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“Strength.”

It’s a word that means many things to many different people. In the Merriam-Webster English Dictionary, there are many definitions, including but not limited to: ‘capacity for exertion or endurance’, ‘power to resist force’, and ‘a strong attribute or inherent asset’.

To Kumon Kaito, it meant refusing to break no matter what the world threw at him.

He had been young, too young to do anything, when Yggdrasil had swept in and taken everything away from him. He had seen how his father had failed to cope with the changes, had been too weak to support their family… The image of the man hanging by his neck from the tree in their backyard would be forever burned into Kaito’s memory. Then it had been life in the orphanage, with every talking about “the poor Kumon boy”, and “how awful it must be for him to lose his family this way”. The sting of the constant pity burned just as much the grief.

So, he took that pain and sadness and let it turn into anger, into a burning resolve to never be a victim of circumstance again. And that meant being able to stand on his own two feet, to handle whatever came his way without needing to rely on the support of anyone else. The deaths of his parents had taught him the hard way that the world was a cold, cruel place, and if you weren’t strong enough to handle it, it would crush you in one way or another. Even if it took longer for the lucky weaklings who were handed whatever power they wanted on a silver platter. Kaito threw all his effort into everything he tried, whether it was schoolwork, fighting lessons, part-time jobs to save up as much money as he could, or taking over the city’s best dance team. If someone came to him and told him “You won’t be able to do this”, or “You aren’t good enough”, he fought to prove them wrong and always come out on top.

To Takatsukasa Mai, it meant being able to give people their smiles back after their world turned upside down.

It had been her dream, for as long as she could remember, to dance at her father’s shrine. To perform the rites that had been carried down throughout history. And then Yggdrasil had come, with their big plans and construction crews, and had wiped it all away. The shrine was gone, the ancient tree, too, as if it had never been there. Even the hole where it had once stood had been filled in. And to add insult to injury, the company hadn’t even done anything with the land. They had claimed that whatever project they’d had planned for the space had fallen through, leaving behind nothing more than an empty lot.

Her parents had persevered, even though Mai could see how much it pained them to give up their old way of life. As a young girl, Mai did her best to cheer them up. She continued to practice the old dances, even as she learned and adapted her own style to perform on the stages all over the city. The first time her father watched her dance, she saw his face light up, and she knew that this, this was what she wanted to do. She wanted to keep the old memories alive, even the ones that were no more than memories. Yggdrasil could take and take and turn her city into something she didn’t recognise anymore, but they could not take that away from her, or for the people who still remembered the days when Zawame City was just the small town of Zawame. And those victories carried her onward in life.

To Ōren Pierre Alfonzo, it meant staying true to himself, even if so many people in the world didn’t accept it.

Far too many took one look at him, at his makeup and sequined clothes, and dismissed him as a deviant, as someone who violated some law of nature. Even those who accepted that a man could wear as much pink as he wanted, or that he could love another man, were often stunned to find that such a man could also be strong and powerful. His status as an expert fighter and his passion for beauty and things commonly considered feminine were often viewed as opposites, as two things that shouldn’t coexist in one person.

He had felt so much pressure from the people around him to choose just one side of himself, but Ōren Pierre Alfonzo was not a man who would be cowed into conforming. Even when it cost him the friends that only liked one side of him, he didn’t allow the pain of that loss to show. He completed his time as a military man, and wore it as a badge of honour. He trained and perfected his craft as a pâtissier, and wore that accomplishment with pride, as well. He held himself to the highest standard in all parts of his life, and demanded no less from those who came to work for him. If society held no place for him, he would merely carve out his own place for himself.

To Kureshima Mitsuzane, it meant being able to make the hard choices.

Finding out that his family’s company- that his brother was behind a plot to use his (secret) friends as guinea pigs for some nefarious purpose had been the greatest shock he’d ever experienced at that point in his life. Learning that their purpose wasn’t so nefarious after all – the salvation of the human race – was nearly just as shocking. Project Ark, when he was briefed on its details after visiting the ruined city, had chilled him to the bone, but the more he thought about it, the more he felt it was the only option.

He couldn’t get the images out of his head, of his friends’ homes, the Team Gaim Garage, their stage… all abandoned and crumbling, covered in the flora of Helheim. Nor could he forget the nightmares of all his friends succumbing to the urge to end their starvation by eating the alien fruits and becoming monsters, just like Yūya. Project Ark was cold, calculating, leaving over six billion people to die in one horrible way or another, but attempting to save all of them would be impossible. No doubt the effort would instead cost them the people they actually could save. Project Ark had to go forward, for the sake of everyone he cared about. Nii-san had asked for all their names, so that he could add them to a list of people chosen by Yggdrasil members in the know, a list of those who would be given priority when the time came to hand out the Drivers the ordinary citizens would need to survive in the new world that was coming. And Mitsuzane had given him those names, each one falling from his lips accompanied by a silent promise that he wouldn’t let sentimental ideals get in the way of keeping them alive.

To Kureshima Takatora, it meant admitting that he had made a mistake, that his actions taken to save humanity had ultimately done more harm than good.

For as long as Takatora had been working on this project, ever since his father had welcomed the freshly-minted university graduate into his company and revealed their true objective in the privacy of his locked office, he had done his best to ignore the gnawing feeling of guilt. Especially once the time came to distribute the Sengoku Drivers and use people not much older than his baby brother as faceless guinea pigs and scapegoats. (That feeling went from gnawing to outright stabbing when he discovered that said baby brother was actually the green Armoured Rider that he’d intended to bludgeon into submission back on Christmas. When his brother had desperately put names to faces and begged for them to be saved.) But he had pushed it down and kept on working, reminding himself that this was all for the sake of saving the human race.

Then Kazuraba Kōta had gone and barged in, messing up the company’s plans while insisting that there had to be a better way. And then, after weeks of this, he had actually presented Takatora with the opportunity to make that pipe dream a reality. Sentient Inves, ones that could control the growth of Helheim and thereby held the power to stop the invasion of Earth before it even began. Neither Takatora nor Kazuraba had any illusions that it would be easy; aside from finding these Overlords, they would have to make a very strong case in defense of their species. And in defense of abandoning the less-than-legal-or-moral plans that his father and his associates had been working towards since Takatora’s childhood. A lesser man might have insisted on continuing, anyway, refusing to look at himself as anything less than a hero for his past actions. Takatora had done some horrible things recently, many of them to the boy- the young man standing in front of him and offering him an impossible hope. If he was going to go through with this new plan, there would be no denying that. But he would own up to his past sins, and do his best to atone for them.

To Jōnouchi Hideyasu, it meant having the resolve to improve himself, even when everything in him was screaming ‘I can’t do it’.

For much of his life, he had taken the easy way. He worked smarter, not harder. He found tough, easy-to-manipulate pawns to help him get his way, although his association with Hase-chan was by far the longest of its kind. And when the other Beat Rider had lost his position on the new chessboard that the Inves Games had become, Jōnouchi hadn’t even hesitated to drop him like a hot stone. He had sought out another potential pawn in Ōren Pierre Alfonzo, and hadn’t that been a big mistake.

For one, Jōnouchi had probably ended up working harder in his first week than he had in the past year. The old man was an unforgiving taskmaster who seemed to take pleasure in ordering his newest employee about. But there was an odd sense of pride that welled up inside him every time he had a slim spare moment to take in everything he’d accomplished under the ex-soldier’s iron fist. Ending up in the maniac’s idea of training had been a nightmare, but it had taught him a very important lesson: That he could do better than he had before, and on his own merit, not by relying on using others to get his way. Perhaps that was what Kaito had meant whenever he went on about ‘strength’ and ‘power’ as if they were two completely different things. As his new mentor had carried him home after that hellish first day, Jōnouchi vowed to himself that he would no longer allow himself to be stagnant, unchanging, but to keep on challenging his limits until he surpassed him.

To Chucky, it meant being able to keep the people around her going, even through the toughest of times.

Of course, that was a lot easier to do when the toughest of times consisted of other dance teams encroaching on their territory, when their ranking was down at the very bottom of the list. And Mai had been better at encouraging them, at getting their spirits back up and igniting their determination to not take it lying down.

When creatures from another dimension invaded her city, and her friends went out to fight them, Chucky had initially felt helpless. She didn’t have armour, or powers, or fighting skills, or even a trusty slingshot. She couldn’t go out and do battle with the monsters roaming the streets. What she could do was bandage wounds, pass out food and water to scared civilians who had been going without for too long. She could hound the warriors she walked amongst into remembering to eat a goddamn sandwich in between patrols, badger them into letting her treat an injury that they would otherwise power through in their determination to save the innocent, and drag them by the ear over to the nearest cot when they insisted on doing ‘one more sweep’ despite being dead on their feet.

To Zack, it meant having the ability to choose between what he felt was right and what was easy.

He had followed Kaito’s lead loyally from the moment the other boy had proclaimed the name of their new team and explained what it meant. In that moment, he saw someone driven to succeed, to rise above whatever limits society placed on him. It was something that Zack could respect, and aspire to do, himself. Even when Kaito had quit and left Team Baron in his hands, Zack had based most of his decisions on the thought ‘What would Kaito do?’.

But when Kaito had revealed his plans for once he won the Forbidden Fruit, and Zack started adding up the number of people who would die as a result, a cold feeling had washed over him. ‘This is wrong,’ he thought. And although it would be easy to go with the flow, to follow the leader as always, the sheer wrongness of it all could not be ignored. Kōta wasn’t able to stop him so far. Beating Kaito in a fair fight didn’t look like a possible option, not with how powerful he’d become. There likely wasn’t any cell that could hold him. Killing him through deception looked to be the only way to stop the madness. It broke Zack’s heart to admit it, but it was true. And there were only three people that Kaito would allow close enough to do the deed. Minato was completely loyal and devoted to his plan. And Zack couldn’t bear to put the burden on Peco. So, Zack stepped up. He played the part, he planted the bomb, and he pressed the button.

To Kazuraba Kōta, it meant having the resolve to do what was needed to protect people, while still having hope for the world.

The months that passed between putting on that Driver and biting into the Golden Fruit had tested that resolve so many times. He had faced the fear of death, the horrors of war, the despair of learning that he’d unknowingly killed Yūya, and so many other struggles. He had given up more than once, wanting to hide away from the violence that now seemed to constantly paint his life with blood.

But every single time, something happened. Someone he cared about needed help, or even a stranger in danger, and deep inside, something within him pushed, reminded him that if he had the power to stop even just some bad things from happening, he should use it. Even as the cost of that power rose higher and higher until he was faced with the prospect of sacrificing his own humanity and being forced to leave his home. But he thought of his sister, of his friends, and of what would become of them if he didn’t. He had the power to stop that. Kaito had said it himself, with his final words: “You are truly strong.” So, he used it. He took the shining, otherworldly orb from Mai’s hands, and he accepted its power.

THE END