....
The air hung thick with metaphor. Mist coiled between the squares of the chessboard like forgotten lullabies, curling and retreating, only to snake forward again. The cityscape behind them was suspended—frozen, like a dream paused mid-breath—its windows smeared with melted light and half-formed words. Beneath Shotaro's feet, the black tiles of the living chessboard pulsed faintly with memory.
Mugyiwara Shotaro stood still on the back row, arms folded, eyes slow and unblinking. Around him, the girls of Prism Hexaria took their places—not as proxies this time, but as names reclaimed. Symbols in human form. Swords and spirits ready to be wielded not as tools, but as truths.
Cerulea Prismheart, whose real name was Aika Hanekawa, stood at his right as his knight—hood pulled low over her determined eyes, her gauntlets simmering with latent wind energy, her stance rigid and ready to leap in odd angles.
Carmine Aetheria, born as Sakura Minazuki, shimmered in her bishop's square—slender fingers gripping her mantra staff, eyes set with the quiet sorrow of someone who had always known how to walk diagonally through life.
Lumine Buttergold, once called Hinami Torii, waited as a pawn—tiny in size but not in presence, her breathing heavy and rhythmic, as though even now she was psyching herself up to charge straight into madness.
Viridia Hex, real name Yuzuki Kagawa, held the queen's post, twin blades sheathed but humming against her hips, her hair flickering like red lightning, her eyes locked with their opponent's as if daring them to blink first.
Rosalia Popcrash, or Misora Taki, served as his rook—silent, broad-shouldered, and unmoving, the most grounded of them all, a girl who once never believed in herself but stood now like a fortress of will.
so Did Alba Lumenheart, born name Maya Taijo
And finally, Umbra Nullveil—Ami Iwasaki—stood as the king. Soft-voiced and hesitant, once the shyest of them, now the emotional pillar. She had cried the most when they'd failed—but she was the only one whose tears still meant something now.
The rest of the pieces—the remaining pawns, knights, and bishops—were constructs. Empty-bodied, hollow-eyed. NPCs made of soot and discarded syllables. They bore names that vanished when looked at directly.
On the other side of the board, the Reader descended.
A being shaped like a child but carved from contradiction.
He was small—no taller than a fifth grader—but the space bent gently around him as if gravity bowed in apology. His skin glowed like melted candle wax. His chest was cracked wide open where a heart pulsed, bleeding a soft, endless light that stained the tiles beneath. Tears streamed steadily down his cheeks, and yet his smile never wavered.
A quiet, haunting smile—the kind children wear after hiding something unforgivable.
"Looks like you figured it all out," said the Reader, his voice echoing like it was being read aloud from a journal written decades ago in a room that no longer existed. "You managed to trigger a game of wits. A chessboard born from memory. Rules forged by trauma. And now—"
He extended a single hand, fingers twitching like a puppet's. "We must play."
Shotaro narrowed his eyes. "And what are the rules of this little after-school activity?"
"A game of riddles and chess," replied the Reader, his smile flickering slightly like a candle in the wind. "I ask you a riddle. If you answer correctly, you move one of your pieces. If you answer wrong, I move one of mine. Then it's your turn to ask, and so on."
The Reader's pawn glided across the board—D2 to D4—with a soft hiss like crayon across wallpaper. It didn't walk. It didn't step. It simply arrived, rippling reality as if memory itself had pushed it forward. The square beneath its feet flickered, then darkened—like a light in a classroom quietly switching off forever.
The Reader leaned forward, dripping light from his chest like a cracked lantern. His voice came not just from his lips, but from the air itself—like a story being told by someone not in the room."Who is the protagonist of that story?"
There was no smile now. Just eyes—wide, wet, knowing. The kind of eyes that had waited too long to be asked what happened, only to forget the answer themselves.
The world paused. Even the low hum of distant streetlights seemed to wait, listening.
Shotaro didn't speak at first. His gaze lingered on the board, tracing the lines not of movement, but of meaning. He remembered the seed. The page he'd pulled from the belly of the Drake, the one that had glowed with the stink of old guilt.
The handwriting had been uneven. Some letters flipped, others exaggerated. Certain words are misspelled in the exact same way, over and over, as if the author had never learned the right form—or worse, had learned and been punished for getting it wrong.
He saw the loops of an 'a' that looked more like a bubble, the 'e's pressed backwards, and a capital 'T' with eyes drawn on it. And below it all, a scribble. A stick figure with a huge head and no face.
Shotaro folded his arms, his head cocking to the side just slightly. His voice, when it came, was quieter than usual but clearer somehow—like chalk against silence.
"A child," he said. "The protagonist was a child."
The Reader blinked once. A drop of that liquid light fell from his cracked chest and hit the square with a noise like a book snapping shut.
Shotaro kept going. "The seed had childish grammar—short, looping sentences that repeated themselves. No proper punctuation. You do the sort of writing you do not because you know how, but because something in you needs to. And the page was folded seven times. The kind of folding kids do when they're hiding something they want to forget but can't quite throw away."
His eyes narrowed, and his voice dropped a note deeper. "And the narrative didn't begin with 'Once upon a time'—it began with 'I didn't mean to.' That's not fiction. That's confession."
The Reader closed his eyes.
"Correct," he whispered.
The word didn't sound triumphant. It sounded like relief.
A tremor passed through the board. The tile beneath Lumine Buttergold's feet—Hinami's—lit up gently, like dawn through the slats of a wooden shutter. The pawn was allowed to move.
She didn't hesitate. The tiny girl stepped forward, arms trembling but held steady. Square by square.
D7 to D5.
The two pawns stood locked in stillness, one from Shotaro's side, the other from the Reader's. They weren't just pieces. They were echoes. Hollow children sculpted from memory, each a silhouette of someone who had once sat at a desk, whispered into their pillow, or flinched at a shadow they couldn't name. Their faces shimmered—blank at first, then flickering with features only when no one looked. Across that fragile gulf of unspoken pain, they watched each other in perfect, broken symmetry.
The Reader exhaled—not through lungs, but through story. The sound was dry paper brushing across wood, the rustle of a page being turned in a book that hadn't been opened in years. It was the kind of breath you hear in attics and under floorboards. The kind that belongs to forgotten things.
Shotaro barely moved. His weight was set in his heels, eyes never leaving the boy-shaped anomaly in front of him. The gum in his mouth shifted, just once, as if marking the rhythm of the domain's heartbeat. "Your move," he said—not as challenge, but as ritual. Something old, something necessary.
The Reader tilted his head, the bleeding light from his exposed chest dimming just slightly, as though a new thought stirred behind his smiling mask.
"Then here's the next one," he said.
He did not lift his arms. He didn't gesture or speak the move aloud. But the bishop moved.
From F1 to C4, it floated—gliding like a memory that had always been there, nestled deep in the folds of time. It made no noise, yet the board felt it. Every square trembled in its wake like teeth rattling inside a closed mouth.
It landed on its square and froze, shimmering faintly, its form barely distinguishable—a bishop of black glass and melting ink, wrapped in a robe of erasures. Beneath its feet, the chessboard bruised a dull maroon.
Then the Reader spoke again, voice quieter now. Older.
"Why was the child sad?"
It wasn't just a riddle. It was a cut. A sharp, precise scalpel of a question—reaching not into Shotaro, but through him, into the game, the board, the domain, the psyche that held all of this together. The question curled in the air like the final line of a bedtime story left unfinished.
The silence returned. Not hollow, not blank—but heavy. The kind of silence that used to follow slamming doors, or unanswered phone calls, or footsteps that came too close. A silence packed with the weight of too many moments when someone should have said something and didn't.
Shotaro didn't answer immediately. He didn't rush. Instead, he walked.
Past Cerulea Prismheart—Aika—who tensed slightly, like she expected something to leap from the void.
Past Carmine Aetheria—Sakura—whose mantra staff hummed with protective grief.
He reached into his coat and pulled out something small.
A toy.
It was simple—plastic, molded in a shape hard to describe. Maybe a soldier, maybe an animal. It was hard to tell anymore. The arms were snapped off, glued back on with tape. One of the eyes was scratched out. The color had faded from sunlight and sobbing. Shotaro held it out in front of him, letting the board see. Letting everyone see.
The toy wasn't just broken.It was forced to be whole.
Shotaro's voice, when it came, wasn't angry. It wasn't loud. But it was terrible in the way old truths are. The way trauma, when spoken aloud, is terrible. Sacred. Tainted.
"Abuse," he said.
He didn't embellish it. Didn't shout or spit or cry.
He just held the toy a moment longer. Then let it drop.
The board accepted the answer without flourish.
A square lit beneath Cerulea Prismheart.The knight's square.
Shotaro looked to Aika. She didn't need to be told. She moved.
The knight stepped out in its strange, not-quite-logical gait. B8 to C6—a crescent of memory. A strange angle through the storm. She landed with a thud, planting one boot like it mattered. Like she knew what she was standing for.
Somewhere distant, the city beyond the board exhaled. A wind curled down from the tops of frozen skyscrapers. The fog stirred in the alleys. A single streetlamp turned back on.
The Reader did not move.
But his smile faltered.
Not all at once. Not like a crack in porcelain, but like a child trying to hold in tears, lips quivering, eyes wet but stubborn. His knees did not shake, but his hands pulled inward. He touched the space just below the radiant breach in his chest—the wound of light that no longer bled like before. The glow throbbed slower now, a candle weeping at its own diminishing.
And then, he whispered it.
Soft. Barely audible. Like a bedtime secret passed between ghosts under a blanket of nightmares.
"Who was abusing him?"
The question was not aimed with menace. There was no venom in his voice. Only ache. Only the kind of sadness that could not be screamed—only asked.
Across the board, Shotaro's jaw clenched.
He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he turned—just slightly, just enough—for the others to see he was thinking not as a commander, but as a boy. The gum in his cheek had gone still. His hand hovered near his sword, but it wasn't war that pulled his instincts now—it was memory. Empathy. Recognition.
He looked down at the crumpled, taped-together toy still lying at his feet.
"A mother," he murmured aloud, almost trying to believe it. "A father. Siblings. It could've been anyone…"
But it didn't feel like anyone.
And Shotaro trusted feelings like his were rarely wrong.
"I need more," he muttered.
He turned slowly toward the smallest figure among them—Lumine Buttergold, once Hinami Torii—his pawn, his little sunbeam of raw courage. She was breathing heavily, her blade lowered but her eyes burning with something defiant.
"I need you to take one step forward."
She looked at him. "You know that'll get me taken off the board, right?"
"I know," he said. "But it's the only way to draw the answer out."
She squinted, then sighed. "Don't forget me."
"I never do."
Lumine stepped forward, her little boots tapping softly onto D3.
A move with no tactical value.
But metaphysically—it cost something.
The board shook. Light engulfed her. A scream nearly broke from her throat—but she trusted him. In the last moment before she vanished into the shimmering fog beyond the board, she locked eyes with Shotaro and gave the faintest, most radiant smile.
Gone.
Sacrificed.
But she left something behind.
A single phrase, scrawled into the square she departed from—etched like chalk on a blackboard.
"A king conquers the land… then ravages it with taxes."
Shotaro's eyes widened.
His voice didn't rise. It dropped—into gravity. Into the bedrock.
"I get it."
He closed his eyes, then opened them as if seeing the question through the bones of every abused child in every world.
"It wasn't his real father," he said, voice a blade. "It was his stepfather."
The Reader didn't speak. He reacted.
Violently.
As if Shotaro had driven a dagger directly through the cracked glow of his chest.
His body jolted. His hands clutched at his ribs. Words leaked out of his mouth—but not in sentences. Just scraps. "Don't tell… he said I was lucky… I'm not ungrateful… I—"
Shotaro pressed forward. Not cruel. But deliberate.
"The metaphor is simple."
He pointed to the square where Lumine had vanished.
"The king wasn't born into the land. He conquered it. That's a stepfather. A ruler who marries into the kingdom, then bleeds it dry. That's not neglect. That's violence dressed in inheritance."
The board moaned.
Not physically—but narratively.
The NPC pieces twitched, as if straining to remain part of the tale. The girls of Prism Hexaria stood taller, something unspoken burning behind their eyes now.
Shotaro stepped again.
Not toward the child.
Toward the story.
He drew his queen, Viridia Hex, from her post and let her slide—not rashly, but with elegant violence—to H5.
Check.
But it wasn't just the kind of check you measured in kings and castles. It was the kind that made air stop moving. That made the sky flinch. That made memory shudder like a fever-dream too close to being real.
The Reader didn't just flinch. He blinked—as if suddenly aware he had eyes again.
And Shotaro grinned—sharp, cold, inevitable.
"Peek-a-boo."
The domain cracked.
Not instantly. Not cleanly. It fractured like ice over a frozen lake where something had always been moving beneath. The sky above the chessboard hiccupped—colors bleeding back into themselves. Clouds lost their ink and became clouds again. Time remembered it had somewhere to be.
And from just beyond the rippling edge of the board, Lumine Buttergold reappeared.
Alive.
Watching.
Whole.
"Damn that child," muttered one of the enemy pieces—a corrupted pawn, now just a splinter of someone else's shame. He didn't mean it cruelly. He meant it terrified. As if the child's survival was a betrayal of the story they'd all been forced to swallow.
Even the Dragon Who Sought the Boy began to wither. His body, once small but infinite, now trembled—not like a monster caught, but like a truth uncovered.
"He looks… painful," someone said.
But Shotaro wasn't watching the dragon.
He was watching her—the girl beside him, mouth twisted in incomprehension. Cerulea Prismheart, born Aika Hanekawa, eyes full of wind and confusion. She didn't understand yet. But Shotaro did. He always had. He just hadn't had the proof—until now.
"So what?" she said. "I still don't get it. Why would a child seek out a dragon just to make people forget? Why not reveal the abuse? Why not scream?"
Shotaro's voice cracked—not with weakness, but with too much weight.
"No." he said. "I thought the same. I was confused too. But…"
He stepped forward, crunching broken metaphor beneath his boots.
"Later pages of the seed… they didn't look childish anymore. The grammar was more stable. The spelling fixed itself."
He drew from his coat a torn fragment of the story-seed. It shimmered in his hand like the last page of a book no one wanted to finish reading.
"The child didn't write the end," he said. "He never got to."
His voice dropped lower. Not cold. But funeral-deep.
"The child killed himself."
Silence. Like the wind had forgotten how to move.
"There was graffiti near the last passage," Shotaro continued, holding up the parchment. "A semicolon. Not a typo. A message. A symbol."
His fingers trembled—not from fear, but from truth he couldn't carry alone.
"It's the mark of suicide."
The girls behind him went still. Even the constructs on the enemy's side seemed to lean closer, hungry to know.
Shotaro stepped to D5.
Not a reckless push.
A reclamation.
He advanced his bishop, Carmine Aetheria, to F7—ripping diagonally through the veins of the enemy formation, striking at the very soul of the false domain. The move wasn't just strategic.
It was personal.
"The king conquered the kingdom," Shotaro repeated, more to himself than anyone. "But he wasn't born there. That's the point. He wasn't the father. He was an invader. A predator who stepped in after the first man vanished—or was pushed out."
He looked to the Reader, who was now kneeling in the center of the board, flickering like a dying film reel.
"The mother," Shotaro said. "She's the one who sought out the dragon."
He pointed to the crackling tear in the memory-sky above them. Faint images flickered through it—birthdays without candles, a report card with blood on it, a hallway with no doors, just silence.
"She wanted people to forget about her child—not to protect him—but to protect herself."
The light above grew hotter.
"She let the king conquer her house. And when his rule turned to ruin, she blamed the child. Or let him take the blame. Or watched it happen without stopping it."
He turned slowly back to the girls of Prism Hexaria. His voice was iron now.
"So she summoned a dragon."
The words left Shotaro's mouth with no triumph. Just recognition. A terrible kind of clarity.
He gestured around them.
"The Domain King. Memory-eating draceel Drake."
A title too ornate for what it really was—a lie given teeth, a trauma given reign. It was not a monster; it was an eraser made of scales and breath and parental silence.
And then, slowly, the pieces began to fall.
Not from clash or cutlass.Not from check or checkmate.
But from shame.
The board itself began to unmake—not shatter, but weep.It wept not with rain, but with light. Soft and sorrowful and human.And the light was not empty.It came down as names. Old names. Forgotten truths. Echoes that once had faces. Lullabies that once had singers.
Cerulea looked up as the rain of memory fell across her cheeks. It did not burn—it blessed. Carmine whispered something she'd never been allowed to say. Rosalia closed her eyes and let the sorrow slide into her armor like oil. Viridia clutched her twin blades as if they'd always been stories, not weapons. Umbra cried without noise and let her hand fall away from the king's crown—her part done.
And in the center of it all, where once the game had been cruelest, the Reader collapsed.
Not struck down.
Released.
He fell to his knees like a child who finally knew he was allowed to stop pretending. Light ran through the cracks in his waxy skin, and in that final flicker, something fully human returned to his expression—eyes no longer storybook-laced or fogged by someone else's pain, but clear.
He looked up at Shotaro.
And Shotaro—Mugyiwara Shotaro, tall and solemn, gum now flavorless, sword humming faintly against his back—closed his eyes.
Just for a second.
Not because it hurt.
But because he had seen something he did not know how to carry just yet.Because the moment required reverence.Because the child had finally been remembered.
And then—
With a low crack, like a spine realigning after decades of wrong, the world reset.
The chessboard crumbled into old parquet wood.
The sky returned its ink back to the stars.
The girls of Prism Hexaria—those beautiful, broken mythologies made flesh—stood tall once more.
Not pristine. Not untouched. But whole.
Their armor shimmered faintly in the wake of the shattered domain, not the kind of armor forged in forges, but the kind you earn the long way: by surviving what should have killed you. Each of them bore the signs of their journey—eyes that had seen through illusion, limbs steady after truth's tremor, and that trembling kind of grace only warriors who have wept can wear without shame.
They had stood inside a weaponized memory.
And won.
Not perfectly. Not painlessly.
But they had won.
Shotaro stood quietly at the edge of the board, which was no longer a board at all, but a field slowly being reclaimed by reality. Tiles had crumbled back into soil. Clouds drifted like paper set free from the spell of ink. The air no longer tasted of metaphors—it tasted of rain, sweat, and the hint of lavender from Rosalia's torn sleeve.
He took a breath.
Then another.
The kind that shudders through you as if your lungs forgot how to do it for the last hour and are only now remembering. He tilted his head up and looked to the sky—a sky no longer bleeding light or lies.
And then, he said it.
"Thank you, Beyoncé."
There was a pause.
A stillness, soft and utterly sacred, as if the universe itself had stopped to squint.
Cerulea Prismheart turned slowly, her hood half-fallen from her head, blinking like he'd just declared war on a vowel. "I'm sorry—what?"
Shotaro didn't look at her. He didn't look at anyone. His crimson eyes were fixed on the horizon, jaw tight, posture exhausted in the way only someone spiritually sandblasted could manage. His voice was lower now, raw and strangely fragile.
"You always thank Beyoncé."
He didn't say it like a joke.
He said it the way soldiers tell you not to touch the red wire, or how old priests warn about names that still echo in empty temples.
He said it with reverence.
He said it with trauma.
"Or what?" Rosalia Popcrash asked slowly, narrowing her eyes as she dusted off her pauldrons. "Something happens?"
He turned. Not fast. Not dramatically. Just slow enough to make the gesture feel like it came from somewhere below the chest.
"There are some unpleasant situations," Shotaro muttered, voice hollow in that very particular way that only men who have seen the abyss and noticed it flinch can manage. His tone was flat, too flat, like it was balancing on a blade. "I once forgot. In 2021. I'm not… legally allowed to talk about what happened."
The girls just stared.
"You okay?" Viridia Hex asked, blinking.
"No," he replied quietly. "But I remembered to thank her this time, so I will be."
Carmine Aetheria folded her arms. "The fuck are you on about?"
Shotaro didn't answer.
He just started walking.
The sky was healing. The story was remembering itself.
And Beyoncé, wherever she was, was thanked.
Balance, for now, was restored.