As Mirzayael dashes toward Kanin, he splits in two.

  Or at least, the void all around him splits in two. One half of the shadowy, inky blob shoots off to the right, leaving the ring. The other half rears up in front of Mirzayael.

  She pivots to the side as the void seems to unfold like a rippling, black cloth. Before she’s able to reach Kanin, however, the sheet of void snaps forward and engulfs Mirzayael.

  My heart skips a beat, but I hardly have a second to process what this means before the void around Mirzayael collapses upon itself like a black hole. At the same moment, the second volume of void bursts wide open and she spills out, catching herself before she falls and whipping back around to face Kanin.

  Only now, she’s outside the ring.

  Zyneth bursts into a full-bellied laugh, while smug satisfaction emanates from Kanin and Ink’s minds.

  Mirzayael scowls at the man. “That was underhanded.”

  “Hey.” He raises his hands in a helpless gesture. “I was just following your rules.”

  My mind finally catches up with everything that happened; the match was over in less than three seconds. Kanin can teleport things through his void—fascinating.

  For me, at least. I’m sure Mirzayael is much less excited by the prospect of teleportation magic. “Uh oh,” I tease Kanin. “Now you’ve done it.”

  He doesn’t reply, but he also doesn’t try to hide his amusement.

  Sure enough, Mirzayael calls out, “Rematch!” just a moment later.

  “Sure,” Kanin says, the void swirling back to him as Mirzayael stalks back into the opposite side of the ring, eyes narrowed.

  “Ready?” she calls.

  This time, Kanin lowers into a fighting stance, the void hovering around him rather than sinking back to the ground. And then I witness something strange occur in his mind.

  The boundary between Kanin and Ink becomes indistinct. The two separate senses of self bleed into each other, their thoughts mixing like drops of dye dispersing into water. Abruptly, I can’t tell them apart. Or it might be more accurate to say, I’m now looking at one mind—a new mind, not Kanin, not Ink, but something else.

  “Go!” Mirzayael calls.

  She dashes forward, throwing her spear. Kanin’s body jerks to the side—not like he side-stepped the attack, but as if an invisible string pulled his body out of the way. Since his entire body is made of Attuned glass, it makes sense that he can move it in inhuman ways; it’s just rather strange to witness it.

  Mirzayael’s spear flies past him, and she pulls back on her spidersilk, causing the weapon to fly at him from behind. Kanin doesn’t even flinch; instead a giant orb of glass appears in the air behind him, blocking the spear and sending it clattering to the ground. Mirzayael reels it back into her grasp before he can knock it out of the ring.

  Kanin’s mind—or whoever this new entity is—reacts to all this with a cool perceptiveness. He doesn’t seem amused and cocky, like he had before, but neither is he acting aloof. Rather, his mind is entirely absorbed by the fight, analyzing every move Mirzayael makes, planning ahead and thinking… I frown, trying to understand what I’m witnessing. He’s thinking about a dozen different things at once. Like a computer performing parallel processing.

  The large ball of glass Kanin had pulled from his Inventory breaks apart, spreading into dozens—hundreds—of shards of glass. My grip tightens around Kanin’s coat, worried he’s about to shred Mirzayael to pieces, but he has something else in mind. Even as she rushes him, the pieces of glass click together like links in a chain, and his void joins them, together forming six long octopus-like limbs.

  Kanin stabs toward her with the limbs while maneuvering his main body out of her range, and Mirzayael deflects each of his attacks with a blur of her spear. Kanin adds a few separate daggers of glass into the mix, but Mirzayael is undeterred. She advances on him as his attacks pick up in speed and frequency.

  It’s like they’re both testing the waters, each feeling out the reaction time and force of each others’ blows. Neither are fighting at full strength, yet, but Mirzayael abruptly grins; clearly she’s enjoying the challenge, at least.

  Kanin remains completely silent. His mind is a storm of concurrent thoughts, but without banter or even breathing, he’s eerily quiet during the fight.

  Kanin catches one of Mirzayael’s jabs, a glass and shadow limb spiraling around the spear. Mirzayael yanks it back, causing Kanin to stumble forward along with it. Before he can let go, she grabs his limb, keeping it pinned to the spear, and grunts as she leverages her weapon—and Kanin—to the side. He swings out over the ground, outside the ring. Except, instead of falling, he remains hovering there, floating in place.

  Mirzayael laughs. “You’re full of all sorts of tricks, aren’t you?”

  Instead of replying, he swings himself over her head like a pendulum on a string, slips out of Mirzayael’s grasp, and lands behind her on all-fours. Or, all-ten?

  As he’s fought, the glass on his body has shifted around in response to Mirzayael’s attacks, and what’s left is hardly human. He uses some of the glass limbs like legs, supporting himself, while others are hovering at the ready for any attack Mirzayael may throw his way. The void both clings to his form like a layer of skin, and also floats around him, like the morphing contents of a lava lamp.

  “Are you mocking me?” Mirzayael asks, though her tone indicates she’s more amused than insulted by his now spidery appearance.

  “No,” Zyneth says, when Kanin remains silent. “Ink just prefers more limbs.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Ink? Is that who I should be referring to this entity as? It doesn’t feel like Ink’s mind, exactly—but I suppose it’s closer to the remnant’s mind than Kanin’s.

  The realization disturbs me. Is this mind-merging something that every remnant is capable of? Even the Dungeon Core or the Shuddering Shroud? Certainly, at minimum, I know both of these remnants are able to affect our minds—expecially in Sandro’s case—and try to wrestle for control—especially in mine. Is this what could happen to us if our remnants become more powerful?

  “Fun,” Mirzayael says, actually sounding like she means it. “That’s the second time I’ve underestimated you. Let’s get serious, shall we?”

  And then the real fight begins. The two become a blur of motion and sharp ringing cracks of metal-on-glass. Mirzayael uses her legs to fend off Kanin’s extra limbs, and he dodges her attacks, sometimes skittering beneath her when he becomes too caught up in her legs. When she manages to pin one down, he simply disconnects the limb to slip away.

  He trips her up—she pins him down. He launches a barrage of glass daggers at her back, and she dodges away, deflecting dozens of shards with the spinning motion of her spear. The fight is so complicated and swift, I can barely keep up.

  As the fight stretches, I happen to glance Zyneth’s way—and do a double-take. Though he’d been laughing after the previous match, and Mirzayael is clearly enjoying this one, the cambion is watching with a frown, his body tense as if he’s ready to spring into motion. One of his hands grips his daggers, and a spark of electricity jumps over his fingers. He must be worried about Kanin—but the question is, worried he’ll lose, or worried he’ll win?

  Some of Kanin’s disconnected glass clusters together, and Echo recognizes the spell he’s activating as one I already have: a Lightbeam. My chest squeezes in abrupt alarm—when I last used that attack, it manifested as a laser beam and was used to execute a hydra. But to my relief, Kanin’s attack doesn’t have any mana in it, so instead it merely shines a very bright light straight into Mirzayael’s eyes.

  She hisses, flinching as she turns her head away, but the floating glass just turns with her, continuing to blind her. Mirzayael raises a hand to block it, but by then it’s too late.

  Kanin leaps at her, his limbs wrapping around her torso and grabbing every limb he can manage. Mirzayael manages to get one arm loose, but the other becomes pinned to her side, and she cries out as she stumbles forward, her front legs giving out as Kanin’s glass limbs yank them from under her.

  Kanin’s mind is buoyed by elation. He won! She is completely subdued.

  Mirzayael, however, appears to think differently.

  With her free hand, she whips her spear around, cracking it against Kanin’s head. Even though it’s not a real head, I can’t help but wince. But when Mirzayael pulls her spear back, the head comes with it; spidersilk catches the light. She swings the spear around, slamming Kanin’s head into the ground—outside of the sparring ring.

  “You lose,” Mirzayael says.

  I let out a relieved breath. The match is over. Just in time, too, because the fight was getting a little too intense for my liking.

  Kanin’s mind sours. Lose? He didn’t lose! He subdued his prey. His limbs are still wrapped around her neck. All it would take is a slight squeeze—

  Alarmed, I reach for his mind, and at the same time I see Zyneth stepping forward.

  “Kanin!” I think, panicked.

  The moment my mind touches his, I feel it shatter like a pain of glass. Kanin—actually Kanin’s mind, not this strange, distorted version—flinches away, abruptly filled with shock. His glass form slips off of Mirzayael and stumbles to the ground.

  “Good fight,” Mirzayael says, unaware of the moment of danger she’d been in. “I’d like another match someday.” She retrieves her spear, pulling Kanin’s prismatic head from her weapon and handing it back over.

  “Yeah,” Kanin says, taking his head back. “Thanks for indulging me.”

  Out loud, he sounds like his normal self. Confident, casual. But with a first row seat to the inner workings of his mind, and can feel his shame and faint fear. Ink’s mind has also resolved back into a distinct entity, though it’s more annoyed than anything. It hates losing. And it hates that Kanin stopped it. Grumbling, it retreats to a distant corner of Kanin’s head to pout.

  “Sorry,” Kanin thinks, turning his attention to me. “It wouldn’t have actually gone that far.”

  He doesn’t sound as certain as I would like, but knowing that it only takes a small disruption to his thoughts to snap him out of it is reassuring.

  “It’s good to see you’re able to pull back from the brink, at least,” I think.

  Rather than reply, Kanin radiates embarrassment as he plops his body down at Zyneth’s side. The cambion has his arms folded, stance casual, as if he hadn’t just been about to intervene.

  He looks down at Kanin with faint amusement. “Do you plan to walk around like that all day?”

  “Oh, shut up,” he grumbles. “I’m out of mana. I’ll fix it all when I’ve regained some.” He waves a hand at the rest of us. “I’m out of the fight for a bit. Someone else go while I fix this body.”

  “Fix?” Mirzayael teases. “This form seems far more useful than your previous. It was surprisingly difficult to combat.”

  Ink, who had been pretending not to listen, abruptly perks up at this praise. Its previous annoyance at losing to Mirzayael has evaporated, replaced with smug satisfaction at having its many-limbed form recognized as superior.

  I don’t want to hear it, Kanin grumbles at Ink.

  I watch their exchange with continued fascination. Ink is so much more of an individual than the Dungeon Core. It has such a wider breadth—and depth—of emotions. And from the memories Kanin shared with me, it wasn’t always like this. Is he changing it? Or is it changing itself?

  “So who’s next?” Mirzayael calls, casting a challenging look around our group. Her eyes alight on Aquenno. “I hope it’s not beneath you to spar with a mortal.”

  “Mirzayael,” I caution. Mentally, I add, “Don’t forget Aquenno is our guest. It would be to our advantage to retain positive relations with Blair.”

  I can feel a mental eye roll at the suggestion that we should remain friendly with a god, but she doesn’t argue. “It would also be to our advantage to evaluate his abilities and the threat he poses—as I have just done with our glass man, here.”

  If that was her goal, I’m not sure if Mirzayael knows exactly how much of a threat Kanin really posed.

  But Aquenno shakes his head. “I have no interest in sparring with you. I am here to observe.”

  “I, however, would like to accept your invitation,” Zyneth says, stepping forward.

  Oh, dear. This can’t end well.

  Mirzayael grins, her mind lighting up with a predatory eagerness. “Oh, yes. I’d love to see what the prince is capable of.”

  A dark look flashes in Zyneth’s eyes. “I’d prefer if you’d address me by name.”

  “Of course.” Mirzayael steps back with an exaggerated sweep of her hand so Zyneth can join her in the ring. “My mistake.”

  “You don’t think they’re going to go too far, do you?” I wonder to Kanin with an inward grimace. Aloud, I call out, “You two take it easy, now!”

  “Not to worry,” Mirzayael says. “It will be a quick match.”

  Zyneth smiles tightly, loosening his knives in his sheaths. “I’m in complete agreement.”

  “No,” Kanin thinks. “I’m pretty sure ‘taking it too far’ is exactly what they have in mind.”

  Unfortunately, that matches my assessment of the two as well.

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