Izumi ran until his body forgot what running meant.
Each step was agony, each breath a shard of frost in his throat. The violet glow ahead had dimmed to a whisper — a dying echo in an ocean of black. But even without looking back, he knew.
The creature wasn't gone.
Something in the air told him — a pulse, faint but steady, crawling beneath the silence like a second heartbeat. It followed him. Slow, patient, deliberate.
At first, he tried to convince himself that the noise was his imagination. That the drag of limbs and the scrape of unseen flesh were only the echoes of his own steps rebounding through the mist. But then the sound changed — uneven now, wet and closer.
He looked over his shoulder.
The darkness shifted. Something vast was moving there, its outline bending the space around it. For an instant, the faint violet light caught the surface of its form — a shimmer like oil sliding over glass — and then it was gone.
Izumi's legs burned, his chest heaved, his thoughts were nothing but instinct. Don't stop. That was the only truth that mattered.
But the void had other plans.
The ground beneath him began to change — no longer firm, no longer flat. The veins of mist thickened, coiling around his boots like living tendrils. They pulsed faintly, trying to hold him back. Each time he tore his foot free, another tendril wrapped tighter. The world itself was turning against him.
"Let go!" he shouted, ripping through the clinging vapor. It responded with a sound — a low hum, mournful, like the earth sighing.
And then the whisper returned.
"Izumi…"
His heart stopped.
He turned, gasping. The mist behind him trembled — and from within it, a shadow rose. Not the creature. Something smaller.
A human shape.
It stumbled forward, clutching its chest, crawling like it was half-born from the darkness. And when the mist peeled away from its face, Izumi's mind fractured.
It was him.
The same eyes, the same cuts on his cheek, even the same torn sleeve. But this version of him was trembling — pale and translucent, its veins glowing with that faint violet light.
The doppelgänger smiled faintly.
"Running again, are we?"
"This isn't real," Izumi whispered. "You're not real."
The illusion tilted its head. "Does it matter? Real is just what the void remembers, and it remembers you too well."
Izumi took a step back, pulse hammering. "What do you want from me?"
"Not me," it said softly. "It. The thing that crawls behind you. It's not chasing your body. It's chasing your echo."
"My… echo?"
The doppelgänger nodded. "Every time you ran, you left something behind. Fear. Pain. Light. It's feeding on those pieces." It stepped closer. "You can't kill it, Izumi. You can only confuse it."
Izumi swallowed hard. "How?"
"The same way light hides from a shadow — by becoming the shadow. Hide your light. Let it think you've gone dark. Become the shade and it will lose you."
For a moment, neither spoke. The mist coiled between them, trembling — as though even the void itself waited for what came next.
Then, the echo's expression changed.
A flicker — confusion, fear, and something deeper that Izumi couldn't name — crossed its face. The faint violet light behind its eyes wavered, dimming to a fragile ember.
"Wake up," it whispered.
Izumi frowned. "What?"
The shadow's gaze shifted — not at him, but through him, as if seeing something far beyond. Its mouth opened slightly, as if to speak another word — but no sound came.
"Wake up…"
And then it was gone.
No shatter. No scream.
Just absence.
The figure's outline thinned, dissolved into mist, leaving behind only the faint distortion of its shape — a hollow echo that lingered for half a heartbeat before the darkness swallowed it whole.
Izumi blinked, disoriented. The silence pressed in again, heavier now, as if reality itself had taken a breath and forgotten to release it. His pulse pounded in his ears.
He stumbled, gasping — and the world snapped back.
The cold hit him first. Then the smell — that strange, metallic air. The mist thickened once more, alive with motion.
And somewhere behind him, the crawling began again.