Silence.

It pressed against him as the ice coffin held Masamia, as the spiders quivered against the walls, as Bosch bled into Aria's arms. The world had quieted, but Kaiser's mind had not.

One thousand, three hundred and fifty-two years. That was the time he had spent in Bosch's cursed prison. An eternity, compacted into the span of another man's memories. Every day, every breath, every pitiful heartbeat Bosch wasted in that house, Kaiser had been forced to endure with him. He had seen it all—the paint, the canvases, the endless devotion to a woman who had long ceased to matter. He had seen how the man rotted alive in his own love.

And Kaiser hated him for it.

More than hate... contempt. For three-fourths of his life, he had been forced to share it with a corpse that pretended to live. Bosch, with his brushes, his walls, his endless colors bleeding into the white, all for the sake of love. A man who painted truths and shackled himself with them. A man who gained strength only by not using it.

Kaiser had thought himself well-versed in weakness. He had seen soldiers beg for their lives. He had seen kings abandon their crowns to fear. He had seen priests twist themselves into knots to appease gods that never cared. But Bosch was something different. He was a smear. A walking insult to the very idea of man.

Kaiser clenched his teeth, the thought burning through him.

For him, freedom was the only measure that mattered. Freedom to act, freedom to enforce, freedom to be. Men who lived in pursuit of more—whether power, knowledge, land, or legacy—they were good. Not moral, not righteous, but good. For to want was to live.

And men who wasted themselves, who drowned in stillness, who handed their years away to nothingness, they were evil. Not because they harmed, but because they did not exist.

That was why he had never flinched at Shabab, never once thought himself guilty for the rivers of blood. He had not slaughtered innocents, but he had cut down men who stood against his will. He had been alive, burning in the pursuit of more.

Bosch, though? Bosch was evil incarnate. Not because of what he had done, but because of what he had not done.

A thousand years Kaiser had been shackled to that rotting thing, his soul dragged through the dust of wasted days, watching him paint, and paint, and paint. Paint walls with truths he never acted upon. Paint memories of a woman who became nothing more than his grave.

And yet, Kaiser had endured.

He had learned.

He had studied the only thing Bosch could not strip from him: Sol.

At first, it had been maddening. He could not interact with Bosch's world, only hover within ten meters of him like a chained ghost. But his Sol answered him still. He could cast it, refine it, bleed it dry, and drag it back again. Time was all he had, and so he burned it in trial and error.

And slowly, the truth had come.

Excessive use of Sol forged him. Every time he drove himself to the edge of emptiness, every time his core screamed under the strain, it came back stronger. Like muscle torn and rebuilt, Sol returned sharper, denser, more obedient.

It was a cycle: spend, exhaust, collapse, rise. More than a thousand years of this rhythm had carved his Sol into something that no battlefield alone could teach.

But that was only the beginning.

He had watched the abilities of Liberators Bosch had met through his life, and learned its limits. Most abilities were bound to the self. Fire burst from hands, ice formed on skin, blades of Sol cut from the arm outward. To affect the world, one had to extend themselves through it.

Cryomancy... yes, a man might summon frost, but only from his body. To freeze an enemy across a hall, he had to throw it, hurl it, bridge the gap with crude force.

Kaiser had asked himself: why?

And then he broke it.

He learned to spin threads. Thin, invisible lines of Sol, drawn from his body like spider silk. They stretched unseen, reaching outward in any direction he willed. Once the line was made, he could enforce his Sol through it. Ice could bloom, not from his hand, but from anywhere on the thread. He could cut, he could freeze, he could burn—all from a distance.

It was not easy. Each line demanded focus. Each strand drank from him constantly. To maintain dozens was agony. But Kaiser did not stop. For centuries, he refined it, weaving Sol into a geometry no man before him had dared imagine.

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And when the ice bloomed at Masamia's back with the twitch of his finger, it was the culmination of 1300 years of obsession.

But even now, it was not enough. He felt it in his bones, in his core. The glass ceiling above him. The Blue Sol Core, stretched to its limits, refined until it could hold no more. He had tested every edge of it, and it would not break with training alone.

The outer shell of his core glowed orange now, but at its center, the old blue still clung stubbornly. He was close to the breakthrough, so close... but there was a barrier. Something more was required for him to breakthrough.

He could not yet see it. But he knew it was there. And when he shattered it, the world would be his.

Kaiser moved toward the great window, the green sea stretching endless and silent beyond the glass. From his back, Sol bled outward. At first, it was a scatter of shards, small branches of ice jutting and curling. But they did not stay separate. Each line bent and flowed into the next, twisting over one another, merging into streams, fusing into each other. Slowly, two long tendrils formed, their surface alive with glints of Sol. They hung weightless in the air, coiling like patient serpents.

One reached forward, curling around a frame. The painting it plucked free was heavy with age, its gilded edges cracked, its colors dark but unyielding. A vampire. The pale shape of Lilian Eztil, immortal and laughing in his captured stillness, flanked by the women Bosch had painted beside him.

Kaiser held it there a long while. His eyes, hollow and rimmed in faint exhaustion, studied it without expression. The tentacle adjusted, turning the canvas just slightly in the light, until the blood-red eyes of the vampire seemed to meet his own.

When he spoke, his voice was low, stripped of all but certainty.

"I hated the old man. But… even rot manages a worthy thing, once."

His gaze lingered, the light of his Sol dancing faintly in the glass.

"He trapped a Supreme. A Vampiric one. Stronger than Titans, weaker than Hopes, and yet still a terror beyond reason. Lilian Eztil… painted into stillness."

The word tasted bitter on his tongue, but he did not spit it out.

"I respect that much. However wasted the years, however pathetic the obsession—he did this."

The tendril turned the painting once more, and for a heartbeat Kaiser's expression tightened.

"Strange, though. The vampire… wanted it. He let himself be caught, as long as it was here. As long as it was beside these women. Why? Bosch never knew. And neither do I."

His fingers flexed faintly at his side, but his face was calm.

"Still. It was his choice. And it worked."

The tentacle folded, setting the canvas aside with a precision almost reverent. Then, without pause, it shifted, striking hard against the wall behind where the frame had hung. Brick shattered in a clean burst, dust settling in waves.

From within the hollow, a small box gleamed.

The second tendril extended. It slid around the box, pried it free from the shadows, and lowered it smoothly into Kaiser's waiting hand. He weighed it once, then patted the lid twice with the calmness of a man testing a blade he already knew was sharp. Without opening it, he slipped the box into the pouch at his side, the faintest sound of leather snapping shut.

Behind him, Bosch barely stirred, his gaze glassy, fixed on Aria alone. The old man did not notice. Could not.

And Aria… she noticed. Her spiders twitched, her throat clenched, but she said nothing. She dared not. Her every instinct screamed at her that speaking now, asking what he carried, would be trespass.

Kaiser turned.

The ice flowed back into him, the tendrils breaking apart into hundreds of glittering shards before dissolving into faint lines of Sol that crawled into his skin. For a heartbeat, the room was nothing but the faint hiss of melting frost.

He did not glance back at the sea. He did not spare the painting another look. He only walked, his shadow long against the fractured stone.

Kaiser drew his sword as he walked, the sound of steel whispering against its sheath. His eyes never left Aria, nor the frail body cradled in her arms. Each step rang sharp in the silence.

Aria's breath hitched.

"Stop!" she cried, louder than she intended. Her spiders recoiled against the walls, their legs scraping stone as though they too feared the weight in his hand. "Remember—last time my Origin appeared, I was able to… to control them when they appeared!"

Kaiser's advance slowed. For an instant, the blade hung between them, catching faint green light in its edge. He studied her in silence, the thought sliding coldly through his mind.

Right. The last time he had stood in this place, he had been on a Tale. He didn't outright say that the blade was not meant for them, but for that trash in her hands. But... he could not simply cut Bosch down here, not yet. A shame. The man would die today, one way or another.

He sheathed the sword. The click was soft, almost kind, but the intent beneath it was not.

Closing the last of the distance, he stopped just in front of her. His eyes softened only slightly, the sharp lines of his face easing as he spoke.

"You're right, girl. I forgot."

Aria's gaze lingered on him, uncertain, searching for something that wasn't there. Finally, she lowered Bosch gently onto the marble floor. Blood pooled beneath his skull, and her hands lingered there only a moment before she let go.

Her body moved on instinct, closing the gap, and then she was in his arms, clutching him as though he were the only solid thing in a world that kept breaking.

"I'm sorry," she whispered into his chest. Her words quivered, muffled, tangled in breath. "If I did something wrong. If you're angry at me..."

Kaiser looked down at her. For the first time since he stepped from the dissolving door, the corner of his mouth bent, faintly, but enough. He let out a low breath that almost resembled a laugh, one that was brief and gone in an instant.

His hand rose, resting lightly on her head. The strands of her hair caught cold against his palm as he patted once, twice.

"You've done nothing wrong," he said, voice quiet but certain. His smile deepened a fraction as the memory returned to him.

"Little spider."

Aria stiffened, then relaxed, her tears pressed into the black of his armor.

I have learned more than I thought possible. More than I deserved from this cursed prison. For that, girl, I am beyond grateful.

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