Sooooooooo, I was in the process of drafting another theory post-Kuro 2 (and actually shared a early draft of it over discord), but was never very happy with it because it felt like two separate theories mashed together that didn’t mesh well together. It also didn’t really have any predictions beyond adding additional conditions or rules to my earlier theory post-Kuro 1 (Devils, Death, and Lost Time).
But now things have changed. We had the first teaser trailer showing off outer space, Gundam mech battles, and Van sitting on what appears to be either the moon or a giant meteor. We then had a second trailer hinting at the return of picnic squad (officially), Rean and his closeted gay lover Crow, KEVIN. This was on-top of Hamilton giving the first true hint that Zemuria is stuck in an eternal recurrence loop and, of course, everything about Hermes is a black box. Armed with a bunch of other theories and reddit posts, it’s time to get cooking.
As always, the place I am going to start is with the themes. There are essentially three of them that have been omnipresent throughout the Calvard arc–Fear, Deception, and Progress.
Fear, of course, is the most in your face of them with “True Fear” being the primary objective of Almata’s boss Gerard Dantes, but it is also present in how the Genesis operate. As far as we are aware, the genesises have two functions. The first is that they simulate possible worlds which is why Latte linked them to the 2nd Causality Engine. As phrased by Kondo in the visual collection, their function is “to reproduce the principles and phenomena of all things existing in the universe” (TL: Gu4n). The second function is to rewind to a previous world state, essentially erasing the previous possible world from existence but maintaining a record of it in people’s memories. In my opinion, fear is both the activation mechanism and main protocol for both functions. Just looking at Kuro 1,
2nd Genesis
Activation: The members of Eisenschild were tortured and killed by the three surviving Wardens of Garden.
Event: The members of Eisenschild are turned into ghouls. Ayda has retained her sanity but is slowly being taken over. Ultimately, she fails and all the jaegers are fused together into a grotesque monstrosity. Notably, this genesis was used by Epstein to test healing arts.
3rd Genesis
Activation: Gein Lu worked with Almata to help awaken Aaron as Taikun because he was afraid that Heiyue would be forgotten and lost in the upcoming chaos. Almata killed several of Aaron’s friends.
Event: Taikun returns through Aaron to enact his revenge against Heiyue and Langport for rejecting him 40 years ago.
4th Genesis
Activation: The CEO of Vegas Films is caught in a bind and is forced to spread a drug for Almata that is making people lose control over their actions.
Event: Everyone loses control of themselves and a giant barrier forms around the hotel.
5th Genesis
Activation: Professor Callaghan has recently been having difficulty obtaining funding for research. He feels like he is being humiliated by Professor Cronkite and is willing to do anything to repair his legacy including abusing his grad students and work with Almata.
Event: Callaghan becomes an AI and calculates a method to create a nuclear bomb cementing his legacy in Zemurian history but ultimately the system shuts down before he can finish the calculation.
6th Genesis
Activation: A nuke is dropped on Criel village because a bunch of white people are afraid they are gonna be (genetically) erased.
Event: A bunch of weirdos are forced to fight in a death game to prevent Almata from dropping another nuke over Oracion.
Now going back in time to the Rean era, one of the early surprises of Sen no Kiseki III was that the divine knight colors didn’t match the seven elements. Kondo, in fact, also confirmed that they deliberately didn’t match the elements and instead followed a separate ruleset which is believed to have been the tempering and/or sintering colors of steel. Thus, under the same train of thought, I decided to google shit about fear and found that according to psychotherapist Karl Albrecht, Ph.D., there are five primal fears that all humans share:
Ego-death – Fear of humiliation, shame, profound disapproval.
Separation – Fear of abandonment, rejection, loss of connection. Not being valued by others.
Loss of Autonomy – Fear of immobilization, paralysis, entrapment, or being stuck in bad circumstances with no escape.
Mutilation – Fear of your body being damaged or invaded. Fear of spiders, sickness, animals, etc. all fall under this.
Extinction – Fear of death.
And they form a hierarchy from entirely metaphysical to entirely physical harm. There are two things I noticed with this. One was that there were five demon lords and five primal fears which is something I will talk about later. The other was that these five fears matched up pretty damn closely with each of these five genesis. If it wasn’t obvious by how I worded the previous section or the color coding of the pyramid, 2nd=Mutilation (it was literally used for testing healing arts), 3rd=Separation, 4th=Loss of Autonomy, 5th=Ego-death, 6th=Extinction.
Now, the 1st, 7th, and 8th seem to have unique functions different from the other but still are linked to fear. The 7th Genesis is clearly Van’s personal nightmare activated by the partial reunion of Van Arkride with Diabolic Core and the man who took it from him. I actually wrote a good character analysis of Van in my pre-release theory for Kuro 1 that was based only on his orbment slots (Two Time/One Earth) that ended up being remarkably spot on despite the game having not been released yet. Essentially, Van is a character who is deathly afraid of losing the people who are close to him, and for this reason, he downplays his relationships with others and attempts to emotionally separate himself from others. This is, of course, a lie he tells himself (Deception). Pandemonium is thus a possible world where everyone Van is connected to is put in harm’s way from existential, supernatural threats, of which Van is one of them. Within this world, the source of Van’s fears have returned to life and even can become immortal demons themselves.
The word pandemonium (Latin: all demons place) was first used in John Milton’s Paradise Lost to refer to the capital of Hell. In modern uses, it has come to mean a wild uproar or utter chaos. In Kiseki, it is both a world of demons and of the fearful irrationality that demons feed on. I think in a sense that this hints towards what Gerard means by true fear and the nature of devils in the Zemurian system–our natural irrationality and ability to believe the bullshit, which is yet another connection to the second of our three themes, Deception.
The purpose of the eighth genesis is to observe mankind’s original sin—the inherent capability of all mankind to do evil given the right circumstances. It builds upon this idea that evil and fear come from mankind’s inherent weakness which is once again, the ability to believe the bullshit (a running community gag is that the 8th Genesis’s core ability is to lower everyone’s IQ by 50 points).
While it is clear the 8th Genesis is at the core of the events of Kuro 2, in Act 3, there are five sub-acts where you find one of your allies has been infected by the erosion similarly to how there are five chapters in Kuro, and in each case, that infected individual contains one of five genesis. So I decided to go back and check which genesis each person has.
Act 3A
Van and Aaron allegedly brutally murdered Cao and Ashen kills them with a deadly neurotoxin. She has the 2nd Genesis which I previously linked to mutilation. Poissons and bodily invasion fall under this category as well.
Act 3B
After being rejected, Paulette allegedly started dating another man who abused her. Yume asks Maxim to help her. This is the 3rd Genesis which I linked to separation/rejection.
Act 3C
Van is alone and being hunted and killed over and over again by Celis Ortesia. She has the 6th genesis which was linked to extinction/death.
Act 3D
The party’s friends and allies keep luring them into traps. Feri believes Van trapped and killed Ayda. Feri had the 4th Genesis which I previously linked to Loss of Autonomy. Notably Claustrophobia and being tapped fall under this category. The idea that everyone else is screwing you over.
Act 3E
Cody is really really upset that Rocksmith’s party lost the election. He has the 5th Genesis which was previously linked to Ego–death.
You could also argue that the sixth genesis was simulating fear of death in Act 1:B as well since it was the only genesis operating at the time and the party kept getting killed over and over again.
I think the big implication here is that the genesises interact with each other on a complementary level. When put together, the 2nd and 8th genesises simulate a possible world that demonstrates both Mutilation and the inherent weakness of mankind. The 4nd and 8th genesises simulate a possible world that demonstrates both Loss of Autonomy and the inherent weakness of mankind. Notably, the seventh governing True Fear or even the demonic and eighth never interacted which is something I think Falcom either deliberately avoided to prevent us from learning too much…or it could’ve just been the original False Zion plotline before it got cut and repurposed, idk.
However, we also learn from Dingo the genesises also work in competition with each other to establish. This is observed through the first genesis actively working to undo the timelines formed from 2-6 + 8 that culminates in the final confrontation with Grendel-Zolga to establish the true timeline.
Not much is known about the first genesis other than it allows Mare to appear and that Mare is connected to some CIA text name, but my opinion is that ultimately Epstein created the Oct-genesis for good not for evil. If the other seven are meant to represent fear and the nature of fear, then the first genesis, Agnes’s genesis, is the tool for overcoming fear. The device that filters out the bullshit. When all eight genesis work together, the first genesis acts as the core that directs Zemuria while the other seven act as filters, so that the true Zemuria beyond the eternal recurrence loop can be established.
Now that we’ve gone over the first of the three major themes and touched upon the second, we can move onto more directly the second and third major themes–Deception (Truth/Lies) and Progress—and how they are linked to “true enemy”.
I have already written about how these themes are presented in Kuro 1 here so I will just give a quick summary and move onto what I didn’t discuss in the previous section (i.e. the stuff not directly connected to the genesises). Essentially, Van’s role is the truthseeker that wades around in the darkness, so that normal people don’t have to (hence he being bluish-black or before dawn). Most of his requests deal with discovering the truth or dealing with an issue that people don’t want to be made public. The villains are people who rely on deception and fear to manipulate people and backstab everyone they ever work with.
On the other side of things, Calvard is the most diverse and progressive country in Zemuria. Van is the woke kiseki protagonist willing to work with anyone regardless of what you are. You have a diverse cast of main party members including fantasy asians, middle easterners, robot maids, and the first intersex main cast member I have ever seen in a video game. The bad guys who are manipulated by Almata are mostly reactionaries who hate the changes since the old imperial days. Hell, the head of Almata is a descendant of the royal family (I’m still pissed that I deleted this prediction the day before my Kuro 1 pre-release theory). Calvard is also the most technologically advanced country in Zemuria, at least in distribution over the entire landscape, and is set to lead the world with its first ever space program.
Now if we look at what is new in Kuro 2, while Almata definitely fits in the box, Garden Master and then Grendel-Zolga is a much more blatant example of the thematic opposition style of antagonist. For reference, in my previous theory Land of Lies, I categorized villains of the Trails series into two groups. Villains in the first part of the story or ‘setup’ are diametrically opposed to the protagonists and the themes of the narrative. So for example, if Arkride Solutions are truth seekers and allies of woke-ism, then the first part villains are liars and reactionaries. For Auguste, both are pretty straightforward. He’s an out of nowhere bullshitter pretending to be Nadia’s older brother and his goal is to rewind time back to the revolution through the destabilization of space-time. Kuro 2 also likes to bring back the petty reactionary villains like Jacobi and Anti-Immigration Terrorists.
Kuro 2 is also where we start getting all the time bullshit and I’m starting to piece together just why Calvard is the Land of Lies and more importantly why El Tiempo Grande would be the Sept-Terrion of Bullshit. The short answer is that everything is fake, nothing is true. I brought up in my reddit post that Calvardians seem to have an aversion to bringing up the past at all. Like all that matters is the destination not the journey. I would take it a step further and say that the past doesn’t exist at all. Not only can time be rewound but memories of those connections to the rewinding can be maintained. Combine this with memories from other possible worlds potentially being transferred a la the eight genesis or (even without such as the girl in Trion Tower or the delusional old lady in Old Town who always “Lies”) and the whole idea of fact version fiction gets flipped on its head.
“My imagination/delusions are way more vivid when up in the tower”
This links back to the two functions of the genesis as well. They were originally tools for testing the capabilities of orbal technology. The primary function allows you to test a hypothetical possibility and the secondary function allows you to rewind if said possibility didn’t work out. It would also let you do hundreds or even thousands of large scale trial tests in the time it would normally take to do a quarter of one. Hence explaining the rapid technological advancement with the Orbal Revolution. This is what was achieved with eight small artifact like devices, that at best may be a microcosm of the true power of the Sept-Terrion. Now imagine what could be possible with the real thing.
I’m getting past myself. For Kai, for the ‘delivery’ part of the story’s antagonist, we return back to the Land of Lies. The second part of the story’s villains are what I like to call the thematic hypocrite. I think the technical term that literary nerds made up is ‘foil’ but I prefer calling them hypocrites. These are people that represent the themes of the narrative on the surface but are super-hypocritical about it and use methods that compromise the themes they supposedly represent. The protagonist also has some hypocritical characteristics, but they are expected to overcome them at key moments in the story’s narrative (usually the two-thirds to three-quarters mark).
So if we go back to the themes, the hypocrite or hypocrites should be someone who seeks the truth but relies on lies and deception; someone who exudes confidence, but relies on fear or is deeply fearful under the surface; who seeks to advance mankind, but sets the world back…
I can think of several individuals who fit some of these—Elroy, Gramheart, and Nina to name a few, but I could also see people like Rene or Thornedyke depending on the direction the story takes. Ultimately, I think the answer to who this is and what their true objective(s) is/are going to be related to the ‘true fear’–to the seventy seven devils.
Falcom’s lead scenario writer is notoriously formulaic and not once in the series history has a concept introduced at the very end of the setup arc (or sub-end) not been important to the story of the Sept-Terrion in that country. In Sky we had the first barrier generator under Grancel which activated four more backup barrier generators. In Crossbell, we had the introduction of KeA as the Zero-Child. In CS1, they introduced the divine knight; and CS2, the idea of conflict/rivalries as well as the first hint of the curse through Testarossa. 
The finale of Kuro 1 is all about demons and devils. It brings back the Book of Ezer from the 3rd and introduces the 5 top devils of the 77, of which, Van is the host of one of them and has been since birth. Then Kuro 2’s postgame brings back the Book of Ezer and as the tool Garden Master used to take over Marten Garten along with more Zion mumbo jumbo with Van. At this point, I’m pretty damn sure that seventy-seven devils are going to be the focal point of Kai no Kiseki; at least, the big five are.
I think a good place to start would be by defining what the seventy seven devils evil are. As far as we know, they are evil demonic beings that rule over the other demons on the plane of Gehenna. They appear to use fear and deception to lure unsuspecting victims to their doom, but generally only appear in places where the higher elements are active. Usually these locations also have a lot of residual negative emotions associated with unclean death. The word devil notably means false accuser in Latin. According to Bergard, there were originally only 72 of them, but after the world was reset (at least once), the number suddenly increased to 77 with five even greater demon lords ruling over the other 72. Historically, they have been worshipped by members of the DG Cult. In the far east, they are referred to as denizens of the underworld, and according to Gerard, the plane of Gehenna does not exist in reality.
I think it is very easy to link demons and devils to the first themes of fear and deception. It’s their modus operandi. The only thing missing is the connection to the third theme of progress. But then it dawned on me–
The combat orbment Xipha stands for eXternal Interface for Post Human Activation. Post-humanism is the successor philosophy to transhumanism. If transhumanism is about augmented self through science and technology, post-humanism would be the next stage in human evolution, to become something beyond human such as an AI or god. The word unshackled in a gnostic sense would describe this well.
—Devils are Post-humans.
Van Arkride isn’t just the host of Vagrants-Zion. Van is Vagrants-Zion. Van’s morality or philosophy is described as being bluish-black, the color of sky just before dawn. Vagrants-Zion has dominion over the bluish-black hour, the time before dawn. (NISA localized this wrong. Removing bluish removes the thematic connection to Van’s bluish-black or before dawn morality. Also, the Kanji was 刻 which is used to represent specific periods of time, not time itself (Thanks to HAMITOB for this)).
And its not just Van, all demons are post-humans. Given the timeline, the original 72 must be the original Kinship of Time or at least their leadership. Hence the ‘brief hesitation’ and ‘great evil’ lines from the Book of Ezer in the third. The new five were created after the world ended at least once and therefore must be connected to Epstein’s predicted end of the world in 120X (1209) and the eternal recurrence loop.
One theory that I have seen going around (Thanks Gashizmo) is that Gramhearts plan involves using Xipha’s technology, spread continent wide through the low-cost T-phones, to upload the spirits of all Zemuria’s residents to the space satellite so that they metaphysically survive the upcoming end of the world. However, they no longer have physical bodies to return to upon in the reborn world and appear as malicious demons that need to feed on spiritual energy to maintain their existence.
So…demons, devils, and what not…these evil alien creatures…are not actually alien creatures at all. They represent the final stage of human evolution, they represent Progress, but they also represent the costs of progress (moralizing warning). Humanity fundamentally lives in a zero-sum world. We have not achieved post-scarcity. To advance in one area means to take from somewhere else. To build something new, you have to destroy what it was built on top of. The technological advancement of the West is built upon the exploitation of the 3rd World and has resulted in potentially irreparable harm to the Earth’s climate. Change and revolutions always involve death, destruction, and erasure of the past because room needs to be made for the new. People’s opinions don’t really change much after their mid-20s. Society changes because old people with old ideas die.
And so…achieve the final evolution of mankind…the old world must be sacrificed. Zemuria itself needs to be destroyed…and then reborn anew. They need the eternal recurrence loop to survive…because ultimately the desire to become a post-human existence is fear. Fear of death, fear of pain, fear of losing control, fear of losing those close to you (they can’t leave if they are also post-humans), fear of losing yourself…
There is one final bonus section to this theory and that is who the five demon lords might be (subject to change).
Ego-death
Rene Kincaid — He’s a childhood friend of the main character, has glasses (traitor material), is highly self-motivated, and exudes passion. He has ambition for politics and is the most likely candidate for the CID agent who introduced Gramheart to MTSC.
Separation
Van Arkride — It’s his entire character arc.
Loss of Autonomy
Lucrezia — Her weapon prevents her from being trapped or contained anywhere which would fit with Claustrophobia. However, the fact that she is an enforcer not an Anguis weakens the chance of her being connected to anything significant.
Mutilation
Elroy Harwood — He specializes in poisons and explosions, is an obvious Joker expy, and clear villain candidate. An Anguis usually has some connection to the Sept-Terrion either directly or indirectly, and he’s the main Anguis of this arc.
Extinction
Gilliam Thornedyke — Has similar vibes to Rufus but more importantly MTSC as an organization has a ridiculous amount of post-humanism vibes associated with it. I won’t spoil it, but MTSC has a lot of similarities to Vector Industries from Xenosaga.
As a bonus, I think there might be another twist to the role of the 77 Devils in the Zemurian system which may even explain why someone like Van would become one. Below is one of the new “Sept-Terrion” cards introduced with the Northern War gacha game.
It’s been my opinion for a while that the flower on the original seven cards represent the role or purpose of the Sept-Terrion for the original Kinships. For example, the space card contains rejection and the space tribe builds a floating city in the sky to isolate themselves from the surface. The new ‘demonic’ card shows a surprisingly noble looking demon positioning themselves like a guardian. The flower is most likely the Baptisia which symbolizes protection, so I wonder if the devil’s role is to protect Zemuria from something even worse. From something truly “outside”.
Thanks to HAMITOB, gashizmo, and Renza for reviewing the initial draft.