Zei laughs, weakly, mirthlessly. "So no one told you? Yeah, killing Sin has also killed every high summoner. It's the Final Aeon, it's not the same for everyone, it's personal to each high summoner and—it's more powerful, much more, since it can kill Sin. But it also kills the summoner at the same time.

"—not that the pilgrimage isn't dangerous, mind you. Summoners do die pretty often during it, when they don't give up. But it's not the reason I was treating it as goodbye, last night."

"What the fuck, dude! And people just—just go do it anyway, knowing they'll die even if they succeed, and then the monster is gonna come back anyway?"

"...well, yeah. I'm just one person. I'm one person, and Sin kills so many more people than that. If I die and the time Sin stays away for saves two people's lives, that's already worth it."

No it's not, he thinks, but he can't really—argue. He doesn't know why he feels so strongly that way, he understands the maths Zei is pointing at, understands that, in the large scheme of things, even a trade of one for two like that is worth it. And it's probably a lot more than that, isn't it? If Sin is gone for even a year, that's, that's, who knows how many people will get to live who wouldn't otherwise?

But there's still some part inside him that's horrified at the thought, that's rebelling against it with all his might. It, it's, it feels wrong that that's the best they can do, that throwing promising altruistic people like that at the monster hoping this time it won't come back is, is, that's...

"Mind you, I do want to win."

"—huh?"

Zei looks out at the ocean, too, and doesn't turn to look at Tōkan when he speaks. "Five times. Sin has been killed five times. Once by Lady Yunalesca and her husband, Lord Zaon. She was the one who taught us the arts of summoning and how to stop Sin, or so the story goes. I was named after her husband. And then four other people. Four other people, in a thousand years, managed to reach Zanarkand and get their Final Aeon and kill Sin."

"...okay?"

"That's not a statistically significant sample. Even if I save two people, that'll have been enough. But—five people did it. What are the odds that I'll figure something out that they didn't? Actually quite high, when you think about it. Or maybe I'm full of myself, I don't know. But—that's not a maybe, I am full of myself, I do think I'm special, and I do think I can figure something out. Or that there's a chance. I'm—I'm really smart, I'm driven, I'm curious, I'm studious, and I really, really want to win. I don't want to try my best, I want to win.

"And that was already true before the mystery of the century just landed on my lap as if by Yevon's providence." He gestures towards Tōkan for a moment when he says that.

"That's really hot."

Zei laughs. "You're stealing my lines."

"Kinda wanna give you a blowjob again."

"You'll get indigestion. Wait an hour after eating before strenuous physical exercise."

"Mark my words, I will get your cock in my mouth, just you wait."

"You're so romantic."

"I have a lot of practice."

"I'm not going to say I'm not tempted, but probably later, you have a team to teach."

"We still have like half an hour, come on, grill me on my tragic backstory."

Zei laughs. "Honestly you're such an out of context problem that I have no idea what to even ask. You had no recognisable magic but you could spontaneously develop underwater breathing. Your whole country is on an island but named the same as a country that was destroyed a thousand years ago, here, and is now holy grounds. No summoners, no other countries, definitely no Bevelle you were in a war with, you might have been mind controlled somehow. No Sin."

"Oh! And let me show you something..." He rummages inside his bag for his pocket computer and shows it to Zei. "If you tell me this kinda tech doesn't exist anywhere that will go a long way marking me as not having made it all up in a toxin-inspired hallucination."

"...what, uh, is it?"

"It's a pocket computer! It can—or could, when it had charge and a connection to the network—be used to communicate with people anywhere in Zanarkand, or access various, uh, 'places' that are not like physical places, I have no idea how to explain this to people who don't have it. You can play games in them too?"

"Yeah uh we absolutely do not have anything like that. What kind of—infrastructure—would you even need, we have computers and terminals and stuff but they're all local to individual cities and definitely not pocket."

"No clue. I think there were towers that relayed information through the air? I never really looked it up."

"Well. This is definitely not widely available, and as far as I know not available at all, anywhere."