The Painter's Pain

Ren didn’t move.

He couldn’t.

His chest felt like it had been pried open and filled with acid and ash. Each breath scraped raw. Each heartbeat rattled like something broken in his ribs. His vision blurred, but everything inside him was screaming.

Aoi’s head hung still from Asahi’s hands.

Her eyes still open.

And beside her, Yume’s body — crumpled, cold, missing half her face.

A ghost of a memory flickered through the roar in his mind:

Yume handing him a flower she’d folded from an old candy wrapper, whispering that it’d last longer than the real thing. Yume laughing while stealing his bread and making dumb jokes with her mouth full. Yume hugging him after a nightmare, promising she’d never leave like the others.

He had loved her.

And now she was gone. Just like Aoi. Just like Kusaragi. Just like the world.

“You look uncertain,” Asahi said, his voice a blade dragging against Ren’s nerves. “What’s wrong? Don’t you recognize the gift I’ve given you?”

Haruto, shaking, stepped forward. “Ren, don’t listen—”

But Ren couldn’t hear him anymore.

He couldn’t feel anything anymore.

Only the roar.

Only the crackle behind his eyes.

Only the break.

Asahi’s voice rose, drunk on the moment. “You wanted truth? This is the truth. You were always a vessel. All that grief, that pain? It’s not yours to carry — it belongs to her. Let it out, Ren. Let it out!”

He kicked something forward.

Aoi’s head.

It rolled across broken stone and tile, bumping once, twice — till it came to rest against Yume’s outstretched fingers.

Ren’s vision fractured.

A tremor burst from beneath his skin.

A pulse. A crack. A scream without sound.

And then—

The ink exploded.

It poured from his hands, his chest, his mouth. Tendrils of pure shadow, writhing and vast, like serpents born from nightmares. They did not slither — they tore, carving through the air as if the world were paper and rushed upward towards the Veil.

The sky groaned and screeched.

It sounded like bone grinding against itself. Like a thousand children crying backwards. The clouds convulsed, colours running like melted oil paint — red bleeding into violet, violet twisting into green.

Asahi stood still.

Smiling.

Eyes wide.

He whispered: “Finally, Aiko…”

He turned, the reverence vanishing from his face like smoke. Only cold purpose remained.

Yukawa, trembling, took a step back. “This isn’t what you said — this isn’t how it was meant to go—”

Asahi’s hand shot forward. A shimmering distortion of reality — like glass warping — bloomed around his fingers. The space around Yukawa bent.

“You were the anomaly all along,” Asahi said flatly. “The Traveller. The one looping through time. You kept pulling the threads back. Resetting. Delaying.”

He stepped closer. “But even you ran out of time.”

“No—wait—” Yukawa choked, but the moment shattered.

With a sound like breaking bone and unravelling thread, Yukawa crumpled to the ground. His eyes wide. His breath still. The life gone.

But Asahi wasn’t done.

Shin tried to run but something stopped him mid-step. A phantom weight clamped down. Asahi turned, eyes glowing faintly with something that wasn’t light, wasn’t fire.

“You were loyal,” he said almost kindly, “but loyalty doesn’t equal necessity.”

With a flick of his fingers, Shin's chest ruptured inward. A quiet, wet gasp — then silence.

Two bodies.

Gone in an instant.

Asahi exhaled, calm once more, watching the sky unravel with the ease of someone who had been waiting an eternity for this moment.

“You can rest now,” he murmured. “I’ll take it from here.”

Haruto turned towards him.

Blood ran down his face. His hands trembled. But there was no weakness in his voice — only something steady, cracked through with fury and sorrow.

“She’s not coming back,” Haruto said.

Asahi didn’t move.

Haruto’s voice rose, hoarse. “She wrote to me because she knew you would do this. She said… if you reached the end… if you tore the world apart… she wouldn’t be there.”

Asahi’s smile faltered.

Haruto stepped forward, defiant. “Her words… ‘If you have to destroy everything to see me again, then you never really loved me to begin with.’”

Silence.

Asahi’s fists clenched. His knuckles cracked. But he didn’t reply.

Because the sky was splitting.

And everyone felt it now.

The world buckled.

Somewhere across the city, a mother dropped her child — not because she slipped, but because time rewound her fingers and un-dropped them an instant before, before snapping forward again. The child’s scream echoed five seconds ahead of its mouth.

One man found himself with two mouths — one laughing, one weeping — as his reflection blinked three seconds behind him.

Buildings bent in on themselves, not crumbling but reverting, walls returning to foundations and then leaping centuries into the future in an instant. A coffee shop aged into ruins. A temple rebuilt itself. The sky wept pink rain that melted into mirrors.

Across Sanctuary 7, prisoners screamed as their chains turned into veins, their memories overwritten. Guards fired weapons only to find their bullets still floating in barrels, frozen mid-shot or rewinding back into magazines. One soldier screamed as he met his own past self, and they collapsed into each other — merging into something that should never have breathed.

Timeline threads bled.

And from the heart of the Veil —

Something stirred.

Asahi stared up at the sky, consumed.

The Veil pulsed.

The rent in reality had widened, stretched by Ren’s ink until it was a wound — a gaping mouth in the cosmos. There was no voice. Only a pressure. A humming presence that bled wrongness into the world.

Haruto grabbed Ren, trying to shake him back to awareness.

But Ren’s eyes had gone black.

Not void — but infinitely full.

He was whispering, but no one could hear the words. The tendrils had taken root in the sky now, forming a black halo across the rupture. Symbols twisted in the dark — unreadable, ancient, living.

Haruto shouted over the roar: “Ren, stop! You don’t have to be this — you don’t have to carry all of it!”

But Ren didn’t flinch.

And then — from within the fracture — something came forth.

It wasn’t Aiko.

It wasn’t anything human.

It wasn’t supposed to exist.

A shape — tall, glistening, impossible — pulled itself through the sky with limbs made of cascading memories and bone-like branches. Its head was a shattered crown of faces, weeping backwards, each eye stitched shut by ink. Its torso flickered between forms — a young girl, a dead mother, a painter, a corpse. It had no name.

And yet, as it stepped onto the broken ground below the Veil, even Asahi’s triumphant smile collapsed into silent horror.

Because this —

This wasn’t salvation.

This wasn’t resurrection.

This was the consequence… of greed.