The shadow realm was dying.
Niko felt it through his soul—the dimensional fabric tearing itself apart as Umbrathax forced its essence through the breach Ayesha had created. The anchor chamber, which had seemed eternal in its wrongness, was collapsing into recursive geometries that hurt the senses. Walls folded into themselves. Gravity became a
Yuki grabbed his arm as the floor beneath them ceased committing to solidity. "Niko, we need to retreat! The whole structure is—"
"Exactly where I want it." Niko's voice carried a certainty that surprised him. The fear that had defined his relationship with power for years had been replaced by something clearer: purpose. "Umbrathax is vulnerable right now. It's committed everything to manifestation."
Through his connection to Ayesha—attenuated by distance and dimensional interference but unbroken—he felt her unconscious in the physical world, felt Adrian defending her depleted form, felt the shattered remains of the corrupted shard still radiating dissolution.
She'd destroyed her half of the anchor. Now he had to make that sacrifice mean something.
"You're planning to do something catastrophically stupid," Yuki said flatly. It wasn't a question.
"I'm planning to force Umbrathax to fight me here, in a dimension that's collapsing because it no longer has a stable connection to our world." Niko gathered his spirit energy, feeling it respond with fluid immediacy that still amazed him. Integration had transformed his relationship with power from wielding to being. "The entity spent centuries building this realm as a feeding ground. Now it's a trap."
"A trap that will kill you along with it!"
"Not if I'm faster." He met her eyes, saw her spirit sight perceiving the truth of his transformation. "Yuki, I need you to get back to the rift. Guide anyone still trapped here to evacuation. When this place falls apart, I don't want collateral damage."
For a moment, the spirit seer looked like she might argue. Then she nodded sharply. "You'd better survive this, Niko. Ayesha will kill me if I come back without you."
She vanished into the distorting corridors with the efficiency of someone who'd spent countless hours surviving impossible odds. Niko watched her go, then turned his full attention to the crystalline structure at the chamber's center.
The shadow realm's anchor point was cracking, its counterpart in the physical world destroyed. But it still pulsed with stolen energy, still maintained enough coherence to anchor Umbrathax's consciousness. The entity was attempting to force full manifestation before that coherence failed completely.
Niko touched the anchor with his bare hand.
The contact was like grabbing a live wire. Centuries of compressed suffering, stolen potential, half-digested souls—all of it slammed into his awareness with the force of absolute history. He felt every victim, knew their names, experienced their terror as Umbrathax had consumed them.
He also felt the entity's attention snap toward him with predatory focus.
*BRIGHT THING,* that voice resonated through multiple dimensions simultaneously. *YOU DARE TOUCH MY FOUNDATION?*
"I'm doing more than touching it," Niko said, and channeled his unadulterated power directly into the anchor's cracking structure.
It was the opposite of what Ayesha had done—where she'd carefully dismantled corruption, he simply overwhelmed it with the blazing enormity of his spirit pool. Raw energy flooded the anchor point, not destroying it but claiming it, rewriting its fundamental allegiance through sheer spiritual mass.
The effect was immediate. Umbrathax, in the process of forcing manifestation through the dimensional breach, found its primary anchor point in the shadow realm suddenly hostile to its essence. The entity recoiled, its vast consciousness fragmenting as it attempted to maintain presence in both realms while fighting Niko's takeover.
*IMPOSSIBLE,* Umbrathax howled. *NO ADOLESCENT POSSESSES SUCH DEPTH, SUCH CONTROL—*
"I'm not fighting you with technique," Niko interrupted, his body beginning to glow with the overflow of channeled energy. "I'm fighting you with trust."
Through his connection to Ayesha, he felt her unconscious presence like an anchor of his own. Felt the absolute certainty that she'd succeeded in her impossible task because she trusted him to succeed in his. That mutual faith was a kind of power no entity that fed on fear and isolation could comprehend.
He poured more energy into the anchor, claiming another layer of its structure.
Umbrathax recognized the threat. In the physical world, its manifestation faltered as the entity withdrew essence from the breach, redirecting it to defend its shadow realm foundation. Adrian would gain precious seconds to evacuate Ayesha. Ji-yoon could reinforce defenses. The immediate assault on Grimoire Academy would weaken.
But that meant Niko now faced something worse: Umbrathax's full, focused intelligence.
The chamber reconstructed itself into an arena that existed in states between dimensions. Shadow coalesced into appendages that defied anatomical logic. The entity's voice became omnipresent, no longer filtered through stolen mouths but speaking directly into Niko's consciousness.
*YOU SEEK TO CLAIM MY REALM? THEN FACE ME WITHIN IT, BRIGHT THING. FACE WHAT I HAVE BECOME THROUGH CENTURIES OF CONSUMPTION.*
The first attack came from seven angles simultaneously—shadow-matter solidified into blades that existed partially in dimensions where Niko's defenses couldn't reach. He responded not with barriers but with movement, his integrated power allowing him to flow between attacks like water, each dodge calculated by instincts that had finally learned to trust themselves.
*CLEVER,* Umbrathax acknowledged. *BUT INSUFFICIENT.*
The next assault was psychological—the entity projecting memories of every student it had consumed, showing Niko their final moments, making him feel their despair. Marcus Chevalier confusion as shadows claimed him. Catherine Okoye's terror as her spirit was digested. Seventeen victims from 1847, their identities preserved in the corrupted shard Ayesha had just destroyed.
"I know what you are," Niko said through the onslaught of stolen suffering. "You're not an ancient evil. You're a parasite that learned to feed on potential because you have none of your own."
He struck back—not with spirit energy configured as weapons, but with energy configured as assertion. He wasn't fighting Umbrathax's attacks so much as denying their right to affect him, rejecting the entity's claim to primacy within this collapsing space.
It was a technique that shouldn't work. Spirit energy manipulation required structure, form, tactical application. What Niko was attempting was more fundamental—he was making his power synonymous with his will, his existence a counterargument to Umbrathax's claims of inevitability.
The arena shuddered. For the first time in centuries, Umbrathax encountered resistance it couldn't overcome through accumulated might.
*WHAT ARE YOU?* The question carried genuine confusion.
"Someone who stopped being afraid of his own strength." Niko advanced toward the anchor point, his body now blazing with so much channeled energy that the shadows around him were burned away simply by proximity. "Someone who trusts the people fighting beside him. Someone who knows that potential isn't something to be consumed—it's something we choose to become."
He reached the anchor again, both hands making contact, and released the full measure of his power.
What happened next defied conventional spirit manipulation. Niko's energy didn't destroy the anchor so much as invert it—turning a structure designed to pull victims into the shadow realm into a structure that expelled the realm itself. The crystalline formation began pulsing in reverse, each beat pushing against Umbrathax's essence, forcing the entity back toward whatever distant dimension it had originally emerged from.
Umbrathax fought with everything accumulated over centuries. Shadow constructs manifested by the dozens, each one a distilled fragment of the entity's will. The arena's geometry became hostile, gravity pulling in six directions at once, temperature fluctuating between absolute zero and plasma heat.
Niko weathered it all, his vast spirit pool finally finding purpose that justified its unprecedented depth. He was a living seal, a human anchor point maintaining inversion through pure determination.
But he was also sixteen years old, and even the deepest pool eventually runs dry.
His vision started flickering at the edges. His spirit channels, pushed beyond their limits, began suffering microscopic tears. The energy required to maintain the inverted anchor was burning him out from the inside, and Umbrathax recognized it.
*YES, BRIGHT THING. BURN. YOU ARE MAGNIFICENT FUEL.*
Through his connection to Ayesha, Niko felt her stirring toward consciousness in the physical world. Felt her awareness touching his across dimensions, felt her alarm as she recognized what he was doing and how much it was costing him.
He sent her reassurance wrapped in affection. *Trust works both ways.*
Then something unexpected happened.
Ayesha, depleted and barely conscious, reached through their spiritual connection and offered him her remaining energy. Not much—her spirit pool was nearly empty after destroying the corrupted shard—but given freely, without hesitation, trusting him to use it wisely.
Behind her gift, Niko felt others. Yuki, guiding evacuees through the collapsing realm, spared a thread of her awareness to support his anchor point. Adrian, defending the foundation chamber in the physical world, channeled a portion of his barrier techniques to stabilize Niko's defenses. Ji-yoon, monitoring energy flows from the sanctuary, fed him tactical data about Umbrathax's vulnerabilities.
Professor Morse, coordinating academy evacuation while watching dimensional barriers fail, sent a pulse of energy that carried decades of experience and hard-won wisdom.
Even the rescued students—Marcus Chevalier, Jennifer Zhao, Daniel Okonkwo—contributed what little they'd recovered, their gratitude transformed into tangible support.
Niko wasn't fighting alone. Had never been fighting alone.
He wove their gifts into his own power, creating something greater than individual strength: a collective assertion that Umbrathax's predation would end here, today, regardless of cost.
The inverted anchor flared brilliant enough to illuminate dimensions that had never known light. Shadow realm architecture that had stood for centuries began disintegrating. Umbrathax, still attempting to maintain presence in both realms, found itself stretched too thin, its essence fragmenting under coordinated assault.
*THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE!* The entity's voice carried something Niko had never heard from it before: fear. *I AM ETERNAL! I HAVE CONSUMED HUNDREDS! I AM—*
"Losing," Niko finished.
The anchor's inversion reached critical threshold. In one catastrophic pulse, it expelled Umbrathax's remaining essence from the shadow realm, forcing the entity back through dimensional barriers it had spent centuries eroding.
The backlash was apocalyptic.
The shadow realm collapsed entirely, its architecture disintegrating into component energies. The inverted anchor detonated, releasing centuries of stolen potential in a single explosive moment of liberation. Every victim's trapped essence, finally freed, dissipated into whatever afterlife awaited them.
Niko, at ground zero of dimensional collapse, felt reality fracture around him. The rift connecting shadow realm to physical world was sealing, was being sealed, was already sealed—temporal causality became meaningless as two dimensions ceased their unnatural connection.
He tried to move toward the evacuation point Yuki had used. Found his body unresponsive, his spirit pool utterly depleted, his consciousness fragmenting from energy expenditure that should have killed him three times over.
Through the collapsing dimensions, he felt Ayesha screaming his name. Felt Professor Morse making rapid calculations about dimensional mechanics and sealing protocols. Felt the terrible realization spreading through everyone who could perceive what was happening:
The rift was sealing, but someone needed to remain inside to complete the closure. Someone needed to anchor the dimensional boundary from the shadow realm's side, ensuring Umbrathax couldn't force it open again.
Someone needed to stay behind.
Niko's last coherent thought before unconsciousness claimed him was bitter irony: he'd finally learned to trust his power and the people around him, just in time to lose everything.