Chapter 166
- Kaysi -
Heat spread throughout my body down to my legs.
Josh reached me—
And this time the demon didn't bend the fire.
This time, it made its mark. Cutting into his shoulder. Black blood spilling out. We finally injured him.
For real this time.
He retaliated instantly, sending Micah, who was ready for the second blow, behind Josh, who was knocked backwards.
She skipped ten feet away and collapsed.
Unmoving.
James tried to reach her—
His legs aged mid-step. Muscles weakened for a second, then restored as he knelt by her.
Evan staggered to me and slid to the ground, holding my head upward in his lap.
"Evan," I whispered with what breath I had left, feeling blood fill my lungs from a wound I don't remember from long ago.
"Sh... Save your strength, Kaysi," he whispered.
I shook my head. "No."
My head is pounding, and my ribs were the worst wound of them all, yet I don't remember any of it.
"This pain must have been what erased my memories," I whispered.
Evan's face twisted in sorrow. He knew what had happened, as I had thought before. That didn't matter right now.
"The variants and how he fights—he can only take one of us on at a time. His power is limited to how many people he can freeze and for how long."
Blood spilled from my mouth as I coughed.
The demon smiled as he turned back to Becky.
Evan locked eyes with Becky. "BECKY," Evan shouted, "he has a limit to how long his time power works and how many people he can control!"
"You think that's enough? You can stabilize moments and fractures, but can you stabilize death?
Josh's voice came out low. "Where she can't fight, I will be her strength. BECKY, GET TO KAYSI!"
Josh slid under the ice swords from the Becky variants, destroying them before they could lay a hand on her.
Becky moved behind Josh as they crossed paths. Josh kept the hits going while Becky slipped through the cracks in his army.
Becky dropped to her knees by me, pressing her hand to my abdomen.
Evan moved her hand to my chest. "If you can only heal one area at a time, this is what almost killed her before."
Becky jerked and gave him a look that said she believed him but distrusted him.
I don't understand whether Becky knew the same secret Evan kept from me.
The pain of my past made it unbearable to think; it was eating away at my life force fast. I could barely stay conscious right now.
"Becky, you know, don't you? What this wound of my past is—the one that is killing me now.
Both of you know who caused this pain, the one who took my memories from me—don't you?"
Becky had no words and just looked away.
But my words caused Josh to look back at that moment. His face filled with grief and shock.
"I see it in your eyes." I inhaled the best I could. "This pain is by far worse than I have ever experienced. And now I am barely alive. Josh, your eyes tell me all I know as well. It was you, wasn't it?"
James and Micah looked away in that moment.
"It hurts, doesn't it, child? Pain is a great reminder." The demon smiled.
The demon snapped his fingers, and I was in his arms, barely able to stand.
"How well do you know your friends truly, or should I say traitors?" He whispered in my ear.
The sound made a sick feeling in my hollow stomach.
"Becky Flatter, Evan and Josh Hoshi, Micah Monk, and James Tenshi." He laughed. "However, will you stand when your anchor and walls are torn down?"
The demon placed his hand on my head, and his claws sank into my skull. I was helpless, feeling more blood run down from the crown of my head.
"My gift to you. I restore to you what has been stolen from you, my child."
He threw me down to the ground.
My head spun, my mind collapsed, and my body was being unraveled and rewritten. I couldn't control the power spilling out from within me.
"You play with time, treating it like a toy, a game. Let me show you what happens when the toys no longer play your games," he snarled.
My memories came flooding in. I heard everything, I saw everything, and I knew everything about who I was and what had happened to me. I sat there curled into a ball, holding my head as the painful memories bashed into my soul.
Dark energy was leaking out of me. Not in my control, something entirely.
"Josh"—the name was a choked sound, thick with agony. "You didn't just take things. You annihilated my world. My home, my peace, everything I cared about... and you just kept going. My mother... she couldn't bear the weight of what you did, the helplessness you inflicted. You stripped everything away, piece by piece, from me!"
"He dropped to his knees. "I know I... I am sorry, Kaysi. We should have said something sooner, but I was hoping you could see me—"
"ENOUGH. I finally see you as the monster you really are, that tore everything away from me."
"And all of you backed him up. Protected him even." Looked at the eyes of all my once-called friends.
I felt the darkness consuming me, drowning me. I could barely see or feel what was right or wrong anymore.
"How can any of you call yourselves my... friends? It was all a lie. If even one of you had the spine to look me in the eye and say something—anything—then maybe..."
My head ached again.
"Agh! This demon burnt this nightmare back into my mind as it replayed over and over, and I am grateful for the fire that lights the truth you all hid from me. I finally found what you cowards stripped away from me. I'm not your shadow anymore! He gave me back my IDENTITY!"
Energy blasts from my body. Darkness vining out and grabbing hold of all the treacherous friends I thought I once held dear.
The demon had his hand on my shoulder. I felt his energy pouring into me.
The veins of darkness absorbed each of their powers, reclaiming the divine gifts they no longer deserved.
"You dare call yourselves Waymakers, holy peacekeepers?"
I said, my voice trembling.
"All of you, self-proclaimed saviors of humanity, while your hands are still stained with the blood of my existence. Tell me… how does it feel to play God while living in defiance of everything He commanded us to be? How many sins have you buried beneath your righteousness? How many shattered souls did you leave behind while pretending you were saving the world?"
— Evan POV —
I couldn't reach her anymore.
There was nothing left to reason with.
Her heart… it was gone. Not broken—consumed and swallowed whole by something darker than grief.
This demon isn't just hurting her. He's reaching inside her and rewriting her very soul—peeling apart the foundation of who she is and rebuilding it in his image.
And I can only watch.
I remember her in the Abyss—fractured, yes, drowning in pain, but still herself. Even after she learned what Josh had done… even after everything collapsed around her… There was still light in her eyes.
This is different.
I'm standing here, watching her disappear all over again—and I'm powerless to stop it.
"Becky!" I gasped, the storm swallowing my voice as our strength bled away. "I'll give you the truth, all of it—I swear. But please, just trust me now. This isn't her. When she remembered the first time, she never... acted like this!"
"You're telling me she got her memory back before!? Evan, I warned you and Josh to tell her!"
"I know, I know," I rasped, the words breaking in my throat. "But her gift is rotting—her light is literally draining the life out of us. We have to stop her! She begged me... before the memories slipped away, she clawed at me and begged me not to let her lose herself. And now we're both watching it just happen."
I choked back a sob, my voice thick with a jagged mix of agony and self-loathing. "Activate... emergency Abyss."
It was our final, haunting fail-safe and hollow mercy. To save us from death or the rot of evil, the Abyss emergency plan rewinds time to before the disaster struck. We get to live, but at a staggering cost: our memories will be wiped clean. We'll be safe, but she'll be left alone in the silence, carrying the torment of everything we've forgotten so that we could survive.
"BECKY!!!" James's voice tore through the air, a raw, ragged scream of pure terror.
"Micah's heart... It's stopped! I'm losing her, and I'm slipping too—I can't hold on much longer!"
We watched helplessly as Kaysi walked over to Josh.
"An eye for an eye," she wheezed, blood bubbling from her lips and her lungs. "You slaughtered my mother... and now, I'm giving you back the heartache left in me."
She lunged, burying the steel deep in his chest. It was a common, jagged blade—not her sacred Crane. She was too corrupted, too drowned in hate, for the holy weapon to answer her call. As the metal bit into him, the last spark of her old self flickered and went cold.
"JOSH!" Becky's scream shattered the air.
"I understand," Becky cried. "Evan, this is the only way! I'll shield your mind from the erase—find her, tell her everything!"
"I will, I promise!"
A shard of rogue ice tore through my throat. I hit the ground, my life bleeding out into the frost.
Through a blur of tears, Becky unleashed a cataclysm. A blinding wave of ice surged outward, burying us all in a tomb of winter. Kaysi froze mid-motion, her corruption halted.
Becky's nose bled from the strain.
"Do you see!?" The demon growled, looming over the carnage. "This is what happens when you leave an anomaly run free!"
Becky didn't flinch. Her hands were caked in frost, her lips were a deathly purple, and her hair had turned bone-white. The Eternity ice flowed through her veins, glowing a cold blue—she was burning out her soul to hold the world together.
Time skipped, and she was suddenly behind the demon. She drove a blade of jagged ice into the demon's chest and twisted. Black blood hissed against the frost. She learned from the variants.
"I may be an anomaly," she hissed, her voice cracking. A glitch in your design of the universe, but I will stitch this world back together until my very last breath."
He began to dissolve into the shadows. "This is not the conclusion of this story. I will return.
As he vanished, Becky stumbled toward Kaysi's frozen statue. "I wasn't strong enough to save everyone with him here," she rasped. "I had to clear the way first."
She reached out, taking Kaysi's hand. "I'll fix this, I promise. But I have to take everything from you again."
Kaysi was no longer under the demon's control.
The demon's grip broke; Kaysi was herself once more. She nodded, her breath hitching in the frozen air as she collapsed into Becky's shoulder, sobbing.
"I'm so sorry," Kaysi choked out. "Fix it, Beck. Save us."
Hearing that name—Beck—for the first time in three years... it was the last thing I felt before the pain in Becky's eyes faded into the black as I passed out.
— Becky —
The world lurched—and then the screaming wind was gone.
The cold, the blood, the ruin… all of it vanished as if it had never existed.
We were standing on the bridge again.
No demon.
No wounds.
No anguish echoing in the air.
The timeline had reset.
The trauma had been erased from everyone's minds but mine.
Evan died the moment before I pulled us back. His death, anchored in the reset, bound him to the rewind rather than to my protection. He's alive now—but he's a blank slate. Our pact is gone, unraveled by the very power meant to save us.
And Kaysi…
She's left with nothing but a faint, phantom instinct to trust him.
I don't know what to do.
Do I tell them the truth and risk reopening the darkness that nearly consumed her? Or do I stay silent and let him stumble toward the answers on his own?
If the enemy finds her first—if someone else restores her memories before we're ready—her already fractured spirit might finally shatter beyond repair.
But I can't decide that now.
The weight of two worlds presses against my chest—one that remembers and one that doesn't.
And as the bridge stands calm and untouched beneath a sky that has no memory of what it survived…
I collapse into the silence of a world that has no idea it was saved.