“Strike.”
Not the flashy explosion. The quiet kind. The warmth in the chest of a man who has nothing left but still chooses to stand.
His fist drew back. The cosmos inside him—that fragile, burning thread—ignited not as a flame, but as a supernova compressed into the size of a child’s heart. The atoms of his broken bones screamed. The shattered Cloth reassembled not around his body, but through it, metal and flesh becoming one absurd, beautiful contradiction.
Hades had won. For now.
Seiya smiled. It was a terrible, beautiful, human smile.
Why do we fight? he thought. Not as a question. As a mantra.
The blood did not feel like his own.
The Cloth fragments trembled. Not because of him. Because of them . Every fallen Saint. Every nameless soldier who had bled into these same stones for two hundred years. Their voices were not a roar. They were a hum , like a lyre string plucked by a god.
The Sanctuary bells began to ring. Not in alarm. In defiance.
“Pegasus...” he rasped, fingers scraping stone. “...Ryūsei...” Saint Seiya
It flew sideways . Through the temporal wall. Through the memory of every defeat, every doubt, every moment he had been told his constellation was the lowest, the weakest, the joke of the Saints.
“PEGASUS...”