The Beta Worldline's cleanup forces poured into the gymnasium like a silver tide. The hum of High-Frequency Particle Blades slicing through the air mingled with the rustling of Rose Vines, composing a symphony of death.
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka—or rather, Lin Yuan, with all his memories awakened—stood amid countless reflections of himself. The roots of the Wild Rose in his palm greedily drew on his blood.
Each drop that hit the ground brought forth a blue-glowing rose, its roots tearing the invaders' metal boots to shreds.
"What a sick sense of humor." The Beta Worldline Ayanokoji at the head of the group flicked a leaf from his blade. The data stream in his left eye suddenly froze—the roses blooming at his feet were devouring system code. "You're contaminating every worldline with your own genes. Is this what you call salvation?"
Lin Yuan didn't answer. His retinal display was simultaneously analyzing the memories of every clone: in Worldline No. 32, Karuizawa Kei's mechanical eye had been converted into a miniature nuclear reactor; in Worldline No. 179, Ryuen Kakeru had used a High-Frequency Particle Blade to split open his own skull; and this version of himself from the Beta Worldline had once strangled Shiina Hiyori with his own hands when she tried to confess to him.
"You're not here to erase an error," Lin Yuan suddenly said. Behind him, Wild Rose vines wove themselves into a throne. "You're here to retrieve the 'mother sample,' aren't you?"
The Beta clones froze in unison. This secret should have been buried forever with the destruction of the original world—all the clones came from the stem cells Lin Yuan had left in the White Room twenty years ago, and the Wild Rose's gene sequence was the key to unlocking the Final Protocol.
Karuizawa Kei's metal-edged hair sliced through three clones' necks, only for her to discover that what spilled from their wounds wasn't blood, but glowing blue Nano-swarms. "Watch out!" She vaulted onto the Rose Vines covering the dome, only to see Ryuen Kakeru surrounded by the swarm. The tyrant looked like a true gardener as he branded the code E-127 into the swarm's core. "Turn into fertilizer, damn you!"
The swarm abruptly changed course and hurled itself at the Beta clones. Ryuen spat out the blood in his mouth. A crack split the crest on his chest, revealing a throbbing plant heart within. "Didn't see that coming, did you? I'm half a Rose person now."
The cocoon around Horikita Suzune at the center of the gymnasium suddenly shook violently. A golden-red light seeped through the gaps between the vines.
Every clone clutched their heads and fell to their knees. A blood-red warning flashed across their system interfaces:
"Mother gene contamination detected. Forced hibernation mode initiated."
Lin Yuan seized the chance to plunge the Wild Rose into the ground. Its roots spread like lightning, piercing every Beta clone's chest and planting thorny shoots in their artificial hearts.
As the last clone crumbled into rose-covered soil, Karuizawa Kei suddenly wrapped her arms around him from behind. "Your body temperature... it's fading."
The biological-monitoring module in her mechanical eye showed Lin Yuan's cells quantumizing.
This wasn't damage from the battle, but a side effect of overusing the Seed of Paradox—his very existence was tearing apart the stability of the worldlines.
"Take me to the cocoon." Lin Yuan's voice had grown faint. When Karuizawa Kei helped him to Horikita Suzune's giant cocoon, the Rose Vines parted on their own to reveal the girl floating at its core.
The barcode on the back of her neck had turned into flowing golden lines, and droplets of data like morning dew had gathered on her lashes.
"You knew how it would end all along, didn't you?" Lin Yuan stroked the cocoon's shell. In the memories of the eleventh loop, Horikita Suzune had once pointed a gun at her own temple and said, "When I become the server, fill my code with roses."
The cocoon suddenly cracked. Horikita Suzune opened her eyes, and the star map of the entire universe flowed through her pupils.
She reached out and touched Lin Yuan's gradually transparent cheek. A string of teardrops made of binary code trailed from her fingertips. "Father, it's time to say goodbye."
The name made Karuizawa Kei tremble all over. In the fragments of memory she had yet to decode, Lin Yuan from the original world really had been the White Room's chief scientist, and Horikita Suzune was the first-generation clone he had cultivated using his wife's genes.
"Activate the Final Protocol." Lin Yuan placed the Wild Rose in his daughter's palm. "Use my data to mend the fractures in every worldline."
As Karuizawa Kei carried the fully quantumized Lin Yuan out of the gymnasium, the Blood Moon Array was collapsing.
Rain fell across the skies of every parallel world. Golden shoots appeared on the backs of the necks of those touched by the rain—the altered cognition code, destined to resist system formatting forever.
"Wait!" Karuizawa Kei's mechanical eye suddenly went into overdrive. In the instant before Lin Yuan vanished, she captured a set of encrypted memories.
The scene showed Lin Yuan in middle age, on the last night in his lab. As he placed infant Ayanokoji Kiyotaka in a cultivation pod, he secretly tucked something into the baby's swaddling: not a sensor, but a little rose drawn in crayon.
"So from the very beginning, you..." Her sob was drowned out by an explosion.
The Beta Worldline's central fortress dissolved in the rose rain. On the ruins of the original world, countless light-years away, a Wild Rose burst through the concrete and grew wildly.
Seven days later, Karuizawa Kei stood on the rooftop of the reborn Advanced Nurturing High School. Her right eye had become a fully biological prosthetic, and an undying rose bloomed deep within its pupil.
When Ryuen Kakeru approached with a rose stem between his teeth, she was gazing at the sky with a smile. There, a blurry silhouette made of data streams hovered, faintly resembling the lean outline of a boy.
"Did he become a ghost in the new world?" Ryuen tucked the rose stem into her hair.
"No." Karuizawa Kei reached out to touch the motes of light drifting through the air. "He became possibility itself."
Below them, Hirata Yosuke led the students in turning the battle-scarred ruins into a rose garden.
A silver-haired girl crouching in a corner to water the seedlings looked up. A fading barcode was faintly visible on the back of her neck—she was unmistakably Shiina Hiyori.
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