I will always follow

To the end

It felt like betrayal.

All the hours—no, the eternity—of fighting, bleeding, dragging their bodies through fire and stone, and for what? For the sky to split open and swallow them into silence? For the earth to bury them before victory could find them? His body trembled with every breath, every pulse a raw reminder that he hadn't died—but maybe he was supposed to. And if his body chose now to give out, Giyuu wouldn't blame it. Not after everything.

What welcomed him after hardship and pain was not dawn, not triumph, but darkness. An endless sprawl of sky stretched above the ruins, stars scattered like indifferent eyes watching from far away. There was no warmth. No light. No promise of morning. Just a vast, unmoving night that looked down and offered no comfort. It was quiet. Too quiet. No wind. No crickets. No rustling trees or whispering grass. No sound of breath or steel. Just stillness—wide, unnatural. A stillness so complete he wasn't sure if it was real or if he was still lost in some fever-dream.

He stirred beneath the rubble, and the pain came instantly—sharp and blooming, blooming like fire beneath his skin, like knives in the joints. Splintered beams pressed against his ribs, stone pinned one leg. Something inside his shoulder shifted wrong. He choked on the dust, on the blood pooling in his mouth. It tasted bitter—metallic and stale—and he swallowed it out of habit, not strength.

The edges of his vision shimmered. Not with light—but with static, like the world was unraveling by threadbare degrees. A high-pitched ringing overtook the quiet, shrill and steady, as if something inside his head had broken loose. He blinked, but his surroundings didn't settle. The stars above seemed to breathe, to pulse. They shifted—too slow, too deliberate—as if watching him back.

Was this still the castle? Was he buried in it? Or was this some half-world between life and death, suspended in the silence that follows failure?

The sky had cracked. Fractured moonlight filtered through the debris like reluctant mercy, pale and cold. It glinted on broken tiles and snapped rafters. He could see the stars, and something about that felt deeply, offensively wrong. After everything—after hours of battle, after the collapse of the Infinity Castle—morning still hadn't come.

A groan echoed across the rubble. He froze.

But nothing moved.

The castle had fallen. The others had screamed. The world had come down around them. And still, he was here. Alive as he never should have.

The silence carved holes in him. Not just from pain, but from absence.

He didn't hear Tanjiro. Mitsuri. Not the scrape of Obanai's blade. Not even the wind bringing him news of Sanemi. No breathing. No voices. No heartbeats, except his own—shaky, traitorous, alone.

And the guilt... it pressed harder than the rubble ever could.

What if he was the only one left?

He'd survived too many times when others hadn't. Sabito. Urokodaki's other disciples. The Hashira beside him. He knew the way grief could hollow a man out. But this wasn't grief yet—it was worse. It was the waiting. The cruel, bitter hope that someone else might still be breathing under this mountain of silence.

And if they weren't—

He had no right to keep breathing. Not unless it was to finish what they'd all started.

He couldn't even hear himself breathe.

The quiet was too much. Not peaceful. Not sacred. Just... empty. The kind of emptiness that came after ruin, the heavy quiet of devastation, thick as ash, heavy as grief. The kind that settled on battlefields after the dying stopped screaming.