I had been right.
From the first exchange, it was clear, he was stronger than me.
The space around us no longer behaved like a room.
Darkness flooded outward, not as shadow, but as something luminous in its own wrong way.
A sea of black light spread across the corridor, swallowing depth and distance while somehow sharpening every detail.
I could see too much. The bars.
The dust in the air. The boy's still body behind me. The man's breath, steady and unhurried.
He expanded the space as he defended, each clash stretching the distance between us without ever letting me gain ground.
My strikes landed, but the meaning behind them dissolved.
His spatial magic warped perception itself, bending my spells until their logic unraveled mid-formation.
Runes flickered and died. Concepts failed to take shape.
It was infuriating.
If not for his vileness, he could have been great.
A man like this, with discipline and reach, could have stood against the darkness rather than feeding it.
So I abandoned refinement.
I poured everything into speed, strength, durability, raw exertion, brute cultivation.
My body screamed in protest, sickness burning through my veins, but I moved anyway.
I deflected his attacks by instinct alone, steel against steel, force against force.
He lunged with his heavy sword.
I dragged my blade downward like drawing a line across the world.
His strike veered off course. I stepped in and drove my knee into his side.
The impact sent him skidding back, teeth clenched, boots grinding against stone that no longer knew how far away it was.
He spun. Our blades collided again, and this time I was thrown hard into the bars.
They rattled, bent inward.
The space tightened.
He had enclosed it deliberately.
His foot came up and slammed into my stomach. Armor absorbed the worst of it, but pain still exploded through me.
Blood spilled from my mouth and splashed onto his boots.
He looked down at it, amused.
"Are you sick?" he asked mildly. "With power like this… you'd make a fine slave. Far too special to waste."
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. "Hold your tongue."
Gravity surged.
The world lurched as space bent backward, collapsing toward a single point.
I lifted my sword as the pressure mounted, time stretching thin and brittle.
His expression finally changed, confusion flickering across his face as my gravity folded inward.
Then my body rebelled.
Blood burst from my mouth as a singularity formed in his chest.
The corridor screamed.
Wind howled as reality tore itself apart, the room extending outward impossibly far.
I saw it then, his Regalia. A localized dominion, allowing him to assert control over a confined area of space.
In that brief, catastrophic moment, the singularity vanished.
He staggered, coughing, exhaustion finally showing.
So that was it.
He was powerful, but inefficient. A larger engine with a shallow reservoir.
I could work with that.
I forged a spear of darkness in my left hand, dense and wrong, its head ringed with miniature black holes that bent light inward.
When I threw it, I felt it.
I saw it. I was it. The paths clarified.
I stepped to the right as he deflected the spear. His blade shattered on impact. In the same motion, I swung and severed his right arm.
He was left-handed.
As the broken sword fell, I spun and kicked his remaining arm.
My foot struck his elbow, folding it inward.
Gravity wrapped tight around my leg and detonated upward.
His head exploded.
I turned again and drove my fist into his stomach.
The impact punched straight through his torso, leaving a ragged hole where his body had been.
Light flickered in his eyes as he tried to reclaim his dominion, but runes flared across the walls, the floor, the air itself.
He couldn't overpower them.
His Regalia collapsed, negated in an abstract, humiliating way.
Before his body could fall, I swung once more.
My sword, still wrapped in its white cloth, cleaved his head clean off.
The seal held.
As his corpse hit the ground, I heard shouting beyond the corridor. I had caused a disturbance.
I had no choice.
Spatial magic was unfamiliar to me. Time magic even more so. But I needed isolation, now.
With the last of my strength, I screamed, "Lamb King's Castle!"
[Nicholas was a genius and a lazy bastard. In that moment, he conjured something far greater than he understood.]
Reality did not break so much as it withdrew.
The world folded inward, swallowed by a darkness that was not absence but substance, thick and luminous, like black light spilled across existence.
The floor beneath me vanished, then reformed into uneven stone.
The iron bars screamed as they twisted apart, not torn by force, but forgotten by the rules that once defined them.
Walls stretched, bent, and softened into shapes that resembled battlements and corridors, though none of them obeyed sane geometry.
Towers rose without foundations. Arches curved back into themselves.
It was a castle only in suggestion, a memory of fortresses filtered through something that did not understand what safety was meant to be.
The captives were freed all at once.
Cages dissolved into mist, chains fell away, and monsters and people spilled into the warped space together.
That was when I realized my mistake. The darkness did not discriminate.
The creatures surged forward, instincts sharpened by confinement and hunger, drawn toward the smallest, weakest presences.
Toward the children.
I tried to move. My body refused. My limbs felt distant, as though they belonged to someone else.
My vision washed pale as consciousness began to slip, and in that moment I felt it, attention.
Not from the creatures, not from the space I had created, but from far beyond it.
Eyes opened where stars should have been, vast and innumerable, pressing their awareness through the cracks of what I had made.
Their gaze scraped against my thoughts, peeling back meaning, threatening to unravel me entirely.
Then warmth surrounded me.
Cradella's presence closed around my mind like a seal.
It was not kindness, nor comfort, but protection with intent.
She stood between me and those eyes, not shielding me from fear, but from annihilation.
Her will pressed down, heavy and absolute, and the madness recoiled.
When I woke, I was slumped against a pillar that rose upward into nothing, its surface flowing slowly like frozen smoke.
Blood pooled at my feet, dark against the black-lit stone.
The space around me had stabilized, though only barely.
Holding the vague shape of a great hall whose ceiling could not be seen and whose walls shifted if stared at too long.
The boy stood in front of me.
He was breathing hard, his hands clenched around the old man's broken sword, blood smeared across his arms, his face, his clothes.
His eyes were clearer now, no longer distant or dulled, but sharp with shock and something close to fury.
Behind him, the other children huddled together, shaking.
Clinging to one another as the last remaining monster let out a final, broken scream before collapsing into nothingness.
The boy looked down at me, blade still raised, his voice unsteady but demanding. "Who are you?"