Beast Gacha System: All Mine

F—FWOOOOOM—

In a blink of an eye, they became a streak of black light shooting toward the vortex, Bunny’s whoop of joy trailing behind him like a comet’s tail.

The lightning flickered. The black clouds churned. They were gone, swallowed by the void at the center of the vortex, and the sky went very, very still.

ROAAAAAAAAR—!

The leviathan screamed. But it was nothing like a roar of challenge or a cry of pain. It was a sound of pure terror.

Its massive obsidian body convulsed, scales the size of cars rippling and spasming as something deep within the vortex began to pull at it, to tear at it, to unmake it from the inside out.

The black flame started to drip from its wounds, flickered and guttered like a candle in a hurricane. It slowly enveloped it, and Cecilia imagined how the flame devoured it like a living thing, making its flesh bubble inside out and rot.

The clouds around it began to contract, spiraling inward toward the central void as though the storm were a drain and someone had pulled the plug.

BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM—

A blast of blue light erupted from the heart of the vortex. It looked like a deep, electric blue of a clear summer sky, the blue of divine judgment.

It illuminated the city below in a single, blinding flash that turned night into day. Every skyscraper, every street, every upturned face caught in its brilliance.

The leviathan’s silhouette, vast and writhing, was etched against that light for one eternal moment. Then it dissolved. Unmade. Erased.

And then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the light vanished. The vortex was gone and the black clouds and the lightning, the terrible weight that had pressed down on the city for hours, all of it, simply gone.

The wall cloud that remained began to resolve slowly, its angry bruise-colors fading to the soft gray of ordinary rain clouds. It thinned and parted. And from the dissolving remnants, something began to fall.

Glittering particles, millions, billions of them, drifted down through the atmosphere like snow made of starlight. They caught the faint glow of the distant moon and sparkled in shades of silver and gold and pale, luminous blue.

Cecilia sat in the sand with Oathran still cradled in her arms, their faces tilted toward the sky. Arkai and Eastiel stood on either side of her, their shoulders brushing, their faces upturned. None of them spoke.

There were no words for this, for the beauty that followed the terror and the silence that followed the scream.

Below, in the streets, the evacuation had halted. People who had been running for shelter, clutching children and belongings, those little fragile remnants of their ordinary lives, had stopped in their tracks.

They looked up. The glittering particles fell around them, catching in their hair, dusting their shoulders, dissolving on contact like snowflakes made of light.

For a long, breathless moment, there was only silence. The stunned silence of a city that had expected to die and had instead been given a miracle.

Then, slowly, the cheers began. A single voice somewhere in the crowd, raised in a wordless cry of relief. Then another. Then a wave, building and spreading, rolling through the streets.

People embraced strangers. People wept. People laughed, and their laughter echoed off the skyscrapers and filled the space where the roaring had been.

In the control room, Damon Iondora stood frozen in front of a bank of monitors. His tie was loosened, his sleeves rolled up, his hair a disaster of anxious fingers.

On the screens, the feeds from dozens of cameras showed the same impossible sight. The vortex was collapsing, the leviathan dissolving, the glittering rain falling over the city. His jaw hung open. His eyes were wide and unblinking.

Around him, his staff, hardened veterans of a thousand rift crises, men and women who had seen everything the corruption could throw at them and had learned to expect the worst, stood in identical poses of disbelief.

Momo stood in front of Cecilia and her three men, her blonde hair settling around her shoulders as the unnatural wind finally died.

She watched the glittering particles drift down through the atmosphere, watched the city slowly realize it had been saved, watched the last traces of the vortex dissolve into ordinary clouds.

A gentle smile curved her lips. She sighed. "The containment is complete."

Cecilia’s eyes faltered. The relief that had flooded her chest just now vanished as quickly as it had come. Something else caught her heart.

Dread.

"Mother!"

She released Oathran gently, laying him back against the sand, and then she was running. Her feet pounded across the open space, her pregnant belly heavy with every stride and her tears already streaming down her face before she even reached the goddess.

She threw her arms around Momo with all the strength she had, clutching her to hold her in place.

Momo exhaled in surprise and then chuckled gently. Her hand came up to rest on Cecilia’s head, fingers stroking through her tangled blonde hair. "What is this? Crying again?"

But Cecilia’s instinct was correct.

Even as she held on, she felt it. The faint wrongness of Momo’s body beneath her hands. It was growing lighter, less solid.

From the edges of her form, tiny particles of light were beginning to drift away, glittering like the snowflakes that were still falling across the city.

Cecilia pulled back just enough to see, and her eyes widened with a sudden unbearable sadness. "Mother..."

"No more entering worlds to meet the babies in the future."

Momo’s earlier words crashed back into Cecilia’s mind. She had said it so casually on the rooftop, so matter-of-factly, that Cecilia had barely processed the implication.

Now it crushed her heart without mercy.

They had intervened too much. They had come to this world, to her, for her sake. She wouldn’t be able to meet these gods anymore. Not in this world. Not in the next. Perhaps not for an eternity.

"Didn’t you say using your power here is environmentally irresponsible because your body won’t decompose...?" Cecilia’s voice cracked, tears staining her face, dripping onto the fading form of the goddess in her arms.

"That’s why we have to destroy it thoroughly." Momo said gently, almost apologetic, as though she were explaining a minor inconvenience rather than her own dissolution.

"Mother—" Cecilia broke down into ugly, uncontrollable sobs. Her shoulders heaved. Her breath came in ragged, desperate gasps.

She was a child again, losing the only mother she had ever known, losing Summer Silver all over again, losing the Cassian Queen she had never met, losing everyone, everyone, everyone—

"Ah, there, there..." Momo’s dissolving arms wrapped around her, pulling her close against a chest that was already beginning to crumble at the edges.

Her hands, fading, translucent, shimmering with particles of escaping light, patted Cecilia’s back and stroked her head with the same gentle rhythm she had used on the rooftop.

"An eternity is not that long, my child," Momo murmured against her hair. "We will meet again before you realize it."

"But what if I fail?" she asked between sobs. "What if whatever you expect me to do... fails?"

"You won’t." Momo shook her head, the motion sending a fresh cascade of glittering particles into the air.

"How... how do you know that...?" Cecilia pulled back, searching the goddess’s face for something. Reassurance, proof, anything to hold onto.

Momo’s blue eyes, full of a love so vast it could have swallowed galaxies, met hers. "Because time and quantum superposition are easier to observe in higher dimensions. All versions of you, in all timelines and in all lifetimes, we can see it all. And in all of them, you exceeded our expectations."

Cecilia fell speechless.

Of course. Of course Momo knew this kind of answer would be the only one that could convince her.

The goddess had given her exactly that. A peer-reviewed prophecy. A divine guarantee backed by the mathematics of higher dimensions.

"So... you’ve seen me succeed?" Cecilia whispered.

"We made sure you do, no matter the cost." Momo’s smile was fading now, her features growing indistinct, her body thinning and crumbling in Cecilia’s arms. "We made sure of it countless timelines ago."

"Mother..." Cecilia clutched her tighter, as though she could hold her together through sheer desperate love. "Mother... Mother..."

She cried. Hard.

Even knowing they would be alright, even knowing it was pointless, that gods did not truly die, that an eternity was not as long as it sounded, she missed them already. She didn’t want them to leave.

She just wanted her parents to stay.

"Good child... don’t cry." Momo’s voice was growing fainter now, thinning like smoke in a breeze. "You know that praying will reach us anywhere and everywhere, all at the same time, right?"

"Yes—but I won’t be able to hear your voice... hug you—"

"You have to work for that." Momo’s chuckle was barely a whisper now, the last flicker of warmth in a body that was almost entirely made of light.

"Mother—" Cecilia burst into fresh tears, her arms closing around a form that was no longer solid, no longer there, no longer anything but a fading glow of golden particles.

Behind her, Oathran had forced himself to stand.

His brothers flanked him, Arkai on his left, Eastiel on his right, their hands gripping his arms to steady him, their own bodies still trembling from the terror of the miracle.

They didn’t understand everything they were witnessing. They didn’t know who this goddess was or why Cecilia called her Mother or what words had passed between them.

But they felt all of it.

Momo was dissolving faster now. Her legs were gone, scattered into the glittering snow that continued to fall across the city. Her torso was translucent, her arms barely visible, her face a watercolor painting of fading light.

Only her eyes remained clear, those devastatingly blue eyes, fixed on Cecilia, burned brighter than any star.

"You already know what to do. And even if you don’t, know that you will. It has been done, and it will be done again."

Her body was almost gone now. Just a silhouette of golden particles, the suggestion of a woman. Her hands, what remained of them, cupped Cecilia’s tear-streaked face one last time. Her voice was barely a whisper, barely a breath, barely anything at all.

"Do you understand, baby?"

Cecilia nodded. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t do anything but nod and cry and hold onto the fading light with everything she had.

"Good." Momo’s smile was the last thing to disappear. "We admire the essence of your soul."

And then she was gone. Cecilia’s arms closed on empty air. The last particles of golden light drifted upward, joining the glittering snow that still fell across the city, and then they, too, faded.