Barish started the exchange with a growling uppercut toward James’s chin. The young man stepped back, avoiding the blow even as he lashed out with a low kick. Barish stepped forward, blunting the blow and pushing the attack. A wild headbutt came next, catching James off guard.

He felt the flare of pain from his nose and lashed out with a knee, catching Barish in the stomach. The demonic cultivator coughed from the blow even as his face split into a manic grin.

“Come on!” he shouted, throwing an elbow.

James leaned back, avoiding the blow before diving down for a tackle. Barish countered with a knee, stunning James and sending him stumbling back.

“Did you think I wouldn’t know how to counter you?” the demonic shade taunted. “I spent so long! So long sitting in your head and watching you fight! I know your every move, James!”

James coughed, using the moment to regain his senses. He snorted, pushing a clot of silvery blood out of his nose as he stood. It vanished underneath the expanse of water below him. He settled into another fighting stance.

Barish laughed. “What, no taunts for me? No twisting words?”

“Just trying to give you a fighting chance,” James said woozily. “Jabbing at you with both words and fists seems unfair to you since you’re lacking in the former.”

Barish snarled. “Still cracking jokes! Well, you won’t be for long!”

“What do you expect to get out of this?” James asked. “You can’t take over my body.”

“Not while you’re in it!” Barish said. “But, I’m betting that if I get rid of your pesky conscious this body will be mine for the taking!”

“You’re deranged,” James said.

Barish rushed James. “I’m perfectly sane!”

A punch came at James’s neck. He dodged to the side, snaking his arms up to grab the extended arm. Barish twisted his arm as he yanked it back, stopping James from the grab. The demonic shade used his momentum to send a twisting low kick towards James. He danced to the side, avoiding the blow.

Two quick punches tried to knock James’s head back. He guarded, bringing his arms up and deflecting the blow. A spinning kick came next, James avoiding it by ducking low. James took the opening and attempted a tackle, only for Barish to instantly sprawl outward. James fell to the ground, his foe on top of him.

“No tricks for you to try here,” Barish said with a sneer. “Only skills that you don’t have enough of.”

The demonic cultivator put James in chokehold, attempting to bring him to unconsciousness. James tucked his chin into the crease of Barish’s arm and bit down hard.

“Grah! You piece of scrap!” Barish shouted as he reflexively released James from the hold. James used the moment to sweep around Barish and take his arm.

He pulled Barish into an armlock, forgoing any decency and dislocating it as quickly as he could. Barish snarled and swung his entire lower body around to axe kick James in the chest. James gasped as the wind flew out of him.

He released Barish from the hold and rolled to the side, gaining some distance to stand and face his foe again. He coughed, feeling a bruise—or perhaps worse—forming. Barish stood as well, his arm hanging limp. He growled, his face looking less and less human the longer the fight continued.

Barish grabbed his useless arm by the wrist and brought it straight in front of him, guiding the dislocated shoulder back into its socket. James tried to stop Barish with a flying kick, but the demonic cultivator retreated with quick steps. He yanked his arm back into place, howling as he did.

James tried to flow from his kick into a grab, but was forced to retreat when Barish threw an elbow toward his face. The demonic cultivator screeched at James, running forward with a wild haymaker. James met it with a deflecting guard, throwing the punch over his head as he tried to go in for another tackle.

But despite the look on his face, Barish wasn’t acting mindlessly. He sprawled out again, stopping the tackle and taking James into another choke. The demonic cultivator released as James tucked his chin in once more, unwilling to let the man cause another wound.

The two reset, standing and preparing themselves for their next move. James tried to send waves of intent, but he couldn’t connect to the Metastate correctly. He could feel his body sending him signals, but it was distant. It felt like talking through a tube, the feelings he got were long and echoing instead of the quick response he was used to.

Barish’s face had almost completely changed. No longer was he the young man mourning his dead lover. His face was now a hard red mask of rage with two long fangs jutting from his mouth. His fingers elongated, becoming slicing knives intent on stabbing through James.

“Someone needs a makeover,” James gasped through heaving breaths.

“Ha. Ha,” Barish said slowly, his voice a raspy imitation of radio static. “Still so flippant. Let’s change that.”

Barish moved, crossing the distance in moments and slicing down James’s arm. James shouted in pain and tried to clinch his foe, bringing a knee up to slam into the man’s head. It felt like striking metal, and James recoiled from the echoing pain.

The demonic cultivator rolled his neck and stabbed into James’s shoulder. “You see, you never had a chance.”

James’s left arm fell uselessly to the ground, then the other as Barish lifted him off the ground. “Poor tower born, useless to the end. How about this, give me your body and I’ll leave you alive. You can watch as I rise above all others and enact my will on the world!”

James gave Barish a look of disgust before spitting in his face.

“Die then!” the demonic cultivator said.

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James closed his eyes. Deep inside, a part of him was grateful for this. His master was dead, and James blamed himself for it.

A wall of water rose from the still lake below, erupting between the two duelists and sending them flying backward. James braced himself, ready to land at an awkward angle. Instead, he felt someone catch him.

“Giving up so soon, disciple?” Nadia asked.

James stared. “Master, wha—how?”

The woman shrugged.

“Master!” James shouted, the unhelpful answer getting to him.

“I cannot explain what I do not know, disciple,” Nadia said. She turned toward Barish, the demonic cultivator running back toward them. A wave of water pushed him back. “There, we have some more time. Let’s get you fixed up.”

“But you’re dead!” James shouted. “I saw it! I felt it!”

Nadia made a gesture, pulling James’s arms back to them. She picked them up and placed them next to his shoulder. “Imagine yourself whole.”

“Master, this is not the time!” James shouted.

“Disciple, this is your world,” Nadia said. “You would have more answers than I. Now, imagine yourself whole.”

“How is that going to bring my arms back?” James asked angrily.

“How do you have both hands when you lost one earlier today?” Nadia asked.

James looked down at his hands. “What?”

Nadia turned to push Barish back once more. “As I said, this is your world, disciple. As long as you think it, you can change it. Now, imagine yourself whole.”

James did and his body reassembled. He squeezed his hands in surprise, then looked up at his master.

“Are you real?” he asked, grabbing her by the shoulders.

“Again, I do not have an answer for you,” she said.

“Why don’t you make a guess then,” James said. “Because I’m completely lost.”

Nadia looked over to Barish. “Perhaps we should discuss this after we clean house.”

James looked over toward his foe. The demonic cultivator had sprouted two more arms out of his back like a spider. The knifelike fingers at the end hung on cords and clinking together like the deadliest wind chime. His legs had thickened to support his new weight as well, becoming the same deep red as his face.

With a roar, Barish leaped over to James and Nadia. An arm whipped out, the dangling knives whistling as they cut toward James. Nadia pushed her hands upward, sprouting a torrential geyser from the lake below. Barish retracted the flailing knives as they were knocked off course.

The demonic cultivator stepped around the geyser and lowered his shoulders in an aggressive charge. Nadia met it with a spinning wave kick, knocking Barish off course.

“There is no need to capture him this time,” she said.

Water spun up from the lake below, covering her hands and feet in spinning water. Barish extended his fingers, whipping them at Nadia. She moved forward, deftly severing the cords even as Barish sprouted more stabbing fingers. The severed pieces of the demonic cultivator disintegrated into qubits before vanishing completely.

Barish was soon on the back foot, Nadia’s prowess too much for the parasite in James’s mind. And as each piece of him was cut away Barish became more and more of a person. The red, demonic face changed into one of pale fear. The hands sprouting from his back fell like dead leaves from a tree before vanishing. His knife-like hands reverted to their usual form.

“No!” Barish yelled. “You can’t do this to me!”

“Begone, shade,” Nadia said. “You are not welcome here.”

Nadia stabbed downward, slicing through Barish’s shoulder. The lake below him spun, transforming into a sucking whirlpool. The demonic cultivator shrieked as he vanished out of sight, his last words shouts of disbelief.

“And that, I believe, is the end of it, disciple,” Nadia said.

James tackled his master in a hug.

She returned it, a small smile on her face.

“Master, I’m so sorry,” James sobbed. “If I hadn’t—“

“James, there was nothing you could have done,” Nadia said.

“But—“ he started.

She stopped him. “You did the right thing, disciple. It was my mistake in trusting my old master. I was blind to his imperfections, only seeing what I wanted to see.”

James nodded, then broached the subject that came to him in his mind. “You aren’t real, are you?”

Nadia raised an eyebrow. “What brought you to this conclusion, disciple.”

“You can’t be,” James said with a shake of his head. “You died, made a core with what you had left.”

“I did,” Nadia answered.

James sank his shoulders, a thought coming to him. “You’re the core. It’s consciousness or something. You’re an interpretation of her, either something my mind made, or a program inside the core to test me.”

Nadia kept silent, letting James work things out on his own.

“You said that when a person makes a core, they put their essence inside it. You must be that essence,” James said.

“That is the conclusion I came to as well, disciple,” Nadia said softly.

“But, how come you didn’t tell me this would happen?” James asked. “Surely others would have talked about seeing their ancestors in a core.”

“I can’t say,” Nadia said.

“Some kind of mental block?” James asked.

Nadia shook her head. “No, I mean I cannot recall this happening to anyone.”

“No one?” James asked. He started to pace, thinking. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“And now you understand why I have no answer for my creation,” Nadia said with a chuckle. “One moment I sat with you in a train, and the next I found myself underneath an endless expanse of water with my foolish disciple letting a shade of a cultivator get the better of him.”

“You know, at any other moment I’d be upset at your teasing,” James said. “But I’m just glad I can talk to you, even if you aren’t real.”

“It is not wise to casually dismiss your master’s existence, disciple,” Nadia said with a smile.

James rolled his eyes. “You agreed. You’re the essence inside the core.”

Nadia conjured a chair from the water, leaning back in it. “And who can say that I wasn’t essence piloting a biomechanical suit? Perhaps I sequestered myself into the core?”

“But then, why doesn’t anyone else see others inside the core?” James asked.

“Why can’t anyone else isolate a possessive demonic cultivator in their mind?” Nadia asked.

James stopped. He turned to his master and narrowed his eyes. “You said you didn’t have an answer for your existence.”

“I don’t,” Nadia said smugly. “I have a conjecture. It’s completely different.”

“Master, I don’t think I like this more flippant side of you,” James said.

“Apologies, disciple,” she said with a laugh. “I wanted you to come to the conclusion yourself.”

James gaped at his master. His actual master, not some program, as she sat in the chair she made for herself in the endless expanse of water. “You piece of scrap! You let me sit here thinking you were nothing more than a program! You knew this entire time, didn’t you!”

“Not the entire time, disciple,” she said with a smile. “I truly believed I would die passing a core onto you. It was only upon waking that I realized what actually happened. However, I believed telling you in your current predicament was imprudent. There was, if your remember, a monster of a man cutting you to pieces.”

“Yeah, yeah, there were more important matters,” James huffed. He moved to sit next to his master. “You’ve gotten a lot less uptight in your death, you know that?”

“I attribute it to something akin to a runner’s high,” Nadia said. “My being is so relieved that decorum is thrown out the window.”

“We have to figure out how this happens, don’t we?” James asked.

“Indeed,” Nadia said. “Will this happen with all cores? How did your demonic parasite gain access here but fail to possess you? Will I stay as I am inside your mind or deteriorate over time?”

“Way to bring the mood down, master,” James said sourly.

“It is a question you must ask, disciple,” she said. “There is much we don’t know about your constitution.”

James leaned back. “I think—and this is also conjecture—that I was born with something like a partition? Perhaps a miniature core of some kind? Whatever it was, it gave me an isolated space in my mind. When Barish tried to possess me, I instinctively locked him inside. But when I linked with your core…”

“Your inner world merged with the core, allowing Barish inside,” Nadia finished.

James nodded. “It makes a bit of sense, right?”

“It is better than nothing,” Nadia answered. “Though I suspect the truth is much more complicated.”

“Well, nothing is ever easy,” James said. He stretched, standing. “Speaking of difficult things, have I linked with your core?”

“Partially,” Nadia answered. “Look below you.”

James did, his eyes going wide as a vast underwater expanse greeted him.