Akira held on to Mucular's neck.
His fingers stayed locked as the purple flame consumed everything the villain had. Layer by layer. Membrane. Muscle. Bone. And beneath all of it, the very soul of him was being erased.
As time passed, Muscular's screams faded.
His body followed too.... faded. The black membrane dissolved into ash that drifted upward instead of down, caught by the purple flame and carried into the atmosphere like offerings of incense.
The purple flame burned smaller. And smaller. And smaller.
Until Akira's hand was empty.
He held it there for a moment. His fingers still curled around nothing, the shape of a throat impressed in his grip. Purple embers drifted from his palm and scattered into the wind.
Muscular was gone. Not defeated. Not imprisoned. Not knocked unconscious and handed over to a system that would give him a trial and a sentence and a cell that he would eventually escape from.
Gone..... he was dead.
Erased from existence by a boy who died twice.
Akira lowered his arm slowly. The purple flame on his hand extinguished. Then the last embers died.
Slowly, Akira turned toward the camera.
His purple eyes looked directly into the lens.
And he spoke.
"Hope this lets your parents' souls rest in peace."
His voice carried across the broadcast. And the only thing in his voice was exhaustion. The voice of someone who had finished something that needed to be finished and felt no joy in the finishing.
Across the country, people heard him. Most didn't understand what he meant. They cheered anyway — erupting from their seats, from their couches, from the floors of evacuation shelters and hospital waiting rooms, yelling with a ferocity that shook windows and rattled walls. A villain was dead.... something everyone will realize when the adrenaline has worn off. A hero had won. The Symbol of Fear had made good on his promise.
The streets erupted. In Tokyo, people flooded out of buildings, phones in hand, replaying the clip, sharing it, screaming about it. In Osaka, a bar full of off-duty heroes slammed their glasses on the counter and roared. In Kyoto, an old man watching alone in his apartment stood up, placed his hand over his heart, and bowed to his television.
The Symbol of Fear had delivered on his blood oath. In front of the whole world.
But those close to him understood what the words actually meant.
On the helicopter, Momo heard every word. Her hand was on the edge of the open door, the wind from the rotors catching her hair. She was crying again... not from grief this time, but from something she didn't have a name for. Something that was all of those things and none of them.
She understood. She knew about Kota. She knew the whole story. She knew about the promise.
And Honoka? She pressed her hands together and whispered something that only she could hear.
A prayer..... to her two friends.
In a house far from everything, Kota moved.
When he heard Akira's words.... he knew exactly what he was talking about.
Hope this lets your parents' souls rest in peace.
The words hit him like a wave, as he jumped out of Mandalay's arms.
She reached for him, stopped when she saw what he was doing.
Kota walked to the television. He stood directly in front of it, close enough to touch the screen. He looked at the image of Akira floating in the sky, purple wings catching the light.
Then he knelt.
He placed his hands on the floor in front of him and pressed his forehead to the ground.
"Mom," he said between hicupps. "Dad."
He pressed his forehead harder against the floor.
"Please be happy now."
Behind him, Mandalay's hand went to her mouth. Her legs gave out. She sank to the floor, tears streaming, and crawled to him. She wrapped her arms around his small body from behind and held him, her face pressed into his hair, as her shoulders shook.
"They are," she whispered. "They are, Kota."
***
High above the jungle, Akira's divine form began to change.
It started with the wings. The feathers began to flicker. One by one, starting at the tips, the individual flames sputtered and went dark.
Akira felt it. A heaviness was settling into his body. A weight returning to his limbs. Gravity..... which had forgotten about him for the past ten minutes, suddenly remembered.
His wings lost another row of feathers. Then another. The halo above his head flickered as it dimmed and rotated more slowly.
His hair changed too. The deep purple strands, strand by strand, were changing back to his natural red. His eyes going through the same transformation.
He wobbled in the air.
The divine form was leaving. The power that Aurelia had unlocked was withdrawing, retreating back to whatever place inside him it had come from. He could feel it going, like warmth leaving a room when someone opens a window in winter.
And then he remembered her words.
***
"This power," she had said, her purple eyes holding his, "cannot be accessed freely. It awakens only when you face those who carry a fragment of the descendant of Death... or the descendant of Death themself."
Akira had stared at her. "So I can't use it whenever I want?"
"No."
"Well," he had said, leaning back in his chair, "that's a bummer."
Aurelia had laughed and told him the full thing.
"Well... at least not yet," she had added.
Akira's eyes had narrowed. "What do you mean by that?"
"You will figure it out. You have a very long way to go, descendant. What you will get access to right now, will be a fraction of what the original flame can do. The door has been opened, but you have barely stepped through it."
She had looked at him with eyes that held millennia.
"Train. Grow. Learn to carry the weight of what you are. And when the time comes — when you face the one who carries Death — you will need every ounce of it."
"Who i-"
"You know I can't tell you that."
"Worth a shot."
She had smiled one last time. The garden had dimmed. The flowers had closed their petals. The tea had gone cold.
"Until next time, Akira."
The mindspace had shattered like glass, and he was back.
***
Back in the present, the last of his wings dissolved.
Akira hung in the air for one final second. Just Akira.... red hair... red eyes... and two arms....
Wait... two arm?
He looked down. His left arm — the one Muscular had punched off — was there. But somehow it felt different.
It felt... heavy. Like it belonged to someone else and had been attached to his body by a force that was now leaving.
He flexed his fingers. They moved. Slowly. Painfully. But they moved.
Well, he thought as the last of his power drained and gravity wrapped its arms around him, guess it's time for another visit to the good old hospital.
And with that final thought... he fell.
The wind rushed past him. The ground accelerated toward him. The helicopter banked hard, trying to follow his descent. Momo screamed his name from the open door.
He closed his eyes.
I'm too tired for this shit.
He hit the canopy. Branches snapped beneath him, slowing his fall in painful increments. He crashed through three layers of foliage before his body hit the ground with a thud that knocked whatever breath he had left out of his lungs.
He lay in the dirt staring at the sky through the hole his fall had punched in the canopy. The clouds were still tinged with violet. The sun was setting.
Everything hurt.
Worth it though.
He tried to move, but his body refused. Every muscle, every joint, every nerve ending had collectively decided that they were done for the day and would not be accepting further requests.
He laughed.... alas, that hurt too.
"Okay," he said to nobody. "I'll just... stay here for a bit."
On the ground, the shadows moved. The HPSC agents received a single message through their earpieces.
Just two words.
"Arrest him."
Lieutenant Sato heard the order. She looked at her team. Five operatives, all of them staring at her, all of them having watched the same thing she had watched.
She looked at the earpiece. Then at her cuffs. Then at the jungle where the boy had landed.
She pressed her earpiece.
"Understood," she said.
And the six of them moved.
++++
With this another arc has finally came to an end..... Hope you like it.
Get ready for some court stuff!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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