The cavern was alive.
When Elric, Selene, and Evangeline descended into Brasswick's underworld, they found not rubble but a cathedral of glass and brass. The shard had grown, its fragments knitting together into a jagged mirror that pulsed with impossible light. The air thrummed with equations, symbols burning faintly in the mist. And at the heart of it all, the Phantom stood.
His mask gleamed as though never broken, his cloak flowing in geometric precision. He was not flesh, not ghost, but reflection given form.
"Resolution approaches," his voice echoed, not in sound but in every vein of their minds. "Error shall be erased. Perfection shall endure."
Evangeline fell to her knees, clutching her head as glyphs blazed across her skin. "He's inside me—he wants me to complete him!"
Selene's shadows writhed, straining against a force that bent even darkness into ordered patterns. "We can't fight this, Elric. Not with blade or flame. He's everywhere."
Elric stepped forward, cane in hand, though his grip trembled. His voice was steady, cold. "You claim to erase error, Phantom. Yet you exist because of it. You are not perfection. You are the fracture given shape."
The mask tilted. "Flaw is fuel. Flaw births system. But flaw must be resolved."
Elric's gray eyes burned. "Then you will destroy yourself the moment you succeed."
For the first time, the Phantom hesitated.
It was the opening Elric had gambled on. "Evangeline," he said sharply, "don't finish him. Break him. Turn his proof back on itself."
Through tears and pain, Evangeline raised her hands. Equations swirled in fire and shadow, glyphs racing like rivers across her arms. She screamed as she rewrote the lines he forced into her mind, twisting them, folding them back, until the shard's runes flickered with contradiction.
The cavern shook. The mirror cracked.
The Phantom roared, voice splitting into a thousand fractured echoes: "ERROR—ERROR—RESOLUTI—"
Then silence.
The shard shattered into dust.