>>6284312>>6284328>[x] “Wait – You're saying that the Hollow Sun is alive?”Daegal’s gleaming helm doesn’t register emotion, but you can sense the wince in the way Kazuya carries himself. Whatever he’s seen, it’s rattled him.
“It’s…” he begins, then catches himself. “-Not in the way we’d understand it,” Kazuya says, at last. He chooses each word with care, like he’s fumbling with something he barely understands.
“Once, it was - I guess you could say, it was part of a greater whole. It had a <span class="mu-i">purpose</span> it was made for, one it was looking to complete…But it can’t remember. Not any more.”
He turns his head, at where the throne has lowered itself into the recesses of the gleaming walkway.
A blurt of electronic noise issues from his speakers. It takes you a moment to realize that it’s a sigh - A long, slow sigh.
“It’ll help us, though. That’s what it’s agreed to do.”
A pause-
“...I don’t think it knows how to do anything else.”
>[x] “It's damaged, isn't it? That's what you were supposed to fix.”>[x] “...Isn't there anything we could do?”“-Not in four days.”
There’s a quiet surety, in those four simple words. Daegal’s armor gleams, as the light slides over it; He half-turns, as if contemplating the vastness of the Hollow Sun.
“If we had more time - If we had the chance to figure things out…We could have done <span class="mu-i">something</span>. But now…<span class="mu-i">Now</span>, it’s too late.”
He shakes his head, that golden helm swivelling with a soft hum of actuators.
“Anon - There just isn’t any time left, not now. Every moment we spend <span class="mu-i">here</span>, now…It’s another moment over <span class="mu-i">there</span>. Back in the real world.”
He turns one golden gauntlet palm-up. A soft focused hologram, tiny enough to cup in the palm of one hand, materializes in the air above it: Numbers, counting down.
<span class="mu-i">84:59:34</span>
<span class="mu-i">84:59:33</span>
<span class="mu-i">84:59:32</span>
“I, uh-” Daegal casts around, the way he always does when there’s something that’s hard for him to say. “Anon, I…What you’re going to do - It’ll kill the Hollow Sun. There just won’t be enough of it left to survive, once the Hellions are released. It’s…”
That sense of searching for the words, again-
“-It’s not just <span class="mu-i">enough</span> for the Hellions to be deployed, you know? When the Sun opens, it’ll disperse parts of itself, to stabilize them long enough to assault the Diadem. After that-”
A crackle of static.
“...After that, it’ll be gone. All this will be gone, forever.”
(Continued)
