The coldness of the glass bit into the skin of his palm, and slowly, Koyoi’s fingertips began to turn a ghostly white.
Beyond the window, the echoes of the Coordinates shifted with every angle of his gaze. One moment, they appeared as rows of roof tiles from a ruined capital; the next, they became a forest of grave markers, countless stone hands reaching toward the empty sky. Koyoi bit his lip, trying to catch the residue of the gods' memories dwelling within those visions, absorbing them into the vessel of his own soul.
Inside his drawstring pouch, the three deities stirred ever so slightly. Their tremors traveled through his waist, radiating throughout his entire body. The gods, too, could feel the scene outside the window—the remnants of their ancient home being ground to dust within the frenzy of the shifting Coordinates.
The floorboards of the carriage groaned, a sound that bled through the train’s steel skeleton and into the very walls. The leather upholstery of the seats expanded and contracted unnaturally, pulsing in resonance with the vibrations of the Universal Laws. It created the visceral illusion that the train itself was the entrails of some gargantuan living creature. From the ceiling, the pale flame of a hanging lantern flickered, casting the shadows of the three travelers to crawl across the interior walls.
Kuon’s gaze remained pinned to the pages of the Registry. His artificial eye throbbed with a rhythmic blue light.
The cadence of that light was far faster than usual— a warning flare suggesting his thoughts were on the verge of spiraling out of control. Not wanting to miss a single character, Kuon stared without even allowing himself the luxury of a blink as the letters on the page were overwritten one after another. Beads of sweat on his forehead caught the azure glow, illuminating his face with an eerie, otherworldly light.
"...Look. The Coordinates are being rewritten right in front of us. The Observers are using the 'Master Registry' in the depths of the Scripture Vault. They’re trying to forcibly invalidate this stolen data."
Kuon pressed his lips thin before speaking. He fought to keep his voice flat, yet he couldn't entirely mask the irritation and urgency bleeding into his words. Though there was no wind in the carriage, the pages of the Registry began to flip of their own accord, and the numerical strings of the Coordinates recorded there vanished into blank white before their eyes.
Kuon pressed down hard on the cover, narrowing the blue light of his artificial eye to its limit, desperate not to let the final fragment of information escape. He pulled away from the back of his seat, leaning forward to huddle over the book, resisting the disappearance of the text with every fiber of his being.
"...Rewritten? Then, does the place we're heading to actually exist? Or is it all just a... 'lie'?"
Koyoi’s question drifted through the chilled air of the carriage as a white mist, momentarily clouding the surface of the window. In his eyes, two lights flickered: the terror that their destination itself might cease to be, and the prayer that he might still find something to believe in. When he finally pulled his hand away from the glass, his palm print remained behind like a patch of frost, before eventually thinning and being swallowed by the echoes of the Coordinates.
Watching his own print vanish felt like a microcosm of his own existence being erased from the world, and he instinctively balled his hands into fists.
Asahi leaned his back against the wall, listening to their conversation in silence. It wasn't the silence of indifference, but rather a manifestation of his own clumsy kindness—supporting the two not with words, but with the sheer weight of his presence. With his thick arms crossed over his chest and the weight of his blade resting against his shoulder, Asahi watched the chaotic frenzy of the Coordinates outside the window with a wild intuition, like a beast scenting an approaching storm.
Occasionally, his nostrils flared slightly, as if he were picking out the scent of the fluctuations in the Universal Laws carried in the air.
"...Don't rush the record. The true 'awakening' only comes at the exact moment this storm of information freezes solid."
Asahi spoke without looking back. His low voice echoed off the carriage walls, and the steel skeleton of the train hummed in subtle resonance as if affirming his words. Guided by that voice, Koyoi slowly unclenched his trembling fingers.
The moment the storm freezes.
In that hollow space, truth resides.
Asahi’s words didn't appeal to logic; they reached into the depths of Koyoi’s soul, steadying the ground beneath his feet. Outside the window, the echoes of the Coordinates continued to surge like a madness, but the color of fear had faded from Koyoi’s eyes.