The hangar was silent that night.
No alarms, no feeds, no coordinates blinking red. Only the echo of wind whispering through the cracks of the steel walls and the faint hum of the cooling nanite core buried beneath the mech's armor.
Karl stood there beneath the open roof, looking out at the endless stretch of night sky. It was so vast it almost mocked him. The stars were cold and indifferent — pinholes in a sheet of ink. He'd painted enough of the world red to notice how little the heavens cared.
His voice came quiet, almost too small for the cavern around him.
"Do you think they're proud of me, Reginald?"
The butler paused beside him, his usual composure softened by fatigue and pity. "That would depend, sir," he said gently. "On what you believe pride looks like."
Karl's lips twitched, a shadow of a smile that never formed. "I kept my promise, didn't I? I erased everyone who ever touched them. Every last one. I… I did what any son would do."
Reginald said nothing. Silence carried the answer.
Karl's eyes lifted again to the sky. The night wind pressed cold against his face, almost cleansing. "I thought it would feel… lighter. That maybe, when it was all over, I'd finally sleep. But now… it just feels like I took their light and turned it into smoke."
He looked at his hands — pale, veined, trembling slightly from fatigue.
"These are the same hands she used to hold when she told me I'd grow up to make the world better," he murmured. "Now they only know how to destroy."
Reginald bowed his head. "Perhaps, sir, destruction isn't the end. It's only the middle… if you choose to make it so."
Karl blinked slowly, the words stirring something faint beneath the wreckage of his mind. He turned back toward the mech — his towering monument to rage and grief. For years it had been his sword and shield, the judge and the executioner. Now it loomed like a ghost of everything he'd done.
He reached for the control console. The nanite shell shimmered, folding into its dormant state, collapsing upon itself until it was no more than a monolith of dull metal and faintly glowing circuits. Karl placed a trembling hand upon it.
"Sleep," he said. "You've done enough killing."
Then, for the first time in years, Karl walked away from the cockpit without looking back.
Over the following months, the name Kurogane Karl reappeared in headlines — not as the ghost of war, but as the man funding peace.
Entire hospitals rose in his name. Orphanages once forgotten in crumbling districts were rebuilt, filled with laughter instead of dust. He emptied his vaults into scholarship programs, relief funds, and research foundations. Teams bearing his crest worked to cure HIV, cancer, and a hundred other diseases the world had grown numb to.
It was as if he was trying to reverse entropy itself — to glue together the shards of humanity he'd shattered.
The media hailed him as the Repentant Titan, the man who had gone from demon to savior.
But Reginald, ever at his side, could see it clearly — Karl wasn't seeking redemption. He was buying silence from the ghosts.
Late at night, when the cities he'd rebuilt were asleep, Karl would still return to the hangar.
He'd stand before the sealed mech and whisper to the quiet metal,
"Are you proud now, Mother? Father? Did I make it right?"
Only the wind would answer.
And the stars, indifferent as ever, blinked like cold embers over a man who had everything — except peace.
For the first time in years, the sound of machinery in Karl's private lab didn't feel like the pulse of war.
It sounded… alive.
Gone were the nanite shells forged for vengeance. The walls no longer bore missile racks or reactor cores. Instead, a single project filled the cavernous chamber — a car so sleek and strange that even Karl's reflection warped across its surface like liquid glass.
He called it the Erevos Prototype, though the world would later rename it The Miracle Machine.
A self-sustaining vehicle capable of converting life particles — ambient motes of bio-energy suspended in air — into pure kinetic drive. No fossil fuels. No reactors. No waste. It breathed with the world instead of burning it.
Karl stood before it in a white coat, eyes ringed with exhaustion but glinting with purpose.
For the first time since his parents' death, he wasn't designing a weapon.
He was designing a future.
Reginald approached from behind, holding a clipboard that seemed almost ceremonial now. "She's beautiful, sir," he said quietly.
Karl smiled faintly. "She's alive, Reginald. Every molecule adapts. Every nanite learns. She can feel temperature, wind, motion — even the heartbeat of the driver. I want to build something that gives, not takes."
He circled the machine, his fingertips brushing along the morphing surface as if tracing the curve of a dream. "I spent half my life making things that could kill the world. Maybe this one can save it."
Within months, the global stage erupted.
News outlets, investors, and governments clamored to his doorstep. The Erevos Prototype was hailed as the dawn of a new technological era — an engine that could revolutionize energy, travel, and sustainability all at once.
Karl held a worldwide press conference from the balcony of his Tokyo research tower. Cameras flashed like lightning. Helicopters circled. The crowd below was an ocean of humanity.
He stepped forward, his voice steady but humble.
"For too long, we've built machines that devour the earth," Karl said, his tone carrying through the microphones. "This… this is different. This is my promise — to my parents, to humanity. The future doesn't have to burn."
Thunderous applause followed. Corporations and military divisions offered obscene sums to purchase or license the design. One conglomerate offered three trillion dollars just to obtain the nanite fuel schematics. Karl refused every one of them.
"You don't sell the future," he told Reginald afterwards. "You protect it."
And for a brief, fragile moment — it seemed like Karl had finally found peace through creation.
But the future he was trying to save had other plans.