It wasn't a fight anymore.
It was a collapse.
Of space. Of thought. Of self.
The Echo didn't move like a living thing—it moved like a memory unraveling, like a scream caught in a loop. Every strike it threw came from an angle I hadn't seen until it was already hitting me. Every dodge I made left me trailing milliseconds behind, like reality itself was shifting in its favor.
Violet shouted something behind me—I couldn't hear the words. The chamber warped the sound, bent it, swallowed it. Her voice stretched into a thousand tones at once and vanished into the walls.
The Seal at my spine kept me tethered.
Barely.
Each time the Echo landed a hit, NULL tried to sink into me—not like poison, but like fingers curling around a lock, testing the edges. Trying to find the key to something inside me it already knew existed.
But I held it off.
Voidscar moved in my hands like it wanted to remember something. It shimmered when I swung, the air splitting around it, each arc leaving behind trails of light that didn't fade immediately. The blade wasn't just cutting—it was marking.
The Echo caught one of my swings.
Its hand, gnarled and stretched, closed around the edge of the blade. Skin sizzled. But it didn't pull back.
It pulled forward.
Our faces met—mine solid, grounded, human.
Its? Like looking into a broken mirror.
It leaned in, its breath like static across my cheek.
"You're a lie built on top of an older lie," it said. "Let me show you what you were before they sealed you."
And then—
The chamber fractured.
The floor beneath us buckled inward like a heartbeat collapsing, and we were pulled down.
Not by gravity.
By memory.
By force.
By whatever truth lived in the pit of this place that the Echo had come to protect—or destroy.
Darkness swallowed us again.
But this time, it wasn't empty.
It was full.
We fell without falling.
The world around us spun, stretched, inverted. I saw the walls of the chamber melt upward like wax pulled from the flame. I felt Violet's presence somewhere above—yanked away before she could follow me into the collapse.
Then, silence.
And then—
Impact.
But it didn't feel like hitting ground.
It felt like hitting thought.
I slammed into something solid, cracked a layer of what looked like obsidian and shadow fused into one. My shoulder screamed in protest. My breath caught. The air here was thicker than before, like it was mixed with ancient dust and old screams.
I pushed myself up slowly.
It was a different room.
A lower level—buried beneath the vault. The walls weren't made of stone. They were made of panels—some metal, some organic, all pulsing softly with dull, sick-colored light. Symbols crawled across the surfaces like they were alive, squirming along grooves carved by something smarter than any man.
And the Echo was already standing.
It didn't move toward me this time.
It just stood there—half-shrouded by fog, NULL pouring off of it in waves.
"You feel it now," it said. "The weight beneath the waking world."
I rose to my feet, Voidscar dragging through dust and filth.
"What is this place?"
Its head twitched once, like a glitch. "The basement of your becoming."
I took a slow step forward. "You knew I'd come here."
"I didn't have to know," it said. "You always come back. You always fall. And when you fall far enough… you find me."
It spread its arms wide.
"I am what's left after they strip everything else away."
The chamber around us lit—brief flashes of moments. Not lights. Memories.
Not mine.
Ours.
Shadows of a hundred Matts flickering against the walls, each wearing a different scar, a different blade, a different failure. Each of them alone. Each of them dying.
"This is where you were built," the Echo said, stepping closer. "Where they put the seals on you. Where they buried who you were to make room for what they needed."
My grip tightened on the hilt.
"That was a mistake."
It smiled—wide and cracked and full of something black.
"I know."
And then it struck again.
The second round began—not faster, not louder—but heavier. Like the fight itself had sunk deeper, and now every movement carried the weight of a truth neither of us wanted to face.
I blocked the first blow and swung.
It dodged like water.
NULL collided with soulsteel.
And the chamber shook.
The second clash sent sparks and shadow screaming through the air.
Voidscar met the Echo's limbs with force that should've shattered bones, but nothing broke. Its arms weren't made of anything flesh remembered. They moved like tendons strung from memory and malice—twitching, bending wrong, reforming mid-swing.
I ducked a wide arc and spun beneath its follow-through, dragging my blade across its midsection. The slash landed—clean. But instead of pain, the wound split open into a mouth. It laughed.
Not out loud.
In my head.
"Still wearing shape like it means something," it whispered. "Still clinging to the myth of form."
I drove my elbow into its throat. Its neck compressed—too far—and snapped sideways with a sound like tearing wet paper. But it didn't fall.
It spoke with its neck still broken.
"You were beautiful once, you know. When you didn't need skin. When you were just… possibility."
I roared, not to drown it out, but to anchor myself—to silence the part of me that wanted to listen.
We clashed again.
Faster this time. More brutal. My knuckles split. My ribs screamed with every twist. I could feel the Seal burning to hold itself steady, fighting back the pressure of NULL pouring off the Echo with every movement. It wasn't power that protected me. It was identity.
It was the part of me that still remembered who Matte was.
But the Echo wasn't tiring.
It was evolving.
Every attack I used—it adapted. It learned.
And with each second, it became more like me.
Or maybe—I was becoming more like it.
We crashed into one of the walls, breaking through a half-formed memory embedded in the panel. For a second, we were somewhere else. A flash—
A younger version of me.
Trapped in a medical harness.
Eyes wide.
Screaming.
As NULL was pumped through wires into my spine.
The Seal.
The first Seal.
I staggered as we returned to the present, breath ragged.
The Echo surged forward, its hand crackling with concentrated black static, and slammed it into my chest.
I dropped.
Hard.
The room blinked. Not with light—but with understanding.
Like the place was remembering me.
Like the room itself wasn't a witness…
…but a participant.
The Echo stood over me, jaw slowly reforming, eye sockets filling with black mist.
"You want to know what they erased?" it asked.
It didn't wait for an answer.
Its hand gripped my head.
And it forced me into a memory that wasn't mine.
But should have been.
There was no falling this time.
No motion. No gravity. No sound.
Just sudden immersion.
My body dissolved into thought, and that thought sank straight into the marrow of something ancient—something buried in the dark, pressed beneath a thousand years of silence. And in that silence, I saw it:
A room like the one we'd just been fighting in—only cleaner. White light. Sterile floors. Dozens of figures in full-body suits watching from behind walls of glass.
And in the center…
Me.
Strapped to a gurney. Tubes jammed into my arms. A breathing mask over my mouth. The seals on my back glowing faintly—seven of them, but only one active. The rest locked tight, humming beneath the surface like dormant gods waiting for blood.
I wasn't awake.
But I was aware.
And they were talking about me like I wasn't even in the room.
"Still stabilizing," said one voice. "Seventh exposure complete. The host is holding."
A second voice: "That's the problem. He's still holding."
The Echo's voice emerged, not from the memory, but from the space between it.
"You didn't survive because you were strong," it whispered. "You survived because you were chosen. Because they needed someone to seal it all inside."
The scene flickered.
The lab bled into a battlefield—craters filled with bodies, sky ripped open, NULL falling like rain. I stood at the center, Voidscar in one hand, the other wreathed in radiant soulfire. My eyes weren't mine.
They were hollow.
Empty.
I watched myself slaughter both Dracus and Runner alike. Not in rage.
In silence.
The kind of silence that only comes after forgetting what mercy means.
The Echo spoke again, closer this time.
"You think the seals are yours? You think you own what's inside you?"
The vision collapsed.
I gasped as I was thrown back into my body, the chamber slamming into focus. My head ached. My heart pounded. My hands shook.
The Echo stood a few feet away, hands open, twitching with residual NULL.
"Those memories were gifts," it hissed. "Truths they locked away. You weren't their weapon. You were their vault."
I got to my feet, barely.
My voice came out low. Raw. "You think you're the truth? That everything you are is what they buried?"
"No," the Echo said, stepping forward. "I'm what grew in the dark. I'm what happens when truth is left to rot."
Then it attacked again—faster, harder.
We clashed once more, and this time, the chamber didn't just shake.
It began to break.
Cracks split the floor. Panels snapped free. NULL surged along the ceiling like veins over a skull, pulsing in rhythm with each blow we traded.
This wasn't just a fight anymore.
It was a war.
And one of us wasn't leaving whole.