Dyllan breathed a sigh of relief. What his Nightmare was doing… he’d seen it before. The way it was brandishing its new weapons. The way its posture shifted, and a flicker of confidence seemed to grow in its hollow eye sockets. No, not confidence - arrogance. It was stronger now, more powerful. More powerful than Dyllan could ever be. But its power was raw, unfocused and uncontrolled.

It was an arrogance Dyllan was intimately familiar with. He saw it in every body builder that walked into his sensei’s classes. They were massive hulks of meat that could bench press a car - and they would always laugh when the teacher set them up against kids that were half their size and half their age.

They always stopped laughing when they hit the mat. Then they’d complain, say they were caught off guard… pointless noise that was usually followed by them hitting the mat again. And again. And again. By the twelfth time, they’d either stormed out, or learned a valuable lesson:

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Bunkers built to withstand a nuclear blast could have their doors blown down by breaching charges that held only the smallest fraction of the nuke’s power.

Dyllan had applied this principle to conflicts of the body for years, yet it seemed he had remained foolishly stubborn in mind.

When something was too painful to let wash through you, and too strong to be fought back, you guided it down a new path.

A roar interrupted Dyllan’s thoughts. The same roar his Nightmare had unleashed several times already - unchanged, unlearning. The monster refused to allow its newfound advantage to disappear as quickly as it had arrived. It refused to accept that it had lost control over Dyllan

Dyllan just wondered how he’d ever been controlled by something that couldn’t even control itself.