She watches Bam as he laughs and smiles with Khun. They are sitting together on the throne as the teams dissolve into chaos, thanks to Khun's manipulations. Bam is so young and timid now, nothing like the powerful man she sees in the future. That man will still laugh and smile with Khun, but that man will be confident in his power. He will be the true God of the Tower.
The 25th Bam is nothing but a shadow of his future glory.
She watches and she thinks. The longer she is here with Bam, the less certain she is of the future. Perhaps she doesn't want it to be true, she thinks with a wry smile. But it's little things that she's noticed, little things that make her uneasy. When Bam is supposed to get hit by Rak's tail, it somehow misses and he is unhurt. When she knows Lero Ro will make Bam retake the shinsu test, he passes Bam for being "lucky". When Anaak should remain calm after Endorsi's insult, she almost attacks. And the only difference Hwaryun can detect between her predictions and the actual events are a few words or gestures from Bam.
The boy is an Irregular, and he is warping the path before him.
But Bam cannot change anything now, not anything important in the next 10 minutes. Hwaryun is confident in her abilities. No one knows who she is, or that she isn't an ordinary Regular. Some would say it was luck, luck that Evankhell wasn't here or that Lero Ro hadn't noticed her yet, but Hwaryun knows it isn't luck. She has seen the paths laid out before her, each leading to a different future, and she chose the paths that would lead her to her goal. To her God. Even if she couldn't be there to guide him afterwards.
When the time comes to step into the arena with her team, she does. When you find your path, you must ignore your fear. She knows what to do. The paths are twisting and swirling before her eyes. If she moves just so, she can break Endorsi's heel, hop over the lumbering guardian, swing her weighted staff at Rachel's head, and then she knows what happens next—
She hears Bam leap off the throne, knows the crown tumbles to the floor, and she smiles sadly. This is the path I must walk.
The paths she has foreseen, the ones that lead him to unimaginable power and glory, the ones that make him the God of this Tower, all require great sacrifice. Her sacrifice. But Hwaryun has sworn on her life that she will lead Bam to greatness. The future depends on what I do today. She closes her eyes and resigns herself to death. She waits for the deadly blast of shinsu—
—and suddenly a new path appears. She can have a second chance, if she only moves her staff just so—
Excruciating pain slices her eye.
Hwaryun staggers. Blood drips down, her mask sliced beyond repair and her face scoured by a long, deep cut. She gingerly touches it, notes the pain, then falls to her knees.
He chose to spare her. Whether he knew it or not, he had saved her. For that mercy, she will repay him. She will lead him to his true destiny as God of the Tower, because she has seen his path, and it is hard and lonely. But for him, for that future God, she will do anything.