The silence that followed Akio's challenge wasn't empty. It was listening—dense with the weight of an unseen gaze that regarded him not as a man, but as data. He could feel it—the cool, dissecting scrutiny of a scientist observing his specimen. Akio didn't wait for another taunt from the shadows. He moved, following the trail of spiritual rust, not with his eyes but through the far-reaching threads of his Shadow Network.
The canyon walls began to narrow, the passage opening suddenly into a massive sinkhole that plunged deep into the earth. This, he realized, was the heart of the corruption. An abandoned spiritual quartz mine, its entrance a gaping maw heavy with the stench of ozone and rot. The locals might have given it a name once. Akio knew it only as the epicenter—the Dead Spiral.
He descended without Shunpo, his movements measured and silent. Rust-eaten ladders and crumbling ledges gave way beneath his touch, but he flowed downward with the precision of habit. The air thickened as he went, the hum of decaying reishi pressing against his skin like invisible static. The shaft walls were no longer bare stone—they were layered with corroded seals and fractured Kidō formulae, their intricate lines scabbed over with spiritual rust, flickering with sickly blue light. They looked less like inscriptions and more like infected wounds.
This was Kabe's laboratory.
The main chamber stretched vast and circular, a cathedral of entropy. Its illumination came from the same flickering seals etched into the walls, each pulse weak and uneven, like the heartbeat of something dying. At the room's center stood twitching, half-formed spiritual constructs—misshapen amalgams of reishi and fragmented souls, suspended in crystalline cages that were themselves dissolving. The air trembled with a chorus of fractured whispers, fragments of prayers and pleas stolen from those Kabe had unmade.
"...forgive me...""...the light, it burns...""...must be pure... must be clean..."
Akio tuned them out. His mind was dissecting the scene, cataloging every detail—the flow of the decay, the rhythm of the corrosion. And then he noticed it: a pattern. The rust on a nearby seal, near a construct that seemed to be weeping spectral tears, was thicker, spreading faster. The corrosion on another cage, which contained a construct frozen in a soundless scream, pulsed sharper, angrier.
It reacts emotionally, he realized, cold clarity settling over him. The decay isn't random—it's catalyzed by emotional resonance. Anger, despair, fear… they accelerate it.
Kabe's idea of "purification" wasn't about removing emotion—it was about proving that emotion itself was decay. He believed that by erasing it, he could create something eternal, something pure—immune to the entropy he worshipped.
A flicker in his periphery drew his attention. Akio spun, Kagegari half-drawn—but there was no enemy. Just an illusion. The image of Captain Isshin wavered into being, his face twisted in disappointment.
"You failed them," it whispered, voice perfect, cold, poisoned with intent. "You were too slow. Too weak."
A crude psychological attack—juvenile, really. But even so, Akio felt the faint, cold spike in his chest. Not guilt—fury. Fury at the violation. He didn't answer. Instead, he raised a hand, a single thread of shadow extending from his fingertip toward the illusion, seeking to blast the illusion in pieces.
The instant his shadow touched the phantom, it didn't dispel—it corroded. A black, rusted streak raced back up the thread toward his hand. Akio severed the connection at once. The end of the shadow disintegrated into fine metallic dust.
The illusion of Isshin smiled faintly as its edges began to flake away like peeling paint.
"Interesting…" it rasped—in Kabe's real voice—before dissolving into nothing.
Akio stared at the space where his power had been unmade. A cold knot tightened in his chest.
"He's adapting," he muttered. "He's learning how my shadows work."
This was no longer a philosophical experiment. Kabe was testing, evolving—refining his corrosion to counter Kagegari's very essence.
Across the far wall, the rusted seals rippled, smoothing into a mirror-like sheen. A dozen reflective surfaces formed, each one showing the same image: Genshiro Kabe.
He looked older than the last records—his hair thinning, his eyes fever-bright behind cracked glasses, burning with a fanatic's light. It wasn't his real body—just a projection, an echo cast through decaying Kidō.
"Observe, kid," Kabe's voice came from everywhere at once, calm, almost professorial. "Your power—like all others—is born from desire. The urge to protect, to control, to exist. Desire breeds instability. Emotion is the flaw of the soul. My Sabitsurugi cuts with truth, not longing. The truth of the end of all things. To purify the spirit is to strip away the rust of feeling—to return to perfect, silent order."
Akio didn't look at the mirrors. He continued his steady walk around the chamber, his Network silently mapping the room, searching for the source of the projection—the man himself.
"Perfect, silent order?" Akio's voice broke the echo, dry as steel. "You mean sterility. A dead universe. If decay is purity, then your own soul must be immaculate—a perfectly rusted void."
The mirrors flickered. A tiny fracture of anger slipped through before being suppressed. Kabe's lips tightened.
"Insolence born of ignorance," he said, voice hardening. "You cling to shadow because you fear the light of truth. You are chaos given form—a disease."
"And you," Akio replied, stopping in the center of the room, "are a mortician who mistakes a corpse for a masterpiece." His gaze locked on a single patch of wall where the energy converged, the nexus of Kabe's network. "You hide behind mirrors and whispers, dissecting souls to justify a theory you're too much a coward to test on yourself. You're no scientist. You're a grave robber with delusions of philosophy."
The silence that followed felt explosive. The dying blue lights stuttered. The trapped constructs screamed in a chorus of static agony. Akio had found the fracture in Kabe's conviction and driven a blade through it.
Then, all at once, the mirrors shattered—not into glass, but into drifting black sand that hissed as it hit the floor. The projection vanished. On the wall Akio had been staring at, a new sigil flared into being, carved into stone by unseen hands. It burned with a terrible, final energy, its symbols reshaped into a single command:
COME FIND ME. CORROSION IS TRUTH.
Akio regarded it silently, his expression unreadable. The debate was over. The invitation had been given. He could feel the labyrinth itself shifting, the decaying reishi realigning, funneling toward a single point deeper within the mine.
His fist clenched, the black fabric of his shihakushō stretching tight over his knuckles. The final confrontation was waiting. And Akio would walk straight into the heart of the rust—to show the Ghost Alchemist that some shadows run too deep for any light to corrode.