"Some things weren't made to be fought.They were made to end the ones who try."
It loomed.
Not like a creature—but like a sin carved into muscle and stitched into time.
The Amalgamation's body twitched, spasmed, flowed without grace or balance. Its limbs bent like they were remembering how to move. Bone grated against bone as it unfurled its towering mass in the center of the arena.
That massive red eye blinked once.
Slow.
Matte's knees ached just from the sound of it.
Violet had collapsed behind him, curled up, shaking. She wasn't screaming anymore—she was too far gone for that. Her mouth moved without words, as if she were stuck between breathing and drowning.
Matte took one step forward.
The arena trembled under his boot.
"You talk a lot for something made of stolen parts," he said.
The eye narrowed slightly.
Then—
The faces screamed.
Dozens. Maybe hundreds. All the faces fused across its body split their mouths wide at once and howled.
Not words.
Names.
Names of people Matte didn't know. Names of people Violet did.
"Carrah. Elise. Jasper. The girl in the tunnel. The woman from the forest. The boy with no hands. The father who burned…"
Matte didn't flinch.
He charged.
The moment Matte charged, the arena responded.
The ground rippled under his feet like living skin. The blood-veined stone let out a low, wet groan—almost disappointed.
The Amalgamation didn't move to block him.
It simply shifted.
Its chest opened like a wound, revealing rows of interlocked teeth around a core of pure, roiling flesh. Faces within the mass began to laugh—one male, one female, one childlike—each layered over one another in a chorus of mockery.
Matte swung his blade with pure precision—Essence surging down the steel like liquid light.
He aimed straight for the eye.
SLAM.
The Amalgamation twisted unnaturally, bones snapping mid-motion as it avoided the strike by splitting its torso sideways—one half dragging the other in a serpentine roll.
The edge of Matte's blade nicked its shoulder—barely—and a spray of thick, black blood hissed as it hit the ground, corroding the stone instantly.
The creature screeched.
But not in pain.
In anticipation.
"YES. YES. BREAK YOURSELF AGAINST US."
Matte ducked low as a spine-covered tendril lashed out from its ribcage, narrowly missing his face. It embedded into the wall behind him with a shattering crunch.
The thing was fast—far faster than something that massive had any right to be.
He twisted around and brought his blade down across the tendril, severing it in a single swing.
The severed limb twitched on the floor.
Then began to crawl back toward the body.
Matte's eyes narrowed. "You regenerate. Good to know."
Behind him, Violet was on her knees again—sweating, trembling, eyes wide as if watching something no one else could see.
"It's talking to me," she whispered.
Matte shouted over his shoulder, "Block it out!"
"It's not in my head, Matte. It's wearing my mother's voice."
She whimpered as her nails dug into her scalp.
"It's asking me to come back."
The Amalgamation let out a low, guttural vibration—not quite a roar, not quite a growl. More like a signal.
Matte didn't know what it meant—until the walls of the arena began to move.
The bone-spines in the ceiling rotated like gears.
The floor peeled back in segments.
New limbs unfolded from hidden compartments—more torsos, more faces, more malformed arms sprouting like cancer.
Matte took a slow breath.
"Alright…"
He rolled his neck, shifted his stance, and pointed his blade directly at the eye again.
"Let's see how long you can keep that mouth open."
He dashed forward—this time lower, tighter, his Essence flaring behind him like a comet trail.
The Amalgamation lunged, swinging two full arms down in an overhead slam—but Matte ducked between them, sliding across the bleeding floor and slicing one knee-joint clean open.
More black blood.
More laughter.
The faces in its chest began to morph, and suddenly—they were Matte's face.
A dozen different expressions of him.
Smirking.
Sobbing.
Dying.
"WE HAVE WORN YOU BEFORE."
He snarled and drove his blade directly into the stomach-maw of the creature. The scream it let out wasn't vocal—it vibrated the air, a pulse that blew Violet back into the far wall.
Matte yanked the blade out, but something caught his arm—
One of the torsos on its shoulder had turned fully sentient—its mouth opening to reveal a second set of teeth, biting into his forearm.
"AGHHH—!"
Matte drove his elbow down into its face, shattering its skull with a wet crunch, but blood was already pouring down his wrist.
It wasn't normal blood.
His arm started to burn immediately—his Essence recoiling from the contact.
"Matte!"
Violet's voice—sharp now.
Alive.
He turned—
She was standing again.
Her body shaking, but her eyes finally locked forward.
"It's pulling pieces of me out."
He saw it, too—wisps of memory drifting from her body, like vapor being drained by unseen hands. The creature was feeding without ever touching her.
She screamed.
Not in pain.
But in rage.
"GET OUT OF ME!"
She slammed both hands into the ground.
A burst of static—faint violet energy—rippled from her palms.
The Amalgamation paused.
Only for a second.
But that was enough.
Matte surged forward again, leaping high into the air, blade raised.
He slammed down on the creature's back, driving the edge between the cluster of shoulder-faces. The creature reared up, letting out a sound like a choir being burned alive.
Matte gritted his teeth.
"You're not the only one made of pieces."
He ripped the blade down its spine, sending chunks of fused limbs flying.
The creature stumbled forward—
And then snapped its torso completely backward, its eye turning full-circle to face him again.
Its jaw unhinged.
Its voice—this time—was Matte's own.
"I am the part of you that never died."
Matte staggered back as the Amalgamation's voice—his voice—rattled his eardrums like a war drum pressed against his skull.
The eye twitched.
The mouth twisted.
Then the beast lunged again, not with fists or claws—with itself, throwing its entire body forward like a wave of organs and bones. The ground splintered beneath the impact, and Matte flipped back mid-air, narrowly avoiding a shower of teeth that erupted from the creature's open chest.
The arena floor cracked in jagged lines. Not random.
Symbols.
Old ones.
Glowing beneath the blood.
"Violet!" Matte shouted, dodging a tendril of fused spines that smashed into the wall beside him. "This place—it's feeding it!"
Violet was breathing hard now, hunched over, one hand trembling against the ground as she struggled to keep herself tethered. Her voice trembled too, lost between panic and something else entirely.
"I know… I see it…"
Matte didn't hear the rest.
Because the Amalgamation split.
Not apart—open.
Its midsection tore down the center, revealing a churning vortex of body parts, arms clawing outward as if trying to escape.
And then—
From within that impossible cavity—
It pulled another version of Matte out.
A full, twisted copy of him.
His face.
His stance.
Even his weapon.
But wrong.
Its smile was stitched on. Its body shimmered like static across a reflection.
Matte blinked once.
And it moved.
Faster than anything he'd seen so far.
CLANG!
Steel met steel as the false-Matte clashed blades with him, moving like a mirror given will. Every swing, every pivot, every breath—perfectly matched.
Matte ducked under a spinning strike and countered with a low sweep, but the copy leapt, flipping over him with unnatural grace.
"VIOLET, IT'S USING ME AGAINST ME!"
She gritted her teeth, finally forcing herself to stand.
"It's not copying you…"
Her eyes flashed with horror.
"It's pulling your reflection out of the shrine's memory."
Matte engaged again, dodging a flurry of slashes from his distorted doppelganger—every one laced with essence corruption. When their blades locked, Matte stared directly into his copy's eyes.
They weren't his.
They were completely hollow, and yet… he could feel something inside them moving.
"You're not me," he growled.
The thing smirked.
"Yet I bleed where you hide."
Matte headbutted it hard, driving his blade straight into its chest—and the reflection burst into a wave of mouths, each one screaming in a different pitch before disintegrating into sludge.
Matte stumbled back, panting.
Blood from his previous wound had reached his fingertips.
It burned.
The creature's venom wasn't killing him.
It was replacing him.
"Matte…" Violet said behind him, voice more even now, "this shrine remembers everything that's ever bled here."
She looked up at the arena.
At the glyphs pulsing across the walls.
"This is its brain. And we're inside it."
Suddenly, the Amalgamation stopped moving.
Its massive form rose again, back into full height, limbs twitching. That enormous eye blinked once—then widened.
The skin over its core began to peel, like old paper curling from fire.
And beneath it…
"Oh gods…" Violet whispered.
A second eye.
Violet's eye.
Perfectly identical.
"It's… using me, too."
Her knees buckled again, but she didn't fall.
Instead, she stumbled toward the center of the arena, hands clutching the ground.
"I can't fight it, Matte," she gasped. "But I can anchor it."
She drove both palms into the stone.
Her Essence surged—not clean like Matte's, but erratic, flickering like broken static.
The arena shook.
The symbols glowed brighter.
Matte spun to face the creature again—its arms now lined with dozens of human hands, twitching, reaching toward him.
"You want me?" he shouted.
"Come bleed for it."
The Amalgamation let out a deafening, layered scream—a hundred voices crying out in both agony and ecstasy—as it descended all at once, flinging its full weight at Matte with a slam that cracked the air.
Matte didn't dodge.
He ran through it.
Sliding under its mass, he slashed upward across its core—directly through the red eye.
The beast shrieked.
But didn't fall.
Not yet.
Because its true body hadn't fully revealed itself.
Matte turned to Violet.
Her eyes were now glowing faintly violet-blue.
And she said two words:
"It's birthing."