Trascender : The Fourth Gust

Chapter 3 : Trascender

The journey to the cemetery had been made in near silence, the ruined landscape of Tokyo blurring past the windows of a nondescript car Merus had somehow procured. The magnitude of the previous night, the deaths, the impossible fight, his own repeated mutilation and regeneration, pressed down on Shinji, a suffocating blanket. The raw, hypersensitive skin of his torso itched beneath his borrowed clothes, a constant, grotesque reminder.

It was only when they stood amidst the quiet chaos of early morning preparations at the funeral home, surrounded by the cloying scent of flowers and the hushed, awkward sympathy of strangers, that Shinji finally broke the silence that wasn't silence at all, but filled with the roaring in his own head.

"Well," Shinji muttered, staring blankly at a framed photo of his aunt and Kiyomi laughing on a beach, a lifetime ago. "This will be just the beginning." The words tasted like ash.

Merus, standing beside him like an azure sentinel, inclined his head slightly. "The beginning of what?" Shinji asked, the question laced with a bitterness that surprised even him.

Merus turned, his glacial eyes holding Shinji's with an intensity that made the mundane funeral parlor walls seem to recede. "You are the Trascender, Shinji." The title hung in the air, charged with impossible weight. "A being prophesied, whispered of, awaited across the vastness of the Multiverse for... years." The timescale was meaningless, monstrous. "You are said to possess... an anonymous potential. A power without defined limits. The potential to dominate the entirety of creation."

A hysterical laugh threatened to bubble up in Shinji's throat. *Rule?*. He couldn't rule his own grief. "It looks like you are talking with the wrong person currently" he said, his voice tight. "I'm just... me. A guy who failed to protect his family."

"No," Merus stated, the single syllable absolute, brooking no argument. "I'm talking totally to the right person." He gestured subtly towards Shinji's abdomen, hidden beneath the shirt. "You literally survived being cut in half. Twice. By a Swordwrath Monarch's blade, imbued with entropy and malice. That wasn't luck, Shinji. That was your first passive ability manifesting. The bedrock of your nature: Immortality. True, unassailable existence. Death cannot claim you."

The confirmation, spoken so bluntly amidst the scent of lilies and death, was jarring. Shinji remembered the sensation; not just the horrific pain, but the wrongness of it, the feeling of being forcibly stitched back together by an unseen, hungry force within him. He hadn't died. He'd been... denied. "That's really complicated and all," Shinji managed, the numbness fighting the rising tide of terror and awe, "but I will believe you for now." It was easier than fighting the evidence of his own mangled, yet whole, body.

Merus's brow furrowed, a flicker of genuine surprise crossing his ageless features. "I don't get how you believed me so easily. I anticipated resistance. Denial. I thought I'd need to explain, demonstrate, convince you a dozen times over. Human minds... they are fragile constructs, easily shattered by truths that challenge their perceived reality."

Shinji met his gaze. "It's because it's all quite logical." He paused, recalling years of a subtle, unsettling presence. "I've been sensing... something. An entity. Following me. Watching. Since I was fourteen. It was... cold. Ancient. Powerful." He locked eyes with the God. "It was you, right"

"Precisely," Merus confirmed, no hint of apology. "I've been your unseen guardian since your first breath. Monitoring. Protecting from shadows you never perceived. But you... you had enough nascent spiritual energy, even at fourteen, to feel the echo of my presence. A flicker of the Trascender's potential awakening."

*Guardian*. The word rang hollow when his family lay in coffins nearby. "So," Shinji pressed, clinging to the analytical thread, "my ability is just... Immortality? I just... can't die?" The concept was horrifying in its implications. An eternity of what? Running? Grieving?