Ashen staggered inside the whirl of blood and screams, his body like a broken gear in a merciless machine. Every step he took snapped, every breath he drew carried weight. Blood poured from him; his face was mangled, his eyes red, his fangs bared in a tired, biting rage.
The malformed copy stood before him, its breathing cold like the depths of a tomb. It laughed—a twisted laugh that echoed the cries of his clan inside his chest—then spoke in a voice mixed of metal and blood: "You fight me, but you are really fighting what is inside you."
The words slid into his head like small knives. He reeled. The faces of his dead clan floated up before him suddenly: his mother calling his name, a small child crying his name, the clan elder falling with sleep in his eyes. Each memory struck him like a cold seizure.
Every time he tried to push them away, the inner voice came back stronger: a low hum, then the copy's words again: "You cannot defeat what is inside you…"
The question began to carve into his heart like hammer marks: Am I fighting myself? Is this enemy the reflection of my regret, the savagery I planted in my soul?
Every wound now had a double taste: bodily pain, then a deeper pain—pain of memory. When he cut the copy's shoulder, he felt a sting in his own shoulder as if the wound told a story on his flesh. The scratches would not heal; they left black lines, each one a carved memory.
The malformed copy attacked without stopping, leaving him no space—not meaning there was no time to think, but that thinking itself had become a weapon against him; one idea rose and attacked him from inside: if I kill my enemy, will I die too?
Doubt spread in his chest slowly: If I destroy this flesh statue, will something precious melt away in me? Does killing it crush a part of my soul? Or is it just a barrier that must be smashed so I can continue?
He tried to find an answer beneath the cracked plates of his iron skin. He searched for a rim of calm inside the bloodstorm: he focused on his breath, on his heartbeat, on the drums. But the sounds did not help; the drums became notes of accusation, each beat saying: you choked us, you left us, your weakness was our sentence.
He treated the question with a harsh pragmatism: if this copy is the reflection of his regret, could he use that? Could he turn regret into a weapon? But the idea was contradictory—each time he tried to use regret, it consumed him.
Lost in this maze, he remembered a simple habit from his childhood: he used to tuck a small stone under his pillow when he feared the dark, touching it in the morning to remind himself he still existed. The memory was silly, but it fixed in him a steady reminder that parts of him were locked away, parts that could still remember.
Why that memory? Maybe because it was the simplest, least burdened memory. Or maybe because it served as a divider—a piece of his humanity that had not died yet.
He pulled from his pocket a torn cloth stained with blood not wholly his own. He wiped his lips with it, smelled the blood, as if the scent tied him to a distant past. He did not feel remorse for what he had done here; there was no room for regret.
The copy moved closer, its gaze empty but filled with bitter understanding. "Do you feel it?" it whispered. "Do you realize every blow you land on me is a blow you land on yourself?"
Ashen did not answer. A steady light shone in his eyes—not the light of wisdom but of surrender. A surrender that was not the end, but a gateway to a deeper embodiment.
He found himself at a crossroads with no clear path. His memory played quick frames: scenes before his clan's massacre—failures, decisions that seemed necessary then, promises he made, hatred stored in his chest. Each picture birthed another until the scene became an open book his enemy read without pause.
This was no longer just a fight in the arena but an internal trial. Aggression, weakness, regret, the desire for revenge—all appeared as defendants. The more he sat under judgment, the more he slid into a pit of unanswered questions.
At a turning moment, the copy raised its arm, not to strike but to grip the side of his face with its cold claws and pull him into a tight circle of ritual. "Look at you," it said in a contented voice, "you curl up around yourself, dreaming you are a hero, but you are a broken mirror."
Ashen felt stabs in his chest—some not of steel or blood but of words and curses. At that point, something happened: he no longer had the strength to resist the words. He began to cry—a silent crying, faint tears from his still-burning eyes.
The crying did not make him weak; on the contrary, it became a kind of ritual: blood from his wounds mixed with his tears, a blend of tenderness and disgust.
His thoughts now crossed with other memories: small images of child blankets, fishermen's laughter, an old day smelling of the sea. Human moments flashed within the wreckage of regret. Each flash reminded him of a single truth: there was something worth protecting, and he had not lost everything.
But the fundamental question returned, striking hard: does killing the copy save what remains? Or will he himself be taken away with each murder of a part of himself?
The pain itself was less terrifying than the idea. Now the real danger was becoming a mere echo of something evil—to become a boiling cauldron where regret would explode onto the world.
The copy whispered again: "Go. Kill me. If you do, you will understand that each wound you leave on my body writes your story on your flesh."
Ashen trembled. His mind shattered between two poles: the desire to silence this constant cry, and a darker desire—to surrender completely and let savagery and regret weave him from inside.
The decision ripened, not in heroism but as welcomed surrender. His choice was not a moral victory but a harsh acceptance that the path beyond this trial would not pass through the beast's defeat, but by pushing it inside until it became part of him.
He looked up at the sky. The hanging coffins shifted as if watching this collapse. The drums moved to a matching tone, waiting for the judgment's result.
Ashen swallowed his last breath and then whispered one word—not remorse, not triumph, but the birth of a dark decision: I… will become what I need to be.
The words left his mouth like a wild arrow, cold and terrifying. In that moment he felt he had made an irreversible choice: to open a door in his chest and let his clan's regret and the shared savagery invade and dominate him from within.
The copy smiled a wide smile, half flesh, half bone. It said nothing. It knew the transformation had begun.
In the blood-soaked arena, the first signs of a new change appeared in Ashen; not a change into a clear hero or a clear demon, but into a living embodiment of regret and savagery—someone who now held a decision that placed pain as leader, not morality.
The roads to the end were open, but Ashen had entered a dark room whose end he could not see. Still, one stark truth multiplied in his heart: no salvation without surrender, no power without a price.