CHAPTER 70: CHAPTER 70 – “WHEN FLAMES MEET BLEED”

The Pane bled light.

Where Ren’s Thorn had struck, cracks ran not just across the Architect but through the very air. Each fissure leaked shards of reality, spilling pieces of worlds that didn’t belong here. A sky filled with burning moons. A river that ran backward. A classroom door creaking open into nothing but teeth.

Ren’s chest heaved. His fractured eyes glowed faintly, but the glow was unstable—bleed crawling deeper into his veins. Thorn’s edge hummed like a living wound, vibrating against his grip as though it might shatter him as easily as the Architect.

The Architect staggered back. Not with pain—no, it didn’t feel—but with rejection. Its mirrored body was no longer perfect; cracks marred its surface, spirals of impossible reflection distorting its once pristine form.

"Deviation... rewriting in progress..."

"Containment priority elevated."

Its voice glitched, warping between a hundred tones. Each word carried weight, and yet for the first time, Ren noticed hesitation.

The girl gasped, collapsing to one knee, her flame flickering in a storm of sparks. But unlike before, the sparks didn’t gutter into ash. They clung to her skin, tracing veins of light along her arms and neck, searing symbols into her flesh like forgotten runes being rewritten.

"Ren..." her voice trembled, half with awe, half with terror. "You—you broke it. You cut law itself..."

Her words struck something deep inside him. His lips curled into a bitter grin, though his body was near collapse.

"I told it..." Ren panted, Thorn dragging sparks against the Pane’s shifting floor, "...I’d be the error it couldn’t erase."

The girl’s flame pulsed in response—suddenly brighter, as if feeding on his defiance. Her outline shimmered, shadows splitting from her form, showing faint traces of wings made of pure light struggling to unfold.

Ren’s double tilted his head, watching the girl’s flame with something sharper than mockery in his smirk. "So the Savior stirs," he murmured. "All it took was you refusing to kneel."

The Pane groaned. Its edges curled like a collapsing page.

The Architect rose again, its mirrored body stitching itself back together with jagged precision. Where its cracks had been, now hung distortions—empty outlines of laws it could no longer fully enforce. Its faceless head tilted, focusing on the girl.

"Secondary anomaly detected. Unauthorized flame awakening."

The girl’s body shook as the flame consumed her weakness. Her eyes snapped wide, glowing with searing white, her voice overlapping with echoes she didn’t understand.

"I—don’t know why this is happening—but if this power can burn through your chains—"

She stood, her flickering outline flaring like a lighthouse against the Pane’s endless darkness.

"—then I’ll burn with him."

Her light surged outward, striking the Pane itself. For the first time, the laws around them didn’t collapse into order—they shattered, igniting in a blaze of rebellion.

Ren staggered back, blinking through the fractured glow. His eyes widened, not with fear—but recognition.

She wasn’t just awakening.

She was rewriting alongside him.

The Pane did not simply shake.

It screamed.

Light fractured, rules bled into chaos, and the mirrored horizon twisted upon itself like a scroll catching fire. Every edge, every reflection, every obedient law the Architect had spent eternity enforcing began to warp beneath the blaze that surged from the girl’s body.

Her flame had no color, and yet it was every color at once—radiance too raw to be defined by a spectrum. What once had been fragile sparks clinging to her arms now flooded outward, etching her silhouette in burning strokes. Her shadow became wings, her hair a stream of light unraveling into constellations.

Ren, still hunched, Thorn vibrating in his hands, could only stare. This wasn’t power stolen from the Pane. This wasn’t borrowed law like his Thorn. This was something older—something that didn’t belong here at all.

The Architect knew it, too. Its cracked body folded in on itself, reflections twisting violently to reassert control.

"Contain. Suppress. Rewrite. All unauthorized origins will be neutralized—"

The voice glitched, distorted, drowned beneath the roar of her flame.

Her chest rose and fell, steady now, no longer weak. For the first time since Ren had found her, she wasn’t trembling to survive. She stood, the Pane bending away from her presence, flame blazing higher with each heartbeat.

She turned her head, eyes like suns bleeding through the void, and met Ren’s gaze.

"You bleed against their law," she whispered, voice carrying the weight of a thousand unheard echoes. "And I... burn against it."

Ren’s throat tightened. His cracked eyes widened, not just from awe, but from recognition. Something about her, about the way she shone, tore through the fog of bleed clouding his mind. He had seen this before. Not here. Not now. But in the fractured memories that weren’t his—where another him had stood beside another silver-haired girl beneath two moons.

"...You," he muttered, staggering forward. "You’re... not just a reflection. You’re—"

She raised her hand, stopping him—not in rejection, but in affirmation. "Not yet, Ren. Don’t name me. If you give me a name now, the Pane will try to erase it."

Her voice trembled slightly at that last word. For all her flame, she wasn’t invincible. She was fighting to exist at all.

The Architect lurched forward, its faceless mask cracking, shards raining to the Pane below. From within the fractures of its mirrored body, figures screamed silently—faces of all those erased by its law, trapped in a prison of reflection.

It extended a hand.

Not claws. Not blades. Not even concepts this time.

It reached with a pure, blank light. A reset. A rewriting of her flame into nothing.

Ren moved instantly. Thorn lashed upward, screaming like a storm as it tore through the air. His body cracked under the recoil, blood spilling from his lips, but his strike met the Architect’s hand and bent it back.

The girl’s wings flared wide, her light blasting outward in a storm that made the Pane ripple like water.

The Architect staggered again, for the second time in eternity.

Ren spat blood, his voice ragged but certain. "Looks like it’s not just me you can’t erase anymore."

The girl stepped forward, her flame igniting the floor beneath her bare feet. Each step carved a scar into the Pane, not of collapse, but of rebirth.

Her voice rose, overlapping with echoes Ren couldn’t understand—voices of other flames that had burned and been snuffed out, all reignited through her.

"You tried to chain him. You tried to chain me. You tried to chain every version of us across your mirrors..."

Her flame spiraled upward, tearing a hole into the sky.

"...But your laws burn now."

She unleashed it.

A torrent of fire, not destructive, but rewriting. It engulfed the Architect, not as heat, but as denial of its order. Its laws melted like wax under the weight of something older than reflection.

Ren’s double laughed, standing on the edge of the blaze, unbothered but fascinated, his grin sharper than ever. "Now this," he muttered, voice dripping with hunger, "this is the kind of fight worth existing for."

The Pane screamed again. Shards fell like meteors. Whole landscapes shattered and reformed in new shapes: forests of glass, oceans of flame, skies written with bleeding constellations.

Ren could barely breathe—but he smiled.

Because for the first time, he wasn’t striking alone.

The girl wasn’t surviving anymore.

She was burning.

The Pane couldn’t contain them anymore.

Every rule it had written across eternity began to blur.

Ren’s Thorn was screaming, bleeding light so violently it felt like the weapon itself wanted to tear him apart. His cracked veins pulsed with a rhythm that wasn’t human anymore, each beat pushing him closer to collapse—or to something beyond collapse.

And beside him, the girl’s flame surged like an ocean in reverse, devouring the sky instead of the ground. Her hair whipped upward, blazing threads reaching like they wanted to burn the stars themselves.

When Ren’s eyes met hers again, the Pane buckled.

Bleed. Flame. Two contradictions that weren’t supposed to exist, staring directly at each other.

The Architect twisted, its fractured form trying to reshape the battlefield into silence, into order, into anything that could erase them. But for the first time since its birth, it hesitated.

Because it wasn’t looking at anomalies anymore.

It was looking at a union.

"Ren," the girl whispered, her voice both fragile and infinite. "If we touch, the Pane will change. Forever."

Ren coughed blood, his vision flickering, but his grin was sharp. "Good. Let’s change it, then."

Their steps echoed as they moved toward each other.

The Pane shook harder, as though begging them to stop. Reflections cracked into rivers of light. Whole towers of mirrored history collapsed and reformed, showing glimpses of lives Ren had never lived—him laughing with friends, him holding hands with a silver-haired girl beneath two moons, him dying alone in rooms with no windows.

All those echoes shivered as he reached out.

Her flame reached, too.

When their hands touched—

It wasn’t heat.

It wasn’t pain.

It wasn’t even power.

It was rewriting.

Bleed and flame folded into one another, not canceling, not clashing, but fusing. His cracks glowed like fire pouring through glass. Her flame bent, curling into shapes that followed his pulse. Their bodies became pages, and together they began to write something the Pane had never authored.

The Architect screamed—not with words, but with the collapse of its own body. The faces trapped inside it scattered free, tumbling into the Pane like freed echoes, sobbing silently as their prisons dissolved.

Ren’s double tilted his head, his grin twitching wider. "Ahhh, so this is the road you’re walking? Fusing with her? Careful, partner. That kind of choice... can make you something worse than me."

Ren ignored him. His voice cracked, but he spoke anyway.

"We’re not anomalies anymore."

The girl’s eyes flared brighter. Her flame bent into the shape of wings around them both.

"We’re the fire and the fracture. We’re what comes after."

The Pane’s horizon shattered. For a moment, the entire Mirror World seemed to invert—sky plunging downward, ground rising upward, reflections twisting into a spiral around the two of them.

And in the center of that spiral, Ren and the girl stood fused—bleed and flame roaring together.

A single strike pulsed outward, not swung, not forced—just born.

The Architect’s body tore open, its faceless mask splitting clean down the center. Its scream echoed like an entire history erasing itself.

The Pane bent.

The Pane broke.

And for the first time in eternity, something unwritten was alive.