Starborn Renegades: Anthem of the Flawed

The Sea of Paradox exhaled corrosive fog over cathedral ruins as Rin's cursed blade Oborogenkū trembled in its sheath. A charred Church banner hung from a tilted steel cross, its remaining Ω sigil pulsing with bioluminescent veins like dying nerves.

Hayate's Stardust Eye fractured with crackling light.

"Fall back!" He yanked Rin's combat sash, "Contract residues here trigger resonance—"

Too late.

Oborogenkū tore through its restraints. Seven hundred holographic beams erupted from the scabbard, illuminating translucent figures on scorched earth—Rin's father in Hierophant robes, wielding her blade's prototype. Twelve Paradox Corsairs knelt at his feet, each branded with Sakabane crests on their collarbones.

"Atone." The specter raised his blade, voice interlaced with lab broadcast static. "Pay for the sin of free will."

Rin's crystalline arm locked rigid. She recognized this scene—classified file E-Ω777-1 titled Flawed Gene Purification. But the hologram revealed crueler truths: as her father's blade pierced the first corsair's neck, resonance waves mimicking infant wails rippled across the steel.

"That's…the brainwashing frequency?" Hayate smashed his wrench against ground stones, Stardust sparks disrupting the projection.

Rin didn't answer. Her eardrums bled from the scabbard's ultrasonic emissions—identical to the "cognitive realignment" sessions in Church labs. 3 PM daily. Restrained on alloy tables. Neurons scrubbed raw until doctrinal recitation became reflex.

The spectral massacre continued. With each fallen corsair, her father's blade absorbed cerulean energy, its engraved motto Sever Destiny warping into Church dogma: Obedience Is Salvation.

"Look at their faces." Hayate gripped her shuddering shoulder.

When the seventh corsair lifted his bloodied head, Rin's breath crystallized—features beneath grime mirrored Hayate's grandfather.

"Sakabanes were never pirates." Hayate's voice echoed from oceanic depths. "They're Church-made memory vessels for erased histories…"

The specter turned. Its data-blurred face resolved into Rin's mirror image.

"Specimen E-Ω777." Her father's blade glinted at her throat. "You were born to witness traitors' demise."

Oborogenkū's scabbard detonated ice shrapnel. Rin's crystalline arm slashed autonomously, decapitating the hologram. But dispersing pixels reconstituted her deepest nightmare—

(Neonatal incubation tank. Infant self submerged in nutrient gel, spine pierced by eel-gene transfusion needles. Beyond the glass, Hayate's mother bludgeoned containment fields with shredded Paradox Pacts, her fists raw meat.)

"Stop this…" Rin impaled her blade into soil to halt memory reflux.

The headless specter persisted: "You think to escape bloodline curses?" Its body disassembled into scrolling Church edicts, coiling around her arm. "Every breath filters flaws for the Holy Equation."

Hayate's Stardust wrench struck cathedral bronze.

Reverberations cracked the banner's Ω veneer, exposing Paradox Corsair Ψ sigils beneath. The specter's sonic waves distorted—her father's face glitched into a clone's features: pupil-less, pallid, neck branded E-Ω777-β.

"They…cultured me from your genes?" Rin's arm shrieked with harmonic feedback. Blood droplets rolled across scorched earth, absorbing Stardust particles to form embryonic sacs—each containing her fetal duplicates.

Hayate's eye bled quicksilver filaments. Three-second precognition triggered:

1.2s until clone incubation | 3.5s until brainwash frequency breaches seal | 5s until cathedral sinks into Sea

He lunged for the banner, ripping smoldering Ψ fabric barehanded. Agony seared his palms, unleashing sealed memories—centuries of Sakabanes strapped to gene-filtration altars.

"Rin!" He hurled the sigil cloth.

The fabric unraveled into photonic strands, binding Oborogenkū. Brainwash frequencies shifted into lullaby resonance—a mother's hummed melody.

Embryos hatched.

Dozens of Rin clones emerged, Church katanas mirroring her father's execution stances. Yet they froze mid-lunge—the Ψ-empowered blade projected Hayate's Stardust DNA, forcing neural synchronization across all clones.

"So this…is our truth?" Rin pressed her blade to a clone's throat. Its crystalline arm flickered with stolen memories—Hayate's five-year-old self huddled inside a lab cabinet, watching Church surgeons transplant his mother's consciousness into gene-drives. The cabinet's ventilation slits cast prison-bar shadows across his face as drill bits whirred toward her exposed cerebellum.

Hayate's spray canister shattered floor tiles. Stardust pigment flowed through Church engravings, forming a colossal inversion equation. Clones clutched their heads screaming—gene chains disassembling into bioluminescent moths that fled through shattered stained glass.

"Flawed genes can't be purified." Hayate pressed Rin's palm against the equation's Ψ core. "They evolve into new laws."

The cathedral collapsed. Her father's specter coalesced one last time—no longer Hierophant, but Paradox Corsair in battle-scarred armor, blade engraved Sever Destiny.

"Forgive me…" his lips formed before dissolution.

Rin's crystalline arm speared the ground.

A buried Church incubation pod erupted upward, housing her father's corpse—Hayate's Stardust wrench lodged in its chest.

"You were a vessel too." She gripped the wrench, dual gene-chains resonating.

As the tool withdrew, the Sea of Paradox echoed with the First Sakabane's laughter.