"W-Why…?" The word scraped out of Dama's throat like a thread pulling through skin. His chest heaved, each breath feeling like hauling air up from the bottom of a well. He searched for sense, any sense, to pin why, to the empty dark, to the duplicate with a hole where a face should be.

The copy does nothing.

Dama swallows and forces his teeth together until his jaw aches. "You're the C-Curse of Hatred, aren't you?" His voice wobbles on the name. "H-How are you here? We d-defeated you!" The last word stumbled. He can hear his own breathing now, fast and shallow, like an injured animal.

The copy does nothing.

Dama took a step forward, fist clenched, lone arm shaking. "Where is everyone—what did you do to them!? Where is Giona!?" The sound of her name raked across his tongue. "Answer me!"

The copy does nothing.

The silence between them swelled. It grew until the space between the two of them felt stretched as thin as glass, yet the tension as thick as slime.

Dama felt his breaths come louder, harsher, rising in tune with something within him. Whether it was from rising fear or anger, he couldn't tell. His mind simply couldn't focus on anything else other than the situation at hand.

It looked for a seam in the dark, a clue, a trick, anything to make sense of the situation. Nothing. Only the weightless hush and those bleached circles staring back at him from that impossible void-face.

Dama involuntarily clenched his fist further. His fight or flight kicked into overdrive. One part of him wanted to run, knowing he stood no chance without Mumu, Nini, or Saa'ir. The other part wanted to throw himself at the copy, knowing it was the reason Giona was missing.

However, it was the third part of him that asked the needed question: "Is this…still the transference? Is any of this real?" Dama perked up and his breath hitched as the thought skittered in.

Whether this is a dream, a trap, a test, or his nightmarish reality, the pressure in Dama's chest kept climbing.

Then, those words. "Be a man. Protect them. Protect her."

With no place of origin, an unrecognizable yet familiar voice spoke those words to Dama. They rang throughout his head. They rooted themselves within him. They steadied his knees.

Then, he sees Giona's tiny, rose blushed smile.

Hears Tsubasa's weathered, but motherly laugh.

Tastes Kina's and Koul's cooking.

Feels Mumu's comforting hug.

Smells the comforting, nostalgic scent he could never place from Nini's fur as she coils around him.

Finally, he remembers his family. The spark flares.

"Real or not," he whispered to himself, jaw set, breath knifing in and out, "I'm not backing down."

He planted his foot, dug into the abyss as if it were earth, and with a raw cry that ripped from someplace deeper than his throat, Dama surged forward at the copy.

The warmth in Dama's chest swelled until it burned—hot and fierce, a living thing that matched his will. Every step toward the copy doubled the rhythm in his chest; his heart hammered so hard he could feel it under his teeth. \

Without thinking, and as Okun had described, his body gathered that living heat and funneled it into his raised fist. It pooled there in the form of a golden ooze, like a molten sun, humming with all the messy pieces of him: fear, rage, the fierce love he kept for the people who steadied him.

For a heartbeat, the world narrowed to the gold around his fist which flared brilliantly and painfully pure. It was not an outward show so much as a thing that belonged to him, roaring to life.

Dama's soulura had answered to his will.

"Again—" he roared, cutting across the void, "—if I can defeat you once, I can beat you again!!" The declaration burned in his throat and reverberated in the abyss.

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The copy simply raised an arm in reply.

For a stunned second, Dama's breath hitched, for the arm the copy raised wasn't its left arm, but rather confusingly, its right stub of what barely could be called an arm now.

That stunned second was all it took.

Time cleaved into slow, grating knives that slid against each other. Dama's brave yell broke apart as his entire body lurched to a sudden stop. He blinked and the world tilted. The previous feeling of heat in his chest turned to ice as Dama felt something punched through it.

He coughed the hardest he had in his life, as if his body wanted to cough up one of his lungs.

He tried to breathe, but nothing came, only a breathless gasp. He tried again, same result. His body tried for a third time on its own out of panic, same thing.

He coughed again, stronger. This time, something came out. It tasted weird, metallic even. Some of it dribbled down his lip, then chin.

It was blood, something Dama realized when he looked down and saw a single drop splatter on his sweater.

His vision twitched and shook as he then saw why his chest felt to cold and pressured: a giant, black spike skewered into it. There was no pain, only a tight pressure.

Dama's vision continued to shake as his body desperately tried to breathe again, only for each and every attempt to fail into breathless gasps akin to a dying, cornered animal.

He looked up to see the spike's origin. It was the copy; where the copy's stub of an arm should have been there was a black spike, a column of shadow sharpened to a cruelty that drank the light.

Dama watched as his copy's hollowed face and void-for-eyes bored into him with calm indifference. The golden halo around his fist stuttered, then unraveled like a candle blown by a wind. The warmth he'd summoned bled away, soaked by the cold that seemingly seeped into and outside of his body at the same time, and vanished.

Throughout all of this, the void made no sound, the silence returned.

Dama's knees wobbled. His fingers, still clenched, trembled as the world narrowed to the absurd fact of the spike in his chest and the impossibly calm, black-faced thing that had put it there.

He opened his mouth to scream, but found only a rasp. He swallowed, but the motion got stuck in his throat. His body reached for breath again, but nothing came. He tried his damndest to call upon the heat within him once more, but as soon as it came, it fizzled out.

The creature moved with a patient, horrible calm, every step a slow certainty. It slid forward along the length of the black spike that had impaled him—no rush, no frantic motion, as if it were savoring the moment.

And then the voice began—not spoken aloud but poured directly into him, syllables forced into his mind until they sounded like his own thoughts.

"I swear, no matter what comes, I will protect you, Giona, until the day my soul passes on…"

The sentence was his: Dama's own vow from his nightmarish struggle, replayed in his head. Only this time, it was stripped of his hope and rewired into mockery. The cadence was the same but the color had been stripped—there was the faintest undercurrent of amusement, like a smile pressed against his ribs.

Dama's eyes went wide. His pupils shrank to pinpricks as though the world had suddenly been lit by a harsh, clinical light. Panic spooled through him. He could have sworn he heard the echo of his own voice, but the sound had the wrong shape, the wrong warmth.

The copy stopped directly before him. Up close, the face that wore his skin was now in full view, and an insult to anatomy. Where eyes belonged there were hollows of perfect black—pools without depth, but with a bright, pinprick white dots at the center, like the image of a pupil magnified and turned inside out. The effect was almost comical until it was monstrous: those tiny white dots, impossible against the void, fixed on him with pure malice. It was ironic in a sense, as both of their eyes were the exact same size, becoming true mirrors to each other.

Its mouth—God—its mouth was wrong in every possible way. Where lips and teeth should have been was instead a cavern of stitched-black emptiness that split the face from cheek to cheek, a grin that had been cut out and painted with night. The edge of that black curve spilled past the supposed boundary of a jaw, a smile stretched so far that it became obscene, like fabric pulled beyond its seams. No tongue, no teeth, only a perfectly hungry blackness that swallowed what light dared reach it. When it moved even the shadows seemed to recoil.

At the climax of it all, Dama felt a soft and tender hand on his left shoulder.

"Until the day your soul passes on, right?" A voice whispered into his ear. "I cannot wait for that day, Dama Jinbia…"

That voice, Dama knew it all to well. He liked that voice, he cherished it, loved it, yearned for it. It was Giona's. It was a perfect copy.

However, Dama instinctively knew something was wrong. It was like poison in sound form.

Tears began to streak down Dama's face, He didn't know why, he couldn't even form a single thought for the past minute. Despite that, his body moved on its own, turning his head to face Giona's voice—to confirm if the owner really was Giona.

What Dama found was something straight out of his darkest nightmares: it was Giona...in body.

Just like his own duplicate, what he was now face to face with was the Curse of Hatred, wearing Giona's skin. Its eyes, its smiling mouth, and even its hair was now an jet black.

Dama's eyes trembled and shook, his tears flowing without restraint. His mind, despite not being able to comprehend anything, made one realization. What he was looking at is if he fails.

As if on cue, two white pinprick white dots swirled into existence inside the black eyes of Giona—fixed on Dama.

"You understand now. It's only a matter a time." Dama heard both directly in his head and from Giona. Then, both voices laughed, with Giona's mouth moving in an uncanny way.

It wasn't a promise than it was a countdown spoken for him. The voice merely echoed the Curse's declaration—one Dama tried his best to think of as an empty threat. But now it was intimate, personalized, as if the Curse had learned to use the exact shape of his love and fold it into a weapon.

-

Next: (Chapter 92) The Oni Cometh

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