For a time, I knew not how long, I just stared in shock. Unable to believe what I had just seen. I had seen them prepare for such a thing, but I had assumed Kyoko would stop it.

How had he missed it? Spotting and severing such a threat should have been trivial for him. What had happened?

What now?

Humanity was reduced to animals, and I watched as they ripped each other's throats out, the perfect image of the earlier failures.

Kyoko drifted in the void, struggling to maintain his consciousness.

Why hadn't I acted? I was bound to my path, bound to the separation of divinity, but even I should have been able to intervene for an event of such scale.

WHAT HAD HAPPENED?

I began to tremble as the weight of what I had just seen hit me like nothing I had ever felt before. My creation had just been destroyed. Sure the physical remnants remained, but that was not my creation. It was the paths, the ideas that made it special, that gave it color.

Now they were gone.

WHAT HAD JUST HAPPENED?!

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The void reared its ugly head and struck and this time I hardly resisted. Only a part of me hesitated, mind fixated on long blonde hair and piercing azure eyes. A laugh that brightened the universe.

A fight.

Over this very moment.

Still, even HER memory could not hold me. Not after what I just witnessed. I would shred this universe down to atoms, and I would restart anew. This time, there would be no gentle guidance, no non-interference.

If they didn't want to ascend I would make them.

At the last moment, a weak voice reached out to me.

Wait.

It was Kyoko.

Don’t do this.

The majority of me ignored him, preparing, but a small part, the part that remembered HER listened.

Please. We can rebuild. We can do better. I will do better.

Kyoko looked old now, but when I looked at him, I couldn't help but see HER.

I hesitated.

Why should I? Humanity has failed enough.

Because we are your children. And we are begging you.

I laughed at such sentiment, too little and far too late.

Please.

A futile at–

The part of me that hesitated struck, binding my essence in a cocoon of law and power. The void, now me, roared, but that small part had struck in a moment of vulnerability.

It couldn't hold me long, maybe 10 years or so, but I resented the fact I had been trapped by a fragment of myself.

Still, 10 years wasn't long, and when I emerged, that part of me will be gone.

Then there will be reckoning.