He looked at Jabber.At the face.At what was in the face, the specific expression of someone who is in the middle of a process that hasn't finished and is not going to finish by running away from it."Jabber." Eren said."Get out of here.” The purple-cloaked Loki said. Urgent. Clear. "Go with him. If you leave this space, the black-cloaked version can't sustain itself without a host,it will dissipate. You will be free. Asta is outside. Flora. Yuki. Mira. Roderick. Everyone who actually knows you is outside and they are waiting…""’Shut up.’"Jabber said it quietly.Just two words.But the specific quality of them, the way they came out, the weight that was underneath them, the thing that had generated them,made the purple-cloaked Loki stop as completely as if a physical force had been applied.His eyes went slightly wide.Across the void, the black-cloaked figure's lips pulled into a small curve."Jabber.”Eren said.Jabber turned to him.And the look on Jabber's face was not the

And two people.Standing together at the entrance of a home, a man and a woman, close in the way of people who were close because proximity was their natural state rather than a choice they made moment to moment.The man was laughing.Not at anything visible, the specific laugh of someone responding to something the person beside them had just said, the laugh that belongs to a very specific relationship, the laugh that is not performed.The woman was watching him laugh with the expression of someone who finds the laugh satisfying, not because it is funny but because it is there.Jabber looked at them.At the faces.He had not seen these faces before.He had never seen these faces.And yet.There was something in the specific configuration of the man's jaw, the way the laugh sat in it, the way the expression moved, that was familiar in the specific way that faces in mirrors are familiar, the way certain angles of a known face seen from a new direction produce a recognition that arrives

Inch by inch. Not with power, with the specific sustained effort of something that had decided it was going to do this thing regardless of whether the conditions were favorable."Jabber." He said again, his voice strained with the effort of speaking against the constraint. "Listen to me. Whatever you just saw, whatever that was, it is true. I won't lie to you, it is true. Your parents were real and what happened to them was real and the grief you are feeling right now is the most real thing in this space." He pushed against the constraint another inch. "But he is using the truth. He is using it the way you use a key, not to open a room that is good for you, to lock you into a room that is good for him." He looked at Jabber with the eyes that were also Jabber's eyes, carrying in them something that was not performing concern but was it. "Asta is outside. Roderick. Flora. Yuki. Mira. Elara." He said each name was like a weight placed deliberately. "People who chose to stand besi

He walked to the staff.He pulled it free with one hand.The golden surface went cold the moment it left the ground,the warmth of the technique leaving it the way warmth leaves something that has been removed from the source of the warmth. He looked at it for a moment, then set it down beside the chief.Across the borderlands,through the trees, from the direction of the swarm, the sound of the engagement changed.The specific change that Asta had been listening for, the change that said something had shifted in the source rather than the surface of the situation.The dwarfs were stopping.Not all at once, in waves, the soldiers in the front of the swarm first, then the ones behind them, the grey leaving the eyes in the same waves as the soldiers' bodies seemed to receive information from their own internal processes that they had been away from for some time and were now being returned to.Then falling.The exhaustion of a sustained forced march arriving all at once in bodies that had

"Benimaru.” Gabimaru said.Benimaru looked at him."Are we going to stand here all day." Gabimaru said. "Ir are we going to do what we came here to do?"Benimaru looked at Asta again."We came here to retrieve the vessels." He said. "We will retrieve them.""Yes.” Gabimaru said. He looked back at Asta with the smile. "All of them."He launched.The speed of it, the specific speed of something that had moved at that speed so many times across so many centuries that the movement had become purely instinctive, closed the distance between the clearing's altitude and the ground in a duration that Asta's processing of the movement had not kept up with.Green flame.Dragon claw, not a technique with a name, not something that had been built and refined, the raw expression of a dragon's nature through a vessel that had been completely given over to it, the claw of something ancient and enormous expressed at human scale.Asta went backwards.Not a step backwards, a leap, full commitment