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The pressure kept climbing.
Gregory's lungs worked harder for the same amount of air, atmosphere pressing down with the weight of three thousand meters of ocean above him, a burden that had no business existing on the surface of a city street. His ears had started ringing sometime in the last minute and hadn't stopped.
He was afraid. He had been afraid for several minutes now and hadn't found the bottom of it yet.
The monk reached up and removed the upper fold of his kasaya.
Underneath, his skin was already changing. The warm brown tone bled out of it in patches, replaced by a deep, unnatural blue that spread across his chest and arms like ink dropped in water. Then the eyes opened.
Not eyes. Gregory corrected himself before he had fully processed what he was looking at. Faces. Hundreds of them, small and perfect, breaking through the skin across the monk's torso and arms and throat, each one distinct, each one aware.
The monk's arms split down the middle, bone and sinew dividing with a sound like wet cloth tearing, until six arms hung where two had been.
Every face across his body twisted into something wrathful, teeth bared, eyes narrowed, a chorus of fury spread across a single form. Only the original face, the one Gregory had been arguing with minutes ago, kept its benevolent smile intact, untouched by whatever violence lived in the rest of him.
He spoke, and the voice that came out was kind. Calm. It reached every corner of the district at once, weather that needed no permission to arrive.
"I am chief in the world. I am supreme in the world. I am eldest in the world. This is my last birth. There will now be no more rebirth for me."
He took seven steps.
At each step, a lotus flower opened beneath his foot, blooming through solid stone as if the street had been waiting for this exact invitation. He surveyed the four directions with unhurried patience, a gesture rehearsed across more repetitions than Gregory wanted to guess at, and then he raised one hand toward the sky and pointed the other at the ground beneath him.
"In the heavens above and on the earth below, I alone am the World-Honored One."
Behind him, the air split.
Hundreds of portals opened at once, gold-rimmed and silent, and through them came monks. Ten thousand of them, saffron robes flowing, feet bare against the ruined street, all of them chanting the same mantra in perfect unison, a wall of sound that pressed against Gregory's skull from every direction.
"Namo Bhagavate Eon Tathāgatāya Arhate Samyaksaṃbuddhāya."
"Homage to the World-Honored One, Eon, the Thus-Come One, the Worthy One, the Perfectly Fully Awakened Buddha."
Gregory's face went white.
He recognized faces in that crowd. These were no strangers, no conscripts. He recognized ten specific figures moving among the ten thousand, each wearing the same saffron robe, each chanting the same words, and every one of them belonged to a name he had known for years.
John. Revola. Quentin. Violet. Waltier. Capon. Vito. Giovani. Park Hyo Shin. Shosuke.
Ten Mythical-rank Guildmasters of the Victoria Kingdom, walking out of a portal in matching robes, chanting homage to a name that wasn't theirs.
"What the fuck are you doing," Gregory shouted, his voice cracking on the last word. "Wake up. Don't let this monster control you. You're dignified Guildmasters of this kingdom."
The response came from all of them at once, the ten Guildmasters and the ten thousand monks and the six-armed figure standing in the center of it, every mouth moving in perfect synchrony.
"What is there to wake up from."
"We are all the same person. We have always been the World-Honored One."
Gregory took a step back.
They kept speaking, the voices layering into one, no delay between any of them, no individual will breaking rhythm with the collective.
"They are me and I am them."
"Apostle of Gluttony. Retractor. Monk Eon. The World-Honored One."
"We are the World-Honored One."
A pause. The lotus flowers along the street continued to open, one by one, unhurried.
"And you are as well."
Gregory's eyes went wide.
Something behind Gregory's eyes clicked into place, an answer he hadn't wanted and couldn't unsee now that he had it. His faith in the Goddess had never wavered, that connection was still his own, thirty years earned and undiminished. But the body underneath it, the vessel that had carried that faith for thirty years, that was something else entirely. He looked down at his own hands. At Armand's hands. At the question of where one had ended and the other had ever begun.
"Ah." He said it quietly, almost to himself, and something that might have been a smile crossed his face, thin and disbelieving. "So that's it. I'm a clone of the World-Honored One."
He said it quietly, the same quiet a man reaches when the sentence in front of him is going to cost more than he has left to give.