The Kaels had barely begun to breathe again when Leon noticed the gap in the mont.
Valeria was not there.
The realization settled quietly, like a stone dropping into deep water. Leon’s gaze swept the ruined ground, the scorched earth, the scattered survivors of Unit Alpha. Nothing. No familiar presence. No echo of her aura.
’That’s right,’ he thought. ’I didn’t sense her when I scanned the planet.’
Before the question could leave his lips, the air itself split apart.
A blinding light erupted nearby, forcing several mbers of Unit Alpha to stagger back. Weapons were raised on instinct. Luke halted mid step, whatever he had been about to ask dying in his throat as he brought his guard up. The marshals tensed. Everyone did.
Everyone except Leon.
He stayed where he was, shoulders loose, eyes steady. He already knew who it was.
The light faded, revealing a man who looked like he had been dragged through despair and left there to rot.
Akira Yamamoto stood hunched, gasping for breath. Stubble clung to his chin and neck, the marks of days without rest or care. His hair was a tangled ss, as if he had run his hands through it a thousand tis and never once stopped.
Dark bags sagged beneath his eyes, deep enough to tell the story of countless sleepless nights.
The Governor of the Federation looked broken.
He had co with everything he had.
The mont the video feed with the Kaels had cut off, Akira had seen it. A vision sharp enough to stab. Danger. Blood. His daughter. He had not seen how it ended. The future had gone dark the instant Dayton was impaled.
That had been enough.
Akira had torn through space and ti alike, bending Lost Ti until it scread under the strain. He had frozen monts, rewound heartbeats, forced his body beyond what it should endure. Not because they were Silver Marshals. Not because they were critical assets.
Because they were Leon’s parents.
And because Sakura was involved.
That truth weighed heavier than any vision ever had.
Part of the hollow look on Akira’s face ca from months of staring into futures that ended in ruin. But another part ca from sothing far worse.
The knowledge that his own daughter had slaughtered her siblings with her own hands. That she had traded blood for power and crossed a line that could never be erased.
And for the first ti in his life, Akira could not place the bla solely on her.
As he stood there, chest heaving, he saw his past laid bare. The way he had ruled his family. The way he had taught them that power ca before all else. Before bonds. Before rcy. Before love.
Power above family.
That creed had killed most of the Supre heirs. It had pushed Sakura into the dark. And no matter how tightly Akira grasped ti, that truth could not be rewound.
He had wanted to fix it. To save them. To save his family.
But fate had already finished writing that Chapter.
So he had chosen another path. If he could not save his own, he would save soone else’s.
Yet what greeted him now was not the scene he had braced himself for.
Unit Alpha was not a field of corpses.
Luke stood alive, tense but breathing. Selena was unhard. Dayton Kael, who should have been dead by Akira’s own vision, stood on his feet.
And at the center of it all stood a stranger in a black robe.
White hair caught the fading light like silk. Violet eyes, now tinged with blue, regarded the world with a calm that felt profoundly out of place amid the destruction.
Akira stared.
His gaze lingered on the stranger longer than it should have.
It was instinct by now. A reflex carved into him by years of terror and inevitability. Before his thoughts could catch up, his supre talent stirred, Lost Ti unfurling as he reached forward, prying into the future of the man in black.
Nothing.
No branching paths. No distant echoes. No inevitable ruin waiting at the end of the line.
Just blankness.
Akira froze.
His breath caught, and for a heartbeat the world seed to tilt. He did not need to test it again. He did not need to rewind or peer deeper. He already knew.
"Boy..." His voice cracked, disbelief bleeding into certainty.
"It’s you."
He started walking.
Gone was the imposing governor who commanded domains and bent ti itself. What approached Leon was a man stripped raw by exhaustion. His stubble was uneven, crawling down his jaw and neck like he had forgotten what rest ant. His hair was a ss, as if he had run his hands through it a thousand tis and never stopped. The dark circles beneath his eyes looked carved there, deep enough to tell the story of sleepless months and futures he could never escape.
With every step closer, the sensation grew stronger. The sa blankness. The sa absence that had redied his madness.
Akira stopped in front of Leon and stared up at him.
Then he laughed.
It burst out of him, sharp and unrestrained: the sound of a man finally finding hope in a losing battle he had been fighting alone. "Hahahaha... it is indeed you. It is indeed you." His shoulders shook as he laughed again, breath hitching between words.
"I knew it. I knew you weren’t dead. One mont there was only doom, only endings... and then suddenly everything went blank."
His laughter softened, almost reverent. "Looking at you now... I can finally confirm that the future didn’t just disappear. You erased it."
Leon said nothing.
He simply watched the governor, eyes calm and unreadable.
He wondered what kind of weight the governor had been carrying for him to reach this state.
The laughter suddenly died just as suddenly as it had begun.
Akira’s expression changed. His eyes darted around the ruined battlefield, taking in the living Silver Marshals, the shaken mbers of Unit Alpha, Dayton standing where a corpse should have been. His mouth opened, then closed.
When he spoke again, his voice was low and stripped of all madness.
"Where is Nikko?"
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