Chapter 38 — Between the Echo and the Light
The world no longer had edges.
Only waves — soft, endless ripples of light that hummed like laughter fading into water.
Rimuru drifted within it, neither fully awake nor gone. The distortion had consumed what remained of the dream, but she had taken its core with her — containing it, binding it, becoming part of it.
Her body didn't exist here, not in the way it used to.
Every thought was light. Every breath was a ripple.
Still, she smiled.
> "Guess I overdid it again," she murmured, voice echoing across the void.
The sound didn't fade. Instead, it multiplied — hundreds of faint reflections repeating her tone, her grin, her heartbeat. Fragments of herself that she'd left scattered through every laugh, every fight, every promise.
And through the static came a familiar warmth.
Aira's memory.
Laughing under the rain.
Her voice calling Rimuru's name.
Rimuru turned toward that pulse, drawn like gravity. "Hey… you're still dreaming of me, huh?"
She reached out — her fingers glimmering, translucent. The light responded, forming faint images of Aira sleeping, the morning sun touching her hair.
It hurt to watch.
Not in pain — but in longing.
> "You're doing fine," she whispered. "Better than me, probably."
The space around her pulsed once — slow, deep, alive. The echo space responded like it knew her voice, like the dream itself was listening.
---
A shadow flickered behind her — a ripple that didn't belong.
"Still watching, Echo?"
The figure appeared as a blurred outline, half-reflection, half-memory. His voice was steady but distant.
> "You shouldn't linger here. The longer you hold the distortion, the more it takes from you."
Rimuru shrugged, her smirk faint. "It already took everything that mattered, didn't it?"
Echo's eyes softened. "Not everything. She still remembers you."
That made her pause.
Just for a second, her light dimmed.
> "Yeah," she whispered, smiling sadly. "That's the problem."
---
The echo space flickered — brief scenes bleeding through: Aira laughing with Mina, Ren watching from the shadows, the school rooftop bathed in gold.
Rimuru's expression grew softer, her voice almost a sigh.
"Maybe I can still guide her from here… teach her what I couldn't before."
Echo folded his arms. "And if it breaks you completely?"
She laughed — that same warm, infuriating sound that even the void couldn't silence.
"Then I'll just find another way to exist. You know me — I never stop showing up."
---
As she turned, light gathered around her like a cloak, faint and uneven.
Each pulse of the echo space bent toward her — fragments of laughter, warmth, and memory spinning like stars around her form.
> "If this is where I stay," she whispered, "then I'll make it loud enough for her to find me."
And as her voice carried through the infinite silence, faint laughter rippled across the edges of reality — soft, distant, but unmistakably hers.