Umi's words fell like a final, crushing gavel, stripping away the last shreds of Nijigasaki's perceived martyrdom.
"It's just three years for all of you," Umi added, her voice dropping to a low, gravelly resonance that vibrated through the concrete beneath their feet. "You act as though your three years of waiting is a lifetime. You think your grief is the oldest, the heaviest, the most profound."
She looked directly at Karin, then at Setsuna, her golden eyes unyielding.
"Our history with him? It has been about seven years. Seven years of navigating the quiet, the absence, the building up, and the tearing down. We watched him change, watched him break, and watched him piece himself back together before he ever even crossed your paths."
A harsh gust of wind swept across the Odaiba rooftop, pulling at Umi's long blue hair. She didn't blink.
"And Aqours? The girls in Numazu he is rushing to see right now? Theirs is about five years. Five years of their own quiet storms, their own unanswered questions, and their own endurance. Every single generation has a claim on his past. Every single one of us has a scar."
She walked over to Ayumu, who was still kneeling, completely hollowed out by the sheer scale of the reality Umi was laying before them. Umi looked down at her, not with anger anymore, but with the sobering weight of an elder sister who had already walked through the fire.
"You thought you were his executioners, Nijigasaki," Umi whispered, the wind carrying her words across the frozen group. "But you are just the latest chapter in a book that was being written long before you ever picked up a microphone. If Aqours could wait five years, and if \mu's could endure seven... what gives you the right to try and end his story here with a knife?"
The revelation left the rooftop completely paralyzed. The grand, tragic drama the Nijigasaki High School Idol Club had built around their betrayal hadn't just been dismantled by Agung; it had been entirely contextualized by Umi. They weren't the center of his universe, nor were they his ultimate victims. They were simply a three-year stop on a long, agonizing road of reckoning that spanned nearly a decade.
Kanata let out a ragged, trembling breath, the realization that she wasn't the only anchor—that there were women who had held the line for five and seven years—finally allowing her to let go of the suffocating responsibility she had carried alone.
Umi stepped back, standing tall as the ultimate bridge between the past and the present.
"He is on his way to the train station," Umi said quietly, looking toward the exit. "Numazu is waiting for him. Hong Kong is waiting for him. His children are waiting for him. The world is far bigger than this rooftop, girls. It's time you started living in it."