Earth Year 2840. The Mystic Island, Base of the Titan Tree.
The ontological revelation hung heavily in the humid air, feeling far heavier than the psychic gravity of the Outer Gods had been just moments prior.
"Zeon look away from him, just look away,"
Ruby whispered urgently, her hands trembling violently as she gripped his shoulder to anchor him.
"I can’t breathe,"
Zeon choked out, his lungs feeling like they had been filled with liquid lead.
Zeon was only a nineteen year old recruit, a survivor of the Ark City slums who had barely begun to figure out who he was.
But lying completely broken in the dirt before him was a violently scarred, graying map of a terrifying life he hadn’t lived yet.
"He’s me Ruby, he’s actually me,"
Zeon panicked, his eyes locked onto the jagged burn mark and the premature silver streaks.
"Captain, he is dying right now!"
Daniel suddenly shouted, shattering their trance with a voice cracking with pure panic.
"There is black blood everywhere!"
Daniel yelled, pointing at the dark necrotic sludge bubbling up from the corner of the older man’s mouth.
Captain Eva Diane violently shook off the existential impossibility of the moment letting her military training instantly override the shock.
"His vitals are in freefall!"
Ruby yelled, dropping back to her knees as her hands flew frantically over her flickering medical scanner.
"It is not just blunt force trauma from the psychic pressure, Captain!"
Ruby panicked.
"His internal organs are rapidly rupturing and his cellular structure is tearing itself apart from the inside out!"
Ruby warned.
"Push ten CCs of heavy coagulant into his bloodstream right now!"
Eva barked, ripping open a trauma kit from her tactical belt.
"It won’t work!"
Ruby cried out, her hands shaking so badly she could barely prime the hypospray.
"This is not a standard physical injury Captain, because whatever impossible energy he just used to block the sky burned him out!"
Ruby explained.
"I don’t have the medical technology to fix pataphysical cellular degradation!"
Ruby despaired, watching the vitals crash on her screen.
"We have to do something!"
Zeon begged, dropping to his knees in the ash with his hands hovering helplessly over the chest plate of his older ruined self.
"He’s dying,"
Zeon thought with a cold terrifying grief gripping his heart.
"I’m watching myself die in the dirt."
"Stand aside,"
A soft, melodious voice commanded carrying the absolute unquestionable weight of a sovereign.
Then Commander Maroon spun around, his hand instinctively dropping to his heavy plasma pistol.
Crown Princess Angelica walked forward having discarded her crown on the battlefield.
Her long silver hair billowed slightly in the residual mana currents and though she looked exhausted with her pristine armor stained in Abyssal sludge, her eyes burned with fierce determination.
"Princess, do not approach these mortals!"
High Paladin Vance groaned, trying desperately to stand while clutching his bleeding side.
"They are heavily armed and dangerous!"
Vance warned.
"They are trying to save the man who just saved all of us, Vance,"
Angelica replied coldly without looking back at her guard.
"Hold your fire now!"
Maroon roared, aggressively slapping Chang’s kinetic barrel downward as the recruits aimed at the angelic woman.
"We don’t know who you are lady, but our medic just said our military gear cannot save him,"
Maroon stated, his cybernetic eye scanning her for concealed weapons.
"Unless you have a fully equipped federation Med Bay hidden in that magic forest, you need to stay back,"
Maroon warned.
"Your crude technology cannot heal a soul that has exhausted its aura,"
Angelica stated simply, her gaze dropping to the dying man in the dirt.
"But my magic can,"
the Crown Princess offered.
"Let her through right now,"
Eva ordered, looking down at the older Zeon whose breathing had reduced to a terrible wet death rattle.
Angelica knelt in the gray ash across from the terrified nineteen year old Zeon.
She saw the terror of a young boy staring at his own ruined, apocalyptic ghost.
"Whatever unknown hell this man walked through to become this broken monster... I will not let his sacrifice be in vain,"
Angelica promised Zeon with a deeply empathetic nod.
"You are just a boy,"
Angelica realized softly, noticing how different the innocent Zeon looked compared to the hardened veteran bleeding out before her.
Before Angelica could initiate her magic, N032’s scarred eyelids violently snapped open.
His eyes were hazy unfocused and completely lost in the agonizing delirium of his past trauma.
With a sudden burst of frantic, desperate strength, N032’s heavy armored gauntlet shot out and grabbed Ruby’s bare hands.
"Sarah... I am so sorry,"
N032 choked out, his synthesized voice cracking with raw unmasked devastation as a single tear carved through the soot on his cheek.
"I failed the squad... I failed my mother... I failed everyone,"
the hollow ghost wept softly into the dirt gripping Ruby’s hands as if she were his only anchor.
"But this time... I will make absolutely sure you live the life you couldn’t, Sarah,"
N032 swore to the empty air with tragic devotion.
"Even if it costs me my own life to rewrite it,"
he promised before his grip went completely slack.
"Who is Sarah?"
Ruby asked, entirely bewildered and terrified by the cryptic heart wrenching apology directed right at her.
"Why is he apologizing to dead people while looking at you?"
Zeon panicked, his chest tightening with suffocating dread.
"What kind of unknown apocalyptic hell did I go through in the future to become this entirely broken monster?"
Zeon spiraled loudly.
"Who are these ghosts and why the hell did I have to watch them die?!"
Zeon screamed realizing his inevitable future was paved in immeasurable tragedy.
Before Ruby could even process the name or calm Zeon down, N032’s hazy eyes shifted one final time landing onto Zeon’s terrified face.
N032 didn’t speak another word as the exhaustion overtook his fractured mind and his eyes rolled back as he fainted into the dirt once more.
"He’s out cold again, but his breathing is definitively steady,"
Eva confirmed quickly, checking the pulse at his neck.
Angelica placed her bare hands onto N032’s chest plate and closed her eyes.
"let grace of Celestia heal this broken soul,"
Angelica whispered, chanting in the ancient melodic tongue of the Celestial Realm.
A brilliant blindingly pure golden light erupted from her palms, devoid of the destructive flare she had used against the Abyssal horde.
"Look at the scanner!"
Ruby gasped in awe.
"His cellular structure... it’s knitting itself back together, and his heart rate is stabilizing,"
Ruby reported, her jaw dropping.
"He is officially out of the woods,"
Ruby exhaled a massive breath of relief.
Angelica slumped backward into the dirt, breathing heavily as the golden light faded leaving her drained of her celestial mana.
"Thank you,"
Zeon whispered, his voice raw and hollow.
"Do not thank me, human,"
Angelica replied softly, looking at the older scarred face of the man who had shielded her.
"He actively defied the cosmos for me, so I am only repaying a cosmic debt that can never truly be balanced,"
she confessed.
"I don’t know what kind of glowing fairy tale you just pulled off, but you saved my soldier,"
Commander Maroon said, stepping forward with his heavy boots crunching in the dirt.
"I am Commander Jordan Maroon of the Galactic Federation,"
Maroon introduced himself, his voice devoid of its usual military bite as he spoke to her as an equal.
"And I have a feeling neither of us are supposed to be on this rock,"
Maroon noted.
"I am Crown Princess Angelica of the Celestial Realm,"
she replied, standing up with a tired sigh.
"And you are correct Commander, but if we stay in this clearing, the horrors that dwell in the dark will return for us,"
Angelica warned, looking up at the sealed sky.
"Agreed,"
Maroon nodded firmly.
"Load him onto the Behemoth right now, we are evacuating back to the Forward Operating Base immediately!"
Maroon ordered his squad.
Zeon and Chang grabbed the heavy iron shoulders of N032’s armor, requiring the extra strength of Daniel and Maroon just to lift the massive weight onto the rear chassis.
Zeon climbed up beside the unconscious giant refusing to let go of N032 heavy armor as he stared obsessively at the matching jawline scar, the dark hair and the tiny crescent birthmark.
"He’s not really a clone, is he Zeon?"
Ruby asked quietly, climbing up next to him and offering a protective sorrow in her eyes.
"No, he’s not a clone Ruby,"
Zeon whispered, the horrifying reality finally cementing in his bones.
"Look at his eyes beneath the eyelids... he has the same fleck of gold in his left iris that I do,"
Zeon realized with absolute dread.
"He is me, Ruby,"
Zeon choked out.
"And I am eventually going to become that broken monster."
The massive tank turned, leading the terrified human survivors and the Celestial royalty away from the Titan Tree disappearing into the violet twilight of the alien forest.