The skies cracked open above the capital of Aegis Prime. A silence unlike any Raizen had ever heard washed over the city — thick, final, unnatural. From the heart of the World Government's central citadel, a tower of obsidian rose into the sky, pulsing with a cold, violet light. The Void Verdict had awakened.
Raizen stood on the bridge of the Ember Gale, wind snapping his coat, eyes locked on the storm of unmaking that churned on the horizon. "They're not trying to kill us," he said. "They're trying to erase us — everything we are, everything we've done."
The device was unlike any weapon before it — not built to destroy bodies, but memories, records, history itself. Entire islands blinked from the archives, names vanished from books, languages unraveled into static. The Void Verdict didn't just silence voices — it rewrote the past to favor the powerful.
In the command center of the citadel, the Emperor's Hand stood beside the control core, eyes gleaming with cruel serenity. "Let the world forget its sins," he whispered. "Let it remember only our order."
Raizen's crew launched an assault, storming Aegis Prime in waves of fire and defiance. Lyra led the Ember Order's strike teams through collapsing archives, Rook hacked the control systems with bloodied fingers, and Jin faced the army of erasure-soldiers, each more memory than man.
But at the heart of the tower, Raizen found himself alone.
He faced the Verdict's core — a shimmering sphere of anti-light, pulsing like a second sun. And guarding it, cloaked in shadow and authority, was the Emperor's Hand.
"You fight to preserve a truth that breaks people," the Hand said. "We offer peace — forgetfulness. Mercy."
Raizen drew his blade, voice steady. "Peace without truth is slavery."
Their battle was brutal, each clash of blade and will threatening to fracture the tower itself. At last, Raizen plunged his sword into the Verdict's nexus — not to destroy it, but to overwrite it.
He poured into it every memory the world had tried to erase: the fallen soldiers of the Ancient Kingdom, the burned maps of lost islands, the names of rebels who had no graves.
The Verdict erupted.
Not with silence, but with a scream of remembrance — a storm of forgotten truths sweeping across the world.
The World Government's lie-shrouded grip trembled.
Raizen collapsed amidst the wreckage, eyes wide as whispers of the past flooded back into the world.
The Void had passed its verdict — but the world had chosen to remember.
END OF CHAPTER10