The park was silent. The city’s electrical hum had died, replaced by a pressure in the air that felt like the moment before a massive thunderstorm. But there was no rain—only light. A pillar of silver, cold and absolute, descended from the center of the moon, striking the center of the park's lake.
Asuna stood in the center of the path, her form now little more than a shimmering outline. The green-and-blue FamilyMart vest she had insisted on wearing sat crumpled on the grass; it had fallen right through her.
"It is time," she whispered. Her voice didn't sound like it came from her throat anymore; it sounded like it was coming from the wind itself.
"No!" Kazuto rushed forward, his boots skidding on the gravel. He tried to grab her, but his hands passed through her shoulders as if he were trying to embrace a cloud of steam. "I’m not letting you go! Not twice! I remember now, Kaguya! I remember the fire! I remember the mountain!"
She turned to him, and for the first time, her eyes weren't just silver—they were a map of the cosmos. "Then you remember why I have to go. To stay any longer is to cease to exist entirely. If I stay, there will be no soul left to find you in the next life."
She began to drift upward, her feet leaving the ground. As she rose, her body started to flake away. It wasn't painful; it was quiet. Tiny, glowing grains of stardust drifted from her skin, floating upward like embers from a fire.
"I am the Princess of the Lunar Capital," she said, her voice echoing with a thousand years of sorrow. "And you are the man who burned immortality because a world without me wasn't worth living in forever. You are my Emperor. My Kazuto."
With a roar of defiance, Kazuto jumped, catching a park bench and lunging toward her. For a miraculous, fleeting second, his sheer willpower allowed his hands to solidify against her cheeks. He pulled her down, his fingers digging into the fading stardust of her skin.
He kissed her.
It was a kiss that tasted of salt, cold moonlight, and a thousand years of unspoken letters. It was a kiss that defied the celestial embassy and the laws of physics. For that one second, she was solid. She was warm. She was his.
But as they pulled apart, the light intensified. Asuna’s face began to dissolve into a cloud of brilliant white dust.
"I’m disappearing, Kazuto," she sobbed, her tears turning into tiny glowing pearls that floated away before they could hit the ground. "I can't feel my hands... I'm forgetting... the store... the cats... the movies..."
"Don't forget me!" Kazuto screamed, reaching out as her torso vanished into a swirl of light. "Find me! Find the mountain!"
"I will... find the smoke..." her voice was a fading echo. "Find me... where the sky... meets the earth..."
With a final, blinding flash that turned the night into day, the pillar of light snapped back toward the moon. The pressure in the air vanished. The streetlights flickered back to life, buzzing with a mundane, yellow glow.
Kazuto fell to his knees on the gravel. His hands were empty. All that remained of Asuna was a faint, shimmering dust on his palms that smelled faintly of cherry blossoms and cold winter air.
He looked up at the moon, which had returned to its normal, distant size. He was a college student again. He was a part-timer. He was a man standing alone in a park.
He closed his eyes and pressed his dust-covered palms to his chest. "I’m coming for you," he whispered to the silence. "Wait for me."
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and then Add to home screen.