, fire, and betrayal. In the end, the Amerians stood victorious. The Catherines, stripped of their dominance, became slaves in turn.
And now, he was here. Witnessing it.
Kaito stumbled forward, covering his mouth against the choking smoke. His eyes darted across the burning square, where shadows twisted in agony.
Then—he froze.
Amidst the carnage, a girl stood.
She was untouched by flame, her figure sharp against the inferno. Her hair was long, falling in waves like strands of shadow laced with silver. Her eyes, strangely calm, locked onto his with an intensity that pinned him in place.
Her lips curved into something between a smile and a warning.
"Hey, Vessel."
The word pierced him like a blade.
"…Vessel?" he echoed, his voice cracking. "What do you mean? Vessel of what? I—I don't understand."
"You don't know, do you?" Her voice was smooth, almost kind, but carried an undertone that made his skin crawl. "Be careful. Someone is manipulating your dream."
Kaito's blood ran cold. He staggered back, eyes darting around the burning town. "Manipulating? Who? Who's doing this to me?"
The girl tilted her head. Shadows of fire flickered across her face, making her look both ethereal and terrifying.
"An illusioner," she said simply.
An illusioner. The word struck something primal inside him, though he couldn't place it.
His voice trembled. "Who could do that? Why—why me?"
But before he could demand more, before he could grasp the threads of the mystery, his body betrayed him. His legs buckled, his hands shook violently. A shiver tore through him, spreading to every nerve. The fire blurred, the girl's face dissolved, the tower fractured into shards of light.
He collapsed, falling into the darkness once more.
---
When Kaito opened his eyes again, it was to the sterile white of a ceiling lamp. The world was quiet. Too quiet.
Pain radiated in dull waves through his skull, as though something had been digging into his mind. He tried to sit up but found his body heavy, sluggish. His lips parted, but no words came—only a groan.
"Don't move," a voice said gently.
He turned his head slightly, vision hazy. A man in a white coat leaned over him, adjusting a small chart in his hands. A doctor. His expression was calm but serious, his movements practiced.
"You collapsed," the doctor explained. "Extreme mental fatigue. Your body reached its limit and forced a shutdown. I recommend you stay here for at least three to four days. Rest, and you'll be fit again."
Kaito blinked. The words filtered in slowly, as though through water. Collapsed. Fatigue. Rest.
He tried to grasp the dream, but his memory slipped like sand through fingers. The fire. The tower. The girl. Her words. They lingered only as faint impressions, blurred shapes at the edge of his mind. When he reached for them, they dissolved, leaving only emptiness.
The door creaked open. His parents entered, their faces pale but relieved. His mother hurried to his side, gripping his hand tightly. His father stood behind her, arms crossed but his stern face softened with obvious worry.
"Kaito…" his mother whispered, her voice breaking. "You're awake."
He forced a weak smile. "Sorry… for worrying you."
His father shook his head. "Don't apologize. Just focus on getting better."
Their presence grounded him, and yet somewhere deep inside, unease gnawed at him. Something had happened in that darkness. Something important. But the harder he tried to remember, the stronger the pain in his temples grew, until he had no choice but to let the fragments slip away.
---
The days passed slowly in the ward. Kaito remained confined to his bed, the white sheets stiff, the walls bare. His body recovered, but his mind remained restless. Each night he closed his eyes, he feared slipping back into that burning world, into illusions he couldn't escape.
But nothing came. No fire. No tower. No girl. Only blackness, empty and silent.
And yet, even without memory, he knew instinctively: someone had touched his dreams. Someone had reached into the deepest part of his mind and planted a seed.
And though forgotten, that seed would grow.
"Elsewhere, events were unfolding differently…"
18th August.
The sunlight over Viace poured like molten gold across the rooftops, but for Arthur, the morning felt heavier than usual. He slipped into his uniform, adjusted his collar in the mirror, and stared at his reflection. The faint shadow of a smile tugged at his lips—not because of school, but because of the thought of visiting Kaito later at the hospital.
Kaito had collapsed only days before, and the fear that had gripped Arthur during that time had been suffocating. Now that his friend was recovering, some of that weight had lifted. For a moment, the smile felt natural, unforced.
But it didn't last.
From the dining room, the low murmur of voices reached his ears. His parents.
Arthur walked down the stairs, his bag slung over his shoulder. As soon as his feet touched the last step, the conversation cut short. His mother's eyes darted to him, filled with something between worry and disapproval. His father's jaw tightened, but he said nothing at first.
"You're going again, aren't you?" his mother asked softly, though the tremor in her voice betrayed her tension.
Arthur sighed. He already knew what this was about. "Yes. After school, I'll stop by the hospital."
His father's hand clenched around his newspaper. "That boy—" He stopped, searching for the words, as though saying them aloud might poison the air. "That boy is Catherine, Arthur. You know what people will think."
Arthur's eyes narrowed. "So what? He's my friend."
"You don't understand," his father snapped, his tone sharper than intended. He rubbed his temples, lowering his voice again. "It's not about friendship. It's about survival. People are watching. People whisper. Having ties with a Catherine boy is dangerous. For you. For us."
Arthur looked between them, his chest tightening with something bitter. "Then let them whisper." His voice was steady, almost cold. "I don't care."
His mother flinched as if struck. His father's expression hardened into silence. The unspoken truth filled the room: Arthur was in his rebellious phase, and nothing they said could sway him.
He turned, opened the door, and stepped out into the morning air.
---
Viace stretched before him—grand, bustling, suffocating.
The capital city of Krai was a jewel in the eyes of the world, a place of towering glass structures, sprawling avenues, and endless waves of people. But beneath its polished surface festered something rotten.
Arthur walked with steady steps, but his gaze was sharp, dissecting what he saw. He had grown up here, but only in the last few years had he begun to notice how the city really worked.
Discrimination.
Viace was the epicenter of Amerian power. Here, Catherine blood was a stain. The ratio spoke for itself: ninety-five percent Amerians, only five percent Catherines. A crushing imbalance. In other regions of Krai, the distribution was closer to sixty-five to thirty-five, and there, whispers of resistance could be heard. Small protests flared up, anti-Amerian groups formed in shadows, anger simmered.
But not in Viace. Not here. The capital was too suffocating, too controlled. In its streets, the Amerians strutted with confidence while the Catherines kept their heads down, invisible and silent.
Arthur's lips twisted. He hated it. Hated the way no one spoke out here. Hated the way even his parents bent beneath invisible chains.
And yet, he still walked through it, a single boy daring to stay close to someone everyone told him to abandon.
---
As he neared the school, familiar voices drifted toward him. Rough. Mocking.
"Look who it is," one of them sneered. "Arthur, the sick one."
Arthur stopped in his tracks. Three boys leaned against the school gate, their grins sharp, their eyes gleaming with cruelty. They were Kaito's usual tormentors, but today their words were aimed at him.
"You still hanging out with that Catherine trash?" another spat. "What's wrong with you? Don't you feel dirty?"
The third boy chuckled. "Maybe he's cursed. Maybe that's why he likes them. Sick in the head."
Arthur didn't flinch. He let their words hang in the air like smoke. For a long moment, he simply stared at them, unblinking, until their smirks faltered just slightly.
Then, without a word, he walked past them.
Their insults followed him, but he didn't turn back. Their voices didn't matter. His silence cut deeper than any reply could.
---
Inside the classroom, sunlight streamed through the wide windows, illuminating rows of desks already filled with chatter and laughter. But Arthur's attention was drawn to the front, where something unusual was happening.
A girl stood there, her hand raised, her concentration palpable. Between her fingers shimmered faint crimson light, delicate threads of Rim weaving together into a shape.
A butterfly.
Its wings spread wide, glowing with a soft, otherworldly beauty, as if forged from living flame. It hovered for a moment in the air, fragile yet powerful, before dissolving into sparks.
The room quieted for a heartbeat, then erupted with awe.
Arthur's eyes lingered on the girl. She was unlike anyone he had seen in their school. Her hair was white, falling past her shoulders like untouched snow. Her eyes, an intense blue, carried a calmness that set her apart. She was slender but strong in presence, standing at about 162 centimeters. Beautiful, undeniably so, but not in the fragile sense. Her beauty was sharp, precise, like the edges of glass.
Her name, whispered among the students, was Alia.
One of the few capable of shaping Rim into form—something only 0.5 percent of people could do. To conjure a butterfly from nothing but energy marked her as extraordinary.
Beside her stood another girl, smiling warmly. Her black hair was sleek and neat, her dark eyes intelligent and steady. She carried herself with quiet grace, slightly shorter at 160 centimeters. Her name was Mina.
Arthur watched as Mina leaned closer to Alia, her voice soft but carrying across the room. "That was amazing, Alia. You make it look so easy."
Alia's lips curved faintly, though her eyes never lost their calm focus. "It's not easy. It's discipline. Rim responds only to control."
Arthur sank into his seat, still watching them. The butterfly's afterimage lingered in his mind. Beautiful, fragile, yet fleeting.
The classroom buzzed again, students murmuring, some envious, others in awe. But Arthur sat quietly, his thoughts drifting.
Outside, Viace burned with unseen prejudice. Inside, a butterfly of crimson Rim had taken flight.
The two worlds felt irreconcilable.
And yet, both were real.