Pain didn't come in sentences.
It came in inventory.
Thigh: hot, pulsing, wet—like the rusted slash had turned his leg into a mouth and it wouldn't stop trying to speak.
Shoulder: wrong. Not just hurt—misplaced, half-dislocated, half convinced it belonged to someone else now.
Back: shallow cuts that flared every time he breathed, like his skin had decided to keep a tally.
Wrist: cuffed. Chain biting. A little metal reminder that even his flinches weren't fully his anymore.
Zidane blinked into lantern light and tried to remember how he'd gotten here.
The answer was: by being useful.
He lay at the foot of the bone-cage stairs, sprawled like something dropped and forgotten. The iron bars behind him held piles—too many—stacked like the castle kept receipts. A pantry of bone. A ledger of bodies nobody admitted existed.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The blood looked black in the lantern glow, like the light didn't want responsibility for it.
His leg trembled once—just a single shiver of defiance—then went still.
"…Okay," he thought, faint and distant. "That's new."
Down the corridor, the skeleton swarm wandered off.
Not defeated. Not driven back. Just… bored. Hunger didn't stop; it just drifted toward easier meals once you stopped moving.
Their clicking faded softer and softer, receding like dogs leaving a carcass because it didn't kick anymore.
Zidane tried to inhale.
His ribs punished him for the attempt.
He tried to laugh—because that was what he did when he didn't know what else to do—and the sound turned into a cough that tasted like copper and disappointment.
He stared at the lantern flame like it was a god he didn't trust.
Don't pass out. Don't—
His cuff chain ticked against stone when his hand twitched.
A pathetic little jingle, proud to still exist.
And hanging off that chain—hooked to his collar like a charm on a curse—was the brass tag.
He didn't need to look. He'd memorized it the way you memorized a bruise.
50,000 GIL.
Not a name. Not a person. A debt with a pulse.
Useful.
That word floated up from somewhere deep in his life and landed on his chest like a hand.
His thoughts started slipping. Not sleep. Not peace. Just that slow, mean drowning where your body got tired of negotiating.
He was going to die in a basement no one would admit existed, and the only proof he'd been here would be a number stamped into metal.
The silence stretched.
Lantern buzz. Mist breath. The faint wet whisper of fog curling along the floor like it owned the place.
Then—
A scrape.
Small. Stubborn.
Not bone.
Not blade.
Something dragged itself into the edge of the lantern glow.
Chef hat first. Crooked. Dusty. Damp. Like it had been thrown down a staircase by God personally.
Quina.
Not waddling.
Crawling.
It moved like it had been battered and decided that wasn't a reason to stop.
Quina reached Zidane's boot, paused, and looked up at him with calm eyes that did not understand panic. Eyes that looked at the world the way hunger looked at a meal: patient, inevitable.
"Friend," Quina said softly.
Zidane's mouth tried to grin out of habit. It failed. Tried again. Found something jagged.
"…Quina?" he rasped, like the sound of the name might keep him from dissolving.
Quina climbed onto him—tiny hands on torn fabric, knees pressing his ribs—settling right over his chest like it was trying to keep his heart from escaping.
Warmth spread under that small weight.
Real warmth.
Zidane's eyes stung.
He told himself it was the Mist.
Quina leaned closer, hat brim brushing Zidane's forehead with absurd intimacy—like a funeral blessing performed by a chef.
"Friend dying," Quina said, polite as ever. Like it was commenting on the weather.
Zidane swallowed.
It hurt.
"No," he whispered, and the lie came out automatic. "I'm— I'm just… taking a nap… aggressively."
Quina blinked.
"Friend lies."
A laugh tried to happen. It became a cough. Blood spotted his lip.
Zidane's free hand lifted, barely, and touched Quina's sleeve—not a grip. A check for reality. A desperate little test.
"Don't…" he breathed. "Don't leave."
Quina stared at him for a long, calm second, and then lowered its head so the hat brim pressed to Zidane's brow again.
"Stay," it said.
Not a promise.
A fact.
Then Quina pulled back.
Its mouth opened—not threat-wide, but wrong-wide. Like a door unlatching.
The air changed.
The lantern light sharpened. The Mist on the floor stirred, curling tighter as if it had suddenly smelled something delicious. Zidane felt pressure behind his ribs—not pain, not exactly—something deeper.
Like a door in his blood being leaned on from the inside.
Heat poured into him.
Not normal heat.
Engine-room heat. The kind that kept you alive in metal guts and forgotten corners. It surged through him with brutal, confident hunger, dragging something with it—
Not Trance yet.
The ignition.
Quina's hands planted on Zidane's chest like a signature at the bottom of a contract.
"Hunger," Quina said.
Then, without pause:
"Survival."
Two words like coins on a table.
No romance. No speeches.
Just terms.
Quina's gaze didn't wobble.
"Let me," it said, choosing the simplest shape of the truth, "in."
Zidane's brain threw up jokes like flares. None of them landed.
He was too weak to perform. Too weak to lie pretty.
So he did the only honest thing he had left.
"…Okay," he whispered.
The word barely existed.
Quina leaned in.
The contact was soft. Ridiculous. Tender in a place that didn't deserve tenderness.
And then—
Quina stopped being "in front of him."
Quina became inside him.
Bright, threadlike aether—pink-white strands—broke out of Quina's small body and sank into Zidane's chest as if he was swallowing light through his skin.
The chef hat slipped off and landed beside them with a quiet, heartbreaking flop.
Just cloth now.
For one terrifying half-second, Zidane's chest went still.
His heartbeat stuttered.
Stopped.
The world went quiet inside him—too quiet.
Then a new beat slammed into place.
Not delicate.
Not human-gentle.
A strong, steady thump like a piston catching.
Like an engine deciding it was going to run whether the body liked it or not.
THUMM.
Zidane's back arched.
His breath jerked.
The pain didn't vanish—it got shoved behind glass. Still there, still real, but muffled. Like suffering had been told to wait its turn.
He snapped upright like a puppet yanked cruelly.
Too fast.
His cuff chain rattled hard enough to sound like laughter.
His grin came back fast and wrong, like it had been waiting behind his teeth.
Heat flooded him—bright, predatory, too clean.
Trance didn't feel like power.
It felt like permission.
A skeleton stepped back into the chamber mouth, drawn by blood and mana and the audacity of something refusing to die where it was told.
Its rusted blade dragged sparks on stone.
Zidane turned his head slowly.
The smile on him wasn't cute anymore. It wasn't charming.
It was bright and feral.
"Hey," Zidane said warmly, like this was friendly greeting and not the start of a massacre.
Light condensed along his forearms and knuckles—short, vicious aether-blades, crystallized violence. Not metal. Not glass. Something meaner.
The skeleton lunged.
Zidane simply wasn't there anymore.
One heartbeat—gone.
The next—he was beside it, low and close, like a rumor slipping under a door.
He cut.
The Mist-thread holding the skeleton together snapped like cheap twine. Bones scattered across stone in a dry clatter.
More skeletons funneled in from two corridors like the basement remembered it was hungry.
Clicking. Dragging. Reaching.
Zidane met them like a dance.
Not frantic.
Joyful.
Efficient.
Every cut was too clean. Every movement too fast. A laugh burst out of him—wrong in a place like this, and perfect in his blood.
"Okay—okay—yeah," he panted, breathless and thrilled, "no, this is—this is better."
Bones exploded outward. Blades flashed. Mist shredded off frames like wet paper. The chamber filled with clatter and sparks and the sound of bindings failing.
He didn't get tired.
He got brighter.
And then—
It stopped.
The last skeleton collapsed into useless pieces.
Silence rushed in like the basement had been holding its breath.
Zidane stood in the middle of the chamber, swaying.
Blood still leaked from him. His shoulder was still wrong. His thigh still burned.
But he was upright.
Alive.
The aether-blades flickered once, then dissolved back into heat under his skin.
That heat settled inside his ribs with a satisfied weight.
Not a voice.
Not a presence "beside" him.
Something coiled around his pulse like an animal curling up to sleep.
Zidane's grin softened for half a second.
Then his knees tried to buckle, because Trance wasn't mercy.
It was a match thrown on gasoline.
It burned hot.
And then it left you with whatever you were underneath.
His vision swam.
The world tilted.
And through the haze came footsteps.
Measured. Professional.
Boots that didn't hurry because they didn't need to.
White lantern beams swept into the chamber mouth, clean and clinical, slicing across the aftermath like light doing paperwork.
A voice snapped, clipped and controlled:
"CLEAR THE AREA."
A line of gray coats entered in formation—lanterns, aethercasters, eyes that looked like they'd already written the report.
They didn't look shocked.
They looked… prepared.
Like they'd trained for this exact kind of mess.
And behind them—
Garnet stepped in.
Composed. Eyes steady. Calm warmth with a collar hidden in it.
Steiner at her shoulder like a wall that had learned how to walk.
Zorn and Thorn slightly back, already cataloging with their faces—procedure made flesh, smiling politely at the concept of a boy bleeding on stone.
Garnet's gaze found Zidane and didn't flinch.
Not pity.
Not fear.
Something worse.
Ownership-with-soft-hands.
"There you are," she said.
Zidane's breath hitched.
He took one step toward her like gravity was the only honest thing left.
"Hey—" he tried, because of course he did, because the universe could be collapsing and he'd still try to flirt his way out of it.
The heat inside him collapsed.
The Trance tide pulled back all at once.
His legs gave out mid-step.
He pitched forward.
Garnet moved like she'd expected the fall.
She caught him cleanly—no stumble, no panic—arms steady, posture perfect, like she'd done this a hundred times with a hundred different strays.
Her voice was gentle.
The command wasn't.
"Bring him," she said to Public Safety.
Zidane's forehead hit her shoulder, soft.
He smelled clean cloth and faint incense and the outside world.
His eyes slipped shut.
White lantern light ate the basement behind them.
And the last thing he felt—before the dark finally finished chewing—was the steady, stubborn beat inside his ribs.
Not his old heart.
Something hungrier.
Something that had decided, quietly and firmly:
Stay.