The dawn after the confession did not bring a miracle. The Scarlet Boar was waiting for them at the edge of the clearing, snorting plumes of smoke, its hooves tearing at the soft earth. The fight began again.
It was just as brutal as the day before. Anya was a darting emerald flame, her enhanced blows landing with percussive force, but the boar's hide glowed, dispersing the energy. Deo's spatial warps still fizzled, his fire still splashed harmlessly. He was thrown, trampled, and singed.
But something was different.
When Deo went down, his ribs screaming in protest, Anya didn't shout in frustration. She created an opening, a feint that drew the boar's charge, giving him the precious seconds he needed to scramble back, his Restoration energy a pale, shaky imitation of hers stitching the worst of the damage.
"Its left flank," she grunted, blocking a charge with a concussive blast from her palms. "The hide is scarred there from something old. It's a fraction softer."
It was a observation she would have kept to herself before, a tactical advantage hoarded for her own eventual victory. Now, she shared it.
Deo didn't magically land a killing blow. But he stopped trying to summon an ocean. He focused. He remembered the surgeon's scalpel. When the boar charged Anya, he didn't try to stop it with a wall of fire. He focused a thread of power, a single, concentrated spark of Lightning, and aimed not for the beast's body, but for the ground just before its leading hoof.
Crack!
The small, precise explosion of dirt and energy made the boar falter for a half-step, breaking its momentum. It was enough for Anya to land a clean, enhanced kick to its jaw, snapping its head back with a satisfying thwack.
The boar retreated, smarter this time, melting back into the jungle without giving them a finish.
Anya stood panting, a thin trail of blood from a cut on her lip. She looked at Deo, then at the spot where his lightning had struck.
"That," she said, wiping her mouth, "was not useless."
It wasn't praise. It was a statement of fact. But from her, it was everything.
The days bled into weeks, the weeks into months. K provided no guidance, only the silent, ever-present pressure of the coliseum waiting for their return. This was their test.
They learned the boar's territory by heart the mineral lick it visited at dusk, the mud wallow it used to cool its smoldering hide, the grove of iron-bark trees it couldn't easily burn. They learned its language: the different snorts that meant curiosity, aggression, and irritation. They learned that its fiery tail was less agile in the dense thickets, that its charge was predictable if you read the tension in its shoulders.
Their plan evolved. Deo's role was no longer to be a primary damage dealer. It was to control the battlefield. He used his shaky spatial affinity not to attack, but to subtly alter the terrain creating minor gravity wells to slow its charges, warping the air to distort its depth perception. He used Fire not as a weapon, but as a smokescreen, and Lightning as a series of precise, disruptive strikes to its legs and eyes.
Anya was the spear. She honed her Enhancement to a razor's edge, learning to focus all her power into the point of a single finger for armor-piercing strikes. Her Restoration became a tool of endurance, allowing her to fight through the exhaustion and the minor burns.
They fought it a hundred times. Two hundred. They lost every time. But the losses changed. They were no longer catastrophic routs. They were tactical retreats. A broken arm instead of a disembowelment. A drained energy reserve instead of a simulated death.
A year passed.
Deo sat by their now-familiar campfire, staring at his hands. The phantom fear was still there, a cold stone in his gut every time he reached for his power. But now, he had a counterweight. He'd hear Anya's voice from that first night. "You're wounded. There's a difference." He would picture his family, not their grief, but their laughter. He would feel the solidity of the pact they had made.
He wasn't fighting for a vague notion of godhood anymore. He was fighting for the person sitting across the fire from him, sharpening a stick with a focused intensity.
"It's learning our patterns," she said, not looking up. "The way we funnel it toward the thicket. Tomorrow, we switch. You take the high ground by the river. I'll bait it from the west. We need to confuse it."
He nodded. A year ago, her taking the primary baiting role would have felt like an indictment of his weakness. Now, it felt like trust. She trusted him to be where he said he'd be, to do what he said he'd do.
Another year bled into the stones of the river, the roots of the trees, the calluses on their hands.
And then, on a day that dawned no different from the seven hundred that had preceded it, it happened.
They had the boar cornered against a cliff face, its usual escape routes cut off by Deo's carefully laid spatial distortions the most complex he'd ever maintained. The beast was enraged, bleeding from a dozen shallow cuts Anya had inflicted, one of its eyes sealed shut from a precise lightning burn.
It was tired. They were tired.
With a final, desperate roar, it gathered itself for a last, suicidal charge directly at Deo.
The old terror surged. The cold floor. The fading light. The hand tightened around his throat.
No.
He saw Anya, already moving to intercept, her face a mask of determined fury. He saw the two years of shared struggle, of quiet campfire conversations, of a promise made.
You are a memory. You are not me.
He didn't try to summon a cataclysm. He didn't fight the fear. He let it wash over him, through him, and accepted it. And on the other side of it, he found not emptiness, but a quiet, steely calm.
The boar was almost upon him. Time seemed to slow.
He didn't dodge. He didn't block.
He raised a single hand, palm open.
He didn't reach for Fire or Lightning or Space. He reached for the concept of Stop.
The air in front of his palm didn't warp or crackle. It crystallized. Not into ice, but into a perfect, hexagonal lattice of solidified reality, shimmering with a faint, silver sheen. It was the same energy he'd discovered in the coliseum, but now, it was controlled. Intentional.
The Scarlet Boar, a creature of momentum and brute force, hit the immovable object.
The sound was not a crash, but a deep, resonant THUMP that vibrated through the very ground. The boar's charge halted utterly. Its neck snapped forward with whiplash force. It staggered, dazed, a low, confused whimper escaping its throat.
It was the opening.
Anya was there. She didn't leap. She simply appeared, having pushed her Enhancement to its absolute limit. Her entire body was sheathed in a corona of violent, brilliant jade. She didn't punch. She thrust her hand, fingers together like a blade, into the exact spot on its flank she had pointed out two years prior.
There was a wet, tearing sound, and then a sudden, profound silence.
The light around her faded. The crystalline lattice before Deo dissolved into motes of silver light.
The Scarlet Boar stood for a moment, then its legs buckled. It collapsed to the ground, its fiery hide dimming to a dull, cooling crimson. It was not dead, but completely, utterly subdued.
The jungle was silent, as if holding its breath.
Anya stood over the beast, her chest heaving, her knuckles bloody. She turned slowly and looked at Deo.
There was no wild grin, no triumphant shout. Her eyes were wide, filled with an emotion he hadn't seen in so, so long. It was more than awe. It was respect.
Deo lowered his trembling hand. The fear was still there. The Warden was still in his mind. But he had just proved, to both of them, that he could open the door.
He met her gaze and gave a single, slow nod.
They had done it.
It had taken two years. But they had done it together.