A heavy pause fell between them.
"You saw the coat," Aron said, voice echoing off the plastic shelves. "You saw the tarot cards. You read every warning the world tried to hand you." He closed the distance, unhurried. "And you touched the anchor anyway."
Zekai's jaw locked.
"..."
"You always do that." No footsteps. No sound at all under him. "You see the danger. You know exactly what it is. And you reach out and touch it anyway."
"You know it ends in disaster. And you open the door regardless."
The fluorescent tubes overhead stuttered — once, twice, three times — and the temperature in the store dropped hard enough to bite.
"You never once stop to think about who gets caught in the blast," Aron said.
Zekai's fists closed, knuckles bleaching white.
"That's enough."
Aron didn't slow down. "You wanted answers from the universe. So you kept digging. Kept moving forward. And everyone who stood next to you paid for it."
Something tightened behind Zekai's ribs, an ache sharper than anything the King Knight's blade had managed. Because some buried part of him agreed. Some part of him had already convicted himself of this long before Aron said a word.
Aron stopped a few feet away.
"You know what's funny, Mr. Zekai?"
A smile spread across his face — not warm, not kind. A grimace wearing a smile's shape.
"You still don't actually regret it."
"..."
"You regret what happened to me?" The illusion's voice dropped lower. "But you don't regret opening that door."
Silence. Zekai had nothing to offer back, because somewhere in the dark part of his soul, he genuinely didn't know if that was a lie.
The lights flickered again, and the shelves began to stretch — lengthening into the dark, bending away from each other, the store swelling into something with no edges left.
Aron's voice layered over itself now, bleeding out of every aisle at once. "You know what hurts the most?"
Zekai's throat had gone dry as sand.
"What?"
Aron's eyes found his and held them. "I was happy before I met you."
Everything stopped. For a moment breathing itself felt like work. That one sentence did more damage than anything physical in this place had managed. Zekai just stood there, paralyzed, saying nothing.
Aron kept going, all the warmth drained out of his voice. "My life wasn't perfect. But it was mine. I had a job. Real friends. A future that looked like something."
Colder now.
"Then you showed up."
The lights above them shattered.
CRACK!
Glass rained down across the floor. The store dropped into near-total dark. The endless shelves bent at angles that shouldn't exist. The ceiling spiraled overhead like something being wrung out. Reality itself was coming apart at the seams around them.
"You brought me here." Aron's shape blurred at the edges. "Into this nightmare. Into that palace. You walked me straight to my own death."
One step closer. Another. Until there was nowhere left to go.
"I died, Zekai."
His breath caught in his chest.
"I died again."
A pause heavy enough to drown in.
"And again."
Another step, closing the last of the distance between them.
"And again."
The floor under their boots turned liquid, black, bottomless.
"And again."
Blood welled up from beneath Aron's feet, spreading outward like a tide finding low ground.
"And again."
The smile fell apart, replaced by something raw and jagged. "I screamed until my lungs gave out. I was terrified. I was completely alone down there."
His voice cracked into pieces, splitting into tones that didn't belong to one throat.
"And where were you?"
Silence swallowed the space whole. Zekai's gaze dropped to the black pooling at his feet.
"..."
"Where were you?!"
"..."
"WHERE WERE YOU?!"
The whole illusion detonated.
BOOM!
Walls collapsed into gray ash. The dark ate the endless shelves whole and left nothing behind but empty space. Only Aron remained, standing in front of him — covered in open wounds, clothes torn to rags, body bent and exhausted. Dead eyes, unblinking, staring straight through him.
"You weren't there to stop the blade." The whisper crawled up out of the dark. "You left me to whatever came for me."
Zekai closed his eyes and let the weight land.
"...Yeah."
For the first time since this had started, he didn't argue. Didn't reach for logic. Didn't deny a single word of it.
"...Yeah." His voice had nothing left in it. "I did."
The broken shape of Aron studied him for a long moment. Then it reached into the ruin of its own clothes and drew out a jagged knife.
Zekai didn't move. Didn't raise a hand.
The blade sank into his shoulder.
THUD.
Fire tore through his nerves. His face stayed flat. He didn't flinch.
The knife came out wet.
Stab. Into his ribs.
Stab. Through his forearm.
Stab. Deep into his side.
Again.
Again.
Again.
He never once lifted a hand to stop it. He stood there like something carved out of stone while his own blood ran down and pooled into the black beneath him.
"I earned all of this," he murmured, voice level through the pain.
Stab.
"I'm sorry."
Stab.
"You're right. About all of it."
Stab.
Every accusation. Every wound. He took the whole ledger without a single word of defense.
Then Aron stopped.
The knife's edge hovered an inch off his throat, trembling in the illusion's grip. The wrecked, distorted face in front of him twisted into something wide and horrible, white teeth gleaming in the black.
"I wish I had never met you, Zekai."
Silence swallowed the void whole.
I wish I never met you.
I wish I never met you.
The words looped through his skull, over and over, grinding down toward something that threatened to take the rest of him with it.
Then, at the peak of that echo, something inside him cracked.
Not grief. Not guilt collapsing under its own weight.
Something sharper. The sudden, total certainty that this was wrong.
One clean memory surfaced through the noise.
He saw the real Aron — bleeding from a hole in his chest, body failing, and still standing, still facing down something ten times his size.
A man who had walked into death and come back out the other side of it. Again. And again. And again.
The real Aron had looked at him through blood and ash and smiled — a real smile — and said: "I'll stay."
The real Aron had looked down at his own shaking hands and said: "I'll protect you."
The real Aron had never once blamed him. He'd chosen to stand there, every single time, when running would have been the easy answer.
Zekai's eyes opened.
Crimson light flooded back into them, sharp enough to cut.
✦ End of Chapter 22 — Even If I Break ✦