Morning found Rei bruised, stubborn, awake before the sun. He followed the scarred woman, Kazumi, through corridors that smelled like old fires. Her shadow trailed with her like a second animal. She led him to a chamber ringed in pitch-black sigils. The air felt alive with breath.
"This is your test," Kazumi said, voice flat. "Not of strength. Of what you carry inside."
Rei gave the Blade of Resolve a firm grip. He wanted to say he understood. He didn't. He only knew that fear could become a weapon or a wound, and he couldn't let it win.
Kazumi stepped back and dropped the torches. The chamber swallowed the light. The sigils pulsed, hungry.
"Step into the Abyss," she said.
The darkness wasn't simple absence. It was pressure with teeth. It closed like a fist. Voices crept at the corners of his mind, not outside but planted, crawling through the base of his skull.
"You let them die," the voices said. "You were too late. You were too weak."
Rei's shoulders shrugged under the remembered weight. He tasted iron on his tongue. The Blade of Resolve thudded against his thigh as he took a breath and walked forward.
At first, it was whispers, small and cruel. Then they became faces—the bridge, the river's laugh, a child's shout—all of it contorting into an accusation.
You were the one who could have done more.
He staggered. The blade slipped in his hand. He spat and the taste was salt and guilt. "No," he breathed. He wanted to fight the illusion with anger, but rage alone tore him raw. The Enso in him wanted to roar, to cleave, and the dark ate the roar and spat it back as shame.
Hands gripped him from nowhere. Memories spilled: Shira's last smile, the sound of the Elders, the black stone dropping like a coin into still water. The Abyss shaped itself from his grief and shoved it back down his throat until he choked.
Kazumi's voice came like cold iron. "Hear them. Then do the thing they cannot: stand."
He wanted to break. He tasted the world splitting at the seams. His knees wanted to fold, his vision wanted to close. The Blade of Resolve hummed like a heartbeat against his palm, its ribbon of Enso a thin blue seam.
Rei remembered how Shira had named his strike back in that cave: name it, or it is only a blow. He muttered the name under his breath as his legs sank into the dark.
"Blade of Resolve," he said into his own cracked throat. He pushed the name outward like a claim, threaded Enso through the edge, not as a roar but as a hand.
The darkness pressed. The voices climbed. You couldn't save them. The blade answered, not with flame that consumed, but with a small, stubborn light that cut the whispers, thread by patient thread. He did not scream. He breathed. In. Out. Enso flowed like water around the blade, calm. He felt the first stability like a thin crust forming over boiling liquid.
It didn't shatter the Abyss. It didn't erase the faces. But a thin line of space opened where his fear wasn't the only thing.
The shadows recoiled enough for him to take a faltering step. His breath came ragged and wet but he stood. For once, the voice that wasn't his... cleaner, steadier.... said, not yet.
When he stumbled out of the darkness, the chamber's edges came back like a world waking. Kazumi's face was unreadable, but something... a brief flare of something like respect.... touched her scarred mouth.
"You survived," she said. "Not everyone does that."
Rei's legs trembled but did not fail. The Blade of Resolve felt heavier in a different way. It had a name. It had a rhythm.
Daiken's silhouette in the door was the next thing he saw. "Good," Daiken said plainly. "You will need that."
Tetsuya's laugh came from above, easy and sharp. The hooded elder remained silent, and Rei felt that silence like a hand closing around a future.
On the way back to his cot the black stone in his pack throbbed. Rei placed a hand on the leather for a second and felt a pulse answer him, faint, like something listening. He didn't know if it was the stone, or the Sanctuary, or the world shifting because he had dared to stand.
He sat long after lights were put away, feeling hollow and hollowed. The Blade of Resolve slept on his lap, hilt warm from his palm. The rain was still there outside, relentless. He closed his eyes and let exhaustion take him, but not before one thought crawled through the tiredness: If I can survive that, I can teach myself to live.