Kyoya found himself somewhere vaguely familiar.

His vision was cloudy, as if there were a thin veil of fog covering everything in sight. He was in a two-bed bedroom dwelling, fashioned of waxed wood, with several bookcases and dressers lining the walls around him.

He checked the ceiling. Torches and candles, lit throughout the space, provided comfortable lighting. However, the boy was forced to muffle a gasp when his eyes fell upon a form long adrift in the currents of time.

On the bed parallel to his, Sera sat cross-legged in a shimmering indigo nightgown, brushing cascading navy-blue hair.

Kyoya finally began remembering.

This was his parents' old home, where he and his sister shared a room.

Judging by the calendar hanging above his nightstand, this was seven years ago. November fourteenth. A red circle was scribbled around the seventeenth: his birthday, as well as the day that Sera left to further her skill in combat under the training of higher ranking instructors.

He'd intended to commit more thought to the idea but was stopped once his long-lost spoke.

"Why're you so quiet all of a sudden?" Sera stopped brushing, tilting her head toward him.

All he could do was stare back.

She was just as he'd remembered, sharing his deep azure eyes and her trademark sunlit skin. Her features were a thousand times sharper than his, yet she still retained the brutal charm that earned her a reputation among Teleo's combat corps.

The girl's hair was long, reaching down to her lower waist, which required extensive brushing after battles or a few days. He remembered those brushing sessions as the best time to chat, as he was the only one she'd let stick around for more than an hour or so outside of schooling or training.

After all, she was, even then, what he'd aspired to be since taking up the Reclaimer's way of life.

It almost made him jump when she talked again. "Hello? You okay?"

"Y-yeah! All good over here! Just, uh..." He had to take a hard pause, the notoriously high-pitched voice of his younger years coming back to haunt him. "Just a little extra downtime before you go... y'know?"

She sighed and tossed away the brush, hugging her knees to her chest.

"I hate how mushy you can be, dude." Sera pouted. A light shove of air met his shoulder, and he fell over without much trouble. Her strength was something else he'd forgotten.

"It's not my fault; I've got the biggest rep ever to live up to. Cut a kid some slack, huh?"

"Oh, come on... You'd know better than anybody that you can't have me watching your butt forever. This is gonna be better for everyone, and when I come back, we'll see what time's done for the both of us."

In any other situation, he'd have erupted into a challenging cheer and started counting down seconds, even if it would have taken years. Though, now that she'd said that, he truly grasped what was happening.

She'd said, 'when.'

This finally kicked his awareness back to the real side of the situation. His vision became completely clear—he saw this dream as vividly as if it were in the waking world.

"Yeah... I guess that's not a bad point. I'll pull my own weight, so don't worry about me!" Kyoya flashed a grin and a thumbs up, seeing his objective in full clarity.

"But there's one thing that's been bugging me..." Sera started.

She looked almost tense, now, and something he failed to notice before seemed to blink into being: an unmistakable feeling that, despite nothing being inherently wrong here, there was danger afoot. "...I've been thinking about just staying instead."

Kyoya's eyes narrowed in tune with the room's tightening tension.

He was sure of it by this point.

This was designed for him specifically, and if he were to complete his task, to find whatever light Guran had specified, he had to resist the urge to give anything in this illusion leeway.

"No, I think you had it right, sis. There's a whole great big world out there that needs tough guns, and nobody better to do it than you." After that, the slightest feeling of remorse began to creep in—that sting of the wrong decision, picking away at him... but, again, he knew his mind was influenced here. Otherwise, there would be nothing to conquer.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"I know, and I see what you mean, but it's cold outside Teleo, unforgiving, and you never know what could go wrong... What if something happens, and I never get to see you again?" she prodded.

"Well... I guess that's just how it goes, y'know? Fate works weird... But, at the end of the day, I don't think we'll ever really lose each other, if that makes any sense."

Kyoya's ever-attentive nerves began to go on alert. The tension between them could be cut with as little as a fingernail, and this entire setting began to feel as though it were being controlled.

"Strings," he thought.

Each facet was manipulated—every emotion, idea, all of it... but he couldn't quite come to any conclusion, let alone go so far as to confirm it.

"Kyoya... it's a closely-held secret, but all I want is to know for myself that I'll have a family to come back to when it's all said and done. Even if that means giving up the fight, I'm willing to do that if it can—"

This was the point at which he wouldn't let a bait of any capacity keep him from seeing this through.

"Let me stop you right there," Kyoya cut in. Sera turned and looked to him with such hurt in her eyes that he bit back the beginning of an apology. Knowing that she was no more than something to trick him did well to suppress it.

"W-what?" Sera recoiled, some sort of phantasmic energy beginning to break away from her form.

"I knew it!" He sprung away from his bed, evading this encroaching darkness, as the entire room began to shake off its hinges. While more of these particles drifted away from Sera, the walls seemed to fold in on themselves. They splintered and broke apart, revealing a blank exterior only describable as a void made up of the same ghoulish energy.

He'd bested his emotions, pushed them away, and swept them under whatever rug had been provided. "Why haven't I woken up yet?"

The boy asked the same question a hundred times over in his head, but his surroundings only became more estranged. Sera was now only partially human—the other half was made up of a mass of black and white matter, replacing what parts of her had disappeared.

Kyoya jolted up from the second bed, feeling a massive force erupting from underfoot. He narrowly avoided an enormous tendril of that matter tearing through the bed, impaling what was once the form of Sera straight through its chest while he stumbled back on the floor.

The scene began shifting again, particles phasing and warping themselves to a ruined battlefield, a mile in all directions extending into mountains on all sides.

All of the blackened matter had disappeared, but a sight he'd hoped would always evade him presented itself.

Sera was pierced and strung on a spear of dark matter where the tendril had gone through. Her hands lay limp on the spike, implying a fruitless struggle to remove herself.

Beside her was none other than Oberon, taking frenzied stabs of his flaming lance at any of the gnarled, spindly Demons who dared draw near. He was shouting a war cry to the enemy, holding the line in a last stand against the ones who had robbed him of everything.

The Archduke's expression reflected that of a man whose pride had been massacred, yet his fiery resolve burned away the darkness that surrounded them. He was confused and desperate, but no less determined—too far-gone to ever consider backing down. "He—..." Kyoya breathed, not even realizing that he spoke aloud. "He didn't...?"

With the sight of this final effort playing out right before his eyes, a downright rancid realization rolled over him.

Five years ago, during Kyoya's brush with death—when the Miscreant would've sworn on a hundred lives that the man allowed his sister to die—Oberon was telling the truth.

His attacks were vicious, and his movements were aggressive and precise. Sera had passed, and he still shed flesh and blood to defend her. Wispy claws and jagged fangs from the jumping shadows ripped into his crimson armor, but he'd yet to satisfy the need for vengeance.

He stood against this sea of depraved souls with a distinct look: a plea to Her Benevolence, asking just how he could ever return home—to his people, and especially to his pupil—after failing so terribly.

Kyoya knew that face all too well; it burned through even his closed eyes, reminding him of a man driven to blood in search of answers. Two of his most treasured allies would have been lost in his own hands.

Kyoya now stood at the scene with a faltering ability to fight off the amassing turmoil, but he was only given a few more moments to view it.

Seconds later, the scene began breaking apart again. Both Sera and Oberon slowly became husks of whatever energy composed this vision. Soon, the endless void completely replaced what remained of his surroundings.

Extending infinitely nowhere, an empty expanse of a world greeted his gaze. There was no guiding light for him to find or reach—and there never had been.

His feet stood on nothing, yet he stood firm in a pitch-black reality, still shaking as though an earthquake were occurring in this ruined world. The quake grew so intense that it knocked him to a stumble and forced the boy to try and maintain balance in a crouch.

Then came the truth: it seemed that something else entirely was to blame.

Coming from nowhere in particular, yet everywhere at once, an eruption of speech assaulted him.

"LIGHT? HERE?"

It revolved around the boy, power from the sound alone dropping him to a kneel, having to cover his ears for fear of losing his hearing. He had no sense of distance or size, and for all he knew, this thing could have been standing right behind him.

Kyoya wrenched his hands from his ears and gritted his teeth.

"DAMN RIGHT, AND I'M NOT LEAVIN' WITHOUT IT!" Kyoya was cornered, but fear was something he'd learned to mitigate, snarling his challenge to no avail. He was completely ignored as this twisted display continued.

"TRESPASS AGAINST ME, NOT..." it bellowed further. "THE MOTHER, THE FATHER..."

Before he could shout any further retorts, whatever ground beneath him seemed to finally fall prey to this realm's tremors.

Flickers of blue began shearing through the ground, his footing being lost first as splits and cracks soon left fissures all around his feet, with even those crumbling away quickly afterward.

Then, even they shattered, an ear-piercing crash preluding the last bits dissolving into nothingness and forcing him into a freefall.