The Last Goodbye

The world was gone.

Not erased. Not transformed. Simply... gone.

In its place was a void—painted with the ghosts of what had been.

Twisted echoes of buildings stretched into a sky that bled colours no living eye should witness. The ground beneath was a broken memory, a jigsaw of shattered stone and frozen time. Gravity was a half-forgotten rule, debris drifting like dust through stagnant air.

Inside the Veil, Asahi drifted—no longer a man, but a flickering mind unravelling with the dying fabric of existence.

And then, he saw her.

Aiko.

Amber eyes. The curve of her smile. The memory of her presence shimmered in the fractured light, more real than anything else that remained.

He reached for her—desperate, trembling—hope flickering in the dying embers of his soul.

“Aiko...” he breathed. The word broke from him like a wound, raw and cracked, barely audible over the cosmic sigh of entropy.

He ran.

Through the swirling chaos of collapsing timelines, through memories twisted into nightmares. Around him, reality folded inward—yet still, he reached her.

When his hand brushed her cheek, warmth surged through him.

Wildflowers. Old paper. The scent of home.

He pulled her close. His lips found hers—a kiss made of ruin and longing, a reunion bought with blood and sacrifice.

A kiss that held centuries of yearning, a lifetime of regret, a universe of lost chances.

For one heartbeat, it was real.

But then—her smile faded.

Her eyes darkened, not with anger, but with sorrow deeper than the stars.

She looked at him—not as a lover, but as a witness. As the last echo of a world destroyed.

“Asahi,” she whispered. Her voice trembled with the screams of a dying world. “What have you done?”

He recoiled. The illusion shattered like glass.

The warmth was gone.

The chill of truth crept in.

“You tore it all apart,” she said. “You destroyed everything... for this? For a memory?”

Tears spilled from her eyes—not joy, but infinite grief. Each tear a dying star, each sob the death of a world.

“I wanted you to live,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “To grieve, yes — but to heal. You couldn’t let go. You let my ghost consume you. And now... look.”

She turned, gesturing to the crumbling world around them.

“This isn’t resurrection,” she said softly. “It’s annihilation.”

Her form began to fade, her edges dissolving into the Veil’s chaos. Still, she reached for him—one last time.

“Let me go, Asahi. Let us both find peace. Even in the end.”

Asahi fell to his knees. Her words rang in his ears—every syllable a hammer striking the last pieces of his soul.

“I just wanted to see you again,” he whispered.

But she was already gone.

And the silence swallowed him.

He raised his head. His voice cracked the stillness like a scream in a tomb.

“Gods!” he cried. “Why!? Why take her from me? Why this?”

He slammed his fists against the void. “You took everything! Everything I loved! And left me here! In this hell! WHY!?”

There was no answer.

Only the hum of entropy, devouring all.

Elsewhere.

Haruto stood on the edge of the world.

His body flickered—fading, peeling away pieces of a thousand past lives. He didn’t fight. Didn’t scream.

He simply watched.

The sky bled impossible colours. Cities crumbled without sound.

And still, he stood.

Akane’s face bloomed behind his eyes. Her laughter. Her fear. Her final words.

He remembered her hand in his.

Her breath on his cheek.

Her death.

A single tear fell.

“For Akane,” he whispered. “For Aoi. For everyone I couldn’t save... I’m sorry.”

Then, he was gone.

Yukawa turned to ash.

His body gave way, dust on the breeze, as the laws of reality forgot themselves.

His final expression was calm. Hollow. Acceptance carved into bone.

A bitter end to a coward’s ambition.

Shin, the telekinetic, simply ceased.

Folded inward. Erased by forces too vast to comprehend.

No struggle. No scream. Just... gone.

Yume’s body lay broken amid fractured stone. A flower, carefully folded, rested beside her chest. Ren saw it as he walked past. A flicker of something—grief, maybe—tugged at the hollow shell of his soul.

Ren walked alone through a ruined world.

The silence screamed.

Shattered buildings stretched toward a sky that no longer existed. Air tasted like memory. Every step echoed across dimensions that collapsed behind him.

Then—he saw her.

Aoi.

Or what was left of her.

Her severed head stared skyward, lips parted, eyes empty. A grotesque monument to Asahi’s madness.

He walked on.

He passed Yume’s body—half-buried. Her face incomplete. The memory of her voice clung to the wind, like a song cut short.

He felt nothing.

He was empty.

The ink had consumed him—transformed him.

He was no longer Ren.

He was the void.

Then, he found the café.

Or what remained.

Walls cracked. Tables splintered. The scent of old dreams lingered. Amid the wreckage, something waited.

A painting.

Unfinished.

Colour bloomed on torn canvas—a memory rendered in brushstrokes. A vibrant world, now lost. A last attempt to hold onto something real.

Ren stared.

And remembered.

Asahi — smiling, frantic, filled with a dream he couldn’t let die.

Haruto — silent, burdened, noble in ways the world would never know.

Yume — brave, tender, her final act a whisper of resistance.

They were all gone.

He was the last.

He picked up the brush.

It was dry. Brittle.

But still it fit his hand.

He dipped it into the remaining paints—colours swirling like dying stars.

And he painted.

He painted their faces. Their hopes. Their regrets. The world they lost.

He painted until the last colour was gone.

Until the brush slipped from his hand.

Until his body, too, began to unravel.

The painting was finished.

It was a goodbye.

It was everything.

He looked at the broken sky, at everything that had happened. Asahi, Haruto, Yume, and Aoi. He wasn’t filled with hatred. Nor with love. Just… the sadness of someone who remembered too much.

Ren’s fingers closed tightly around the two interlocked pendants — the last pieces of the family he’d lost — and as his eyes fluttered shut, a single tear slid down his cheek, vanishing into the ink.

And he finally let go.

Then — a figure stepped out from the silent chaos. A masked figure.

Footsteps echoed through the dust. Slow. Measured.

Not bound by the world’s unravelling. Not touched by time’s decay.

His eyes glinted — not with malice, not with sorrow, but something colder.
Purpose.

He stopped before the painting.

It had not faded. Even as the world bled around it, the canvas stood defiant—vivid, still wet with the last breath of a dying boy.

The man studied it. Carefully. Silently.

Then, he knelt.

From his pocket, he withdrew a single item: a folded letter, yellowed and delicate.

He tucked it behind the canvas.

A whisper, barely audible, slipped from his lips.

“For the next.”

He stood. Turned. And walked away—into the bleeding sky, into the ending storm.

He didn’t look back.

Silence.

The wind stopped.
The earth fractured.
Reality folded in on itself, collapsing like brittle paper.

Everything unravelled.

But the painting remained.

Not preserved. Not saved.

Just… left behind.

A relic in a world with no time.

Far from it — buried in the crumbled bones of a forgotten town — a mural endured on the back wall of a ruined café.

Cracks ran through it. Colour had faded. Half of it was already lost.

But two silhouettes sat beneath the ghost of a sun, holding cups in hand, staring toward a sea that no longer existed.

In the corner, scrawled in faint red:

A.I.

And beneath it, like a whisper carried by the end of time:

“This was our world.
And this…
was our last goodbye.”

Nothing followed.
And nothing ever would.