Location: The Memory-Woods of Eralda | Time: Unknown
The roar that burst from Kon's throat was not merely sound—it was the tearing of something buried deep within him. It reverberated through the Memory-Woods, scattering the forest's endless whispering as though even the trees recoiled from such naked anguish. He drove his heel into the memory-soaked earth, a strike not against the ground itself, but against all that pressed upon him: the ghosts, the weight of expectation, the claws of remorse. His body moved like a storm loosed from its restraints, and the corrupted vision of Tigrera was hurled backwards, sliding with eerie smoothness over the glowing moss.
Her body gouged the ground as she went, leaving trenches that bled with faint light—the substance of memory itself, wounded by her presence. She was silent, always silent, and it was that silence which unsettled Kon more than any weapon. He stood panting, chest heaving like a bellows, teeth bared in a snarl that was part warrior's fury and part beast's cry of pain. His claws flexed on the hilt of his blade, as though gripping it harder could steady the trembling that began to take root in his arm.
"You DARE use her against me?!" The words thundered out of him, though he knew they were wasted. He was not truly speaking to her. His burning golden eye fixed itself on the stag who watched them both with the calm of eternity. Eralda, magnificent, untouchable, circled the clearing as if walking the boundary of an ancient stage. Each step was so deliberate, so measured, that it seemed an act of worship—or judgment. His antlers glowed faintly with braided fire, like roots that had drunk deeply of starlight.
"She is not a weapon I wield," Eralda's voice came, soft and melodic, the syllables curved like verses of poetry. "She is a wound. One thou sawest bleeding, and refus'dst to dress. Not forg'd from malice, but born of stress."
Kon wanted to scoff, to spit defiance, but the stag's tone was not accusatory—it was diagnostic, clinical, the way a healer might describe the spreading of a fever. That calmness made it worse.
Tigrera stirred. The silence ended in a new horror. Her arms lengthened, twisting and reshaping with the nauseating scrape of living metal grinding against itself. The bladed limbs became whips, studded with thorn-like barbs that rotated slowly, spinning with a sound that set Kon's teeth on edge. They hummed with a low, eager hunger, as though they had been waiting centuries for this chance to strike him.
The air screamed as she lashed forward.
Kon's sword came up in a blur of gold, his stance firm and wide, but the first strike was quicker—far quicker. The whip cracked across his defense, tore through it, and struck his shoulder with bone-jarring force. Pain flared white-hot down his side as his body was hurled against a tree. The bark shattered beneath him, and for an instant the surface flickered with an image—a sunlit day, laughter, a meal shared beneath open skies. The moment died as the tree itself split, its memory dissolved into motes of dead light.
He staggered upright, his pride stinging more fiercely than his wound. He wiped blood from his lip with the back of his hand, his claws trembling against the edge of his blade. "She's not real," he muttered, forcing the words between clenched teeth. "Just a puppet. A reflection."
The mantra was less conviction than shield, something he hurled desperately against the tide of despair.
"And yet," Eralda answered, voice still soft, still relentless, "she fighteth with all the skill, and all the sorrow, thou leftest her with."
That was the knife's twist. The dam inside Kon cracked, then shattered, and the flood came roaring. His aura exploded outward, a storm of Sunlight yellow light searing through the clearing. The air crackled as if creation itself recoiled from the sudden violence of his anguish.
"ARE YOU NUTS?!" His voice tore the silence apart. "SHE'S THE ONE WHO BETRAYED ME!" The confession came like blood from a wound, a secret he had buried now dragged into the open. His claws shook on the hilt, his whole body trembling with the vehemence of the outburst. "If anyone should feel guilty—it's her! If she had ever cared—if she had ever truly loved me—she would never have—"
The words strangled and died, smothered by rage too great to name.
He surged forward. His blade became a torrent, a whirling light clashing against the hail of thorned whips. Sparks of yellow and purple scattered like fireflies at war. He ducked, twisted, parried, each movement a dance of fury and desperation. The world narrowed to her, to this puppet, to this wound he could neither ignore nor heal.
"She's a ghost," he hissed, voice shaking with conviction he did not truly feel. "Just cut through the illusion. Cut through, and get to the one behind it all—"
He launched himself into the air, every sinew taut with intent to kill. His blade, blazing bright with mana, descended in a perfect, merciless arc meant to sever the phantom and all it represented.
But it never met its mark.
The impact came, not soft like flesh, but hard, metallic, absolute. The sound shrieked across the clearing—steel against steel, defiance against desperation. His strike was stopped, completely and utterly, by something stronger.
The counter-force hurled him backwards as though struck by the blow of a giant. He crashed through smaller memory-trees, their illusions dying in bursts of dim sparks as his body tore them apart. He rolled, gasping, his bones screaming protest, and staggered to his feet. His vision swam, his aura flickered, and his single golden eye went wide with uncomprehending shock.
There, standing between him and Tigrera, was a figure his soul recognized before his mind could name it. A tall tiger tracient, built with a strength and presence that made the clearing itself seem to steady around him. His fur was striped gold and black, clean and proud. Across his back, twin swords were sheathed in an X, glowing faintly. And his eyes—both of them—blazed with steady, white light.
Kon's breath caught. His knees nearly buckled. The hand that had never trembled in war now shook uncontrollably. The name left his lips as a broken whisper, a sound both reverent and disbelieving, as though calling across the gulf of time.
"…Father?"
***
Orin Kaplan—his father, his shield, his executioner of expectations—stood where no living man should stand.
The sight was not a gift. It was an act of desecration. Kon's gut twisted as if his stomach had been turned inside out. His father's memory was something sacred, something buried deep beneath years of silence and scar tissue. To see it now forced into flesh, shimmering with the translucent golden-yellow energy of the Interium Arcem, was like looking at a monument dragged from its pedestal and made to march.
The form flickered at its edges, unstable, a dream stitched crudely into reality. Yet there was no mistaking the weight. His father's stance was perfect—too perfect. Defensive arms raised, energy arcing like molten sunlight down to his claws, he stood as if he had never fallen, never bled, never sacrificed himself to save his son. His eyes—empty as Tigrera's—still bore down with a presence so profound it pressed against Kon's chest. Not living eyes, but the echo of every lesson, every command, every unspoken expectation.
It was unbearable.
And then Eralda's voice wove itself like silk into the space between them. The stag circled the clearing with slow, regal grace, as if conducting the scene rather than observing it. His tones came not as simple words, but as rhymed bars of judgment, each one dropping like iron around Kon's soul.
"The grief thou buried with claw and blade,
Returneth to thee, not to be slay'd.
In love and blood, the debts thou ow'st,
Shall bloom in pain, ere healing grow."
The rhyme lingered. Kon's breathing grew ragged, not from exertion, but from the tightening coil inside his chest. Rage warred with the ache of recognition. He wanted to deny every word, to tear them apart with the sharpness of his claws. Yet something in him knew—the cadence was not invention. It was unveiling.
"You're toying with me," he muttered, the words dragged out between clenched teeth. His chest burned, though the wound was not physical. His single golden eye locked on the stag, blazing with fury and desperation. "You think dragging out my past, dressing it up in my father's face, will break me?"
Denial was easier than despair. So he clung to it.
With a roar he charged.
The clearing erupted into chaos. Tigrera's arms lashed first, morphing into metallic whips that cracked through the air with venomous hunger. From the right, Orin moved—not wild, not erratic, but with the measured exactness Kon knew better than his own heartbeat. It was his father's style. The stance drilled into him in the training yards of their homeland, the footwork corrected with stern patience, the blows that had once tapped his young shoulders now came with crushing, phantom weight.
Kon blurred, his tiger body pushed to its very edge, weaving between the two. His blade intercepted one lash, deflected another, while his claws snapped up to parry the familiar downward strike of his father's phantom. For every glancing hit he managed—a shallow cut through Tigrera's shoulder, a kick thrown into Orin's guard—two more blows forced him back. The world narrowed to survival, to the endless onslaught of past and past-love twisted into executioners.
Sweat stung his eye, salt burning against the sharp focus of his vision. His muscles ached with effort. Frustration burned hotter than pain.
'Why am I struggling?' The thought shrieked in his skull. 'They're not real. Just fragments. Echoes pulled from my own head. I'm stronger than this—I've faced stronger adversery than this—!'
The rationalization was a raft in storm waters, but even as he clung to it, he felt the wood splinter beneath his grip.
He forced himself to breathe, to draw from the Interium buried in his soul. The power of his bloodline surged, lighting his body with sunshine-yellow mana. The woods dimmed against the brilliance of it, shadows shrinking back as though cowed. His aura howled around him, demanding release.
"Let's end this!" His voice rang not only as battle-cry, but as vow.
He struck.
"BIRINCI PENÇE: ZIRH PENÇESI — FIRST CLAW: ARMOR CLAW!"
The energy condensed, a molten shell coating his sword. He swung with the weight of his whole body behind it. The clash with Tigrera's whips detonated like thunder, golden light swallowing purple. The momentum shattered her form, her stance broken, her arms retracting with an almost pained convulsion. For an instant, her corrupted body faltered, stilled.
Kon did not stop. He spun, breath hot, eyes wild. His next words came not as cry but as declaration, iron-clad with will.
"İKINCI PENÇE: HAYALET KALKAN — SECOND CLAW: GHOST SHIELD!"
His free hand shimmered, claws outlined in near-invisible distortion. He dashed past his father's phantom, not striking with steel but brushing with raw disruption. It was like dragging a blade through smoke. The form did not break—but it faltered. The once-perfect stance stuttered, motions jerking, as if the echo itself had been jarred.
Kon landed, his body low, ready for the third strike. His voice carried the force of his entire being.
"ÜÇÜNCÜ PENÇE: ÇARPIŞAN PENÇE — THIRD CLAW: COLLISION CLAW!"
His claws slashed outward, releasing a concussive wave of pure energy. The clearing shook as the force struck both figures. They staggered, their forms flickering like torches in storm winds. But they did not vanish. They held, resilient.
Kon's teeth clenched. Fine. If force could not break them, he would become a storm.
"DÖRDÜNCÜ PENÇE: RÜZGAR DUVARI — FOURTH CLAW: WALL OF WINDS!"
He spun his blade, the air whirling into a roaring vortex of golden wind. A wall formed, a fortress of motion and energy. Tigrera's projectiles—shards of metal from her morphing arms—were shredded and flung wide. Orin's phantom lances of energy broke against the current, dissipating harmlessly.
At the center, Kon stood, chest heaving, drenched in his own power. For a single moment—precious, desperate—he had control. The storm obeyed him, circled him, shielded him.
Yet even as he breathed, sharp and ragged, the truth gnawed at him. The ghosts had not fallen. They waited. Patient. Present. His father's eyes glowed through the flicker. Tigrera's silence hung in the air like a sentence not yet pronounced.
The wind wall howled around him, a storm spun from desperation and bloodline might, and for one fragile instant Kon had believed he had regained control. But then—his eye widened, golden iris constricting to a pinpoint—he felt it. Not sight, not sound, but a pulse through the very marrow of his bones. A mana signature, sharp and familiar, more intimate than any other because it belonged to him.
Only it didn't.
This was his energy twisted, darkened, poisoned by something older than rage and more voracious than grief. It reeked of hunger—the hunger for ruin.
His realization came a heartbeat too late.
The clearing detonated. A geyser of crimson energy, threaded with writhing veins of purple, tore through the trees with the raw, uncontrolled violence of a collapsing star. It wasn't refined, wasn't shaped like his Claw techniques. It was hatred made manifest, the pure destructive instinct he had spent his whole life learning to bury.
Instinct saved him where reason could not. His body twisted in mid-air, a desperate contortion that spared him from annihilation. Even so, the blast caught him along his side, hurling him like a broken doll through the clearing. He struck a memory-tree back-first. The crack of impact split the spectral trunk in two, and with it a captured fragment of joy—his own laughter as a child, chasing after his father's shadow—burst into shards of light and died.
The pain was real, blinding. He groaned, staggered, pressed his claws into the earth to force himself upright. Dust filled his lungs; the taste was bitter, metallic, familiar.
When he managed to lift his head, sword trembling in his grip, the smoke parted.
And there it was.
"No…" The word left him as a cracked whisper, a denial weaker than breath. His blade lowered, his body swayed, his eye refused to believe.
Yet the truth stood before him.
Himself.
Not the self he fought to be—not the scarred, weary warrior still clinging to a code of loyalty, still bleeding for his companions. No. This was the self that lurked beneath, the abyss he had once stared into with hungry eyes and barely clawed his way back from.
The Grand Kaplan Form, in its most corrupted state, breathed before him. The Tiger of Ruin. The Mad Tiger.
His phantom flesh was cloaked in crimson like hardened blood, a suit stretched taut over a body made sleek and lethal. From his waist hung tattered purple kilt-strips that bled killing intent into the air itself. His swords were Kon's own—twin blades, but darker, devouring. His chest pulsed with the cancerous glow of a Whisper Spike, the parasite that bound him in chains of shadow.
And the eyes… White like the others, glazed and soulless, yet within their emptiness Kon saw something worse than death. He saw himself. His hunger. His fury. His abyss.
Kon's throat locked. No cry, no curse, no plea could force its way past the terror strangling him. This was not the fear of being killed. He had faced death before, stared into jaws and blades. This was the fear of becoming.
Eralda's voice threaded into the silence. Soft, steady, inescapable.
"The deepest wound is not of love,
Nor blood, nor friend, nor beast above.
The fiercest guilt a soul may find—
Is what one leaves within his mind."
The verse coiled around Kon's chest like chains. He wanted to spit, to curse, to shout that this wasn't fair. But he could not. Because deep within, he knew Eralda's words were not invention. They were revelation.
The Mad Tiger stepped forward. The earth blackened beneath his feet, memories in the soil withering into ash at his passing. His aura bled into the clearing, a crawling storm of crimson and violet that made the trees groan and the very air shriek.
Kon's hand shook violently around the hilt of his blade. His heart hammered like a beast in its cage, frantic, cornered. He had fought phantoms of Tigrera. He had fought the echo of his father. But this?
This was not just a ghost from the past. This was a specter of the future—his own damnation, clothed in the terrible majesty of inevitability.
He could only whisper, hoarse and broken: "Not him… anyone but him…"
But the woods did not heed. Eralda did not answer. The Mad Tiger did not pause.
The phantom raised both blades. The motion was fluid, certain, merciless. There was no hesitation, no conflict, no humanity. Only the perfect, honed certainty of ruin.
Kon's terror broke into a ragged scream inside his chest. Every muscle coiled, every nerve alight. There was no longer room for denial. No time for pleading.