Shinjiteita Nakama Tachi Ni Dan John Okuchi De Korosarekaketaga Gift __link__ ✦ Trusted & Fast

Kaelen looked at them—really looked. The faces he had loved. The smiles he had trusted. And for the first time, he saw the truth he had always refused to see: the greed behind Lyra’s loyalty, the cruelty behind Torvin’s jokes, the hunger behind Marduk’s wisdom. They had never been his family. They had been passengers on his kindness.

That’s when Marduk had drawn his blade.

He pushed harder, his boots skidding on loose gravel. The labyrinthine ruins of Dan John Okuchi—the ancient, singing prison-temple—hummed around him. Its walls were carved with warnings in a language older than kings. He had translated them for Marduk once, laughing about the paranoid fools who built a dungeon to trap a god. Kaelen looked at them—really looked

Lyra had chosen control. So she became a statue, forever guarding the altar she could never touch.

They had been his party. His nakama .

“What did you do?” Marduk whispered, his spell unraveling in his fingers.

He turned his back on the three frozen figures, walked to the far wall, and placed his bare hand against the stone. The wall opened onto a sunlit hillside he had never seen before. The air smelled of grass and rain. And for the first time, he saw the

Kaelen had thought that was poetry. Now, as his back hit the cold stone of a dead-end chamber, he realized it was prophecy.