The battle was a storm tearing him apart from the inside out. Each strike of Oblivion wasn't just force, it was erasure—an attack that sought not to wound, but to make him cease. Louis staggered, blood running like ink down his arms, yet he forced himself to rise again, his chest heaving.
The voices of Ellie and Chuka reverberated in his skull—Don't do this. You can't fight what even the Seer cannot see. But he had already chosen. He wasn't fighting just for himself; he was fighting to prove that even when the light is smothered, it can ignite again.
Something cracked. Not outside, but within. His veins burned like molten fire, not of destruction but of defiance. The fragments of erased memories around him began to swirl, pulled toward him as though magnetized by the force of his will. The world of Oblivion faltered for a heartbeat, and in that silence Louis realized—he was no longer just resisting.
He was reshaping.
