KamiKowa: That Time I Got Transmigrated With A Broken Goddess

Silence.

No more screaming wind. No more grinding ice. No more reality unmaking itself one cobblestone at a time. Just the soft whisper of snow falling through pine branches and the distant echo of his own ragged breathing.

Xavier knelt in the snow, his hands pressed against the frozen ground, staring at the spot where the portal had collapsed. The dimensional tear vanished, leaving no scar in the air to prove it had ever been. The world offered no proof the nightmare had ever been.

But Xavier knew what happened.

Dalen's weathered face, frozen mid-shout as he tried to organize a defense. Gareth's young eyes, wide with terror, his scout's instincts useless against something that could simply decide he shouldn't exist. Marta, always ready with a joke around the evening fire, was now a crystal sculpture, her crossbow still half-raised. The transformation had been instantaneous.

Henri. Jorik. The others whose names he'd never deemed valuable enough to learn.

All dead because he'd made the call to go through that village.

Xavier lifted his hands from the snow. No blood. No wounds. Not even a bruise from his desperate leap through the portal.

A sound made him turn. Naomi lay crumpled, her purple hair spread across the white like spilled wine. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, irregular rhythms. Classic Essentia burnout.

She'd nearly killed herself getting them out.

Ashley was worse. The golden fractures that had appeared during her psychic breakdown still crawled beneath her skin like living light. Her body convulsed in small, periodic spasms, and her lips moved soundlessly.

Xavier tried to stand, but his legs buckled. A foreign cold, sharp as a needle, shot up his spine.

The cold wasn't coming from the snow.

It started at the exact spot where the Knight's shard had struck him—a point of absolute zero between his shoulder blades that no amount of warmth could touch. But worse than the physical sensation was what came with it: a brief, overwhelming glimpse through alien eyes.

Three insects struggling in the snow. Specks of consciousness so small they barely registered against the cosmic background. Temporary patterns in matter that would be gone in less than a century—meaningless noise in an infinite silence.

The vision lasted only seconds, but it left Xavier gasping. That vast, empty indifference. That sense of being so fundamentally insignificant that his existence barely qualified as real.

Xavier forced himself upright, pushing down the phantom sensation of nonexistence. He couldn't afford to break down. Not now.

Assess. Prioritize. Survive.

Naomi first. He trudged through the knee-deep snow to where she lay, checking her pulse and breathing. Weak but steady.

A cold dread, entirely his own and separate from the shard's chill, coiled in his gut as he looked at Ashley. he golden light beneath her skin pulsed erratically, like a dying star.

"Dalen," she whispered, her voice barely audible.

Xavier knelt beside her, brushing snow from her face. "Ashley. You're safe. They're gone. You can't save them now."

"Xavier...? Where... did we get out?"

"Yeah. We got out."

"The others?"

Xavier's throat closed. "Just us."

Ashley's eyes squeezed shut. A single tear froze on her cheek before it could fall. "I couldn't protect them. I tried, but there were so many, and the pain was—"

"You saved us," Xavier said, the words feeling hollow. "The rest… they didn't die for nothing."

Xavier scanned their surroundings. They were in a small valley surrounded by pine forest. The snow here was clean—this was natural winter, not the weaponized, artificial malice of the plaza.

Shelter. That was the priority. The temperature was dropping as evening approached, and both women needed more than snow and pine branches.

He spotted what he needed fifty yards up the valley's eastern slope: a shallow cave carved into the rock face, probably formed by water erosion. Not much, but better than open ground.

The trek to the cave nearly broke him.

Naomi was deadweight. Xavier had to carry her in his arms, his boots slipping on hidden rocks beneath the snow.

What difference does any of it make?

Ashley was conscious enough to lean on him, but the golden fractures made her skin burn against his coat. She mumbled constantly as they walked—names of the dead, fragments of conversation from before the attack, desperate apologies to people who could no longer hear them.

By the time Xavier hauled them into the cave's shelter, his clothes were soaked with sweat, the moisture stinging in the freezing air. The cave was shallow but dry, with a ceiling just tall enough for him to stand upright. More importantly, there was evidence of previous use: a circle of stones for a fire pit and a small stack of dry wood left by some previous traveler.

Xavier arranged the women on either side of where the fire would go, wrapping them in every spare piece of clothing he could find. Naomi's breathing was getting shallower. Ashley's convulsions were getting worse.

He needed that fire.

The wood was bone-dry, and Xavier still had the flint and steel from his pack. But his hands shook as he worked the striker, and not from the cold. Each failed spark was a fresh accusation. Useless. Another person he couldn't save. He scraped the flint again, harder this time.

A tiny fire against an infinite cold. What difference does it make?

"Come on," he muttered, striking again. "Come on, you piece of—"

His shivering hands betrayed him. The striker skipped, sending a useless spark into the snow. He cursed, his breath ghosting in the air.

Useless.

He scraped the flint again, viciously, forcing a shower of sparks onto the tinder. One caught. A tiny ember glowed with defiant life, and for a moment, it was the most important thing in the universe. He nurtured it, shielding it with his body, coaxing it into a flame.

The small fire beat back the darkness. Shadows writhed on the stone walls, and the sharp scent of burning pine fought the sterile cold. The warmth was a fragile shield, but enough that the ice crystals on his breath no longer formed.

We might actually survive tonight.

Beyond the fire's flickering light, from deep within the pine forest, a branch snapped with a crack too loud to be the cold. Xavier froze, his hand hovering over the flames. An animal? Or something else drawn to their pathetic little bubble of warmth and life? He waited, listening to nothing but the fire and the blood roaring in his ears. Nothing followed. For now.

Naomi's color was improving slightly, though she remained unconscious. Ashley had stopped convulsing, but her muttering had taken on a more desperate rhythm.

"Hannah," she whispered, her voice a thread of sound. "Marcus… Elena."

Xavier frowned. He didn't recognize those names from the caravan. These were older ghosts, dredged up from a past he knew nothing about.

"Ashley," he said softly, touching her shoulder. "It's over. You need to rest."

Her eyes snapped open. They were unfocused, searing with a light that wasn't entirely sane.

Then, her gaze sharpened. It fixed on him with a chilling, lucid hatred.

"You," she rasped, her voice cracking. Her hand shot out, grabbing the front of his jacket. The golden fractures on her skin pulsed.

"This was you," she rasped. "You led us there."

Xavier felt the air leave his lungs. It was irrational. The rantings of a mind shattered by trauma. But it was true.

"Ashley—"

"I tried," she sobbed, her grip tightening. "I tried to hold it back, but there were too many… Dalen… Gareth…" Her lucidity fractured, and she collapsed back into her delirious state, her eyes losing focus. She let go of his jacket, her hand falling limp beside her. "I'm sorry," she started whispering again, to ghosts only she could see. "I'm so sorry…"

Xavier stumbled back, her words echoing in the claustrophobic space. Your choice.

He slammed against the far wall of the cave, the sharp cold of the rock a welcome shock against his back. He stared at his hands, the ones that had just coaxed a life-saving fire from damp wood. Now, they felt stained. Useless.

The accusation didn't just hurt; it cauterized something inside him. It burned away the self-pity, the shock, the desperate justifications. All that remained was the ugly, simple truth.

He hadn't been a leader. He'd been a fool following a beacon.

The faint, persistent pull of his Soul Bond, the connection to Calypso that had felt like a compass guiding him toward reunion, now felt like a leash. A chain that had dragged a dozen people to their deaths. He had chased the thought of her—of one person—at the cost of everyone else. That warm pull south was the source of all this cold, all this death.

He slid down the rock wall until he was sitting on the frozen ground, the fire's warmth unable to reach the absolute zero that had taken root in his soul.

Three insects struggling in the snow.

He looked at Naomi's shallow breathing, at Ashley's fractured skin, at the pathetic little fire holding back an infinite winter.

He hadn't just mistaken borrowed power for real strength.

He'd mistaken selfishness for a destination.