The path of ice held steady beneath my boots as I walked down it, the frozen surface gleaming faintly under the reflected glow of the waterfall ahead. When we reached it, the black knight of slush hurried past me, his armor rippling like liquid tar. He raised his arm and swept his cape wide, creating a shimmering barrier that parted the crashing water. A moment later, the torrent curved away, allowing a dry corridor of air to form between the falls.
The gesture was unnecessary but appreciated. I exhaled softly through my nose. "Thank you, Ingrik."
He didn't answer—he rarely did. His only response was a respectful nod, droplets of water evaporating off his soaking form as I stepped through the opening he'd made.
Past the waterfall now, the secret corridor revealed itself—smooth marble sloping down like a frozen slide, the surface polished from ages of secrecy. Ingrik swatted the moisture from his abyssal cape and followed after me.
Thorn, perched on my shoulder like some smug little gargoyle, gave a sharp snicker. His ghostly feathers rippled with a soft blue shimmer as he peered at the golden mirages playing out along the walls—echoes of the past. My past.
The vision showed me and Raptor sliding helplessly down the same slick path years ago, both of us flailing like idiots before disappearing into the unseen depths below.
"You never told me you had this kind of fun while I was distracting the with the Seven Failures," Thorn said, his tone dripping with mischief. The grin stretching across his beak nearly made me smile. He always had that effect.
"Being distracted by Ingrik back then, you never gave me the chance to tell you," I said, stepping with practiced ease down the slope. My boots gripped the marble easily, the aether-threaded soles biting into surfaces slicker than oil. "Funny how things change. The me from before would've slipped the first second."
Thorn tilted his head. "Huh. You really have changed. You sound proud."
"I am," I admitted. "There's so much I can do now that would've broken me back then. I screamed a lot in those days—regret, rage, fear. Now… not so much."
Thorn looked like he wanted to argue, then shut his beak and held it with one wing. "…That's a fair point. But what was I supposed to say when you and the sissy disappeared, then came back with an army of knights following you?! Ingrik, help me out here!"
The tall knight ignored him, gaze fixed forward.
"And I thought we were friends after I introduced you to the wonder of comic books!" Thorn squawked, throwing up his wings dramatically.
By the time he was done ranting, the sloped path ended in a wide pit—a vertical shaft descending into shadow.
"You do have impeccable taste in entertainment," I said as I approached the drop, smirking. "Be it books or real-life dramas. Though most of your picks are… eccentric."
I jumped.
Thorn dove after me, indignant. "Eccentric?! When the fuck did you find my private collection?!"
"I got curious," I said as we fell, grinning. "Wanted to see what kind of porn a ghost raven hoarded. Found your greatest shame instead."
The bird groaned in existential defeat. "There really is almost nothing secret between us anymore. My precious image…"
We landed with a heavy thump in a pentagonal corridor, the floor humming faintly with old power. Pale light ran along the seams of the five edges, leading us toward an exit. Behind us, the walls still bore the marks of my first climb—a messy trail of holes where I'd punched and kicked my way upward with Raptor slung across my back. That had taken over half an hour. My lungs burned just remembering it.
Ingrik landed a heartbeat later, shaking the ground beneath me. Together we followed the light into a vast black-marble hall, where the air felt ancient and still.
"This place…" I murmured. "It's the same as when we left it. The erosion hasn't touched it much."
I turned on my heel, scanning the interior. And then I saw him—Raptor's mirage, golden and faint, standing at the moat's edge with that same nervous look I remembered too well.
"Oh. I remember this part."
Walking up beside the image, I looked down into the abyssal pit. The illusion replayed perfectly: my past self falling, screaming, disintegrating. "Yeah," I whispered. "This pit had a new trap every tenth of a mile. Each one worse than the last. By the time I hit the bottom, it was pumping out ten nukes' worth of radiation. I bled from every orifice before I figured out how to trigger the terminal."
I pointed toward the white terminal standing alone on its island. Even now, it bore my fist marks—ten cracks, one for every time I lost control.
Then, with a shimmer, my golden past self appeared again on that same platform, shouting across to Raptor.
"…how are you not dead?" Raptor's mirage asked, just as before. "I watched you turn into a skeleton."
"Worse has killed me," my old self replied. "Now get over here. Who knows how long Thorn can keep the busy."
"Let's hope it's a while."
Raptor leapt across, landing hard beside me and immediately getting to work on the glowing terminal. His fingers danced across symbols that no language could translate. Meanwhile, my past self scanned the empty room, uneasy.
[Skill: Hollow Void — Memorisation.]
Aether pulsed from his body, rippling across the hall and filling the space with golden light.
"It was around here things got difficult," I muttered.
Thorn cocked his head. "What do you—oh hells."
The walls split open with the sound of cracking stone. Hundreds of dormant knights stirred, shedding eons of dust. Their obsidian armor glistened as they stepped out in synchronized rhythm, their hollow eyes burning faint white.
Raptor froze at the terminal. My past self didn't. He grinned—mad and eager.
"You think you can take them alone?" Raptor shouted.
"I can't wait to find out."
The platform beneath them trembled. Raptor shoved me aside just as it shot upward along glowing cracks in the walls, spiraling toward the ceiling.
"I'll handle this!" he yelled. "Just keep them away!"
My past self scoffed. "At least you tried to sacrifice yourself. Thorn would've liked that." He cracked his knuckles, electricity flaring around his arms. "Let's see what my limit is."
He leapt into the army.
We watched the golden replay unfold—my fists breaking armor, my body torn apart and reformed again. Each blow from the obsidian knights splintered his form, yet he kept moving, laughing, enjoying it. It was grotesque and awe-inspiring all at once.
Hand severed. Skull caved in. Chest pierced. And still he fought—until the last swing reduced him to silence.
"That," I whispered, "was when I was newly ascended. Fifth sequence. Barely holding onto sanity."
Thorn said nothing. Ingrik bowed his head slightly. The silence lingered heavy as the echoes faded.
"By ordinary standards," I murmured, watching the fading light of my old self, "that would've killed anyone."
A faint smile tugged at my lips. "But even back then… I wasn't ordinary. Just insane."
About to retreat to pursue Raptor, the surviving half of the obsidian knights began to stir. They pulled their blades, spears, and axes free from my past self's corpse, black metal scraping against shattered bone. The sound echoing through the hall like a funeral bell.
But then, his hand twitched.
A pulse of aether throbbed beneath the skin, veins igniting faint white as his fingers clenched around the nearest knight's throat—the same one that had driven a sword through his shoulder. The knight had only enough time to flinch before my past self's palm crushed its neck like brittle glass.
Blood poured freely from his open wounds. It soaked his body, ran down his arms, dripped onto the obsidian floor. And through that crimson haze, an enraged smile crept across his face. His eyes burned silver.
"I'm never going to be done!!" he screamed, voice tearing through the chamber like thunder. "No matter what… I'll never end!"
A knight's head snapped off, to my past self's fist. Its helmet clattering across the marble floor as its body fell limp with a thud.
The rest of the obsidian army froze. Their soulless eyes—once empty and obedient—now shimmered faintly, not with fear but awe.
"What…?" I muttered, standing beside Thorn and Ingrik as we watched the golden mirage replay. Back then, I had been too far gone—too consumed by aether's influence to notice what those knights truly felt. Seeing it now, from the outside, it was clear.
They weren't afraid. They were elated to meet freedom.
After all, these knights had longed to be free—free from the false masters who had enslaved them even in death. My resurrection, my defiance, was the liberation they'd been denied.
They wanted what I had. Violence.
In a surge of fury and reverence, the knights lunged—not in discipline, but in frenzy. Hundreds of blades swept toward my past self as he roared back, his gauntlet sparking with electric aether.
"I'll kill you all! No matter how many times you kill me!!!"
The hall erupted in chaos.
Steel crashed against flesh, flesh against stone. Each impact sprayed blood and shattered armor. My past self fought like a storm given shape—every death feeding his madness, every wound deepening his grin. His limbs broke, healed, and broke again. His eyes gleamed brighter with every resurrection.
They cut him down a thousand times, and a thousand times he rose again.
When the slaughter finally ended, the air was thick with vaporized blood. The knights lay scattered, their bodies reduced to shards of obsidian glass. In the center of it all stood Strife—me—breathing steam through gritted teeth, blood painting his face like war paint.
Arrows, axes, and blades fell from his flesh as his body repaired itself. His heart pounded audibly, echoing through the ruined chamber.
He looked up, exhausted yet alive.
And then—something changed.
The white veins of light running through the walls began to pulse. They flowed across the cracked marble and converged on one wall, shaping themselves into the outline of a massive pentagonal gate. A deep hum vibrated through the ground as the gate's outline flared brighter and brighter until a sharp line split its center.
The door creaked open.
What seeped through wasn't mere energy—it was presence. A pressure so vast it drowned out thought. Whatever was behind that gate made the army of knights feel like insects by comparison.
My past self waited for something to emerge. Nothing did.
Driven by madness and curiosity in equal measure, he approached.
We followed him, the three of us—me, Thorn, and the Ingrik that is—watching the golden illusion as it revealed what he had seen.
Beyond the gate lay a hall of pale marble. At its center stood a white throne, and upon it, the statue of a woman carved in obsidian. Her head was bowed, her hands clasped around a cracked sword held upright before her. Even through the stone, she radiated sorrow.
"How curious," my past self muttered, voice low and reverent.
Lanterns ignited along the walls with ghostly white flame, bathing the room in mournful light as he walked closer. His footsteps echoed between the pillars like the tolling of ancient bells.
"Who is that woman?" he asked aloud, pausing halfway across the room. "She must have been important to have a monument like this made for her. But why here, in a place no one could ever find?"
I almost whispered an answer, though even now, I still don't know.
And then, movement. A sound like stone grinding against stone came from behind the throne. A shadow stepped forward, heavy and deliberate.
A towering obsidian knight. Ten feet tall, clad in cracked armour that glimmered faintly under the white flame emerged, dragging behind him a massive sword that left deep gouges in the marble. A white cape hung torn from his shoulders, ghostly and frayed.
Even through the mirage, I felt it: the sheer weight of his presence. Compared to the current Ingrik's presence however, it was like a subtle breeze.
My past self froze, a nervous grin curling on his lips despite himself.
The knight's amber eyes burned with something strange. Fury, yes, but also a fragile, weary hope.
"Ingrik…" I whispered softly from the future. "That was you."
Even worn down by the erosion of forgotten centuries, he was still magnificent. An echo of godhood, anchored to duty. He had been the final guardian of this place long before he became my ally.
If I'd had the capacity for fear back then—or even now—I might have trembled.
"Logically speaking," my past self said, cracking his neck and rolling his shoulders, "you won't attack as long as I stay away from the throne. But I've already come this far after destroying your subordinates."
He stepped forward, blood dripping from his hands, his grin widening into mania. "Let's see how far I can go. I can feel something maddening about to happen."
The knight said nothing. But his grip on the massive sword tightened.
Respect answered respect.
The air itself screamed as he swung—the sheer force shattering nearby pillars. Then he moved, a blur of white and black, and in an instant his blade met Strife's gauntlets.
The impact exploded through the room.
Strife was thrown like a ragdoll, crashing through a pillar and slamming into the wall hard enough to make the marble quake.
He spat blood. Tried to stand.
But Ingrik gave no quarter—his colossal hand closed around Strife's face and hurled him through another pillar, out of the chamber entirely.
The golden mirage of my past self tumbled through the air, crashing to the ground before us. His observers from the future.
He coughed a puddle of blood and looked up, stunned. "How… is this knight so powerful? Just the wind pressure of his swing was enough to destroy pillars. I've never faced anything like this. Not in hell. Not anywhere."
From the doorway, Ingrik's past form simply turned away. He didn't chase, didn't gloat. He returned to his post beside the throne, his cracked armor gleaming faintly in the white light.
It wasn't arrogance. It was mercy.
Mercy…
The word echoed hollow in my chest. There was no such thing in hell. No kindness, no restraint. Only agony and despair. Even after escaping the infernal pits, even after conquering worlds and breaking gods, mercy remained alien to me.
That day, it infuriated me.
Not because I felt insulted. Not even because I wanted revenge.
But because I wanted to understand it.
I wanted to take myself beyond the knight's imagination. To see the absolute edge of that mercy and tear through it.