Another decade had bled into the stone of the coliseum. The solution to their stagnation, K declared, was a change of venue. A real hunt. A Bane-class entity had been tracked to a crystalline gorge on a fractured moon.
It was a disaster from the start.
The beast, a shifting horror of shadow and obsidian shards, moved through the canyon like a living earthquake. Anya was a whirlwind. She danced between razor-edged claws, her enhanced senses predicting every strike, her healing mending the shallow cuts she couldn't avoid. She was the hunter.
Deo was a spectator. Again.
His fire fizzled against its hide. A spatial tear meant to divert a charge opened a foot wide and three feet off-target. He was a liability. Anya wasn't just fighting the beast; she was protecting him.
« WARNING: PROXIMITY TO HOSTILE ENTITY CRITICAL. EVASIVE MANEUVERS RECOMMENDED. » The System's voice was a cold splash in his mind, uselessly stating the obvious as he dove behind a crystal spire to avoid a tail swipe that would have cut him in half.
"Deo, now! Distract it!" Anya yelled, her voice strained as she leveraged all her enhanced strength to hold one of the beast's limbs.
He stepped out, hands raised. He reached for the ocean of power. He begged. He shouted. He felt the familiar, suffocating hand clamp around his throat. Nothing came out but a pathetic spark.
The beast roared, throwing Anya off. It focused its glowing red eyes on Deo, the weaker prey.
Panic. Pure, unadulterated terror. The same terror he'd felt a lifetime ago, bleeding out on a dirty floor, his world ending.
« HOST VITAL SIGNS: ELEVATED. CORTISOL LEVELS CRITICAL. » « SUBCONSCIOUS PROTOCOLS ENGAGED: SURVIVAL PRIORITY. »
Something in him broke. Not a barrier, but his will. The pent-up frustration, the humiliation of a second decade of failure, the sheer, gibbering fear it didn't manifest as power. It manifested as a scream.
"I CAN'T!"
The raw, agonized shout wasn't at the beast. It was at Anya. It was at the universe. It was at himself.
He saw her face, mid-air, twisting from focus to shock, then to something worse. Something utterly broken.
The beast, startled by the scream, hesitated for a second. It was all Anya needed. With a cry that was half battle-roar, half sob, she plunged her fist, glowing with the most violent jade light he'd ever seen, through its skull. The creature exploded into dissipating shadow.
Silence returned to the gorge, broken only by the chime of falling crystals.
Anya stood amidst the fading darkness, her shoulders slumped. She turned to look at him. The fierce light of the warrior was gone. In its place was a devastation that made Deo's soul ache.
"You never even try," she whispered, her voice hollow. The words weren't an accusation anymore; they were a final, sad conclusion.
Tears welled in her eyes, cutting clean paths through the dust and grime on her cheeks. She didn't say another word. She just looked at him, her heartbreak a physical force in the air between them, and then she turned and walked away, leaving him alone in the silent gorge.
Deo fell to his knees. The weight of it all twenty years of failure, the terror, the look on her face crushed him. Great, heaving sobs wracked his body. He was useless. He was a coward. He had broken the only good thing left in his world.
« SYSTEM: HOST NEUROCHEMICAL IMBALANCE DETECTED. PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS AT CRITICAL LEVELS. » « QUERY: ORIGIN OF HOST SELF-IMPOSED RESTRICTIONS? »
"Wh-what's wrong with me?" he choked out, begging the empty air, the System, anyone.
« ANALYSIS: HOST SUBCONSCIOUSLY ASSOCIATES TRUE POWER WITH TRAUMATIC EVENT: NEAR-DEATH. » « HYPOTHESIS: POWER UNLEASHED = MORTAL DANGER. SUPPRESSION = SAFETY. » « CONCLUSION: HOST IS HIS OWN WARDEN. THE LOCKS ARE A PROTECTIVE MECHANISM. »
The sobs stopped. The truth was more terrible than any external sabotage. The wall wasn't built by K. It was built by him. His own fear, his own desperate will to survive, had become his prison.
"How?" he gasped, tears still streaming down his face. "How do I fix it?"
« SOLUTION: OVERCOME THE ROOT CAUSE. CONFRONT THE FEAR. ACCEPT THAT TRUE POWER IS NOT SYNONYMOUS WITH DEATH. »
The memory flashed before his eyes: the cold floor, the spreading warmth of his own blood, the utter helplessness, the certainty of oblivion. The fear was a black hole, sucking in all his courage.
It was too much. The pain of that memory was worse than the pain of his current failure. To willingly step back into that feeling? To embrace it? He couldn't.
"No," he whispered, shaking his head, wiping his face with a trembling hand. "No, I can't."
The moment of clarity passed, washed away by a fresh wave of denial. It was easier to be broken than to face what it would take to be whole.
He took a deep, shuddering breath. He pushed himself to his feet. He brushed the dust from his knees. He pretended the cracks in his soul weren't there.
He walked back to the rendezvous point with a hollow calm. He offered Anya a weak, shaky smile. "That was a tough one, huh?"
She looked at him, and the last flicker of hope in her eyes died. She didn't cry. She didn't yell. She just nodded, her face a neutral mask, and turned away.
And so, a third decade began. Not with a bang, but with a quiet, terrible acceptance. Deo pretended everything was okay. He went through the motions of training, his progress remaining a flat, stagnant line. Anya, her heart armored now, focused everything on her power. Her growth became meteoric, a silent reproach. She stopped watching him, stopped trying to understand. The chasm between them wasn't just a gap in power anymore; it was a void of silence and unspoken pain, wider and deeper than any gorge on any fractured moon. They were partners in name only, bound together by a past he was too scared to confront and a future she had already accepted he wouldn't be part of.