The field of rusted swords stretched to every horizon.
Blades jutted from the ground at broken angles - some tall as trees, others no larger than daggers. All of them ancient. All of them corroded. The gray rain fell without pause, coating everything in a film of rust-colored water.
I walked between the swords, each step careful. The ground here wasn't stable. Steel plates shifted under my weight, revealing deeper darkness beneath.
Kiba's domain.
The Holy Sword Project. The experiments. The children who died so the Church could forge weapons from their sacrifice.
This wasn't just a battlefield. It was a graveyard.
Shing.
The sharpening sound grew louder. Closer.
I stopped walking.
The figure waited at the center of a clearing - if you could call a circle of broken swords a clearing. Armored in tarnished plate. Faceless beneath a helm that reflected nothing.
The Faceless Knight.
He held a blade across his knees, running a whetstone along an edge that gleamed despite the rust everywhere else. The sound was rhythmic. Hypnotic.
Shing. Shing. Shing.
"Kiba." I kept my voice even. "I'm here to - "
He moved.
No warning. No words. Just motion.
The sword cleared the whetstone and arced toward my throat in a single fluid motion. I threw myself backward, felt steel whisper past my chin.
Fast.
Faster than Dohnaseek. Faster than anything I'd faced in the Soulscape.
The second strike came before I finished my dodge. A horizontal slash that opened a line across my chest. Not deep - but the pain was immediate and electric.
I stumbled. Tried to create distance.
The Knight closed it in a heartbeat.
Shing.
This time the blade bit into my shoulder. I screamed - or tried to. My voice came out strangled as agony ripped through my mental projection.
Flash.
A memory that wasn't mine. A boy - young, maybe twelve - strapped to a table. Hooded figures surrounding him. Light pouring into his veins until he stopped screaming.
Flash.
Another child. A girl with brown hair. She held the boy's hand through the bars of a cell. "We'll survive," she whispered. "We have to."
Flash.
The same girl, dead. Eyes open. Hand still reaching through the bars.
I crashed to the ground. The Kiba-Echo stood over me, sword raised.
Still silent. Still faceless.
He's not trying to kill me.
The thought surfaced through the pain. The cuts were precise. Painful but not fatal.
He's trying to make me feel.
Each wound brought another flash. Another memory. Children dying in sequence, their screams filling the rust-rain air.
"I know what you are." I pushed myself up. Blood - or whatever passed for blood here - dripped from half a dozen cuts. "You're his guilt. His survivor's guilt."
The Knight attacked again.
I raised my arm. The blade bit deep, grinding against bone-memory.
Flash.
The boy - Kiba, young Kiba - crawling through a collapsed tunnel. Bodies behind him. Light ahead. He looked back once.
Then he kept crawling.
"You survived." I gritted the words through the pain. "And you've never forgiven yourself."
SHING.
The sword tore across my back. I fell to my knees.
Flash.
Kiba, older now, standing before Rias Gremory. His face was blank. His eyes were dead.
"I have nothing to offer," he said. "I am nothing but a blade."
"Then be my blade," Rias replied. "And in time, perhaps you'll remember you're also a person."
The Knight circled me. Patient. Methodical.
I tried to stand. My legs buckled.
I can't match his speed.
Every movement was perfected. Every strike was surgical. This wasn't the echo of a fighter - it was the echo of someone who'd been broken down and rebuilt into a weapon.
The Echo of a child who trained through grief because grief was all he had left.
"You want to die." The words came out raw. "That's what this is. You're not fighting to kill me - you're fighting to be killed."
The Knight stopped.
For the first time since the attack began, he went completely still.
"The Holy Sword Project killed your friends." I dragged myself upright. The world spun. "You survived. And every day since then, you've wondered why. Why you? Why not them?"
No response. Just that faceless helm, reflecting the rust-rain.
"You trained to be perfect because imperfection meant death. You became a sword because swords don't feel. Because if you let yourself feel, you'd have to admit..."
I took a step toward him.
He raised his blade.
"...that you wish you'd died with them."
The strike came faster than any before.
I caught the blade.
Bare-handed. Edge against palm. The metal bit deep, slicing through memory-flesh until I felt steel scrape against bone.
The Knight froze.
"You want to die because you survived." I held the blade even as blood poured down my wrist. "But I survived to LIVE."
The helm tilted. The first sign of reaction.
"I know what it's like." My grip tightened despite the pain. "To wonder if you deserved it. To look at the people you couldn't save and ask yourself what made you special. What made you worth keeping."
Flash.
My mother's face. The voicemail I couldn't hear anymore. The knowledge that somewhere, in the real world, she didn't know I was dying.
"The answer is nothing." I stepped closer, forcing the blade down between us. "There's nothing special about surviving. It's just... what happened. The universe doesn't care about fair."
The Knight's sword arm trembled.
"But here's the thing about surviving." I released the blade. Placed my bloody hand on his chest. "It comes with a responsibility. To live for them. To carry them so they don't have to be forgotten."
Flash.
The children's faces. Dozens of them. Names I didn't know. Names Kiba whispered in his sleep.
"I will carry them." I felt the words settle into something true. "So you don't have to."
The Faceless Knight looked down at my hand.
Slowly, impossibly, the armor began to crack.
Rust fell away in sheets, revealing something underneath. Not a monster. Not a weapon.
A boy.
Young. Scared. Wearing the same expression Kiba wore when he thought no one was watching.
"They're gone," the boy whispered. His voice was small. Broken. "They're all gone."
"I know." I kept my hand on his chest. "But you're still here. And that has to mean something."
"I don't want it to mean something." Tears - or rust-water, I couldn't tell - streaked down his cheeks. "I just want them back."
"I know." The words caught in my throat. "I know."
The boy looked up at me. For a moment, I saw Kiba - the real Kiba, the one who laughed at terrible jokes and touched the scar on his hand when he thought about the dead.
"Will you remember them?" he asked. "Even when I can't?"
"Always."
He smiled. Small. Sad. But real.
Then he bowed.
```
No blue box. Just a feeling.
The grief. The survivor's guilt. It's mine now.
But I won't let it crush me.
I'll use it to remember.
[KIBA ECHO: INTEGRATED]
The Knight dissolved into light - warm light, not the cold static of Dohnaseek's absorption. This felt different. Gentler.
The memories settled into me like raindrops into soil. Children's faces. Names. The weight of their absence.
I will carry you.
The promise felt right.
The rust-rain slowed. Then stopped.
I looked down at my hand - the one I'd used to catch the blade. The wound was deep, but it didn't hurt anymore. It felt... earned.
A necessary pain.
The field of swords began to change. The rust fell away in great sheets, revealing steel that gleamed beneath. Not restored - transformed. Clean metal where there had been corrosion.
Kiba's guilt, resolved. His memories, integrated. His purpose, inherited.
I stood in silence for a long moment, watching the swords shed their decay.
Then the ground shook.
Stone rose from the steel.
Walls. Massive and gray, erupting from the ground in a perfect square. They climbed higher and higher, blocking out what remained of the sky.
A fortress. No - a dojo.
I stood at its center as the final stones locked into place. The ceiling pressed low. The walls were unmarked, unbroken, and impossibly close.
Claustrophobic.
The next Echo.
I scanned the dojo. No doors. No windows. Just stone on every side and a silence so complete it pressed against my ears.
Too quiet.
Something moved in the shadows.
Small. Compact. Moving with the kind of stillness that preceded violence.
I saw eyes - golden, catlike - watching me from the darkness.
And it was quiet. Too quiet.