Lily ate, she slept clinging to Eva, but her eyes—now painfully aware—would dart to Wolfen and then skitter away, filled with a primal, animal fear. She didn't see the man who carried her from fire. She saw whatever had looked back at her from the depths of her own shattered mind during those seven minutes. She hid behind Eva, a silent, trembling indictment.
Wolfen saw it. He didn't react. He just kept staring into the fire, but the flames didn't reflect in his eyes anymore. They just died in the flat, gold surface.
"I'm leaving," he said, his voice toneless. "You're together. Lily's back. Find a coast. A valley. Hide. Be… safe."
The word sounded foreign in his mouth.
The reaction was instant and vehement.
"Leaving? Now?" Leo surged to his feet. "After all this? That's your plan?"
"Your strategic assessment is flawed," Jordan stated, though his voice lacked its usual certainty. "Our survival probability decreases by—"
Derek cut him off, stepping forward. "We just got to Vietnam! We just found her! You can't just walk away!"
Maya, her own monster quieted by the lingering echo of Wolfen's, just watched him with a deep, sad understanding. "He already is," she whispered.
Eva stood up, gently disentangling Lily's grip. She walked around the fire until she stood in front of him, blocking his view of the flames. "Why?"
He finally looked up at her. Not through her, but at her. The emptiness in his gaze was worse than any rage. "I don't deserve to be with you."
The statement hung, simple and devastating.
"What?" Derek breathed.
"I am a murderer," Wolfen said, the word clinical, clean. "It's the only thing I've ever been truly good at. It's the only thing I know how to be. You should find a place. Stay there. Be safe. That's a good story. It's not mine."
He moved to stand. Leo was faster. He grabbed Wolfen's wrist, his biopolymer-enhanced grip like a steel vice. "You don't get to decide that for us, you ancient bastard. Not after sixty-two years."
Sixty-two years. The number hung in the air, a lifetime. They had been teenagers when the world ended. Now they were old, yet not aged, their shared history a scar that ran deeper than blood.
Wolfen didn't pull away. He just stood there, letting Leo hold him, his eyes locked on the bigger man's. There was no challenge in them. Only a profound, weary distance.
"Later, dude," Wolfen said, the casual, modern slang absurd and heartbreaking coming from his ancient mouth.
"No," Derek said, his voice cracking. "You said you were created by Absolute-Five to destroy the Architects. We can help. We will help."
"Help?" A flicker of something—pity, maybe—crossed Wolfen's face. "You think this is a fight? You can't help. You'll suffer in ways your minds can't even conceive yet. Imagine your worst memory from the Labs. Now imagine it lasting for centuries, carved into your bones, the screams of everyone you failed to save playing on a loop in the silence. That's not suffering. That's just… Tuesday for me.You have no idea what that means. You think it's fighting monsters? It's becoming one. It's walking into rooms where they've turned children into furniture, and having to burn it all down—the room, the children, the memory of what they were. It's looking into the eyes of something that used to be a person begging for death, and being the one who has to grant it, over and over, until mercy feels like the worst sin of all."
He made them see it. Not with images, but with the bleak certainty in his voice. He made them feel the weight of millennia of violence, the soul-eroding grind of a war with no end, the absolute loneliness of being a weapon that outlived its maker and its purpose.
Their eyes were all on him now, the fear Lily felt mirrored in their own hearts. Not fear of him, but fear for him, and for the abyss he was describing.
"I have killed thousands," he stated, no pride, no shame. "Before I met you, and after. I do not consider any of you friends." He let the words land, watching the flinch in Derek's eyes, the hurt in Leo's grip. "I never have. Now. Let me go, Leo. Or else."
The 'or else' wasn't a threat of violence. It was a promise of a truth so ugly it would poison whatever was left between them.
Then Eva slapped him.
The sound was sharp, final in the clearing. It wasn't a rage-filled blow; it was an act of pure, frustrated grief. "The hell do you think you are?" she hissed, tears of anger brimming in her eyes. "You don't get to define what we are to you! You don't get to decide you're just a murderer and walk away!"
For a second, something in his blank façade cracked. A flicker of pain, raw and human. "I… am a murderer, Eva," he said, his voice softer now, ragged at the edges. "I could kill any one of you. Sure, you and Maya are stronger than me now, in raw power. But you're all… unexperienced. And I am too experienced for you. I've forgotten more ways to end a life than you'll ever learn. Staying with me isn't protection. It's a death sentence waiting for the right day."
He looked at each of them—Leo's stubborn grip, Derek's shattered hope, Jordan's analytical confusion, Maya's sorrowful understanding, Eva's furious love. He saw the family he had unwillingly built over six decades of shared hell.
It was the very reason he had to go.
With a gentle, irresistible twist, he freed his wrist from Leo's grasp. He didn't shove, didn't fight. He just… disengaged. He took the small comms device from his pocket—the link to Architect 328—and turned.
Without another word, he walked into the wall of jungle darkness. He didn't vanish with a flash or a teleport. He just stepped into the shadows and was consumed by them, the night swallowing the shape of the man who had been their constant, their tormentor, and their only hope for sixty-two years.
The fire seemed to dim. The silence he left behind was heavier than any they had known. Lily stopped trembling and just stared at the spot where he'd vanished, as if she alone could still see the ghost of the monster who had, with brutal mercy, given her back her soul.