The chamber wasn't just collapsing anymore.
It was imploding.
Every fracture we'd carved into this place now pulsed with violet-black veins of NULL, crawling up walls and threading across the ceiling like the last breaths of a dying god. Debris fell in chunks. Support beams bent inward. The very shape of the room was losing memory of what it once was.
And still—he kept coming.
His right arm hung dead, Voidscar still buried in the meat of his shoulder, dragging behind him like a tether. His body spasmed every few steps. NULL whipped across his frame in waves. He wasn't stable. Wasn't clean. But he was moving with purpose.
I pushed off the wall, legs shaking, one eye nearly swollen shut.
This was it.
No speeches.
No warnings.
Just war.
He swung first.
Not fast. Not clever.
Just final.
I ducked, caught the blow on my shoulder, took the pain and let it carry me into him. My elbow slammed into his throat, then my knee into his gut. He folded. I spun behind him, ripped Voidscar from his shoulder in one savage pull, and drove the flat of the blade across the back of his neck.
He collapsed to a knee.
But not down.
Never fully down.
He turned, slow, grinding one hand against the ground to keep balance. "You're stalling."
"So are you."
He lunged again.
We crashed in the center of the room one last time.
No techniques.
No styles.
Just two ruined bodies tearing into each other for the right to be real.
His fist hit my ribs—something cracked.
My blade slashed across his side—NULL hissed out like breath.
He grabbed my wrist—squeezed until I screamed.
I headbutted him again—my vision spun.
We fell together.
Grappling, snarling, slamming into the ground over and over until we couldn't tell which of us was bleeding more. He got his hand to my throat. I got Voidscar against his chest. We locked there.
Breathing.
Shaking.
Neither of us able to move.
His eyes flickered.
Mine burned.
Then slowly—inch by inch—I pressed the blade forward.
He resisted.
But his strength was gone.
And I still had just enough left to make it count.
"Matte…" he whispered, voice barely more than a tremble.
"Yeah?"
"…I remember everything."
"So do I."
And I drove the blade through him.
He didn't scream.
Not in pain.
Not in fear.
Just… silence.
The kind that only comes when something has finally run out of reasons to keep going.
Voidscar sank into his chest with resistance—not from muscle or bone, but from refusal. The NULL around him thrashed violently, a storm without anchor, lashing out in all directions like a dying star. But he didn't fight anymore.
He just stared at me.
His face, no longer shifting.
Just… still.
Human.
And for the first time, I saw me—not a monster, not a mirror, but the part of me that never got the chance to survive.
The room was shaking apart. Chunks of stone and steel fell around us like the breath of the world had turned to ash. The ground split beneath our knees, and for a second, we hovered there—both of us kneeling, blood mixing, time stretching thin.
"You were always stronger," he said softly, almost like he was glad.
"No," I said. "I was just the one who refused to give up."
His lips twitched. Not a smile.
But something close.
His eyes dimmed.
And the NULL around him—
Broke.
Not screamed. Not exploded.
Just... broke.
Like glass under water pressure, shattering in on itself and disappearing without sound.
His body collapsed forward into my arms.
Lighter than I expected.
Like there was nothing left of him but memory.
I held him there for a moment.
And whispered, "Rest now."
Then I let him go.
And the room…
The room exhaled.
The moment the Echo's body touched the ground, the chamber went still.
The pressure that had filled every breath, every heartbeat, every corner of my mind—it vanished. Like NULL itself had drawn a line in the void and, for once, chose not to cross it.
Voidscar dimmed in my hand.
The hum that had danced along its edge since the moment this fight began finally faded, leaving only the distant sound of fractured walls settling and the hiss of energy bleeding out of the air like a dying current.
I dropped to my knees beside what was left of him.
The chamber was dark now, but not blind.
The kind of dark you get when something ends. Not just a person. But a weight.
A memory that finally ran out of things to say.
The Echo's face had stopped shifting. No glitches. No warps. Just stillness.
He didn't look like me anymore.
He looked like someone who tried.
Tried to survive what I had.
Tried to hold onto something that was never meant to last.
Tried to be more than what they turned him into.
And in the end…
He remembered.
I reached out and closed his eyes with shaking fingers. They didn't resist.
Behind me, the chamber creaked again. Not violently—just tired.
Like it, too, had been holding its breath.
I rose slowly, every muscle aching, every nerve burning, blood dried into a second skin. The Seal at the base of my spine was pulsing again. Not in pain. Not in warning.
Just… recognition.
It knew what I had done.
What I had become.
What I had survived.
A soft voice echoed from the corridor behind me.
"Matte?"
Violet.
Alive.
Close.
I didn't turn around just yet.
I stood over the place where the Echo had fallen.
And whispered, not to him…
But to the part of me he had carried all this time.
"You're free now."
Violet's footsteps echoed softly across the fractured floor, weaving between chunks of broken stone and lingering trails of NULL vapor as she made her way toward me. The moment she stepped into view, her eyes swept the room—saw the collapsed tank, the warped walls, the scorched symbols—and finally, me.
She didn't say anything at first.
She just looked at the body lying at my feet, then back to me.
Her expression was unreadable.
Then—quietly—she sheathed her blade.
I exhaled.
Didn't realize I'd been holding my breath.
"You're bleeding," she said, stepping closer.
"So are you," I replied, my voice rough. Hollow.
She glanced down, gave a small shrug. "I've had worse."
I tried to laugh. It came out like gravel.
She stopped beside me, her eyes landing on the Echo—now motionless, curled like a shadow that had finally gone still.
Violet didn't flinch. Didn't recoil. She just stared, and said softly, "That was you."
It wasn't a question.
I nodded.
"It was what they tried to make me into. What I would've become if…" I trailed off, unsure what the rest of that sentence even was. If I hadn't escaped? If I hadn't resisted? If someone like her hadn't found me?
If I hadn't remembered who I was?
Violet placed a hand on my shoulder.
Warm. Grounding.
"But you didn't," she said. "You're here."
I looked at her. For the first time in what felt like hours, I let my shoulders drop.
"I don't feel like I won."
"You weren't supposed to." Her eyes flicked back toward the ruin. "You were supposed to end it."
She was right.
This wasn't victory.
This was closure.
And still, something lingered in the air—faint, nearly undetectable. Not NULL. Not Essence.
Just a memory.
A trace of something that refused to vanish completely.
The chamber groaned one last time—an ancient, rusted breath from walls that had seen too much—and then finally settled.
Silence.
Real silence.
Violet's hand slipped away.
"We need to move," she said, already turning. "This place is coming down. I don't think it wants to keep holding what it doesn't need anymore."
I gave the Echo one last look.
Then followed her into the tunnel.
Step by step, the shadows behind us sealed shut, one pulse at a time.
And I didn't look back.