Twelve bodies moved as one.
A faint rustle. A blurred shimmer. And then — the sound of flesh meeting flesh, bone striking bone.
Dawn stumbled back, arm numbed by the parried blow. Another reflection closed in, footwork perfect, aim merciless. A fist caught his ribs — one he should have dodged, one he had dodged — before, but not now.
Pain bloomed, red and raw. He gasped.
The world became a churned ocean of movements: kicks, elbows, relentless assaults. His body answered where it could, parried where it dared, but against twelve relentless versions of himself, each adapting, each learning...
He was drowning.
A glancing blow to the temple. His vision spun. He barely registered the next kick driving into his side, sending him sprawling onto the cracked soil.
The reflections didn't stop.
They advanced with cold inevitability, shadows of what he once thought was strength.
No flames soared. No winds screamed. Only blood. Only breath. Only the silence between heartbeats.
---
He knelt.
Palms pressed against the ground slick with his own blood, fingers trembling.
Above him, twelve figures loomed — mirrors of himself, yet unyielding, perfect in every flaw.
Is this it? he thought.
Am I truly weaker than reflections?
Than mere replicas of myself?
The question gnawed deeper than any wound.
Time seemed to slow, to freeze — trapping him inside a coffin of his own despair.
The reflections raised their arms, each prepared to deliver the final blow. Their expressions were his own: pitiless, determined.
---
But beneath the suffocating weight of failure, something stirred.
A flicker — a memory — a heartbeat from a life he thought forgotten.
A battlefield.
One so vast it eclipsed imagination.
The skies had been torn asunder by titanic figures. Primes — legendary beings — clashed like the wrath of gods incarnate. The land groaned under every blow; mountains shattered like glass.
In that chaos, a boy — small, frail, inconsequential — had stumbled where he did not belong.
Corpses of heroes, monsters, and saints littered the land like broken stars.
He should have died.
Thousands had.
He remembered their screams carried by winds sharp enough to peel skin from bone.
But he lived.
Not because he was strong.
Not because he was lucky.
Not because of the broken shadow that clawed and killed to shield him.
He lived because —
because an old man, half his face melted away by divine fire, had dragged him from the wreckage and whispered into his ear.
His breath had been ragged, broken.
And yet the words burned brighter than the dying sun:
"Remember boy, you survived this hell not by strength... nor by luck...
It was your Desire...
Desire to live, to move, to defy...
Never forget your true Desire. Never... never..."
And then, silence.
The man's hand slackened.
His body crumbled into the crimson earth.
---
Dawn's eyes snapped open.
Breath tore from his lungs, hoarse and alive.
Blood dripped from his brow. His limbs screamed in protest.
But now — now — the world felt different.
The reflections moved, their fists plunging down.
Dawn rose.
No elegance.
No grace.
Just an iron surge of Will so fierce that it cracked the very stillness of the realm.
He was not technique.
He was not talent.
He was Desire itself, breathing, burning, refusing to die.
He met the first blow bare-handed, muscles screaming, bones threatening to snap — but he held.
The reflection's arm trembled against his grip.
The second and third came. He twisted, slammed them aside.
Twelve tides of his own making surged toward him —
And Dawn, battered and bleeding, grinned.
---
Meanwhile, at the precipice of an unreachable distance, where the very fabric of the realm seemed to hum, the Grand Instructor stood, a solitary figure, gazing into the unfathomable depths of a mirror.
The mirror refleced the battle scenery from the forbidden realm— faint but persistent, each blow from the twelve reflections a heartbeat in the vastness of his own mind.
For a moment, the old man's expression shifted. His usual calm demeanor wavered into something unreadable, something that teetered dangerously between regret and doubt.
Did I go too far?
He had watched Dawn through the trials of the Forbidden Realm, seeing the boy's unrelenting will, feeling the weight of each strike that sent him sprawling, each moment of rising hope only to be dashed again. This battle... His gaze tightened. Perhaps Madness has finally caught me in the old age. To think I allowed a kid to be bullied like this. Sigh!
---
The Grand Instructor's hand began to rise, his fingers extending toward the distant scene.
Perhaps it's time to end this...
But before he could make a move, the unexpected occurred.
---
The change came in an instant.
Dawn, broken and battered, rose from the dust like a tempest reborn. His movements were primal, instinctive, as if the very core of his being had been awakened by something ancient, something irrevocable.
A surge of will poured out of him, unstoppable, unyielding. It wasn't technique. It wasn't power. It was sheer Desire, burning through the pain, through the doubt.
The twelve reflections faltered for just a moment — a hesitation — and in that single pause, Dawn struck.
The Grand Instructor froze.
His heart raced.
This... this isn't what I expected. His eyes widened as Dawn surged forward, not with the perfection of a martial artist, but with the raw, untamed ferocity of a survivor.
A boy who should have fallen, but didn't. A boy who faced a thousand impossible odds and chose, each time, to rise again.
The Grand Instructor stood, a witness to the unfolding miracle, caught between pride and astonishment.
---
Dawn stood, his body on the brink of collapse, but his soul—unshakable. The reflections closed in again, but now, they did not seem so invincible. He met them with every last ounce of his Desire to live, to become.
---
The Grand Instructor lowered his hand.
There was no stopping it now.
---
To be continued