*Day 48 - The duel that shouldn't have been possible*
Vorgoth moved wrong.
That was Ora's first warning. She'd studied him, memorized his patterns from their previous encounters. He was a sorcerer, a philosopher—he moved like someone who fought with words and corruption, not steel.
But now, as he drew a simple blade from his robes, his stance shifted into something ancient. Perfect. The Third Form of the Moonlit Waters—a Crysillia sword style that took decades to master.
"Recognize this?" His voice was still his own, but underneath it, screaming, was another.
Then she saw it. The soul-coin pressed against his chest, black glass pulsing with trapped light. Inside, a figure moved—Maestro Kellian, the greatest swordmaster Crysillia had produced in three centuries. He'd died in the dragon attack, defending the Academy's youngest students.
And now Vorgoth wore him like armor.
"Soul Grafting," Vorgoth explained, his body flowing through preparatory forms with inhuman grace. "I consumed his essence, but instead of digesting it, I've... sewn it to mine. Temporarily, of course. The conflict would drive me mad if I held it too long."
He lunged. The movement was Kellian's signature—the Falling Star technique that had won him forty-seven duels without a scratch. Ora barely got Sussurro up in time, and the impact sent her sliding backward across broken stone.
But something was wrong with Vorgoth's eyes. The left one moved differently than the right, as if two people were trying to look through the same holes.
"You feel him fighting you," Ora said, circling carefully. "Kellian's trying to stop you from inside."
"Of course he is." Vorgoth's next attack was a perfect Rising Moon counter-strike, but his left hand trembled, trying to drop the sword. "That's the beauty of it. I have his skill, but also his resistance. Every perfect move costs me a piece of sanity."
He pressed forward with a combination that should have been impossible—Third Form flowing into Seventh without the traditional bridge movements. Only someone who'd spent sixty years perfecting the art could manage it.
But as he moved, Ora saw the cost. Black veins spread from the soul-coin, crawling up his neck like cracks in glass. His left eye had begun to weep blood. And sometimes, for microseconds, his movements would stutter as Kellian's soul tried to reclaim control.
"Why show me this?" Ora asked, deflecting a strike that would have decapitated her if it had landed a fraction differently. "Why reveal your weakness?"
"Because you need to understand." His voice layered now—Vorgoth's certainty over Kellian's desperate screaming. "This is what awaits. Not death. Not ending. Eternal service to the Prima Fragment. Every soul we take becomes a tool. Every master who dies feeds the mastery of those who consume them."
The combat intensified. Vorgoth's borrowed skill was flawless, but the internal battle was taking its toll. Sometimes his strikes would stop mid-swing as Kellian fought back. Sometimes his feet would try to walk in two directions at once.
And then Ora understood. She couldn't beat Kellian's skill. But she could help him resist.
She changed her pattern, deliberately using openings that Kellian's honor would refuse to exploit—exposed backs of fleeing enemies, the moment when an opponent stumbles. Each time Vorgoth's body tried to take advantage, Kellian's soul revolted harder.
"You're not fighting me," Vorgoth realized, his voice now more scream than words. "You're fighting WITH him."
"He was a good man," Ora said. "He died protecting children. That's not something you can just graft over. That's who he WAS."
The soul-coin cracked.
Just a hairline fracture, but enough. Kellian's essence began to leak out, not escaping but spreading through Vorgoth like poison. The swordmaster's memories, his principles, his love for his students—all of it flooding into Vorgoth's consciousness.
For a moment, Vorgoth experienced being a good man. Felt what it was like to choose others over himself. To find meaning in protection rather than power.
The philosophical violation was worse than any physical wound.
He tore the coin from his chest, Kellian's soul dispersing into the air like golden mist. The sword fell from hands that suddenly remembered only being a philosopher's. He stood there, shaking, as two different worldviews warred in his skull.
"That's the cost," Ora said, not attacking the defenseless man. "You can steal their skills, but you also steal their souls. And souls remember who they chose to be."
"It doesn't matter," Vorgoth gasped, pressing palms to his eyes as if he could push out Kellian's memories. "I have thousands more. Heroes, villains, masters of every art. I could wear them all if—"
"If you don't mind losing yourself completely." She sheathed her swords. "How many souls can you graft before you forget which one is originally yours? How many personalities can fight inside your skull before you shatter?"
He looked at her with eyes that, for just a moment, held Kellian's kindness.
"All of them," he said. "I'll graft all of them if that's what it takes to unite consciousness. Even if 'I' am destroyed, the work continues."
He fled then, shadow-stepping away before she could strike. But he left something behind—a single tear that wasn't his. Kellian's final tear, shed through borrowed eyes, for the students he couldn't save.
Ora picked up the fallen sword. It was just steel, but it remembered the hands that had wielded it. She'd return it to the Academy's ruins, let it rest where its master had fallen.
Soul Grafting. Another abomination that seemed like power until you understood its price. Vorgoth could wear any skill, any strength, but each grafting was a battle where the stolen soul had weapons too—their memories, their principles, their fundamental nature.
He could become anyone.
But in doing so, he risked becoming no one.
Or worse—becoming the hero he consumed, feeling their nobility from inside, and having to destroy it all over again.
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*End Chapter 22*
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