Vescrutia: Legacy

Caim's attention shifted immediately toward Inari.

For the first time since their arrival, genuine surprise touched the ancient sage.

The cloud of invisible crystal pollen surrounding him vanished—not because it had dispersed, but because it had been seized.

Captured.

Redirected.

His empty sockets narrowed ever so slightly.

The countless microscopic shards were suddenly drawn into a spiraling vortex of crimson force. The gale twisted around itself with impossible precision, creating a violent cyclone of compressed energy and stellar heat.

Caim studied it.

Not the attack.

The method.

His attention lingered on the strange connection flowing between the twins.

The synchronization.

The seamless exchange of thought and action.

The way Aurelius moved before Inari fully acted.

The way Inari compensated before Aurelius fully committed.

It wasn't merely cooperation.

It was resonance.

A shared rhythm.

A singular will expressed through multiple bodies.

For a brief moment, Caim found himself impressed.

Deeply impressed.

Then the vortex came for him.

The immortal sage immediately shifted to evade, his body beginning to drift sideways.

And then—

Something grabbed him.

His movement halted abruptly.

Not physically.

Conceptually.

His attention turned.

Immediately.

He knew who it was.

The girl.

The one with the devilish smile.

The one who looked at danger the way starving predators looked at prey.

Slowly—

He felt it.

Moments later, he saw it.

Wrapped around Nagase's body.

Wrapped around him.

Wrapped around reality itself.

A presence.

Invisible.

Not hidden.

Not transparent.

Absent.

As though it did not truly exist and yet somehow occupied space all the same.

The contradiction made his ancient instincts recoil.

"...Scion."

The word escaped him in a low whisper.

A murmur older than kingdoms.

Older than nations.

Older than most species.

Everyone felt the shift immediately.

Something enormous surrounded Nagase.

The vague outline of a monstrous mantis emerged around her form, composed of impossible energies and fractured dimensions. One elongated limb stretched outward through a visible rupture in space itself.

No.

Not space.

Something deeper.

The arm reached through a wound in reality.

And held Caim firmly in place.

The giant spectral appendage wrapped around his torso and shoulders, locking him against the incoming storm.

The immortal sage stared at her.

Not with hatred.

Not with fear.

But with something disturbingly close to reverence.

"Good..."

His voice was quiet.

Ancient.

"Good to see Scion survived the purge."

The words carried weight.

History.

Memory.

The kind of statement spoken only by someone who had personally witnessed the event being referenced.

His gaze lingered on Nagase.

Understanding dawning.

Scions.

Often referred to as The primordial Ones, whose only rival were their own kind. A species whose limitless adaptability and terrifying potential had inspired awe and horror in equal measure.

Creatures capable of becoming almost anything. And therefore trusted by almost no one.

Few became heroes.

Most became monsters.

All became dangerous.

The contempt Nagase sensed from him earlier finally made sense.

It wasn't personal.

It was ancestral.

A wound so old neither side likely remembered how it began.

The vortex arrived.

A sea of redirected crystal annihilation racing directly toward the immobilized sage.

Caim watched it come.

Watched impossible teamwork.

Watched Inari's ingenuity.

Watched Nagase's ruthless timing.

Then he spoke.

One word.

One name.

"Aurelius."

Simple.

Clean.

Terrifying.

The effect was immediate.

Aurelius moved.

Not willingly.

Not consciously.

His body acted before his mind could process the command.

The connection between himself and Inari suddenly became a liability.

Something reached through the Arbiter binding them together.

Something ancient.

Something that understood exactly how their resonance functioned.

Aurelius's arm shifted.

His power redirected.

The vortex changed course.

Inari's eyes widened.

The storm spun.

Turned.

And struck Nagase directly.

The mantis aura exploded.

Massive sections of the spectral creature were shredded apart instantly.

Fortunately—

The attack struck the manifested construct rather than Nagase's flesh.

But only barely.

The impact hurled her violently across the battlefield.

Inari froze.

Horror consumed him.

The sensation was unlike anything he had ever experienced.

One moment he had been coordinating perfectly with Aurelius.

The next, that connection had betrayed him.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

His own strategy.

His own redirection.

His own quick thinking.

Had become the weapon that maimed Nagase.

Confusion crashed into guilt with brutal force. He could still feel the remnants of the synchronization flowing through the bond he shared with Aurelius, but now it felt contaminated, foreign. Had Aurelius done that? Had he done that? Was their connection compromised? Controlled? Had Caim somehow reached into their Arbiter and rewritten its function? The thought made his stomach drop. Worse still was seeing Nagase fall. He had trusted the plan. Trusted their coordination. And now she was lying in the dirt because of a mistake he didn't even understand..

Nagase hit the ground hard.

Dust erupted around her.

The remnants of the mantis aura flickered violently before collapsing altogether.

One eye remained shut.

Blood ran down the side of her face.

Yet somehow—

She was laughing.

A low.

Unhinged.

Dangerous laugh.

Caim observed her silently.

Then took another breath.

The surrounding flora immediately accelerated.

Flowers bloomed across the area. First a wave of grass, then Flora of all kind, lastly tall stalks that looked like a hideous fusion of organic matter and crystal
Died.

The flower crystal in the ground began gathering.

Brighter.

The ancient sage inhaled slowly.

Preparing a second Arbiter.

And this time—

Everyone present understood exactly how dangerous that was.

The Scarlet Gyre had been a masterpiece of synchronicity, a swirling gale of razor-edged mana and crystal pollen that promised to dismantle Caim’s ancient, stony composure. For centuries, the Horus sage had stood as an immovable pillar of the realm, a god-tier entity who stood vigil against forces beyond their comprehension. But as the Gyre roared toward him, molten and hungry, Inari felt a rare, intoxicating bloom of triumph. He had finally forced the mountain to move.

He didn’t need to look at Nagase to know she was ready. She was the shadow to his light, the iron to his strategy. As the reality between them fractured like thin glass, her apparition—a gargantuan, spectral mantis—erupted from the void. Its jagged, gossamer limbs snared Caim, pinning his essence to the very fabric of the world. The sage’s eyes, ancient and weary, widened as he realized the nature of his captor.

“A Scion,” Caim breathed, his voice a dry rasp that ignored the impending inferno. “I should have known the void would eventually spit out your kind.”

Caim, however, was not one to be erased by a creature of history. His response was not an attempt to break the spectral blades, but a whisper—an invocation of a name.

“Aurelius.”

The word was a parasite. It didn’t travel through the air; it bled through the resonance that bound Inari and Aurelius together, a sacred tether of shared intent. In an instant, Inari’s triumph curdled into a cold, hollow dread. He watched as Aurelius’s expression went slack, his eyes dimming into a hollow, glassy vacancy. The Arbiter of their will reached out, his hand trembling as he forced the Scarlet Gyre to heel. With a flick of his wrist, he redirected the cataclysm.

The impact against Nagase was a sound that would haunt Inari’s dreams until the end of his days—a sickening, metallic screech of shadow-matter being shredded by concentrated solar wrath. The force was astronomical. Nagase was launched like a skipped stone across the horizon, carving a trench into the earth that vanished into the distance. Silence descended, heavy and suffocating, broken only by the crackle of dying mana and Nagase's own mad cackling.

Inari stood frozen. The smirk he had worn was now a mask of jagged, disbelieving agony. His mind raced, a thousand possibilities, and none of them seemed feasible. There...there was no way he could believe that Aurlius had betrayed him, yet for a single instance, one who weighed felt like the yarning draw of an eternity bottled into a mere second, his gaze shifted to Aurlius, questioning for that single moment everything they were to each other. Aurelius himself was strangled by grief, its emotional grip tightened around his throat like an unseen hand of condemnation.

“Aurelius… what… happened?” Inari’s voice was a jagged blade, the accusation cutting through the air.

Aurelius looked at him, and the grief in his eyes was so profound it felt like the world had lost its color. “Inari… I…” He choked on the words. His hands were shaking with a violence that made the air around him oscillate. Across the smoking crater, Nagase stirred. She was broken, her constructs shattered, but a low, jagged laugh escaped her lips—a sound of pure, delirious defiance.

"I..I don't know. I heard my name...no more than that."

Aurelius said his hands were trembling as he gazed over them towards Nagase, who was wounded but laughing.

"I felt it...taken...not persuaded...Dominated. Our trust...arrested."

These words, though horrifying to Inari that Caim possessed such a trait, brought him a small comfort. But it was minuscule, because of this lapse in integrity created by Caim's technique, Nagase was harmed.

But they could not stop

Inari wrestled with the knowledge that leaning on their Anthem now would only serve Caim's aim of causing a rift between them. The knowing that he could not lean on the bond he worked so hard to create....even deeper than this to know that Caim's touch defiled that bond, took advantage of the trust and love he had between his family filled Inari with a feeling that he had not felt in quite some time

Fury...

No

Deeper

Wrath....

Aurelius began to walk to his side but was barred by a single raised hand from his crown, that single gesture held more power, more weight than any arresting of his will that Caim could muster. As the flora inspired to grow around them by Caim began to die out by his very same edict, the Primordial Red aura around Inari grew more stark, shifting to a heinously deeper cardinal that looked more like old blood than it did mana.

“Blossom,” Inari whispered.

The word seemed to pull the light from the sky. His sanguine aura churned, stripping away its murkiness as it solidified into a shimmering, silver filigree. The air rippled, reality warping as the pressure intensified. He wasn't just pulling mana anymore; he was drawing upon the lineage of the moon itself.

"Lunesta"

His eyes, once lime-green, shattered into a terrifying dichotomy of silver and scarlet. The Gemini cornora flared, and with them, the Birch Rune Lunesta—the legacy of his mother, Malka—etched itself upon his vision. He wasn't thinking; he was executing a truth that Caim had failed to calculate. The truth that some men will endure any suffering until the moment their family is touched. Typically, to reach into the full realm of Lunar sorcery, it would have to be under the presence of Moonlight. But Lunesta was more than just distilled knowledge, much like the "material" that forged Akasha, living memory was to Lunesta an etching of Moonlight inscribed into Inari, allowing him access to pinnacl Lunar arbiters so long as he had the energy to supplement what the presence of true moonlight could not.

And as he was, wreathed in a veil of his mana, he had more than enough to unleash the full force of his next arbitoer. One that came from a life as the guardian of the mood goddess of the Maaluki woods....

Inari vanished. The space where he stood imploded, leaving behind a vacuum of displaced air. He reappeared high above, a silhouette against the blaring sunlit sky, his presence radiating the cold, blinding precision of a lunar solstice.

Caim looked up, his expression finally shifting from the complacency of an ancient sage to the guarded caution of a predator who had realized his tactics may have done more harm than good. If Inari were in his right mind, he could have surmised Caim's use of such a technique as forshadowing for what could happen should the Horsement themselves attempt to sour those things that concern them...after all, their entire system was built on division. But in this very moment, logic left him...

Inari didn’t offer a warning. He felt the weight of every broken construct, every drop of Nagase’s blood, and every second of Aurelius’s stolen agency fueling the strike.

“BAKO KAGEMI!!!”

The sky cracked.

Two beams of concentrated lunar sorcery erupted from Inari’s eyes, searing the atmosphere with such intensity that reality groaned and buckled beneath them. They were not merely lasers; they were celestial comets, carrying the kinetic payload of a nuclear forge. They crossed the sky in a heartbeat, leaving behind crystallized pockets of light that shattered instantly, trailing a wake of vacuum-pressure that threatened to tear the earth asunder.

Caim stood at the epicenter, looking up into the face of a cataclysm he had invited. As the twin beams descended, turning the dawn into a blinding, silver void, Inari’s only thought was the finality of the strike.