Starborn Renegades: Anthem of the Flawed

The First Sakabane's laughter merged with crashing waves as fissures spiderwebbed across Hayate's Stardust Eye. Pact Chains materialized midair, each link glowing with forged Voluntary Sacrifice Agreements in his mother's handwriting—blood signatures now reverse-osmosing into his irises.

"Ten seconds." Hayate's warning rasped through gritted teeth.

Stardust energy erupted from his cracking eye, fracturing vision into 2,000 futures:

Rin's crystalline arm spearing his heart at 3s｜Church dreadnoughts vaporizing the sea at 5s｜The First Sakabane's corpse rising with Ψ-Ω entwined Judgment Hammer at 7.5s—

Only one thread glimmered with his mother's erased final moments.

"Found you." He seized the chain throttling his eye, barbs shredding his cheek.

The Pact Chains snapped. Karmic flames erupted—crimson inferno threaded with glowing data-code—licking seawater into glassified plains that reflected five-year-old Hayate's memory: Mother's latex-gloved hand gripping his, warmth bleeding through like sunlight filtered through galaxies.

"Price confirmed." The Church's synthetic voice boomed from stormclouds.

Hayate's fingertips turned smooth—no memory of glove textures, palm calluses, or that day's salt-air. He became a stranger to his own past.

Rin's blade cleaved through datafire.

"Madman! Ten-second precog burns neural pathways!" Her Ψ sigils warped under Ω corrosion, crystalline arm veined with blood. "Your gene-chains are quantum-shredding!"

Hayate didn't answer. His retinas blazed as karmic-data hybrid vision force-fed memories: Mother's consciousness being surgically grafted into Church gene-drives, 3,000 frames per second.

"Five left." He spat ionized blood, gripping the dreadnought's virtual trajectory. Stardust solidified into bowstrings, chain shards into arrows—tips blazing violet with Goetic sigils and quantum equations.

The dreadnought's shield activated—a firewall of flickering Sakabane Rin gene-signatures. As Hayate's first arrow pierced it, Rin's arm snapped backward, cryo-eel vertebrae bursting through her scapula.

"They…made me…a living firewall?" Rin collapsed on glassified waves, watching her blood self-assemble into Church edicts.

Hayate's eye-cracks reached his jugular. The final future-vision crystallized: His erasure. Rin consumed by the First Sakabane's memories. A new vessel born.

"Rewrite the endpoint." He snapped the Pact Arrow lodged in his arm and drove it into his temple.

Stardust supernova engulfed the sea.

The karmic-fire phantom of his mother stirred—breaking Church data-binds to grip Hayate's bowhand. This time, her touch felt real: chemical burns on fingertips, bioscanner ports in palms, deathbed pulse throbbing through latex.

"Her…warmth?" Hayate's pupil dilated.

Not memory—reality rewriting itself.

Three arrows launched:

First shattered gene-firewall, unleashing hundreds of infant Rin clones' wails;

Second pierced dreadnought core, its overload spewing the First Sakabane's memory-stardust;

Third arrow aimed at Hayate's heart transformed midflight—into his mother's hand.

Real. Warm. Salt-and-machine-oil-scented. It cupped his ravaged eye.

"Survive," her voice crossed a decade's void, "until contracts become jokes."

Karma-data singularity imploded. Dreadnought wreckage reassembled into the First Sakabane's tombstone, epitaph blazing: THE PERFECT VESSEL BREEDS THE FATAL FLAW.

Rin's corruption reversed. Cryo-eel vertebrae absorbed Stardust, engraving Hayate's memories onto her arm—fifth birthday sunsets, latex glove textures, first handhold's millisecond pulses—all encoded into bioluminescent Ψ runes.

"You…gave me your tactile memories?" Rin traced the patterns, Hayate's stolen warmth rekindling her neurons.

Memory-capsules surfaced—each preserving Church-erased errors: the First Sakabane's logs, Hayate's mother's reversal algorithms, Rin's original gene-blueprint. They coalesced into new Pact Chains: milk teeth interlocked with eel vertebrae.

Hayate knelt before the epitaph, eye fully crystallized. Before human sight vanished, he saw his mother's phantom sign to Rin in Flawed Cipher—Sakabane's lost language of scars:

[Beyond blood, we recognize by wounds.]

When Rin pressed her palm to Hayate's crystal eye, the Sea of Paradox sang with disintegrating pacts. Karmic phoenixes and data-whales carried them toward the Church's eternal-night firmament breach.

The First Sakabane laughed a third time—now harmonizing with a mother's lullaby. From abyssal depths rose an ark of Stardust-eel scales, its deck engraved with the new era's first law:

[PERFECTION IS THE CAGE. THE FLAWED HOLD THE KEY.]