Elias understood the flaw in SK's plan the moment his consciousness settled into the vast expanse of his Spirit Domain.
The Torii gate stood against a star-filled sky, its red lacquer gleaming beneath constellations that were not constellations at all but fragments of his own Flow, suspended in endless black. The water below reflected them like a second universe. It was beautiful. It was quiet.
And perched atop the gate, tails swaying slowly, was the Kitsune.
SK had prepared an exorcism. A cleansing. A surgical removal of something foreign.
But she was not foreign.
She had been there for weeks. Breathing with him. Listening to the cadence of his thoughts. Learning the temperature of his anger, the depth of his loneliness. She was no splinter lodged beneath skin.
She was a resident.
Residents did not leave because you asked nicely. And they did not flee because you stabbed them with someone else's soul.
Still, SK had given him something useful.
The shard.
It rested in his hand like a splinter of frozen lightning. Not holy. Not radiant. Dense. Structured. When Elias focused on it, he did not merely sense power. He sensed architecture.
SK's soul was layered like folded steel. Hard angles. Defensive ridges. Threads woven to repel intrusion. It did not burn corruption because it was pure.
It burned corruption because it itself was corruption.
That was the secret.
Corruption was not morality made visible. It was not evil turned tangible.
It was predation.
It is often said that only the strongest survive, only the swiftest win the race, only the sharpest minds can conquer. Regardless of how the proverb was phrased there were two truths to be derived.
First, everyone was strong in their own way. You could be physically weak but have a mind like s steel trap. You could not be the brightest star in the sky and yet be more charismatic as the stars themsleves.
The second truth was that these individaul characteristics, these...Traits, made people strong.
And the strong imposed their strength onto the weak until the weak ceased to be themselves. The Ladder of Evolution of beasts was an example of this. Beasts would absorb energy from their surroundings over a period or just consume other beasts and absorb their essence through predation. It was often that latter that accounted for their growth, for their, evolution.
The world permitted it. Encouraged it.
Growth was institutionalized predation.
The Kitsune lunged.
He fired the shard.
It struck her flank and embedded.
And in the instant her structure reacted—flared, resisted, attempted to envelop and digest the foreign fragment—Elias saw.
He saw the truth of her.
Ancient.
Starving.
She was not evil.
She was incomplete.
When her tail impaled him, when corruption surged through his soul like molten ink, Elias understood with terrible clarity what was happening.
She was not killing him.
She was digesting him.
His boundaries dissolved. The edges of his identity blurred. Memories loosened, like pages slipping from a book and floating toward her waiting structure. Soon there would be no Elias. Just more nutrients to sustain her.
He should have accepted it.
The strong consumed the weak. That was the rule of both worlds he had lived in.
But then he remembered Jamie's voice breaking as she screamed his name.
His mother's tired smile.
His father's steady hand.
Aina whispering "little brother."
SK breaking off a piece of his own soul without hesitation.
They were not consuming him.
They were holding him.
If the strong consumed the weak, then he would stop being weak and in turn, consume the strong.
He reached into the corruption spreading through him.
And he pushed back.
Not with Flow.
With his own essence.
While he didn't fuly understand the mechanics, he bit.
He consumed the fragment of her that was consuming him.
It was revolting. He felt centuries of loneliness. Felt divine arrogance curdled into desperation. Felt the countless hole where something should have been.
And he felt her surprise.
This child.
This spark.
Was eating her back.
For a single impossible moment, she recoiled.
Elias took advantage within her throat—within the metaphysical tunnel where she had been unmaking him—and he understood something else.
He had energy, so much energy.
His Domain brimmed with it, oceans of Flow compressed into shape. He had been using it defensively, desperately. But the moment he corrupted even the smallest sliver of her structure, a crack formed.
And when pressure meets a crack—
Water breaks the vessel.
He forced his Flow through that microscopic breach.
It burst outward.
Her form split around him like fabric torn by a rising flood, and Elias tore free of her body and fell.
He struck the waters of his Domain and sank.
The impact rippled across the star-lit surface, waves distorting constellations as he sank before floating back upward. He gasped though he did not need air.
Across from him, the Kitsune staggered.
Her four tails lashed erratically. Her flames flickered unevenly.
She stared at him.
"You… maintained yourself," she said.
"That has never happened before."
Elias rose slowly. His head bowed. His legs bent as though his bones were brittle. Counter-corrupting something so vast had drained him in a way battle never had.
"Perhaps," she mused, circling, "it is because I am weakened."
He did not answer.
His Domain still churned with energy, but his internal structure trembled. He had forced too much through too small a crack. Still he wasnt done, the water underneath rose in a stream and flowed around his right hand.
She stopped a few feet infront of him and lowered her massive head, golden eyes narrowing.
"You wounded me," she said softly.
"But you have weakened yourself. What stops me from consuming you again? And again? And again—until you cannot break free?"
Her breath washed over him, hot with spirit-flame. Mocking.
"It's useless."
By then, the shape in his hand had finished forming. He raised it slowly and pressed the barrel to her forehead. Then pulled the trigger.
The shot rang like thunder across the Domain.
The bullet, forged from condensed Flow and threaded with the faint predatory aspect he had learned from her, struck. She reeled.
He fired again.
And again.
Each shot chipped at her structure. Individually insufficient. Collectively disruptive.
He felt it now—the strange clarity humming through him. A sharpness.
Exhilaration.
He formed another weapon mid-fall of spent casings.
An automatic rifle. Several othes manifested, suspended around the fox.
He squeezed the trigger.
A storm erupted.
Bullets poured from the barrel, each one laced with the slightest fragment of Soul Predation.In nature, incomplete. Alone, they could not consume her. But as one fragment began to fade, another struck. Overlapping. Continuous. Pseudo Micro-Corruptions layering faster than her structure could fully cleanse.
She snarled and charged.
Flames engulfed him.
He did not dodge.
The fire lapped at him, burning through his being but his Domain fed him. Flow surgedover him like a protective blanket.
It was agony.
It was ecstasy.
He laughed once, sharp and breathless, and kept firing.
The barrage did what singular force could not.
Her tails faltered.
Her steps slowed.
Finally, with a sound like a mountain collapsing inward, she fell.
Silence returned.
Her colossal form shrank. Flames guttered out. What remained was a small, tattered shadow of a fox, like burned cloth.
She was sobbing.
Elias let the rifle dissolve.
He walked over, every slow and step heavy now that the high was fading. The waters parted beneath his feet.
He looked down at her for a moment then collapsed beside her.
She startled, ears flattening. He let out a groan and raised his hands slowly. His whole being ached but he tried to ignore.
"I saw your memories," he said quietly.
"When I was inside you."
Her breathing hitched.
"I saw you fighting a group of people," he continued. "I don't know who they were. But I recognized one."
Her eyes widened slightly.
"Deus."
At the name, something dark flickered through her.
He moved closer, and she flinched, expecting another attack.
Instead, he wrapped his arms gently around her neck.
She froze.
"I'm sure," he said, voice low, "that while you were trying to consume me… you saw some of my memories as well."
A long pause.
"Yes," she admitted at last. "I saw you.... I felt you drwon in another world."
He swallowed.
"I have a vendetta against that off-white bastard." Elias said.
" And from what I saw… so do you. So why don't we form a partnership?"
Her tails twitched weakly.
"You would not uproot me?" she asked.
"I could try," he said honestly.
"Maybe I'd succeed. Maybe I'd destroy myself doing it. Either way I'd rather not waste energy on uncertainties and just let you stay here instead."
She studied him.
"I am a Divine entity," she said softly. "The embodiment of deception and misfortune. What assures you I will not end you the moment I recover?"
He thought of Jamie.
Of her stubbornness. Her unwavering trust.
"I'm willing to trust you," he said. "And you can't trust someone without first deceiving yourself that they'll uphold it. It's called a leap of faith."
Her ears twitched.
She looked away, as if words pressed at her throat but refused to emerge.
"You should think about it," Elias said.
The Domain dissolved.
—
He gasped.
Cold air filled his lungs.
The shack ceiling swam into focus.
Jamie was already there, gripping his shoulders.
"Ellie? Ellie! You idiot—"
Her voice broke, and she hugged him hard enough to hurt.
"You were floating, then you started burning, and the circle was cracking and I thought—"
"I'm okay," he murmured weakly.
The shack was a mess. Talismans had charred black. The hexagon and outer circle SK had constructed still glowed faintly, burned into the wood but intact.
In the corner, SK smoved through cabinets.
His movements where weak and blood dripped steadily from his nose.
He was gripping the wall with trembling fingers for support.
He had been supporting the entire circuit, even after his shard had shattered. Elias felt that shattering now in retrospect—the distant snap when the Kitsune destroyed it. A phantom echo. SK must have felt it like a limb severed.
Jamie pulled back, wiping her eyes roughly.
"Did it work?"
Elias glanced inward briefly.
The Kitsune's presence was still there.
Quieter.
Watching.
"Yeah," he said shakily.
"Somewhat."
He was still unsettled from that near death experience but tried to hide it behind a wall of composure and stood weakly, attempting to approach the old man.
"I need to tell you what—"
SK waved him off weakly. "Save it."
His voice was hoarse, British accent thicker through fatigue. "Bloody hell, lad. Do you have any idea what you just put me through?"
"You felt it?" Elias asked.
"I felt my shard get chewed up, yeah." He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. "Felt you do something else too. Something… clever."
Jamie blinked between them. "Can someone explain what happened?"
SK's eyes locked onto Elias.
"You didn't exorcise her," he said quietly.
"No."
The old man let out a dry, humorless chuckle. "Of course you didn't."
Elias opened his mouth to elaborate—to speak of predation, of hunger, of partnership.
But SK's expression shifted.
It hardened.
"It's time for us to part ways," he said.
Jamie straightened. "What?"
Elias stared at him. "What are you talking about?"
SK finished packing and turned to face the children.
"My times up."