Chapter Twelve – Volume Two
The Emperor Returned from Ruin
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1
It took days for Ethan and what remained of his team to return to the organization "Steps Toward the Future."
They were not returning victorious.
They were crawling.
The psychological wounds were heavier than the physical ones.
Marcus's loss was like losing the spine of the entire organization.
Every step was a reminder of failure—of that horrifying scene: half a body, a blue cigarette pack, and the silence of the King of Time, harsher than any scream.
Ethan walked at the front, but he was not leading.
He dragged his feet across the stone of the organization's outer plaza, head lowered, shoulders bent beneath the weight of defeat and humiliation.
In his eyes, Marcus's image flickered and faded, flickered and faded, like a meteor that refused to disappear.
Around him, the remnants of the "family" moved in silence.
Sarah carried a half-empty medical bag, her eyes red but dry—as if tears themselves had run out.
Leo held a fragment of Marcus's shattered armor as though it were a holy relic.
Ellen stared toward the horizon, her silent eyes searching for a purpose she could no longer see.
They all felt they had betrayed Marcus.
That they lived while he died.
And that now they were returning to something that no longer had meaning.
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2
The moment Ethan lifted his eyes, he saw the shadow before he saw the person.
A long shadow stretched across the ground before him—a shadow of someone standing at the entrance of the main building, surrounded by others.
Then Ethan raised his head fully.
And his heart stopped.
Not metaphorically.
It stopped completely, for a full second, as if time itself had decided to grant him one moment to comprehend what he was seeing before life—or what remained of it—flowed back into his veins.
It was Iris.
But not the fifteen-year-old girl he had left behind on that distant day.
Not even the young woman from the image the King of Time had forced into his mind.
She was a woman in her late twenties now, yet her eyes carried an age far older than that.
She wore practical steel-gray combat gear, her long blond hair pulled back tightly.
Her blue eyes—the same eyes—were fixed on him, but there was not a trace of joy, surprise, or nostalgia in them.
She looked at him as one looks at a stranger.
Beside her stood Guardi—the bald Shepherd himself—and three of his men, gripping her arms as if she were a captive.
Yet their gazes were not those of guards holding a prisoner.
They were the gazes of victors displaying their spoils.
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3
Ethan moved.
He moved without thought, without logic, without any regard for reality.
He moved the way an animal does when it sees its offspring in danger—with everything he had left, with every buried year of longing, guilt, and pain.
"Iris!"
The word tore out of him, broken, cracked, as though shouted from beneath rubble.
He ran toward her, arms outstretched, tears—tears that had not fallen for Marcus—now streaming down a face burned with dust and blood.
He wanted to hold her, to touch her, to be sure she was real, that she was here, beside him after fifteen years of separation.
But before his arms could reach her, two things happened at once:
First: Guardi smiled—a wide, bared smile, full of triumph and contempt.
Second: Iris moved.
It was not merely a fast motion.
It was a cold one.
Measured. Precise.
Like a surgeon cutting away dead tissue.
She raised her right hand.
In her palm, a small crystal of dark blue frost formed in an instant, drawn from the air itself, blooming into the shape of a sharp, icy flower.
Then she thrust it into Ethan's chest.
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4
There was no explosion.
There was spread.
A spreading cold that pierced Ethan's armored coat, his skin, the bones of his chest, and reached his heart directly.
Ethan froze in place.
He looked down at his chest, where frost spread like a glass spiderweb, covering half his upper body.
Then he looked at Iris's face.
She stared at him with absolute emptiness.
Not hatred. Not malice. Not even disdain.
Just void.
As though she were looking at a stone in her path.
"Iris…" he whispered, his voice trembling as the cold crawled into his throat.
"What… what did they do to you?"
She answered with lethal honesty:
"I'm brainwashed. Yes."
Ethan fell to his knees, then onto his back, his body shaking as frost crystallized in his veins.
He tried to speak, but his mouth froze from the inside.
"I… I wasn't… like this…"
"I wasn't like this because you never saw me."
Her words were clear, hard, like knives of ice.
"You think brainwashing made me this way? Maybe. But it wasn't enough to make me forget."
She paused, choosing her words carefully.
Words meant to kill him.
"I didn't forget that you never once thought of saving me.
You never even came to see me.
When I ran from the academy, when I came home… no one was there.
Mother and father, as always, were at work.
And you—the one who was supposed to be my support…"
Her eyes lifted toward the gray sky, as if remembering.
"You were in your room. Comfortable.
Without even regret."
Ethan tried to shake his head, but his neck was frozen.
His eyes widened, filled with shock and pain far worse than the cold.
"I nearly died. I survived alone.
And you… never even thought about it."
A single tear—only one—slid down Iris's cheek.
Her voice, however, remained steady, cold, unshaken.
"How many times did I try to forgive you?
I remembered you eating after returning from the ruins…
I sat at the same table, and you didn't care.
You wouldn't even look me in the eyes.
How dare you call yourself my brother?"
She pulled her hand from her jacket pocket.
In her palm lay a small red sphere, the size of a cherry, glowing like frozen blood.
She tossed it to the ground beside Ethan's frozen head.
It bounced once, then settled.
"From today on, I am no sister to this failure."
She turned.
And walked away.
Each of her steps rang in Ethan's ears like a death knell.
Each step reminded him of the depth of his mistake, the depth of his absence, the depth of the void he had left in her life.
And he was powerless even to scream.
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5
After some time—minutes, perhaps hours—Ethan felt warmth slowly returning to his body.
It was not natural warmth.
It was the warmth of rage.
A silent, black rage that melted the ice from within before it melted it from without.
He slowly sat up and looked at the red sphere on the ground.
He picked it up.
It was warm, as though it carried a heartbeat.
Footsteps sounded behind him.
Baranis stood there, watching him with an unreadable expression.
"Everything…" the old man murmured, as if speaking to himself,
"…is built against you.
Every ideal inverted, every hope turned to ash, everyone you love drifting away or dying—or becoming your enemy."
He paused, then looked directly at Ethan.
Baranis's wise eyes glimmered with a strange light—the light of realization.
"Why?" Ethan whispered, his voice hoarse with lingering cold.
"Why is everything against me?"
"Is it the will of fate?" Baranis echoed the question, then slowly shook his head.
"No…
But…"
He stopped again.
Then added, words heavy as mountains:
"What stands against you may be what serves you.
And what seems like defeat… may be the true beginning."
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6
At the same moment, on the other side of the world…
Marcus and the shelter members were out on a routine hunting expedition.
But at the shelter's walls, something very different was happening.
The King of Time was walking.
He did not walk fast, nor slow.
He walked steadily.
Each heavy step shook the ground beneath the guards' feet like the drums of an ending.
The guards tried to resist.
Arrows, bullets, even special abilities were unleashed.
But every attack dissolved before reaching him.
As if he walked through a field of frozen time, where every threat slowed, stopped, then vanished.
There was no battle.
There was a gradual surrender.
Some men fell to their knees in terror before injury ever touched them.
Others threw down their weapons and fled, only to find themselves walking in place, time looping them backward.
And the King of Time smiled.
A gentle smile, outwardly peaceful, yet carrying all the despair in the world.
He smiled as one who feeds on their hopelessness, as one who enjoys the fact that they try.
He passed them all.
Entered the shelter's inner courtyard.
There, at the center, stood Iris.
She was alone.
The other survivors were either fleeing, hiding, or lying on the ground.
But she stood, blue eyes fixed on him—without fear, yet without open defiance.
As if she had been waiting.
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7
The King of Time stopped before her.
He regarded her for a moment, then closed his golden eyes.
"Good…" he whispered, his voice like a soft breeze that pierced all the surrounding noise.
"Good that you came out to me.
You spared me the trouble of searching."
He opened his eyes again.
There was something like satisfaction in them.
Before Iris could speak, before she could even react, he was in front of her.
No one saw how he moved.
He was there—then he was here—without transition.
He raised his hand.
His index finger glimmered with a faint golden aura, like sunlight through morning mist.
He placed it against her forehead.
"Remember…" he whispered, his voice now like a dream.
"Remember everything you lived through.
Remember your goal."
Iris's eyes widened.
Inside her, memories flooded like a raging river:
Years of loneliness, years of searching for her brother, years working under Guardi, years of hatred…
Then the moment she saw him today—the frost, the red sphere…
Everything became clear.
Everything connected.
"Live now…" the King of Time continued, smiling—a real smile this time, strangely gentle.
"…as a Regressor."
He withdrew his finger.
And vanished.
No sound.
No light.
No trace.
Iris remained standing there, eyes closed, her forehead still warm from the golden touch.
And on her lips, a smile began to form.
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8
Far away, Ethan sat on the ground, still holding the red sphere.
Beside him, Baranis stood, staring at the horizon as though seeing something Ethan could not.
"The battle isn't over…" the old man whispered.
"It hasn't even begun."
Ethan finally closed his hand around the red sphere.
He felt its warmth spread through his body,
melting the last traces of frost,
and igniting a new fire in his eyes.
Not rage.
Not hatred.
Not even revenge.
But the fire of resolve.
The resolve that he would not run away again.
That he would face everything—the King of Time, Guardi, his destiny,
and even his sister who had become a stranger.
Because if there was one thing he had learned from all this,
it was that ruin does not end with rebuilding.
It begins when you stand at its center
and decide to become the emperor who returns from it.
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End of Chapter