The Face of Mercy dissolved like sugar in rain. Lily watched the crystalline dust catch the arena's artificial light, each mote spinning in the air before settling onto stone that had grown warm beneath their feet.
Two faces remained, rotating around a now fully healed body. One bore a hideous, twisted grin. The other had dice for eyes—actual six-sided dice that spun endlessly.
The arena held its breath. Even AJ's translucent form had stilled, no longer rippling with the constant motion that usually characterised his substance. He was watching the dice-eyes spin with curiosity and suspicion.
The grinning face locked into position.
The stone beneath Victor's feet developed the texture of ocean waves, though it remained perfectly solid.
Shadows detached from their owners and wandered with apparent purpose. The arena's walls appeared to breathe as if they were lungs, expanding and contracting in a rhythmic fashion.
Sam's notebook lay open in his hands, its pages filled with observations in his own careful handwriting.
But something was wrong with the words. They described a battle he'd never fought, companions he'd never met, a cultivation realm that he didn't know. His pen moved without his conscious direction, adding notes in the margins.
"Truth is such a fragile thing."
The Arbiter's voice came from everywhere and nowhere, layered with harmonics that suggested multiple people speaking at the same time.
"Shall we see how well yours holds up?"
Whispers could be heard all around them, some clear, some indistinct. Lily heard AJ's voice with perfect clarity, speaking words that carved themselves directly into her consciousness: "You're holding us back, you know. Always have been. We'd be stronger without you."
The voice carried AJ's inflection, even the echo that marked his speech. But underneath it ran a current of contempt she'd never heard from him, not once in all their months together.
Her bow clattered to the stone.
Victor went pale, hearing Walter's voice with a coldness he didn't think possible: "We're just tools to you, Victor, aren't we? You'll use us and when we're no longer useful you'll move on. That's what you've always done. That's what you'll always do."
The words struck him, made his chest constrict. Hadn't he calculated their usefulness when they'd first travelled together?
Hadn't part of him always waited for the moment when he'd need to choose between their welfare and his own survival?
Ethan's roar resounded as Lily's voice filled his mind, carrying thick disappointment: "You're just a brute, all muscle, no brain. When this is over, you'll go back to being what you've always been—alone."
His axe swung at empty air, as if to fight off the voices. But it persisted, echoing in the spaces between his thoughts where doubt lived like an unwelcome tenant.
Sam's hands shook as Eleanor's voice whispered to him: "You chose research over love, knowledge over connection. I'm dead because you weren't there when I needed you most."
Walter didn't hear anyone from the team, not his wife, but the accumulated voices of students he'd never taught, children whose futures he'd failed to shape: "Useless old man. Your time is past. You have nothing to offer anyone."
AJ faced the voices of everyone he'd ever cared about. They called him a monster, they rejected and shunned him.
He began doubting himself—had he forsaken his humanity? Had he made the wrong choice? So what if he could adapt to all survival situations? He doesn't belong amongst humans anymore.
They turned towards each other, but the faces they saw weren't the ones they knew. Lily's bow appeared in her hands—when had she picked it up?—pointed not at the Arbiter but at AJ.
Ethan's axe gleamed with fresh menace as he faced Lily. Victor looked at Walter with a dangerous light in his eyes.
"Lily, what are you doing?" Ethan's voice carried an edge of betrayal that cut deeper than steel.
"You all..." Her words broke on unshed tears. "You've always resented having to protect me."
Victor's corporate mask slipped back into place with the ease of a well-worn glove. "None of you understand the reality of our situation. This was always about survival. I should have known better than to trust—"
"Stop."
Sam's voice cut through the chaos like a blade through silk. He stood in the centre of their dissolving circle.
"These aren't our voices." He grasped for clarity the way a drowning man reached for driftwood. "Listen to the speech patterns. They're constructed. Assembled from recorded fragments, they lack the micro-variations that characterise genuine human speech."
AJ's form solidified slightly as he returned to his senses. The voices in their heads had the hollow quality of recordings being played, missing the subtle breath patterns and unconscious emotional colouring that marked real speech.
Walter forced himself to focus on sensation over sound. The familiar ache in joints that had carried him through decades of ordinary mornings and extraordinary trials.
"Listen to what you know," he said, his words cutting through their mental storms.
Lily blinked, seeing her companions clearly for the first time since the attack began. The voice in her head still whispered, but now she could hear its artificial nature.
AJ's inflections without his warmth, his speech patterns without the underlying current of care that had never wavered, not once.
"AJ would never say that." A faint relief coloured her voice as the realisation settled. "He's never made me feel like a burden."
Recognition spread through them like sunrise through fog. Victor lowered his dagger, seeing past the false fears to the evidence of months spent learning to trust.
Ethan's grip on his axe relaxed as he remembered Walter's patient teachings, his quiet pride in every lesson taught.
The Face of Deceit's grin never faded but just like the Face of Indifference it radiated confusion.
AJ's form rippled one last time before solidifying into his human form once again. "We know each other," he said, his voice carrying quiet certainty. "These lies can't change that."
Their assault was sudden and fierce—they used the opportunity to vent their frustrations. The Face of Deceit, robbed of its primary weapon, cracked under the constant barrage.
With a sound like breaking glass mixed with bitter laughter, the grinning visage shattered.
One face remained.
The dice-eyed face locked into position, and immediately the air in the arena shifted. Colours bled from objects and pooled in corners like spilt paint.
The air itself crackled with potential energy, generating an unsettled and chaotic vibe.
"I Enjoy games of chance, games of fate. Let's see how your luck holds up when everything becomes... uncertain."
The dice rolled quickly before coming to a stop. Both eyes showed a six. For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the world... shifted.
Victor felt it first—a wrongness in his peripheral vision, like seeing movement in an empty room. His dagger suddenly felt different in his hand.
He looked down to find the blade had transformed into something that looked exactly like his dagger but behaved like rubber.
Still perfectly shaped, still obsidian-edged in appearance, but when he tested it against his hand, it harmlessly bounced and jiggled for a moment.
Ethan's axe hummed with strange energy. When he took a practice swing, afterimages trailed behind the blade.
His next movement came faster than he'd intended, like he was moving in fast forward while everyone else stayed at their normal speed.
Walter's cane stretched upward, growing until it towered above his head like a walking stick meant for giants. He gripped it near the bottom, trying to maintain its balance.
Lily nocked an arrow, fired it, and watched in fascination as it split mid-air, becoming three identical projectiles.
Sam's notebook caught fire in his hands—real flames that should have burnt his fingers except they felt as cool as morning air.
The pages crumbled to ash, then reformed perfectly, his writing still there, only to ignite again in an endless cycle of destruction and rebirth.
The Arbiter had changed too. Its towering form compressed, shrinking to half its original height before expanding horizontally, becoming wider than it was tall.
The transformation was unsettling—like watching someone suddenly become a caricature of themselves.
AJ's form rippled through states of matter as if his body couldn't decide what it wanted to be. Solid, liquid, gas, plasma, then back to his familiar translucent green.
The effects lasted perhaps two minutes—long enough for them to adapt, short enough to keep them off balance. Once the effects had worn off, the dice rolled again. This time they both showed a one.
Heat bloomed from the Arbiter like opening an oven door. The air shimmered with waves of heated atmosphere.
But the heat that came wasn't the overwhelming inferno of the Face of Wrath. This was a borrowed power, a mere imitation of the original.
The Arbiter's massive fist struck the ground where Ethan had been standing, leaving a crater of molten stone, but the attack lacked the overwhelming heat that had made Wrath so dangerous.
Ethan rolled away and sprang back up, making the movement look effortless. "It's using the other faces' powers."
The heat faded as quickly as it had come. The dice rolled again—five.
Whispers crawled into their minds, but these felt thin and artificial. Lily heard doubt about her usefulness, but the voice lacked the perfect mimicry that had made Deceit so convincing.
Walter straightened, his cane having returned to its normal size, his voice steady. "Random effects. It's channelling the other faces powers, but something's missing."
"Intent," Sam said, watching his notebook as if waiting for it to burst into flames again. "The original faces had purpose behind their power. This is just... mechanical reproduction."
The whispers faded. Another roll—four.
Warmth cascaded over them, gentle and healing. Their minor scrapes began to close, aches fading from muscles stressed by combat.
But again, the effect felt hollow—this mercy was simply healing them, not erasing their experiences like Mercy had.
The pattern continued. Each roll brought borrowed power from the defeated faces. Justice without personal judgement.
Indifference without genuine apathy. Mercy without compassion. Wrath without fury.
The Arbiter fought like a creature wearing masks that didn't quite fit. Its attacks carried the form of the originals but none of their devastating power.
Where Justice had branded Victor and AJ specifically for their particular sins, this borrowed judgement swept across everyone only having a minor effect.
They learnt to work with the randomness rather than against it.
The Arbiter began to show signs of strain.