CHAPTER 21: THE LAKE OF STOLEN POWER
KAI POV
I close my eyes.
Reach deeper into the resonance than I've gone before. Feel past the rotation, past the mechanics, past the careful control I've spent six months building.
Into the phoenix itself.
Black Dranzer spins. Carving precise cuts through boulders.
But I'm not focused on the physical anymore.
I'm reviewing the fight.
***
Ryuga. Lightning L-Drago. Purple lightning wrapping around black flames on a collapsing rooftop.
I replay it frame by frame.
Thirty seconds.
That's how long I had left before Black Dranzer would've shattered completely. Before the shared pain from resonance would've dropped me unconscious and left me at Ryuga's mercy.
Thirty seconds before losing.
The roof collapsed. Saved me from my own inadequacy.
I analyze the fight clinically.
Before fighting Ryuga, Black Dranzer was already damaged from Kyoya. Both our spin-stealing techniques neutralized each other, forcing pure attrition warfare.
But the real problem was simpler.
My Dark Resonance fueled Ryuga's Dark Power.
They appear the same. Feel the same. Manifest as the same violet-black flames.
But they're fundamentally different.
Dark Power absorbed and converted negative emotions into raw energy.
Dark Resonance is negative emotions. Generates them and projected them outward.
I fought him using pure Dark Resonance. Every ounce of rage, every drop of controlled chaos—I fed it directly into L-Drago's mouth.
Made him stronger with every attack.
From the start, I was at a disadvantage.
And Ryuga himself is terrifying even without that advantage.
So what can I do differently?
How do I overcome the fundamental incompatibility between our powers?
I turn the problem over in my mind. Examine it from every angle.
The answer doesn't come.
Slowly, all sounds began to fades.
The wind, the cracking of boulders, and even my own breathing disappeared until the only thing left was the hum of Black Dranzer's rotation.
I sank so deep into the resonance that the physical world dissolved entirely.
***
When I open my eyes, I'm not on the mountain anymore.
I stood upon a vast stretch of obsidian that reached toward the horizon in every direction. The ground was veined with rivers of violet lava that flowed with a slow, predatory patience.
The air tasted wrong, thick with the scent of ozone, sulfur, and the chemical signature of a dying star. Every breath I took seemed to coat my lungs in a layer of ash that shouldn't have existed.
My skin prickles with it. Sweat evaporates before forming. My mouth tastes like copper and burning hair.
My mindscape.
I had seen brief, terrifying flashes of it in nightmares before the fall of Dark Nebula, but this was the first time I had entered it consciously. The temperature was directionless, with heat radiating from inside my own chest rather than the environment around me.
This is the first time I've entered consciously instead of being dragged.
Everything feels familiar in the way nightmares feel familiar. Recognizable but wrong. Known but not understood.
I turn slowly. As I scanned the plateau, I noticed something new.
The landscape is the same as those brief nightmare glimpses.
But something's different.
There.
At the center of the obsidian glass sat
a vast, silent, and purple lake.
It sits at the center like an infected wound that's been festering for weeks. The liquid is too thick—oil mixed with blood mixed with something that makes my throat close just looking at it.
I recognized the color instantly; it was the exact shade of violet I had seen bleeding into Black Dranzer during my collision with Ryuga.
The color of L-Drago.
My boots crunch on glass as I approach the shore. Each step echoes wrong—too loud in some frequencies, completely silent in others. Like sound itself doesn't know how to behave here.
I crouched at the water's edge and
Up close, the wrongness intensifies. The liquid's surface is perfectly smooth but not reflective. It doesn't show my face. Just absorbs light and gives nothing back.
The lake doesn't move.
But I can feel it breathing.
Depth is impossible to judge. The purple fades to black fades to something my eyes refuse to process. When I try to focus on the depths, my vision doubles. Triples. Reality fragmenting at the edges.
When I breathe, I taste it. Purple coating my tongue. Like licking a battery while smelling flowers rotting in summer heat.
My stomach turns. I swallow bile.
How much of L-Drago's power did I absorb?
How much did he take from me?
I extended my hand toward the surface, and the lake responded by surging upward.
The surface stays glass-smooth. But underneath—something vast rises fast. I can feel its approach.
A foreign consciousness pressed against mine, wrapping invisible, invasive fingers of heat around my arm.
Like the lake is reaching back through empty air, wrapping invisible fingers around my wrist, climbing toward my elbow. It whispered a silent invitation to join it and be consumed by its power.
Do you want to touch? Do you want to know what I can give you?
My hand trembles.
For the first time in six months, genuine fear cut through my control.
Every instinct screams pull back.
I hold position.
Three seconds. Five. Ten.
The heat reaches my shoulder. Wrapping around my neck. I can feel it—foreign consciousness pressing against mine, looking for cracks, testing for weakness.
Join us, it whispers without words. Become purple. Become power.
My jaw clenches.
Not today.
I pulled my hand back sharply, and the heat vanished as the lake settled back into its unnatural stillness. Heat vanishing like it was never there. Whatever was rising sinks back into depths I can't measure.
I stood and stepped away from the shore.Wipe my palm on my coat even though nothing physical touched me.
My hand is shaking.
I make a fist. Forced my hand from shaking.
Not yet. Not today.
I wasn't ready to face that depth yet, but the lake isn't going anywhere. It can wait.
I turn away—
Then, without warning, the surface exploded.
***
The detonation wasn't a sound so much as it was a wave of pure pressure.
A geyser of purple erupts skyward with enough force to crack obsidian beneath my feet. Droplets hit my face, burning cold, and I stumble backward as something massive rises from the depths.
Black feathers edged in purple lightning. Each one a blade that doesn't cut space—it erases it. Where the feathers pass, reality gets thinner.
The phoenix ascends.
It climbs higher and higher. Wings spreading wide enough to eclipse whatever passes for sky in this nightmare place.
The phoenix was beautiful and terrifying at the same time.
The creature is rendered in inky black and dark charcoal, accented by golden-yellow highlights on its massive wings and tail to represent dark fire but somehow absorb light instead of producing it. Silver armor plating protects its chest and head. Eyes that burn crimson with a predatory glint
It represents "dark beauty"—an elegant creature that serves a frightening purpose.
At the zenith, it stops.
Hangs there.
Looks down at me and let out a screech that felt like the death of an atmosphere.
The sound vibrated through my bones.Something in my inner ear ruptures and I taste blood.
The obsidian cracked in spiderweb patterns spreading outward from where I stand.
As the sound fades—
The ground begins to move.
***
Violet lava recedes like it's afraid of what's coming. Heat pulls back, leaving stone so cold it burns to look at.
From the cracks, something rises.
Tombstones.
One by one, thousands of blank tombstones erupted from the cracks in the glass, birthing themselves like bones breaking through skin.
No names. Just blank markers.
They spread like infection. Multiplying. One becomes ten becomes a hundred becomes too many to count without something in my chest breaking under the weight.
The tombstones stretch to the horizon in every direction becoming a silent graveyard that wasn't here seconds ago.
The phoenix descended and landed among the graves, watching me with eyes that had seen this moment nearly fifteen hundred times before.
And I know.
The weight crashes down. Recognition bleeding through resonance. Ancestral memory the phoenix carries.
These are the Fallen.
Every person who bonded with Black Dranzer. Every wielder who thought they could tame what can't be tamed. Every soul consumed by apocalyptic hunger.
All dead.
All forgotten.
I look at the endless graves.
At the sheer scale of failure.
My throat closes.
"How many?"
My voice comes out smaller than intended. Almost a whisper.
The phoenix tilts its head.
The tombstones pulse. Once. Synchronized.
And the number slams into my consciousness.
One hundred, twenty five thousand, nine hundred, twenty-four.
I stagger.
That many. That many people stood where I'm standing. All of them believed they were different.
All of them were now dead and forgotten.
The phoenix walked through the graveyard with mechanical precision, and I followed.
Because what else can I do?
***
We walk in silence.
The tombstones crowd closer. Pressing in until I'm moving through a forest of death with barely room to breathe.
My boots crunch on ash mixed with bone dust. The sound wrong in too-still air.
Every grave I passed sent a flash of a dying memory through me—screams of people being consumed by black flames or losing their identities to the bird's hunger.
A man screaming as black flames consume him from inside. Gone.
A woman clawing at her own face as the phoenix overwrites her identity. Gone.
A child—can't be more than twelve—eyes going crimson before clarity vanishes forever. Gone.
An army of one thousand, four hundred, seventy-three dying in black flames there end moments bleeding through me in fragments.
I clench my hands them into fists.
Keep walking.
Eventually, we reached a clearing where a single, fresh-dug grave sits open.
Tombstones forming perfect circle around emptiness.
The earth is still loose around the edges. Recently excavated. Like someone prepared it this morning and left it ready.
I approach slowly.
I stood at the edge of the pit and looked down into the bottomless darkness.
I know without asking whose grave this is.
The grave is perfectly sized. Just wide enough for my shoulders. Just long enough for my height.
Mine.
The phoenix moves to stand opposite me. Across open earth.
"All who came before you stood here. All chose the same. Keep fighting. Keep flying. Keep feeding me power until I consume them."
Its voice vibrates in my bones.
"You are not different. Not special. Just alive. For now."
I crouch.
Place one hand on loose dirt at the grave's edge.
It's cold. Damp. The most real thing in this entire nightmare landscape.
Because this is truth.
Everyone before me is dead.
Everyone before me thought they'd survive.
Everyone before me was wrong.
What makes me different?
Nothing.
I am not chosen.
I am not destined.
I am not guaranteed to survive.
I am just stubborn, I am desperate, and I am temporarily lucky.
But luck runs out.
The phoenix watches me with eyes that have seen this exact moment one thousand, four hundred, seventy-three times.
Most stop here. Give up. Let consumption happen quickly instead of slowly.
I stand.
Look at my grave one more time.
Then step over it.
Plant my boot on the far side in defiant refusal.
The air beyond the grave is thinner, tasting of old ash and the sharp, metallic tang of an approaching storm.
Keep walking.
Behind me, the phoenix does not follow immediately; instead, it lingers at the edge of the pit, its plumage casting a flickering, shadow against the headstone that should have borne my name.
Waiting to see if the defiance is a genuine spark or merely the final flicker of a dying candle.
Every muscle in my legs protests the movement, screaming that the dirt you just stepped over was meant to be a final resting place, not a hurdle
I can feel the weight of those 125,924 - failures pressing against your spine like a physical burden.
"Good. You choose flight. For now."
It walks beside me.
"But flight ends eventually. Gravity always wins. The question is—will you fly long enough to matter? Or just long enough to suffer?"
I don't answer.
Don't need to.
The phoenix continues.
"You wish to understand what changed. What you took. What took from you."
"Yes."
The phoenix's voice cuts through frozen time:
"The dragon TASTED you. You TASTED the dragon. Now both hunger. This is not partnership. This is PREDATION."
Its eyes burn brighter.
"Next time you meet—one FEEDS. One becomes MEAL. Forbidden things do not cooperate. They CONSUME. Dragon will try to eat phoenix. Phoenix will eat dragon. Only one survives."
The phoenix finally takes flight, its shadow stretching long and thin over the obsidian. It pulls ahead of Kai, a streak of black and gold against the black and red sky, silently daring him to maintain the pace you have set.
"You have the dragon's lightning now. Sitting in your belly. Growing. The dragon has your fire. Both incomplete. Both STARVING. Both wanting to finish the meal."
"What happens if we—if one consumes the other completely?"
The phoenix's beak opens in something that might be a smile.
"—the world burns."
The phoenix then dived straight at me,
talons extended. Moving so fast I can't dodge.
It hits me dead center.
Upon impact, the world erupts in black flames.
***
My eyes snapped open.
Glowing a brief crimson.
As the physical world rushed back. I was back on the mountain, watching Black Dranzer carve its way through the boulders. Everything felt sharper and hungrier now, as if the purple lake from my mindscape were sitting in my stomach.
Black Dranzer still spins downslope. Still carving patterns through boulders.
But everything feels different now.
Sharper. Hungrier. Like the purple lake followed me back and is sitting in my stomach, waiting.
The phoenix's presence pulses once in my chest.
Twenty meters away, Kujaku appears at the trail head. Tablet in hand. Recording.
She's been watching.
I extend my hand.
Black Dranzer stops mid-rotation. Reverses trajectory. Leaps from the ground and arcs through the air trailing embers.
I catch it without looking.
The fusion wheel is warm. Pulsing with layered energy I can finally feel clearly.
I reload my launcher. Three smooth motions.
Time to test what the phoenix showed me.
Time to use what I've been hiding.
"Three. Two. One."
"LET IT RIP!"
***
Black Dranzer hits the crater floor spinning backward.
Left-rotation.
I've never used this before.
***
Black Dranzer has always been dual-rotation capable. The fusion wheel's internal mechanisms allow both clockwise and counterclockwise spin with equal efficiency.
Kai simply never used left-spin.
When he first transmigrated, Black Dranzer was actively trying to possess him. The phoenix testing its new host, pushing against his consciousness every waking moment. Right-spin resonance barely kept him alive—left-spin would have consumed him in days.
During Dark Nebula training, Kai learned control through brutal conditioning. But he still didn't reveal left-spin capability. Doji was already trying to break him, reshape him into a weapon. If Doji discovered Kai possessed the same reverse rotation as Lightning L-Drago—Dark Nebula's ultimate prize—he would have locked Kai in isolation permanently.
So Kai hid it. Kept that capability secret.
Until now.
Until necessity outweighed risk.
***
I stare at the bey spinning in the crater.
Accepting inner darkness and achieving devil resonance was one piece.
Left spin is second piece.
Of the puzzle to mastery.
Survival is not a gift granted by the universe, but a debt reclaimed through sheer, bloody-minded persistence
"Dranzer," Kai's voice is a low, dangerous friction.
The bey's rotation accelerates. Faster. Faster. Air begins to shimmer around it—
Black flames erupt.
The phoenix manifests fully.
The phoenix looks at me.
Then past me. At Kujaku standing twenty meters away with her tablet. Her face pale. Hands shaking.
My hand clenches into a fist.
"Full Power!"
End of chapter.