Night in the jungle was a living entity, full of alien sounds and shifting shadows. Their campfire was a fragile bubble of light in the overwhelming darkness. Anya had effortlessly kindled it with a focused spark of her Enhancement energy, superheating the kindling. Deo sat on a fallen log, gingerly holding his ribs. The subtle green glow of Anya's Restoration affinity had already knit the bone, but a deep ache remained—a phantom pain of his failure.
The silence was a third person sitting with them.
Anya stared into the flames, her face unreadable. The fierce warrior was gone, replaced by someone quieter, older. The reflection of the fire danced in her eyes, but it didn't light them from within.
After an eternity, she spoke, her voice soft, almost lost in the crackle of the fire.
"I became a doctor because I couldn't save them," she said, not looking at him.
Deo looked up, startled. She had never spoken of her past. Not like this.
"My parents," she continued, the words coming out in a reluctant, painful stream. "It was a neurological thing. Rare. Incurable. I watched them… fade. Piece by piece. First their memories, then their motor functions, then… them." She poked the fire with a stick, sending up a shower of sparks. "I held my mother's hand when she forgot my name. I was twelve."
Deo's own pain was forgotten, swallowed by the enormity of her confession. He saw it then—the origin of her relentless drive. Every enhanced strike wasn't just for power; it was a blow against the helplessness she'd felt as a child. Every act of healing was a defiance of the incurable disease that had stolen her family.
"I'm… so sorry, Anya," he whispered, the words feeling utterly inadequate.
She shrugged, a tight, painful gesture. "I thought if I could get strong enough, if I could understand life and how to mend it… I could stop anyone from ever feeling that way again." She let out a short, bitter laugh. "And now I'm here. Learning to be a weapon. The universe has a sick sense of humor."
She finally looked at him, and the mask was off. The vulnerability in her eyes was staggering. "Sometimes… I'm not sure I'm going to make it through this, Deo. Not the training. But… this." She gestured vaguely at the space between them, at the coliseum, at the cosmic pressure. "I'm scared I'm going to lose myself. That the part of me that wanted to heal will be erased by the part that has to break things."
Her words hung in the air. It was the most honest thing she had ever said to him.
And it demanded his own honesty in return.
The weight of his own secret, his own shame, felt unbearable. He looked away, into the dark jungle, gathering his courage.
"I'm the fourth of six," he began, his voice low. "My family… they're everything. Loud, messy, loving. Back in Angola, my grandparents lived with us. When I was nine, my Avó… she had a stroke. I remember sitting outside her room, listening to my mother cry. It was this… helpless, gut-wrenching sound. I remember thinking, 'I wish I had magic. I wish I could just make it better.'"
He took a shaky breath. "I never could. I went abroad to study, to 'do better,' but I always felt like an imposter. Like I was pretending to be someone who could actually make a difference. When my friends were hurting, I never knew what to say. I just… froze. I felt so useless. So bitter. At myself."
He finally met her gaze, his own eyes glistening in the firelight. "That's the lock, Anya. That feeling. That freezing. When I reached for my power for the first time, in that alley… I was dying. I felt my own blood pooling under me. I felt my heart slowing down. And when the power answered… it felt like that same helplessness. It felt like dying all over again. My own mind built a prison to protect me from remembering what it felt like to cease."
Tears now streamed freely down his face. "I'm not a potential god. I'm just a scared kid from a big family who's terrified of feeling helpless and useless ever again. And I'm so, so sorry I've been useless to you."
The silence returned, but it was different now. It wasn't empty; it was full.
Anya didn't speak. She simply got up, walked over to his log, and sat beside him. Not too close, but close enough. She stared back into the fire.
"You're not useless," she said, her voice firm. "You're wounded. There's a difference." She hugged her knees to her chest. "And I'm not going to lose myself. Not if I have a reason to remember who I am."
She glanced at him. "We're both scared. We're both in over our heads. Maybe… maybe we don't have to be scared alone."
The simple offer was like a dam breaking. The tension, the resentment, the unspoken pain of the last decade began to dissolve in the firelight.
Deo let out a breath he felt like he'd been holding for twenty years. "This trial… it could break us. It's designed to."
"Then we'll be broken together," Anya said, a small, genuine smile touching her lips for the first time in weeks. It was weary, but it was real. "And we'll put each other back together. That's what partners do."
She offered him her hand, not for a pull up, but as a pact.
He took it. Her grip was strong, calloused from a decade of war, but her touch was warm.
"Till the end," he whispered.
"Till the end," she echoed.
Above them, the twin moons of the alien world rose, casting a soft, silvery light over the jungle. The Scarlet Boar was still out there. The training was still an impossible mountain. But in the fragile bubble of firelight, they had found something more vital than any divinity: a reason to climb it together. The spark had been lit.