I fell through glass.
Shards sliced past me - memories fragmenting in the descent. My childhood bedroom. A sunset I'd forgotten. The taste of my mother's cooking. All of it shattering into smaller and smaller pieces as I plummeted into darkness.
The darkness didn't last.
I hit ground that shouldn't exist. Stone. Cold and solid beneath my palms.
Move.
Instinct screamed before thought caught up. I rolled sideways as a massive fist cratered the stone where I'd landed.
Dohnaseek's Echo loomed above me.
Thirty feet of corrupted memory. Black wings spanning what passed for sky in this place. His body was wrong - too angular, too sharp, made of condensed shadow and stolen light. The face was recognizable but distorted, like a reflection in rippling water.
"You cannot run from yourself," he thundered. The voice came from everywhere. "You cannot run from me."
I scrambled to my feet. My body felt different here - lighter, less certain. A mental projection, not flesh and blood.
"You're a copy," I said. "A fragment of a dead man."
"I am what you made me." Dohnaseek's grin split his face wider than any human jaw should allow. "Every time you used my power, you fed me. Every time you thought like me, you grew me."
He was right.
All those moments. The cold satisfaction when an enemy fell. The contempt for weakness. The sneer I'd caught myself wearing when facing lesser opponents.
I hadn't just copied his abilities. I'd copied him.
Light Lance.
The thought became reality. I thrust my hand forward, and golden light materialized - the same technique I'd killed Dohnaseek with in the real world.
The spear of light flew straight and true.
And dissolved the moment it touched him.
Dohnaseek laughed. The sound shook the ground.
"You would use MY power against ME?" He spread his massive wings. "In this place, I AM Light Lance. I AM the wings. I AM every technique you stole from my corpse."
I tried again. Flight. The ability lifted me off the ground for a heartbeat before cutting out, dropping me to my knees.
"That is MINE too."
He swatted me like an insect. I flew twenty feet, crashed through something that might have been a memory of glass, and landed in a heap.
Pain here was different. Sharper. More real than physical pain somehow.
"You borrow greatness." Dohnaseek advanced, each step cracking the stone beneath his feet. "You borrow MY greatness. And you think that makes you strong?"
I pushed myself up. Tasted something like blood - or the memory of blood.
"I didn't borrow anything."
"No?" He stopped. Tilted his massive head. "Then why can't you use it? Why does MY power reject YOU?"
Because it wasn't really mine. It was his, filtered through me. A copy of a copy.
"You are a thief, Ryder Cross." Dohnaseek crouched, bringing his monstrous face close enough that I could see the shark teeth filling his grin. "A small, pathetic thief who takes what he cannot create."
His words hit harder than the impact.
Because part of me believed them.
I didn't earn this.
The thought had lived in me since the beginning. Since the first ability appeared without cost, without training, without deserving it.
I just took.
Raynare's light manipulation. The minions' flight. Dohnaseek's Light Lance. Koneko's strength. Kiba's precision. Akeno's endurance. Rias's strategic mind.
All stolen. All borrowed.
"Do you understand now?" Dohnaseek's voice dropped. Almost gentle. "You are nothing without us. A vessel. A container. Empty inside."
My hands shook.
"Every kill you made with my power - I made. Every moment of confidence you felt using my techniques - mine. You wear my skin and call yourself strong."
He reached for me. One massive hand, descending to crush what remained of my pretense.
He's right.
The thought paralyzed me.
*You ARE small. You ARE a thief. You - *
I caught myself.
No.
The hand stopped inches from my face.
"What?" Dohnaseek's eyes narrowed.
"You're wrong." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "About one thing."
I stood. My legs trembled but held.
"I didn't borrow your greatness."
The giant laughed. "Still lying? Even now?"
"I conquered it."
The laugh stopped.
"You tried to kill me." I met those burning eyes without flinching. "You threw everything you had at a kid with a broken system and no training. You SHOULD have won."
The memory surfaced. Not his - mine. That night in the church. The fear. The pain. The certainty of death.
"But you didn't. I did."
Dohnaseek's form flickered.
"Your Light Lance? I tore it from your dying hands and used it better than you ever could. Your combat instincts? I improved them. Your arrogance - "
I stopped.
His arrogance.
That was the key. Not the power. The personality.
"You looked down on everyone," I said slowly. "Devils, humans, your own allies. Everyone was beneath you. Everyone was weak."
"They were." No humor now. Just cold truth.
"Maybe." I took a step forward. The giant Echo didn't move back - but he didn't advance either. "But that arrogance got you killed. By someone you dismissed."
"A fluke."
"A pattern." Another step. "You never learned from it. Even now, even as an Echo, you're making the same mistake."
Dohnaseek's form wavered again. Shorter now. Twenty-five feet instead of thirty.
"You're looking down at me," I said. "Mocking me for being small. But you're the one who's wrong."
"I am your power - "
"You were my power. Now you're my lesson."
He attacked.
No more words. No more taunting. Just thirty feet of fury compressed into a single strike.
I didn't dodge.
I didn't run.
I stood my ground.
The fist connected - and passed through me. Dohnaseek stumbled, his massive form suddenly unstable.
"What - "
"You can't hurt me with contempt." I watched him shrink. Twenty feet. Fifteen. "I already know I'm not perfect. I already know I started from nothing."
This is my Soulscape. My mind. My rules.
"The difference between us," I continued, "is that I grew. You stayed exactly what you were. A dead man's arrogance, preserved in amber."
Ten feet.
"I'm not small because I borrowed power. I'm not great because I conquered yours." I walked toward him - toward it, this fragment of a memory wearing a face I'd almost forgotten. "I am what I choose to be. The power is just a tool."
Five feet.
Dohnaseek - human-sized now, diminished and flickering - stared at me with something like fear.
"You... cannot..."
"I'm not fighting you anymore." I reached out. Placed my hand against his chest. The shadow-flesh felt like cold static. "I'm accepting you."
He tried to pull back. Couldn't.
"I do look down on some people. I do feel contempt for weakness. I do carry your arrogance - and maybe some of it is necessary. To remain untouched when they try to break me. To stay standing when everything wants me to kneel."
The Echo's form began to dissolve.
"But I won't use it to belittle. I won't use it to destroy. That was your mistake."
Light spilled from the cracks in his form - not his light, but mine. Something new, forged from the integration.
"You're part of me now." I felt it happening. The absorption. The merging. "But I am not part of you."
Dohnaseek's face was the last thing to dissolve. And for a moment - just a moment - I saw something like respect in those fading eyes.
Then he was gone.
```
No blue box. Just a feeling.
The sneer. The looking down on others. It's mine now.
But I won't use it to belittle.
I'll use it to remain untouched.
[DOHNASEEK ECHO: INTEGRATED]
The Soulscape shifted.
Glass melted beneath my feet, flowing like water before solidifying into something new. Steel. Cold and gray and endless.
The sky above me darkened - colorless void replaced by heavy clouds the color of old pewter. Rain began to fall. Not water. Rust. Tiny flakes of corroded metal drifting down like autumn leaves.
The tower remained in the distance. Still impossibly far. But closer now. I could see details I hadn't before - spires of light, paths leading upward, something waiting at the peak.
The Core.
One Echo down. Five to go.
I started walking. My footsteps rang on the steel floor, echoing in the silence.
Until the silence broke.
Shing.
Metal on stone. The distinctive sound of a blade being drawn - and sharpened.
Shing. Shing. Shing.
Rhythmic. Patient. The sound of someone waiting for a fight they knew was coming.
In the distance, through the rust-rain and the gray fog, I saw them.
Swords.
Thousands of them.
Jutting from the ground like a forest of steel. Rusted and broken, their edges still gleaming in places. A graveyard of blades stretching to every horizon.
And somewhere among them, a figure waited.
Faceless. Armored. A knight with no name and no identity, sharpening a sword that had never dulled.
Kiba.
Not the Kiba I knew. The Kiba that Kiba feared he might become.
A blade forged from grief. A knight forged from guilt.
The rust-rain intensified. The sound of sharpening grew louder.
One down. But the desert was changing. The glass melted into steel. The sky turned gray. And in the distance, I heard the sound of a lonely sword being sharpened.