The light gradually faded, revealing a devastated expanse of nothingness. The original structure of the dream had been almost completely destroyed, leaving only basic streams of abstract information shifting and flowing through the void like scorched earth after a war.
"Cha!"
Committed as ever to playing his role to the very end, Ian made Tiga's enormous body sway slightly. The energy core on his chest dimmed, its warning light slowing to a sluggish blink.
Maintaining such an intense battle and unleashing that finishing move really 'had' consumed a considerable amount of power from his imagined body, though his current exhaustion was roughly thirty percent real and seventy percent acting.
"Ian, Ultraman Tiga, has saved humanity once again. Yay!"
He slowly lowered his head to look at his still-clenched left hand.
Lina was curled up in his palm, her face deathly pale. The earth-shattering battle she had just witnessed had left her badly shaken. Yet beneath the fear in her eyes was the dazed look of someone who had somehow survived a catastrophe, and an indescribably complicated emotion as she stared up at the Giant of Light.
"Who... are you?" Lina couldn't make sense of him at all.
"Just a passing Super Ultraman."
Tiga carefully opened his hand, gently placing Lina on a relatively stable fragment of the shattered dream. As he did, his fifty-meter-tall body began to glow with a soft radiance, rapidly shrinking and fading. A few seconds later, the light disappeared completely to reveal Ian Prince once more, the cold, handsome boy in black robes.
His face was slightly paler than before and his breathing was a bit heavier, but his eyes remained clear and calm.
"Don't celebrate yet. You're actually still in pretty bad shape, and even I'll need to put some effort into fixing this."
Ian walked over, crouched in front of Lina, and carefully examined her condition.
The signs of mutation on her body, the scales, the gill-like slits, and the faint black patterns writhing beneath her skin, hadn't vanished with the destruction of Cthulhu's Dream Incarnation. They were still there, merely faded, the writhing beneath her skin slowed as though the corruption had lost its vitality and settled into stubborn scars.
Her mind had regained its clarity, but the damage Cthulhu had inflicted on her soul and body remained.
Ian studied the marks covering Lina, then looked at her face. She bore a slight resemblance to another Lina from his memories, a girl who, at a critical moment, had passed her light on to a child.
"Hmm... Lina... With a name like that, I guess I really was destined to turn into Tiga," Ian muttered completely out of nowhere.
What a strange world. Life really did work in mysterious ways.
Lina stared blankly at him, having absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Destined to become Tiga? Who was Tiga? Was that the name of the Giant of Light from earlier? And what did any of that have to do with her name?
"Don't think about it," Ian said, casually waving a hand at her confused expression. "You don't need to understand."
He stood up, turning his sharp gaze toward the stubborn traces of corruption still clinging to her body. "You only need to know one thing..."
He paused, the corner of his mouth curving into a subtle, mischievous smirk.
"I, Ian Prince, or rather, Ian, Ultraman Tiga…" He deliberately emphasized the title as though claiming ownership of it. "...can't just 'borrow' a little light from dying children."
His eyes deepened as if looking past the surface of reality to something far more fundamental. "The darkness accumulated inside an adult's heart... I can 'borrow' that too."
Under Lina's increasingly confused, and slightly uneasy, gaze, Ian raised his right hand again. This time, however, what gathered in his palm wasn't the warm, blazing golden radiance filled with hope.
Instead, it was something deep and restrained. Something that seemed capable of swallowing all light.
Pure darkness.
"Watch this..."
Ian gave a low shout and spread his fingers toward the faded traces of corruption covering her body, then suddenly clenched his hand as if grabbing them from afar.
"Dark Tiga - Conversion!"
Imagination really was omnipotent.
At Ian's command, the pure darkness gathered in his palm suddenly seemed to come alive. Countless black threads of energy, each fine as a strand of hair, yet impossibly tough, shot forward like predators locked onto prey. They precisely wrapped around every remaining trace of corruption on Lina's spiritual projection: the faded scales, the shriveled gill slits, and the black patterns still writhing beneath her skin. Every manifestation of Cthulhu's corruption was tightly bound by those black threads.
"Mmgh...!" Lina groaned.
A strange sensation spread wherever the threads touched. It wasn't painful so much as freezing cold, as though something inside her were being peeled away and sucked out.
She could see the black threads glowing faintly as the wrapped traces of corruption visibly shifted. Their faded colors grew darker and more concentrated, as if their fundamental essence were being forcibly extracted.
This wasn't purification, nor was it dispelling the corruption.
This was plunder.
Ian was using his ridiculous imagination and deep understanding of the concept of Tiga to forcibly redefine and transform the negative, maddening corruption left behind by Cthulhu.
And then, he absorbed it into himself.
He intended to turn that darkness into his own power, just like Dark Tiga, who could absorb an enemy's attacks and negative energy to strengthen himself.
Of course, the process was extremely dangerous. Cthulhu's corruption was filled with madness and uncontrollable influences; absorbing it directly would be no different from setting himself on fire.
But Ian wasn't absorbing it blindly. The black energy threads incorporated his understanding of several aspects of the Raven's power, transformation, containment, fate, and other related concepts, functioning in practice like an extremely precise filter and converter. He stripped away the harmful will and information contained within the corruption first, absorbing only the pure essence of its highly concentrated negative energy.
"Dark Tiga, lend me your power!"
As the corruption was extracted, Lina immediately felt her body lighten. The places that had constantly ached with a cold, distorted sensation rapidly stopped hurting, and the unnatural feelings throughout her body began to recede.
The phantom scales covering her skin gradually disappeared, the gill-like slits smoothed over, and the black patterns beneath her skin faded like old ink until they vanished entirely.
At the same time, Lina saw something astonishing happening to Ian.
As more of the converted darkness flowed into him through the black threads, his already pale complexion took on an unhealthy grayish cast, and dark currents seemed to stir deep within his cold eyes.
Even more obvious was the change around his body: a thin but unmistakable layer of darkness, almost like liquid shadow, began flowing over his skin and outlining his figure.
His entire presence shifted with it. The fiery, heroic aura he possessed while transformed into Tiga faded away, replaced by something deeper and quieter, an oppressive majesty that seemed capable of swallowing everything around him.
"What's happening to you?" Lina asked anxiously.
Ian didn't answer.
At last, the final stubborn trace of corruption was stripped from Lina and absorbed, the black energy threads withdrawing instantly into Ian's palm.
Lina staggered slightly before catching herself. She looked down at her body, her skin was smooth, and every abnormality was gone. Aside from some lingering weakness and the cold memories buried deep within her soul, her spiritual form had completely returned to human. If anything, she felt even cleaner than she had before the corruption, as though every last trace of filth had been scrubbed away.
Ian, meanwhile, stood quietly with his eyes closed. The thin layer of darkness covering his body slowly seeped inward and vanished. When he opened his eyes again, they had returned to their usual cold calmness, though if one looked closely, they seemed slightly deeper and darker than before, almost as though they could pull a person's gaze into them.
He slowly exhaled a breath carrying a faint chill, then rolled his wrist.
"Hmm. The quality's decent. Too many impurities, though. Annoying to process."
He sounded like he was reviewing an ingredient.
Lina stared at him in disbelief, looking down at her restored hands before turning back to him. Her voice trembled with shock and gratitude. "You... absorbed the corruption from my body? Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," Ian said, glancing at her. "This much darkness isn't enough to affect me. At most, you could say I had an extra snack."
He paused, studying her still-weakened spiritual form and the complicated mix of gratitude, confusion, and concern in her eyes. "The corruption is gone, but your soul was weakened by it. Your connection to Cthulhu has been severed, but it left scars behind. Empty spaces, too."
Ian raised his hand again. This time, neither golden light nor black darkness gathered at his fingertips. Instead, a subdued silver-gray radiance appeared, steady and restrained, carrying the faint aura of time and premonition.
Pure Raven power.
"As promised, and also to make sure something like that can't latch onto you again..." Ian gently touched a fingertip to Lina's forehead. "From now on, you are a Seer of the Raven."
The silver-gray light flowed gently but firmly into Lina's soul core, constructing a new, stable foundation within her consciousness that was marked by the Raven and capable of supporting its power. This time, there was no forced awakening or violent extraction, only a gentle bestowal, a connection.
Lina felt a cold, orderly power flow into her weakened soul. It was vast, but unlike Cthulhu's influence, there was no madness in it. It felt like fresh water pouring over parched earth, rapidly filling and soothing the empty spaces and scars left behind by the corruption.
At the same time, a completely new perception slowly unfolded within her mind. She could faintly sense the flow of time, fragments of possibilities, shadows of things that had not yet happened. And somewhere deep within her soul, she felt a strange, stable connection forming between herself and the mysterious boy standing before her, resembling the bond between apprentice and mentor.
"Raven... Raven?" Lina murmured, feeling the unfamiliar power within her as she stared at Ian with awe and disbelief.
Ian withdrew his hand and nodded. "That should do it. Your soul will need time to adapt and recover."
He turned toward the devastated remains of the dream. "Now we get out of this place for good. I'll send you back."
The dream had become catastrophically unstable after the repeated battles, leaving almost nothing except the most basic streams of information.
Ian extended both hands. A point of pure golden light appeared in his left palm, while a thread of deep darkness gathered in his right. Then he slowly brought his hands together.
Light and darkness touched, collided, and under the control and mediation of the Raven's power, the two opposing forces reached an incredibly delicate, and dangerous, equilibrium.
A new kind of energy emerged, neither pure light nor pure darkness: a silver-gray power carrying the properties of Order, Boundary Breaking, and Time Guidance erupted from between Ian's joined palms.
"Light and darkness as the guide. Raven at the helm…" Ian's eyes sharpened. "Dream Corridor, open!"
The silver-gray energy transformed into a spiraling beam and slammed into the weakest point of the shattered dream, the place most likely to still connect with reality. A doorway slowly opened: stable, clear, and filled with the unmistakable presence of the real world.
Beyond the silver-gray portal, Ian could see the trembling dark-silver barrier, Kag's anxious face, and Saruman's solemn, exhausted expression. Right now, that sight looked like a beacon of hope.
"Go!"
Ian didn't hesitate. He grabbed Lina, who was still distracted by the unfamiliar sensations of her newly awakened power, and leaped straight through the glowing portal.
Crossing it felt completely different from moving through the dream. This was unmistakably a return, like a diver finally breaking through the surface of the water to breathe fresh air again.
The chaotic energy currents, maddening whispers, and distorted scenery rapidly fell away, replaced by the familiar texture of reality, still oppressive, still dangerous, but stable.
There was a flash of light. Deep within Cthulhu's domain, Ian and Lina opened their eyes, their consciousness returning to the small, fragile dark-silver barrier that the elderly Saruman was struggling to maintain.
"Lina!!"
Kag reacted first. The moment he saw her standing there completely unharmed, every horrifying trace of mutation gone and color returning to her face, his expression lit up. The man nearly jumped for joy, rushing forward only to stop abruptly several steps away, staring at Lina cautiously as though afraid this impossibly perfect sight might turn out to be an illusion.
At that moment, Saruman's exhausted expression suddenly brightened. "It worked! History changed!"
He could clearly sense that Lina's soul was completely different now. The weakness, chaos, and instability caused by the madness were gone, replaced by a faint but exceptionally pure and stable new aura carrying a strange rhythm of time and prophecy.
History had already been rewritten.
(End of Chapter)
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