The body’s face was tilted up toward him, its empty eyes staring into his, its mouth moving in shapes that formed words he could not hear.

"I... it... hurts..." it seemed to say, the sound not heard but felt, scraping against his mind.

The grip tightened.

"Why... did you live... when we... died...?"

They were watching him.

Skulls, rotten bodies, and discarded remains scattered across the endless ocean all turned toward him in complete silence, their hollow gaze fixed as if something inside them had finally awakened.

Yuuta felt a coldness sink into him that had nothing to do with the water, a pressure that wrapped around his thoughts and made his breath feel distant and wrong.

Slowly, the realization settled in him that they were not looking at his body at all, but at something deeper, something they were all waiting to take from him.

His soul.

And beneath the stillness of that endless, watching sea, something even darker began to stir.

The hand still held.

He kicked harder, and the fingers snapped, not like bones breaking, but like dry twigs, like rotten wood, like something that had been dead for a very long time and had forgotten how to hold on.

The body sank back into the water, its mouth still moving, its empty eyes still watching, until the crimson closed over its face and it was gone.

Yuuta ran.

He did not think.

He did not plan.

He simply ran Like Man who face death, his feet slapping against the blood-water, sending up sprays that stained his clothes, his skin, his face. The bodies reached for him as he passed, their hands grasping at empty air, their fingers brushing against his heels, his calves, the backs of his knees.

They did not catch him.

They could not.

But they tried But FAILED...

The weeping woman grew larger as he approached.

She was not human-sized.

He had assumed, from a distance, that she was a woman like any other, tall, perhaps, but within the range of normal.

He had been wrong. So terribly wrong.

As he drew closer, the scale of her became clear, and his mind struggled to comprehend what his eyes were seeing.

She was kneeling.

Her knees pressed against the blood-water, creating depressions in the surface that stretched for hundreds of meters in every direction. Her massive thighs were like mountains, her calves like cliffs, her feet like islands lost in the distance. Her shoulders were broad as walls, her arms thick as tree trunks, her hands large enough to crush a house.

Her head, bowed in grief, was level with the clouds, maybe higher, maybe too high to measure. Seventeen feet was a child’s guess. She was bigger than that. She was too big to be real, too big to exist, too big to be anything except a nightmare given flesh.

And she was crying.

Her tears were like stars.

Each one that fell from her face, if she had a face; he could not see it clearly, could not make out any features beyond the darkness that shrouded her like a shroud made of shadow, blazed with light as it fell.

Bright as the sun.

Bright as a dying star.

The light was beautiful and terrible and heartbreaking, and when each tear struck the surface of the ocean, it died. The light went out. The warmth faded. The star collapsed into nothing, and the tear became just another drop of water in an endless sea of grief.

The sound of each tear hitting the water was not a splash.

It was a scream.

A high, thin, endless scream that echoed across the ocean and faded into the distance, joining the chorus of all the other screams that had come before. Millions of tears. Millions of screams. The ocean was made of sound as much as water, and the sound was grief.

The whole ocean, Yuuta thought, his mind struggling to comprehend the scale of it, was made from her tears. Every drop of this blood-water was a tear she had shed. Every scream was a sound she had made. For how long? How long has she been kneeling here, crying, while the ocean grew around her?

The question rose in his mind unbidden, unwanted, unstoppable:

Why?

Why would someone weep like this?

What loss could be so great that it could fill an ocean?

What grief could be so endless that it had no bottom, no shore, no end?

What could she have loved so much that losing it had broken her so completely that she had not stopped crying for Many centuries?

Fear crawled up his spine like spiders made of ice.

He tried to stop walking, to turn back, to run in the other direction, but his legs would not listen.

They carried him forward, closer and closer to the kneeling giant, closer and closer to the weeping shadow, closer and closer to something he knew, somewhere deep in his bones, that he was not meant to see.

Something that had been waiting for him.

Something that had been searching for him.

Something that would not let him go again.

This is different, he thought, his heart pounding so hard he could feel it in his throat, his temples, the backs of his eyes. This is not like the other nightmares. The other nightmares, I could think. I could choose.

I could run or fight or wake up. There was always a door. There was always an escape. There was always a moment when I knew it was a dream and could force myself awake.

This one has no door.

This one has no escape.

This one is not a dream.

This one is real.

The woman was close now.

Close enough that he could see the darkness that veiled her face, the way it shifted and swirled like smoke trapped behind glass, the way it seemed to pulse with a rhythm that matched his own heartbeat.

Close enough that he could feel the heat of her grief radiating from her massive form, a warmth that had nothing to do with fire and everything to do with sorrow, a heat that made the air thick and hard to breathe, a pressure that pressed against his skin like hands trying to get in.

Close enough that he could smell her.

She smelled like old bones and older tears. She smelled like the inside of a tomb that had been sealed for a thousand years.

She smelled like the moment before death, when the body knows it is about to end and the soul is already packing its bags to leave. She smelled like loss.

Like the absence of something that could never be replaced.

And then he saw her.

Not her face.

Her face remained hidden, a void within a void, a darkness so complete that it seemed to swallow the light from her own tears.

The darkness was not empty. He could see things moving in it, shapes, shadows, faces that appeared and disappeared, hands that reached out and pulled back, mouths that opened and closed in silent screams. Her face was not a face. It was a wound. An opening into somewhere else. A door that led to a place he did not want to go.

But he saw her eyes.

They were white.

Pure white.

Void white.

The white of blindness, of emptiness, of a star that had burned so long and so bright that it had collapsed into something that was no longer a star at all.

They were not eyes that saw.

They were eyes that had seen too much, mourned too long, and forgotten how to look at anything except the past. They were ancient.

Older than the ocean. Older than the sky. Older than the concept of time itself.

And they were looking at him.

They had always been looking at him.

He knew her.

The realization struck him with terrifying force, like something buried deep inside his soul had suddenly awakened. His chest tightened violently, his breath catching as memories he should not have possessed began clawing their way to the surface.

He knew her.

Not from this nightmare.

Not from some forgotten dream.

From somewhere older.

Somewhere deeper than memory itself.

Yuuta staggered slightly as fragments returned to him, broken pieces of a moment he had nearly forgotten completely. The day he died.

No

the moment after death.

He remembered darkness. Endless darkness. A place colder than this ocean, emptier than this sky, where even fear had felt distant.

And then

her.

The same entity standing before him now.

The same white eyes.

The same tears that looked like falling stars.

The same darkness hiding her face.

His mind trembled as the truth surfaced fully.

She was the one who had brought him back from Death.

Yuuta remembered it now. When he first saw her, she had been crying, yet somehow smiling through those tears as if simply seeing him alive had brought her comfort. At the time, he had not understood it. He had almost convinced himself it was only a dying hallucination.

But now, standing in this nightmare and seeing the ocean of corpses surrounding her, seeing the grief saturating the very air around her existence, fear slowly crawled into him.

Because this place was not normal.

And neither was she.

Yuuta stared at her trembling figure, at the pale emptiness of her eyes, at the star-like tears slipping endlessly from them, at the darkness swallowing the shape of her face, and deep inside himself he knew the truth without needing anyone to explain it.

She had found him once before.

She had reached into death itself and pulled him back.

Somewhere beyond memory, beyond understanding, beyond the boundaries of what should have been possible, she had given him another chance to breathe.

The entity stopped weeping.

The silence was immediate and absolute.

Not the silence of the ocean, which had been thick and heavy and watchful, like a predator waiting to pounce. This was a different silence. This was the silence of something that had been waiting for a very long time and had finally stopped waiting.

The silence of a held breath.

The silence of a universe that knew something important was about to happen.

The waves stilled.

The blood-water flattened into a surface so smooth that it reflected the red-black sky like a mirror, and in that mirror, Yuuta saw himself, but not as he was. He saw himself as he had been. Small. Broken. Dying.

A child in a laboratory, a child in a well, a child in an arena. He saw all of them at once, every version of himself that had ever suffered, and they were all looking back at him with eyes that asked the same question: Why are you still alive when we are dead?

The bodies stopped drifting.

The shadows stopped moving. The worms in the hollow chests stopped writhing. Everything stopped. Everything held its breath. Everything waited.

Nothing in this world made a sound except Yuuta’s heartbeat, thundering in his chest like a war drum, like a death knell, like the final countdown before something ended.

Thump~thump.

Thump~thump.

Thump~thump.

The entity turned its face toward the sound.

Slowly.

So slowly.

The movement took forever and no time at all. Her massive shoulders shifted, causing waves that traveled to the horizon and kept going. Her head rotated on a neck that should not have been able to support such weight, and the darkness of her face oriented toward him like a compass finding north, like a predator finding prey, like a mother finding her child after a very long separation.

Her white eyes, which had been staring at nothing, found something to look at.

They found him.

In her arms, she held a child.

The body was small, far too small, wrong in a way that made Yuuta’s chest tighten the moment he saw it. It was the size of a newborn child, tiny and fragile, like an infant that had died before ever being allowed to truly live.

For some reason, the sight of it made his heart ache.

Not from fear, but from something deeper, something painful and strangely familiar. The grief surrounding the child felt overwhelming, like a mother mourning something she could never get back, and Yuuta could feel that sorrow sinking directly into his blood.

It reminded him of Erza.

The same grief.

The same unbearable feeling of loss.

And suddenly, without understanding why, Yuuta felt an intense urge to run toward that unseen presence and hold it tightly, to tell it

I’m back.

The thought hit him so hard tears burst from his eyes. He couldn’t stop them. It felt as though he was mourning family he had lost long ago, yet none of it made sense to him.

Slowly, he looked back at the child floating in the dark ocean.

Its chest was closed and untouched unlike the other corpses surrounding it. There were no cracked ribs, no hollow cavity where a heart should have been, no worms crawling through rotting flesh.

It looked whole.

Peaceful even.

But that only made the nightmare worse, because despite how untouched it appeared

the child was dead.

Yuuta could feel it from where he stood, the absence, the emptiness, the weight of a soul that had departed and left only flesh behind.

The child was not sleeping.

It was not waiting to wake up. It was gone.

Whatever had lived in that small body had left a long time ago, and nothing had come back to fill the space it had left behind.

The entity looked at him.

Her white eyes, ancient and terrible, studied his face, his real face, the face of the man he had become, the face that had grown and changed and aged while the child in her arms had stayed the same. She looked at his jaw, his cheekbones, his dark hair. She looked at his red eyes, wet with tears he had not realized he was crying.

And the child slipped from her arms.

It fell slowly, almost gently, as if the water was reaching up to receive it. The small body tumbled through the air, limbs flopping, head tilting, its closed eyes facing the sky as if looking at something Yuuta could not see.

The descent took forever.

Every detail was visible, the pale skin, the dark hair, the small hands curled into fists, the lips slightly parted as if about to whisper a secret.

It struck the surface without a sound.

No splash.

No ripple.

No scream.

The water simply opened, and the child fell through, disappearing into the crimson depths, swallowed by the endless void that waited beneath.

Yuuta watched it sink.

He watched until he could not see it anymore, until the darkness had consumed it completely, until there was nothing left but the memory of a small body falling through an endless ocean.

The entity watched too.

Then she looked back at Yuuta.

She had no face, only darkness, only void, only the suggestion of features where features should have been. But Yuuta saw her voice.

He heard it in the trembling of her form, in the way her shoulders shook, in the way her white eyes flickered like candles about to go out, like stars about to die, like the last light in a universe that was going dark.

Her mouth opened.

The darkness parted slowly, revealing nothing, no teeth, no tongue, no throat. Just more darkness. An abyss within an abyss.

A hunger that had been waiting for him.

The darkness inside her mouth moved, swirling, pulsing, and he heard something breathing in there. Something that was not her. Something that lived inside her and had been waiting for this moment.

And she spoke.

Her voice was not loud.

It did not echo.

It did not carry across the ocean or bounce off the sky. It simply was, absolute and undeniable, a truth that had been true before he was born and would be true long after he died. It was the voice of a mother who had lost her child.

It was the voice of a mourner who had been mourning for so long that mourning had become her entire existence.

It was the voice of something that had been searching for him across centuries, across dimensions, across the boundaries of life and death.

"I found you."

To be Contiune....