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The trouble with the Elysium Realm and all its magic, is that it’s seemingly as omniscient as it is infinite.
The unfortunate consequence of this is that it often leads to successors stumbling upon things that Kevin really rather wishes they wouldn’t.
Case in point: Raiden Mei comes to him one day with crystal dust in her hair, a piece of crystallised flame in hand, and about five different questions in tow. In return, Kevin tells her to keep the godforsaken thing, and asks her something in return.
“Herrscher,” is how he begins, “do you still dream? Of people you failed to save, those that died because of you?”
“I do,” Raiden Mei replies with that same spark in her eyes that he had once seen so much of. Each time burning bright amidst the filth and despair of the world. Each time flickering. Each time ashes.
That is why I still fight, goes unsaid between them.
Kevin pauses, and lets the weight of her words sink into the hollow space between them.
“I don’t,” he replies.
A habit now: saying less. Because no human expression could encompass the weight of it all; the ache, the dismembering, the restless reawakening—the urge to desire nothing as to lose nothing.
It takes Raiden Mei a few seconds to wrap her head around the implications of his remark. Kevin watches her brows furrow and her jaw tighten, and it’s like he can almost read her mind, unlike—
“Is that the 'price' you mentioned?” Raiden Mei responds.
Kevin chooses his next words carefully. It would be foolish to accidentally feed into her crude pursuits.
“No,” he says. “You should know that behind every miracle was always an unfathomable price. But nothing that I could offer would’ve come close to what I had wanted.”
“Well?” she asks, without missing a beat. “What is it that you want?”
A pause. It catches him off guard, admittedly, that sudden bold leap straight into dangerous territory.
Raiden Mei, he decides at that moment, is too terribly direct at the most unbefitting of times. It’s a wonder she has managed to keep her skull still nicely attached to her spine despite sticking it into businesses that should be of none of her own. But perhaps there is a good reason for her to be thrown into the murky waters like this—trial by fire, the survival of the fittest. It’s how they all made it to this point: immortalised by the most rudimentary conjunctions of code and scripts and burnt out hope; the charred nostalgias of a bygone history.
What do you want? Kevin mulls this question over.
Then, once more with a twinge of chagrin: what does the real Kevin want?
Here is where Mobius’ principles of her loosely defined humanity demonstrate their inevitable fallacy. Simulations do not eat, sleep, or dream. In this space, Kevin and the rest of the sims are only data suspended within the metaphysical boundaries of the Elysium Realm. By all logical and reasonable inferences, they defy what it means to be human. They blink out of existence at will. They do not want.
Which is to say, they are ultimately only records of what has already been wanted and grieved. But Raiden Mei doesn’t seem to understand this, because she looks at him not as though he were only a complex combination of binary and memory data, but as something simply alive.
The irony is not lost on him that Raiden Mei stands at the memorial for cold, lost bodies, and there she expects the breath of an answer.
“What I want,” he repeats, slowly, turning the words on his tongue like something both familiar and foreign at once. It tastes of fire and dust and despair; a stray wish now empty, and once naive.
(He thinks it went something like this:)
The world yawns into existence: gentle, fuzzy, like the shimmering heat waves of an endless summer evening. The scene lays out in bleeding sepia and smoke-singed edges; cicadas buzzing from below, the scent of dry wind, the city traced out in the distant skyline like an urban cardiogram map.
Kevin blows a stray piece of hair out of his face and turns around.
Su is beside him sitting against the balustrade, nibbling a curry bun and working intently on his biology homework. Kevin plans to copy it later, with the help of a little bribery.
“Do you think I could bring MEI here next time?” he wonders out loud.
Su looks up at him. “I think she would report you to the teachers,” he supplies helpfully. “There’s a reason why the school rooftop is out of bounds.”
“And yet you’re here with me,” Kevin sits down next to Su, supporting his chin on his hand.
“As your best friend I also have a legal responsibility to keep you in check. That includes making sure you don’t fall off the edge,” Su retorts. “How many major organelles does an animal cell contain?”
“Uh. Two?”
“…You’re going to fail this class.”
“That’s alright, then I’ll chill up here while you stress over plants or mushrooms or whatever it is you’re learning about,” Kevin grins.
Su shoots him a confused look. “What’s so great about this place anyways?”
Kevin blinks, bright baby blue against darkening skies. “Well…”
And in that moment, it’s as if the world has suddenly creeped out of orbit. The air is still where the wind has died. The cicadas have disappeared. It’s like the silence before the first break of cannonfire, where everything is so quiet you could mistake your heartbeat for the marching of battalions.
“I like it here,” he says, foolishly. “It’s peaceful.”
The Sea of Quanta is, for the lack of a better word, peaceful.
Kevin spends much of his time treading a fine line between dreaming and lucidity. It’s the most surefire way of travelling between the bubble universes before they descend into the maw of natural entropy.
At first, it takes a while for him to get the hang of drifting in and out of them—Su was much more of a natural at world-hopping and soul-searching than Kevin will ever be—but once he does, he starts to count.
The first hundred or so are the ones closest to the surface, mostly intact, showing him lucid visions of vast futures. Kevin observes everything from Honkai-devastated purgatories to war-torn self-destructions to extinction to extinction to extinction, until the sight of sheer nothingness all but engraves itself into his dreams.
As Sumeru sinks, time regresses.
Eventually in the three-hundred and seventy-sixth universe, he finds this:
…
“Here,” MEI says, circling the number at the bottom of the page. “All you have to do is rewrite it and address the question.”
“What about the rest of it?” he asks, staring at his maths homework as if it held all of the universe’s secrets.
She smiles. “That’s important too, but at the end of the day the only thing we need, really, is the correct answer.”
“That answer,” Dr MEI tells him much later on, triumphant, “is Project STIGMA.”
MEI is different from Doctor MEI, in the same sense that a telescope is never kept at the same angle, instead constantly seeking endless, boundless coordinates. She’s still the same ambitious and bookish girl from high school, with the same nebulous interests, but her eyes had departed from the earthen horizon up to the silhouettes of planetary bodies, beyond swathes of splattered stars and swirling galaxies, towards a place Kevin can only hope to comprehend in his wildest, most inarticulate dreams.
It is this same doctor now who is drawing a cloud on the holographic screen at the edge of the meeting room, edges perfectly rounded and probably calculated to the trajectories of exact pi values.
Inside the perfect cloud she scrawls, in perfect handwriting: THE MEANING OF LIFE.
Dr MEI turns around, pen in hand. From the point where her finger touches the grip the world seems to extend infinitely outwards, her presence expanding against the walls of the meeting room, draped in the muted hum of the overhead projector. The moment is quite vivid until the sepia bleeds through—and then things begin to fall apart all too neatly, quietly, without any struggle at all.
…
It takes another few centuries for Kevin to find a bubble universe replaying that same scene again.
This time, Dr MEI’s glasses are different, and the floor is engineered timber instead of concrete, and the projector is now a silent whiteboard. But Dr MEI is still the same, and Kevin is still the same, and that’s all that really matters.
“Life is, in essence, conflict. We struggle, therefore we must be alive. Or, we are alive and thus we are to struggle,” Dr MEI explains. “But Honkai beasts never see their own kind as enemies. This self-destructive behaviour is unique to humans… no, perhaps it’s unique to Earth. Here life is born, given purpose, seeks worth, and then disappears. But the Honkai, the stars, the cosmos—none of them can be defined as ’living’, yet they still manage to coexist infinitely and indefinitely, without conflict and without struggle. Do you see now? The key to survival is that only by discarding the traits we deem worthy of ‘life’, can we reach the true epitome of ‘peace’.”
Dr MEI has always spoken as if she were addressing an audience, even if Kevin is the only one in the room. It is the audience of her mind, he realises later. A bustling war room of ideas trapped within the boundaries of a single woman.
“So, Kevin, what do you think?” Dr MEI asks. “If all living things are destined for strife… then in your eyes, what is ‘peace’?”
Kevin doesn’t have an answer for peace. But he can answer for strife instead.
He remembers it as though it had happened only hours before: Su crashing through the walls of Sumeru, and yet Kevin feeling as if he’s the one with his guts in his throat, tearing through his body as if slipping through reality. The sequence constantly reweaves itself in his mind like a broken spindle—taking his guilt and anger and stray strands of hope, and spinning it into a fabric of ambiguous dreams and half-whispered apologies, as thin as silk and washed in sepia.
Occasionally, he imagines what it would’ve been like if he had sliced clean through.
Would there have been the scent of burning flesh? Charred remnants? Or perhaps there would have been nothing left at all; Shamash has only ever spared the remains of its enemies when Kevin deemed it necessary to do so.
It would have been a mercy to kill Su on that day, but Kevin knows—that wasn’t a mercy Su would’ve wanted. That wasn’t a mercy Kevin had the right to give.
“We are not supposed to decide their fate like gods,” is what Su had said.
Or; Kevin, your greatest mistake is trying to determine the trajectory of other people’s lives.
In another world, he finds a lock, and he finds a key.
“What is this?” he asks, holding something that seems to fit into his hand comfortably, but not quite perfectly, as if its artist tried to carve its shape according to the lines of his palm.
“A promise,” Elysia tells him.
“Of what?” he asks.
“You should know!” she pouts.
He tries again. “Why?”
“It’s because I’m a beautiful girl, and beautiful girls must have beautiful dreams!” she tells him. “Kevin, did you know? You have beautiful dreams as well. I see them in all the destruction you leave behind.”
He almost wants to say, “I don’t have any,” because the truth is far too heavy even for him to bear. But Elysia looks at him as if she can look through him instead, and Kevin finds that the words die in his throat as quickly as they arose.
“Yes, you are a dreamer,” she decides, in that same arbitrary way she appointed all of the Flamechasers into their respective rankings, “for a dreamer only finds their way by the moonlight, and their punishment is that they see the dawn before the rest of the world.”
Elysia closes his hands over the key. From there the world begins to break again, this time messy and haunting and mesmerising all at once: starlight blooming into vivid paint into springtime blossoms into wildfire as it dilutes and permeates the body, perceptions, consciousness—reality escaping itself as the universe buckles against the foreshocks of its imminent nonexistence.
But Elysia is not afraid, and Kevin also hopes he is not afraid, and from somewhere beneath his feet he hears the mourning of a single whale as it moors into the wastelands.
“Good night, Kevin,” she smiles.
Then he lets go—watching as the broken night takes her by the hand and whisks her away; a lonely, pale figure in the distance, dancing to the echoing rondo of her last swan song.
Hua comes to him the day after the Banquet, mouth taut, shoulders tensed.
She looks at him the same way as she did the day he entombed HIMEKO’s body within the rime, like he was a wildfire which had just razed a village to dust. Not out of madness or any malicious purpose—a natural disaster never discriminates between lives, and that is precisely why the act appears unjustified as it is.
But Hua has always been a righteous person. Her spite towards the injustice of it all has to be directed somewhere, and it just so happens that Kevin is always in the line of fire.
“What do we do now?” she asks quietly, accusation and desperation hidden in the shadow of her words.
Kevin doesn’t blame her. Now that Elysia is gone, the MOTHs are already beginning to collapse inwards like a nascent black hole. But to feed into that hopelessness—that paralysing fear—is to blaspheme Elysia’s pure idealism while the dirt on her grave is still loose.
He’s already failed so much. He can’t fail her legacy too.
Hua stares at him, silent, waiting for an answer that Kevin doesn’t have.
Then: “Are you afraid?”
“We cannot afford to be afraid,” Kevin says, in lieu of the truth.
“Do we still have a chance?” she asks instead, as if the number of sacrifices they made are actually worth enough to weigh into the scales of fate.
Because despite everything Hua has faced, she still carries the sort of naivety that defines a child’s heart. Perhaps it’s another unwritten side effect of her ICHOR. Kevin doesn’t have the courage to tell her that the world does not work like that. The world is unfair. It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose.
“Humanity will win the war, no matter the cost,” he tells her, because he was never good at inspirational speeches the same way Elysia was. But ever since the 7th eruption, it felt as if his words were disjointed from the movements of his lips, and even now it’s still the same. There’s a thin film of cynicism stretched across his answer, bitter like grounded coffee and heavy like battlefield smog.
Hua looks at him, tired. Pity rests in her eyes like stagnant water.
And? she asks silently, what if it costs us everything?
“Aponia,” he asks quietly, as to not disturb all the souls slumbering within the sacred halls of prayer. “What do you see?”
The Third Flamechaser opens her all-seeing eyes and merely smiles at her comrade. “Would you like to know?” she murmurs, like a sound of divine rapturement, the fluttering of wings across the ravine.
“I want to be prepared,” Kevin tells her.
“You want peace of mind,” Aponia corrects him. “You know that is impossible.”
Or, what she means is this: there is no true martyrdom. There is no greater good. You want to save things simply because you seek solace from acts of sacrifice.
(Dr MEI’s hypothesis still lingers in the back of his mind like an incomplete scrap of thought, salvaged after its purpose had been extracted. Perhaps the weight of it brings him comfort, or it serves as a sharp reminder of what still makes him human, digging into his bones until it sinks into him like a curse.)
“What do you see?” he asks again.
Aponia closes her eyes. Dark circles ring around them, a testament to the countless sleepless nights she herself had spent playing messiah for masses.
Kevin waits.
He had never considered her a friend, per se, but there is still a tacit understanding between them that none of the other Flamechasers would understand. In a sense, they resemble each other—not enough to feel kindred, but enough to acknowledge the weight of each other’s existence.
But even so, despite their countless sacrifices, despite being crowned saviours… what then? With the End so rapidly approaching, what can they still protect? If there is no dawn to rise, if it is obvious that there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, then what was the point of it all?
“Nothing,” Aponia says suddenly. Somehow, Kevin doesn’t feel surprised. “Nothing… at all.”
“…”
Kevin closes his eyes as Aponia opens hers. “Are you afraid?” she asks.
“I am,” he replies truthfully, because Aponia has long received his answer before the question even departed her lips.
Aponia smiles at him, stiff as if it were chiselled into her face. “To be afraid… is to be human. Our emotions will demand that we do something, even if only to prove to ourselves we still have the capacity to act. It is our source of courage, our first step towards deliverance.”
”…”
“Like a moth to a flame, a worm in a hole… you have to chase something, even at a cost.” she murmurs. “Kevin, you understand the meaning of that flame. Are you prepared to burn?”
“Yes,” he replies, hushed, for it would be foolish to say anything else.
“Let’s say if Project STIGMA succeeds,” Raiden Mei begins, speaking in that sharp and steel-edged and hawkish way of hers. “Would that finally bring you peace?”
Kevin meets her gaze. “Even if the Honkai is defeated and humanity is saved, I would not be at peace. There are other wars.”
“Where?” Raiden Mei asks, but she already knows the answer.
The last bubble universe is not one of bygone days or surrogate not-realities. It is one of self-immolation. It is one of fate.
“Kevin,” a voice calls out to him, and it sounds like something painfully familiar. Like the whisper of rain in the first dull autumn evening. Like a hundred glaciers drifting with the windless sea, a thousand rivers merging into one as it rushes towards the ocean. Beneath the ocean there is a tree. On it there is a bird. Over there is the Moon. And then the world pivots on its fulcrum, pulling the sky from zenith to nadir, tearing itself apart at the seams. Gently. Gently. Gently—until what remains at the end of it all is but a little dreg of coal. The last blackened carcass of a common, humble dream.
The coal is warm in his hand when he holds it. And then he hears it. The dream, the peace. Gently, it tells him this:
Brave hero, do not rush. Do not fear this entropy of familiarity. The world has ended many times before, and it has always arisen anew with each break of dawn.
Stalwart hero, what is it that you truly seek? Is it power? Is it vengeance? Can you ever return to the catacombs, and admit that you, too, deserve to rest?
Destined hero, you are not alone. Your legacy dons a crimson cape, an indomitable will, and that blazing hope that you have long left behind.
And that no longer bothers you. Because even as the world burns to dust—you can see your comrades smiling, and the sun crying sepia, and deep within the empty hollows of your heart the only thing you know now, is this:
you have lost the war—
(and everything will be okay.)