Reality narrowed around Ethan until the world existed only as fragments... shards of sensation, shards of pain, shards of memory.
Every sound was muffled, as though he were underwater. Every breath tasted of iron and frost. Every heartbeat felt like a hammer striking cracked stone.
Leon wasn't attacking him with simple blows anymore. These weren't claws or ice or chaos. These were concepts slamming into Ethan's existence. Saints fought with the essence of what they were. Leon's Path of Chaos wasn't breaking Ethan's body now.
It was breaking... Ethan.
A whispering wave of dread energy swept over him, and Ethan felt something inside him tear... no sound, no pain, just a sensation like a piece of himself had been snatched away and erased. His memory of warmth. His memory of laughter. His memory of the scent of his daughter's hair.
It vanished.
Another attack landed, this time a spiraling spear of conceptual frost. It didn't pierce his chest. It pierced his identity.
