Like a camel riding through the haze of a sandstorm, Aaron felt confused.

His brain was overwhelmed — the sensations of the last several minutes had stacked up into something his nervous system was struggling to process in any organized fashion. Fear, pain, and underneath both of those, just a thin thread of excitement that he couldn’t entirely account for. After all, it wasn’t an everyday occurrence that a person became a being of a race hailed as gods. The weight of that transformation hadn’t fully settled yet, still moving through him in waves, still looking for somewhere to land.

Then Karen said something. A jumbled sentence that arrived too fast and too garbled for him to parse, the words sliding past his comprehension before he could grab hold of any of them. He didn’t have time to ask her to repeat it. He didn’t have time to do much of anything.

The world around him fractured.

It wasn’t like the space warps he’d been experiencing with increasing frequency — those had a particular quality to them, disorienting but navigable, something his body was slowly building a tolerance for. This was different in a way that sat deeper, more wrongly, like reality itself had encountered a glitch and skipped a frame. The white room shattered around him like glass breaking in slow motion, and the sensation that accompanied it was creepier and more unsettling than anything the space warps had managed — it pressed directly against something fundamental in the mind, the part that depended on the world behaving consistently. Yet when it finished, there was no nausea, no physical aftermath. Just the sudden fact of being somewhere entirely else.

Pros and cons, he thought faintly. Always pros and cons.

"DIE!"

The voice hit him before his eyes had fully adjusted to the new surroundings.

For two or three small, weightless moments, Aaron felt a surge of pure joy move through his chest. He recognised that voice immediately, the way you recognise something that has been woven into your daily life until it becomes as familiar as your own heartbeat. The emotion packed into it was overwhelming, enormous — and his first instinct was to interpret that enormousness as joy mirroring his own, relief at reunion, the particular intensity of feeling that comes from missing someone and finding them again.

Then the actual content of the word registered.

The emotion in her voice wasn’t joy. It was rage. Hot, unrestrained, focused entirely on him.

His survival instincts — sharpened and drilled into something reliable during the course of the trial — snapped online before his conscious mind had finished processing the situation.

’Defense!’

He wasn’t entirely sure what he was commanding or what exactly he expected to happen, but his gut said it and he trusted his gut. It hadn’t failed him yet.

Time decelerated. The world around him slid into that particular slow-motion clarity that came with the flow state, and in that stretched moment he took in everything at once.

Claire. Her beautiful face was twisted with a rage that transformed her features into something almost unrecognisable — almost, but not quite, because even distorted by fury she was unmistakably herself. Her golden hair whipped through the air around her like it had its own agenda, wild and luminous, and her aura was bleeding out of her in waves that felt dangerous even from a distance, the kind of uncontrolled output that didn’t discriminate between friend and enemy. Her sword was already moving, already committed to the arc of the slash before he’d even fully registered she was there.

A little further back stood Eva, her expression carrying a parallel fury — but where Claire’s rage was fire, Eva’s carried the evidence of something that had come before it. Dried tear lines traced pale paths down her cheeks, the residue of crying that had already run its course and hardened into something colder and more determined. Her hands were moving, something swirling around her fingers with the deliberate energy of a spell being built from the ground up.

Aaron didn’t have time to process either of those observations fully because Claire’s blade was already inches from his neck, and there was absolutely nothing casual or hesitant about the trajectory. This wasn’t a warning. This wasn’t a test. If he hadn’t known her — known her the way you know someone whose habits and patterns have become part of your own thinking — he might have doubted what he knew about her. Might have wondered whether the love had been real at all.

But he knew her. He knew that doing this was tearing her apart from the inside even as she committed to it completely.

Despite everything — the blade at his neck, the rage on her face, the highly precarious nature of his current situation — a smile worked its way up his lips anyway. Quiet, involuntary, the kind you can’t manufacture because it comes from somewhere too genuine to fake.

Then he moved. A step backward, one hand raising in a gesture that was equal parts defense and desperate prayer, trusting that whatever his body had become in the last stretch of time would be enough to handle what was about to make contact with it. Drawing a weapon from inventory would take too long. His forearm would have to be enough.

The blade hit.

The flow state shattered on impact like a pane of glass struck by something heavy, and the force transferred into his arm in a rush that was substantial enough to pick him up and send him skidding backward across the floor. But the slash itself — the edge of the blade, the thing that should have opened his arm to the bone — did nothing. The force was real, significant, and he absorbed it through sheer stat advantage as he caught himself and straightened. The scales had distributed the impact across a wider area, taking something potentially lethal and reducing it to a jolt his body could manage.

He barely had a moment to register his own relief.

"Claire—" 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

She wasn’t listening. The moment he opened his mouth she was already moving again, sword repositioned, launching a stab directly at his chest with the same total commitment as the first strike. No hesitation between attacks, no pause to assess. Just continuous, focused aggression.

"Claire, it’s me!" He took the blow on his hands again, the impact firing him backward another couple of meters, the stone or wood or whatever the floor was made of scraping beneath him as he slid.

"Shut up, you evil soul!" She spat on the floor, her aura spiking further outward, eyes narrowed to sharp points of gold. The control she usually maintained over her output had slipped entirely, and the air around her carried an almost physical pressure.

In some corner of his brain that was apparently incapable of reading the room, Aaron registered that she looked incredible like this. Furious, radiant, dangerous, and utterly committed. If only the target of all that magnificent intensity wasn’t his own body.

Eva finished her spell.

Aaron felt the magic bloom outward from her position before he could see what it was, the swirl of it resolving into something that settled over Claire rather than flying toward him. A buff — agility and strength, layered onto someone who was already pushing him to the edges of comfortable management. His stomach dropped slightly. Between Claire’s relentless pressure and Eva’s support, the arithmetic of the situation was getting less favourable by the second.

The room around them had surrendered entirely to the chaos of the fight. The bed had been overturned and snapped clean through the middle, the table reduced to splinters scattered in every direction, luggage tumbled and strewn across every surface. None of them had ever been particularly devoted to tidiness, but this was well beyond the ordinary disorder of shared travel — this was the particular devastation that comes when people who are genuinely capable of causing damage stop being careful about it.

"CLAIRE STOP! IT’S ME!" His voice went up a register, frustration finally cracking through the surface of his composure as he absorbed another blow and felt the increased force behind it courtesy of Eva’s buff.

He became aware, somewhere in the chaos of managing Claire’s attacks, that his scales had extended across most of his body — activated, they turned translucent and milky white, visible if you knew what to look for. Deactivated they were invisible entirely, which helped with blending into ordinary surroundings. The wings folded against his back and the quality of his eyes, however, were doing absolutely nothing for the blending-in project and everything for convincing Claire that something monstrous had moved into the body she recognised.

"Shut up, you monster. Don’t you dare take his name out of your disgusting mouth." She channeled more energy into the blade. The metal began to glow — a light golden shade that started at the hilt and spread toward the edge, and Aaron’s gut dropped when he saw it. That was a significant amount of energy. Enough that the math on tanking it with just his body became genuinely uncertain. The scales were excellent at managing slashing and stabbing damage by distributing the impact across a broader area, preventing any single point from bearing enough force to be lethal — but distribute enough force and the broader area itself becomes the problem. Enough power behind that strike and he wouldn’t fly backward. He’d simply come apart.

Eva had buffed Claire’s strength on top of everything else.

"Why won’t you believe me?!" The frustration in his voice was entirely genuine at this point. "Do you want me to tell you something only I should know or what? I am from Earth! Does that make you believe me?!"

Claire stopped. Not fully, not with any warmth — just a pause, her eyes narrowing further as she studied him with the cold, assessing focus of someone deciding whether a new piece of information changes anything.

"Of course you would know that. An evil soul can consume the host’s original memories."

Aaron stared at her.

He blinked once. Then again.

By that logic he was proving himself guilty by knowing things, which would mean that the original Aaron — who had not, in fact, left him any memories to work with at all, not a single one — had accidentally constructed the perfect trap. Knowing things proved possession. Not knowing things would presumably also prove something equally damning.

The golden glow on Claire’s blade intensified.

He needed his weapon. There was no way around it.

’Haah... swordstaff.’