Sound and heat warped the air. Breathing felt impossible.

The stage seemed enormous, even as Merrick raised his chin and stared into the sapphire eyes of the massive Frost Dragon Broodmother that he would be fighting in his first match. Despite his inner resentment for the dragons, he couldn’t deny that the cooling effect of Wivanya was a blessing; it kept him focused, away from the roaring distraction around them.

Their face-off was midway through the first day, so Merrick had carefully studied a hundred other pairings where one individual was defeated and the other ascended to the next round. His heart teetered between hope and horror; his power definitely earned him a spot in this tournament. He had seen individuals he estimated weaker than him win… but he had also seen stronger individuals lose.

Merrick tried to stay positive. He saw his Path forward with the utmost clarity. For this tournament, thirteen victories would carry you through. Ten would earn you a ticket to fight against the Ghosthound. In his heart, he decided he would be happy if he won only eight times.

All I need to do is start with one, Merrick pressed his eyes tightly shut, trying to ignore the roar of the crowd. It buzzed at his skin. The rest will follow. And I’ve been training for this, for being able to overcome frost dragon’s even if its the most powerful version of this monster-

“Begin!” The Ghosthound, sitting on a comfortable leather chair on the far side of the arena, waved his hand. Blessedly, his voice cut through the crowd, leaving the two combatants with only each other.

Instantly, a pulse of chilling frost burst from Wivanya. Her tail flicked sideways and a scything blast of frigid air hit Merrick in the face. She shifted her bulk, but lazily, like a cat stretching in the sunlight. He settled into a fighting stance, breathing and listening to his pounding heart accelerate. His muscles coiled, ready for action. His eyes narrowed.

He planted his foot and charged forward. Wivanya raised her head and unleashed a belch that became a comet of ice, howling across the arena and leaving flurries of snow in its wake. He shifted sideways, quick and graceful as a loping cheetah, but the projectile hit the ground and erupted in shards of jagged chill. The impact force knocked Merrick off his feet, sending him skittering across the suddenly slippery floor.

But the worst was the cold. It wasn’t just temperature, but her image. Where Wivanya walked, the chill followed.

The shock of his cheek slamming against the hard and frosted ground woke up Merrick’s fury. He had won the previous tournament. He deserved better than fighting against such an impossible foe in the first round. With self-righteous fury igniting through every muscle fiber, he slapped his palms to the ground and tossed himself back to his feet. His image of the sort of dominant warrior he wanted to become surged. His movements became sharper, more violent.

Merrick made a beeline toward Wivanya, power condensing in his fists. He threw himself in the air, moving so fast that he almost couldn’t control his momentum. He saw the massive pupils of his draconic foe dilate as she struggled to track him. Wivanya leaned back and brought a claw swipe to meet him. The limb was as long and thick as the trunk of an oak tree. The juxtaposition of size was almost laughable. Yet Merrick just gritted his teeth. Claw met image strengthened fist.

Merrick felt his knuckles crack, the force sundering the small bones of his hand wrist in a spike of pain. But his eyes flashed with triumph; their attacks had equal force. Wivanya’s scratch was stalled as well. He tumbled awkwardly mid-air, gathering his image for another strike-

He didn’t even see the tail coming. One moment he was floating, the neck blood leaked from his lips and he bounced off the reinforced arena floor. He collapsed in a heap, his chest on fire, his ribs shattered, barely able to breathe. The chill seeped inside of him, impossible to escape. His heart fluttered and struggled.

His eyes bulged as the chill spread and the rest of his muscles seized. Despite his hands somehow becoming numb, he scrabbled at the ground, trying to push himself back up to his feet. This… it can’t end like this. I need to prove myself. I can overcome bad luck with the matching. If the Ghosthound got struck down like this, he would never just give up…

But Wivanya lowered her head above Merrick and unleashed a slow breath. A suffocating, black cold swept over him, weighing down his consciousness until he collapsed into darkness.

Even in the darkness, it took a long time for the cold to release its grip on his body. His heart began to beat normally.

Much later, Merrick woke in a surge of dawning horror, grappling immediately with the fact that he had lost. Lost badly to exactly the sort of foe he didn’t want to lose to. His heart might function physiologically, but something vital and precious within him crumbled. He grimaced upward, but he was distracted by the serene solitude surroundings; he sat up, bewildered. Right now, Merrick was laying on a hill above a rolling pasture with long grass. To his left was a quiet-looking cemetery that looked somehow primitive. In the distance, on the other side of the pasture, was a fat and wiggling river.

“Where-” Merrick began, but he realized he wasn’t alone. If anything, his eyes bulged even more when he saw that the Ghosthound crouched only a few meters away, a strange silver energy radiating from his hands. The grass sighed and swayed, following his careful movements. The whole scene hummed with peace and contentment. The wind caressed them both as it blew by, gentle and warm.

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“A dream,” Merrick muttered. He lay back in the grass and sighed. “I wonder… did the fight actually happen? Or do I get another chance to fight tomorrow?”

“The fight happened.” The Ghosthound’s voice, as always, resonated with the fabric of the entire world. There were depths to his intonation that made it impossible to ignore. His actions pressed against the fabric of creation and pulled attention with a demanding gravity. Which made his words that much more difficult to hear.

Merrick twisted around and looked at the Ghosthound again. It was the eyes, as always, that revealed him. He had thought this was a figment of his imagination, but those eyes were not the eyes of a figment. The Ghosthound spoke and Merrick knew it was him, the same individual that judged the competition. His statements were cold stones of truth. “You lost.”

“I… lost.” Merrick felt tears prickling at the corner of his eyes.

Then he pushed himself up, alarmed. He felt shame and depression curdling in his gut. To have his hero see him like this- “Wait, are you actually here? Why the hell would you talk to someone like me? I couldn’t even make it through the first round. I’m… I’m just some w-weak guy-”

The Ghosthound looked up from the grasses, the light around his hands dying. The corner of his mouth quirked up. “One thing I’ve learned in my life is that weak is a word with tight context, while the descriptor ‘strong’ has the benefit of standing on the whole of your experience, not just present difficulties. You lost to one of the strongest individuals on Expira, Merrick. That does not make you weak.”

Merrick’s heart clenched. When he spoke, his words contained more bitterness than he intended. “To lose in the first round of the tournament, with the whole world watching, means that my previous victory was meaningless. Part of it was luck, yes, meeting Wivanya in the first round. But don’t you dare try and tell me that I’m not weak.”

“Or what, Merrick?” The Ghosthound’s eyes blazed with emerald fire. The corner of his mouth curled up even further, waiting for a response. Merrick couldn’t breathe, lanced through by that gaze. For several long seconds, they stood like that, Merrick forced to acknowledge the meaninglessness of his threat.

Then the Ghosthound looked away, his gaze moving toward the river. “Anyway, luck played no role in this. I made the bracket personally. I knew your grudge against the Frost Dragons. You were set against them purposefully. Until you understood what you were up against, you would never have the chance of winning.”

“What?!” Merrick’s jaw dropped. Both that it happened and for the fact that the Ghosthound knew about him. “Why would you-”

“There are things that winners can never understand. Some of the most meaningful lessons I’ve ever learned came from losses.” The Ghosthound ignored Merrick, still staring at the river. His eyes softened, his heavy shoulder sagging somewhat. “Hints about survival, the ability to cope with your own fractious emotions, ways to master yourself even in the face of adversity… in a way, all the distance I’ve covered is only because of how often I lost and survived early on in the System experience. Heh, if I’m being honest, it might even be because of how many setbacks I experienced before that when I was just… Randidly Ghosthound. A kid with shitty parents and no sense of direction. Plus a name that was just objectively weird, without any context.”

Merrick clenched a fist, squeezing the sun-warmed grass. His head spun. Yet something in the Ghosthound’s tone made him realize something else. He forced himself to relax. “You… you are doing this with everyone. Or all of the losers. Meeting them in a dream like this. How… why would you do that?”

Suddenly, the Ghosthound’s face sharpened into a wolfish grin. “Because I’m the most powerful man in the Alpha Cosmos. Who else could manage this?”

He blazed with those words in a way that made Merrick unable to look away. He could see them, hovering behind the Ghosthound, his rumored trifecta of images. A vast tree adorned with emerald leaves and golden runes across the trunk. A humanoid being sharpened and honed beyond humanity, all claws and burning eyes and two flicking tails, watching Merrick with enough intensity to strangle him with pressure. And then the vast maw of darkness, the hungry thing that devoured a portion of Expira’s PP to keep them all safe.

Beneath that, in the ground, Merrick sensed a maelstrom of Nether, a heavy natural phenomenon with enough current to sweep him away, if he stepped too close to this powerful being. He felt as small and rustling as a dried leave before a waterfall.

“But…” Merrick spoke only in a whisper. Even his vocal cords were cowed by this direct visual of Randidly Ghosthound. “Why… even if you are the strongest, there’s no point in doing this. Us losers-”

“You wield the word loss against yourself to maim and hurt. To punish yourself for not achieving the goal you wanted.” The Ghosthound softened again, the specters of his images disappearing. He released a long sigh, looking very, very human. Albeit incredibly muscular and at ease in his own body. “I get it, I really do. I chose this place, this hillside above the Hallat, for a very specific reason. I fought in a war here, a war we were very close to losing. That small cemetery used to be thirteen unmarked graves that I dug, burying my friends. Some of those graves are empty. They died as we retreated and I just watched, unable to do anything to stop it.

“Because both can be true. I lost that day, something precious and important.” The Ghosthound raised his hand and looked at his fingers. “And now, here, I’ve made the Alpha Cosmos and risen to a very impressive level of power. I can be scarred by the first truth and proud of the second one. I’ve come a long way; its with that distance that I reassure myself. Because it proves I can go even farther.

“As for why I would greet each of you individually, it’s because I see you.”

The phrase ‘I see you’ plucked at some metaphysical guitar string that connected Merrick and the Ghosthound. He stiffened as his inner world swirled with those words, in an entirely different way than the Ghosthound’s words usually resonated. This was personal.

This was between just them.

“You struggle and exhaust yourself. You push yourself to edge, desperate to seize upon some scrap of proof that you matter, that you have a positive influence on your surroundings and friends, that you won’t simply fade away from memory,” Each word another note of percussion, cracking open the deep and desperate fears in Merrick’s heart. At that moment, the Ghosthound’s eyes were dark and forest green. “For all that the Path I had to walk is brutal beyond imagining, people needed something from me the entire way. The threat of death kept me distracted from the gulf of meaninglessness.”

The Ghosthound straightened, quick and graceful. Then he came over and clapped Merrick on the shoulder. “You have lost. But you are not weak. Because you are going to go right back and train some more so you do better next time, aren’t you?”

Merrick couldn’t respond, because tears started streaming down his face. He choked back a sob, desperate not to break down before the strongest man in the Alpha Cosmos.

But he was weak, and broke quickly.