ITE LOOKED DOWN TO SEE YUKAN’S HAND, which she was just now seeing had been badly mangled.

“Yu,” Ite began, “your hand! I can see bones sticking out! We need to-”

“I’m okay,” Yukan told her. “I’m with you now.” Despite the pain he was in, he pull Ite back into an embrace with him.

“It’s okay,” he repeated. “Everything’s going to be alright.”

“I thought I lost you again,” Ite said, shedding a few more tears in the process and hiding her face in Yukan’s chest. Suddenly, Yukan pushed Ite away.

Ite was shocked for a brief moment by the sudden nature of this action, but was only more shocked when she saw why he had done it. Kunshu swept through the heavens and sliced off Yukan’s broken right hand. Yukan collapsed to the ground in immense pain, screaming in agony.

“Get away from him!” Ite yelled out as she took the Nukenai Bow off of her shoulder and quickly knocked an arrow into the drawstring. By this point, Kunshu had returned to a higher elevation, above the ground. Although Ite’s aim was true and its trajectory was perfectly in line with what would have connected with Kunshu, the emperor of Aotoshi sliced the arrow clean in two before it could hit him, killing the arrow’s momentum almost immediately. Kunshu charged once more at Yukan, Alpha Blade readied to strike down the last surviving Kenshi.

Once the sword was close to connecting with Yukan, a sudden clang sounded as Zenpan stood in Kunshu’s path. Kunshu stopped for a moment to see Zenpan still standing, completely unscathed. The entire army was in shock witnessing their top commander survive a slash from the Alpha Blade.

“I’d suggest you take your leave, Mujihina,” Zero bellowed. “I may not be as merciful as I was at Oka Hill.”

Kunshu stood in silence for a moment before returning once more to the skies and flying away. Yukan, on the other hand, was still in immense pain. Ite stood beside Yukan and tried to help him onto his feet.

“Please calm down, Yukan,” she began. “We’re going to get you back to the medic tent. It’s going to be okay.”

By this point, Yukan became unresponsive, having already lost too great an amount of blood. Seeing this, Zenpan grabbed a tourniquet and hurriedly applied it to Yukan, with the only time spared being to ensure the device’s safe application. After it was put on, the 154th regiment of Akuni loaded Yukan onto a stretcher to bring him to the medical tent near Northwell, just a few miles away from Fort Yaoseyun.

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Once they arrived at the medical tent, they transferred Yukan’s unconscious body onto a hospital bed.

“He’s lost a lot more blood than we thought,” Zenpan reported. “We need an IV line in here with an isotonic solution.” One of the nurses went out of the room to grab the IV for Yukan as Zenpan placed Yukan’s mangled, amputated hand near the arm it was once attached to.

“Alright Kadaina,” the mage’s co-commander began. “I need you to heal Yukan so his hand can be re-attached, alright?”

“I’m afraid it’s not that easy…” Kadaina sighed.

“What do you mean?” Zenpan asked.

“I mean I’m not all that good at healing,” the mage continued.

“Are you serious right now?” the general groaned.

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“Why would I joke about a thing like that? And even if I was, reattaching a hand isn’t really possible for a mage. Healing magic doesn’t work like that. The most that magic can really do is speed up the body’s natural healing process.”

“So you mean to tell me,” Zenpan started once again, “that he’ll never be able to use that hand again.”

“I’m afraid so, General Imoru,” replied Kadaina.

Zenpan took in a sharp breath, his face turning red for a second, before turning away from Kadaina slowly and leaving out a disappointed sigh.

“It’s alright, Kadaina,” he said once he had calmed down. “You did the best you could.”

“Our best course of action is to fashion him a prosthetic,” Kadaina continued. “If we were to surgically reattach the hand, we could risk something even worse. More specifically, he might get gangrene. If we were to replant it, we would just need to amputate it again later.”

“Right,” Zero affirmed as he turned to another nurse present. “We need a prosthetic hand with full mobility.”

“I’ll see what we can do,” the nurse said as she headed out of the hospital room. For a moment, Kadaina and Zenpan sat alone in silence.

“You know something, Kadaina?”

“Hm?”

“I’m glad that I took a gamble and made you co-commander. Honestly, it took me a little while to warm up to the idea of putting a teenager in charge of an army, but you exceeded expectations in a way that I don’t think anybody in the 154th could’ve expected.”

“Thank you.”

Another brief silence took over before Zenpan spoke once again.

“Listen, kid,” he started. “I have to be honest with you for a moment. I’m not exactly human.”

“Oh, I already figured that out.”

“You see, I’m- I’m sorry, what?”

“I mean, a human doesn’t normally step in front of a sword and take a direct hit without so much as flinching. You’re still somehow unscathed despite being slashed across the chest by the Alpha Blade and, considering what I’ve seen that thing do, it wasn’t too hard to figure out that the independent variable was you.”

After a few seconds of silence, Zeronius dropped his human form.

“I’d meant to tell you sooner,” the maila began. “I came to realize just how good of friends we’d become since this war started and it just didn’t feel right to keep it a secret from you. You’re one of the best friends I’ve got in Crenon right now and it felt wrong to keep lying to you about who I really am. The name’s Zeronius.”

Kadaina’s eyes widened upon hearing the maila’s name.

“Zeronius?” the mage gushed. “As in Zeronius Kantoku III?”

“Yeah?”

“Mr. Masuta told me all about you!”

“Mr. Mastua? As in Kashikoi Masuta?”

“That’s the one!”

“My God. It really is a small world, huh.”

“I suppose it is.”

Silence overtook the room once again before the sound of footsteps came through the hallway. Zeronius changed back to his human form just as a nurse came into the room bearing a prosthetic arm made from a titanium alloy.

After a lengthy medical procedure to make the prosthetic hand work with Yukan’s motor neurons, the fingers on the prosthetic hand twitched slightly before resting once again. The nurse continued to watch over Yukan as Zero and Kadaina left the base to call it a night, later on receiving confirmation that Yukan’s condition is stable enough to bring him into a medical ward in Murasakino. It would only be a short trip from the medical ward in Northwell to the ward in Murasakino, so they decided to transport Yukan back to the Akuni military base that night.

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Yukan’s eyes snapped open, awoken in the middle of the night from a nightmare he had. To reassure himself, he rushed out of the bed in the infirmary and into his barrack. Once he arrived there, he saw the Omega Blade, just as he had left it two nights prior, propped against his bed. He grabbed the sword once more and the world around him calmed as the blade began to etch the rose design into his prosthetic hand. His breathing calmed as well and his grip tightened around the hilt. At last, he was reunited with the Omega Blade.