Ploc.
Ploc.
Ploc.
The sound of dripping water found him before anything else did — before the cold, before the pain, before the slow, unwilling return of awareness. Each drop echoed in the dark like something marking time.
Giyo opened his eyes.
Stone ceiling. Stone walls. The particular quality of darkness that meant no windows, no outside, no way to immediately know if it was day or night or something in between.
Where... He shifted, winced. ...am I?
"Another dark cell." He said it out loud, quietly, like confirming something to himself. "Did those wolves actually capture us?" The thought arrived and immediately started unraveling — he pushed himself upright, looking around, searching for anything that made sense.
"You're finally awake."
The voice came from the far end of the darkness.
Giyo went still.
Eyes. Two of them, catching the faint light — approaching slowly, one step at a time, the sound of footsteps measured and deliberate. The kind of pace that didn't rush because it didn't need to. Giyo's body tensed on instinct, every nerve reading the approach as a threat—
Until the figure stepped close enough to see.
"Wh— YOU—"
He scrambled backward.
"WHY DO YOU LOOK EXACTLY LIKE ME?!"
The figure stopped.
It was him. Or something that had tried very hard to be him — the same brown skin, the same white hair, the same clothes worn into familiar shapes. But the spiral marks were absent. Every last one of them, gone. The face was his face without the things that had always made it feel dangerous, and somehow that made it stranger, not less.
The copy looked down at its own hands. Something in its expression suggested it was both aware of the wrongness and quietly grateful for it.
"Don't be alarmed," it said, lowering itself slowly to a crouch — an attempt at non-threatening, clumsy in the way that only something learning non-threatening for the first time could be. "We are practically the same person now. I retreated from your body before the process completed. I couldn't finish the cloning."
Giyo stared at it.
"My original objective," it continued, "was to take everything from you. Not become this." It looked at its hands again. "An imperfect copy wasn't what I wanted."
"Then why me?" Giyo's voice was still tight, still wary, but the initial shock was settling into something he could think through. He remembered it now — the crow shape, the impact, the way the world had gone wrong colors. "Why try to clone me at all?"
The copy went quiet.
Its gaze moved sideways, and what lived in that sideways look was something Giyo recognized despite himself — because he'd worn it too, in alleys and empty streets, when the thing you were feeling was too new and too large to look at directly.
Fear.
"My objective was to kill you," it said finally. Direct. No apology in it, but no pride either. "After I gained consciousness — after I absorbed the shadows of certain animals — I developed a basic awareness. And what that awareness showed me, clearly and immediately, was a target. A boy whose presence pushed back against my darkness just by existing."
It looked at its hands again. The gesture was becoming a habit already.
"I tried other bodies first. Most of them failed — they would deteriorate, decompose, fall apart before I could complete the transfer. I couldn't replicate their appearances. Couldn't hold their forms." A pause. "I didn't want to die once my mission was finished. I wanted to be more. I wanted to be perfect." Something in its voice shifted — quieter, heavier. "So I decided your body would be the ideal vessel for my essence."
It pulled its knees closer to its chest.
"I was right. You were the perfect host. But..." The word came out like something that had taken effort. "He didn't allow it. He subjugated me. Made me feel something I had no category for."
Giyo's breath caught slightly. "He. You mean—"
The copy flinched.
It didn't say the name. It pulled inward like something that had been burned by proximity to a flame it hadn't known was there — and the reaction itself was answer enough. Whatever Giyako had done to it in that interior space, the memory was still very present.
"A Demon," it said instead, barely above a whisper. "I didn't know you were carrying a Demon."
A silence fell between them — not comfortable, not hostile. Just present.
"I don't know what I am now," it said at last. "Feelings. Regret. Pain. I don't have names for most of what's moving through me. I wanted a body. I wanted to be perfect." Its voice cracked slightly on the last word, the first sign of something genuinely raw underneath the flat delivery. "And I failed. I failed at becoming what I wanted to be."
The sound arrived without warning — a low, resonant tone, like a window being opened in a wall that had no windows.
Light bled through the darkness. A rectangular frame of it, hovering where solid stone had been a moment before.
On the other side: Aldric, cane in hand, Vela standing at his shoulder with her hands folded and her lamp-eyes steady.
"Both awake," Aldric observed, with the tone of someone confirming a hypothesis. "Excellent. That saves considerable effort."
"Aldric." Giyo was on his feet immediately. "Was it you who put us in here?"
"Don't misunderstand the situation." Aldric tapped his cane once against the floor — a full stop, placed deliberately. "I took an immediate precaution. Consider what might have happened if the host of a Named Demon and an unidentified hostile entity had been left to move freely through a populated area." He let that sit for exactly one beat. "I think you'll find the reasoning sound."
Giyo opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"In any case," Aldric continued, smoothing one side of his mustache, "there is a judgment convening. You are both required to attend."
"A judgment—" Giyo straightened. "Already?! But it's only been—"
He stopped.
Something in Aldric's expression — patient, slightly apologetic — told him the sentence wasn't going to finish the way he expected.
"I should clarify where you are," Aldric said. He gestured around the cell with one hand — the isolated walls, the perpetual dark, the air that sat differently than ordinary air. "This room is one wing of my towers. A secret I have maintained even from the King, until today." A pause. "My Temporal Magic affects this space directly. Time moves differently here — distorted, compressed. What felt like minutes since you regained consciousness..."
He let the silence do the work.
Giyo's eyes went wide.
"...was actually several days since the wolf attack."
The words landed one at a time.
Several days.
Several days of his friends not knowing what had happened to him. Several days of Milica and Pan and Asuna and Lys sitting somewhere in this building — or outside it, or wherever Aldric had put them — with no answer. Several days of Hiro and Paola not knowing if he was alive.
The full weight of it pressed down on him all at once, and for a moment he couldn't find anything to say.
Aldric watched him absorb it without rushing him. Then, when the moment had run its course, he raised one finger.
A snap.
The cell bars dropped. Before either of them could move, the chains came — fast, precise, winding around both of them from the floor up, cold and absolute.
"Temporal Magic — Threads of Perdition."
The chains were unlike anything Giyo had felt before. They didn't restrain his body so much as restrain him — a pressure at the level of something deeper than muscle, something that made the idea of using any ability feel very distant and very unlikely. No evolution. No spells. No movement that wasn't permitted.
Another snap. A window opened beneath their feet.
The throne room arrived all at once.
The hall was full.
To the left, arranged in a line that suggested they had been waiting for some time: his classmates, Professor Paola, Director Hiro. Paola's expression when she saw him was controlled in the way that meant she was working very hard to keep it that way. Hiro gave nothing away at all.
To the right: the Captains, standing at measured distances from each other, each carrying the particular stillness of people who had made peace with whatever was about to happen. And beside them, the Pope.
Greiton stood with his hands folded, his posture immaculate, his eyes moving between the two prisoners with the focused attention of someone who had already reached a conclusion and was now waiting for the formality to catch up.
At the center, elevated, unhurried:
King Arthur.
The room had been quiet before they arrived. It became a different kind of quiet after.
"We will begin," Arthur said. His voice filled the hall without effort, the way a tide fills a bay — not loud, just complete. "This is the Judgment of the Heretics."
He looked at both of them — a long, even look that gave nothing away.
"Before us sit two sides of the great scale of judgment. Those who defend the boy against those who bring accusation." His hand moved left, then right, marking the division. "We begin with the first charge. Speak when ordered. Nothing more."
A gesture. The chains at their throats loosened slightly — enough to breathe properly, enough to speak.
"Giyo. Son of Jack." The King's eyes settled on him. "Tell me: how and when did your Demonification begin?"
Giyo swallowed. His hands were shaking inside the chains and he couldn't make them stop.
"I... I noticed it the day I won the tournament. My arm was covered by the Whips during the fight, and afterward it ended up like this."
"Then we have confirmation that you are the Host of a Demon."
"That's not — it's not that simple—"
Arthur didn't acknowledge the protest. His expression didn't change.
"The Demon identifies itself as the Demon of Chaos. This suggests a Named Demon. Setting aside the mystery of its origin — what are its objectives?"
"I don't know." The honesty of it came out raw. "I haven't spoken with it since the day that..." He stopped. The memory of Paola and Hiro's evaluation surfaced — their magic moving through him, the careful measured way they'd tried to understand what was inside him without disturbing it. "I don't know what it wants."
"You haven't spoken with it since." Arthur repeated the words slowly. "Understood. That confirms you are not acting alone in this."
He leaned forward slightly.
"Name everyone involved with you and the Demon. All of them."
Giyo's fingers trembled.
He looked sideways. His eyes found Paola first — her expression still carefully controlled, still holding — and then Hiro, who gave him the smallest nod. Not permission, exactly. Just acknowledgment.
He pointed to them both.
They stepped forward without hesitation.
Arthur regarded them for a moment. "The Director himself. Involved directly." He moved on without pausing. "Next: who sealed the Demon inside you?"
The question hit a wall.
Giyo reached for the answer and found nothing — a blankness that wasn't ordinary forgetting, the kind of blankness that felt like something had been removed. His mind went white at the edges, the way it does when you try to remember a dream that won't come back.
"I..." Each word came out separately, with a gap between them. "Don't. Know."
"It was simply there one day?"
"It was just... there. And then it wasn't not there anymore. I don't know how to explain it better than that."
Arthur held his gaze for another moment, then moved on.
"Have you had contact with the blood-covered being reported near the borders of neighboring kingdoms? We have reason to believe it may also be a Named Demon."
"NO." The word came out harder than he intended. "I have no contact with anyone like that. I don't even know how to control the Demon's abilities — they just activate. Like they know when I need to defend myself." His voice was starting to fracture at the edges. "The flames. The shield. The Whips. I don't even know how I know their names. I didn't choose any of this."
He stopped.
Drew a breath.
"I'm a victim of this." His voice dropped to something quieter, and it was more frightening than the volume had been. "Please. Don't kill me."
Arthur raised his hand.
"I want the floor."
Greiton's voice was smooth, measured — the voice of someone who had been composing this speech for some time.
He began to walk, moving in a slow arc around both prisoners, examining them with the detached interest of someone assessing an acquisition.
"Boy. Do you understand the scale of the problem you represent?" He stopped in front of Giyo, close enough that looking away would have been a statement. "We are conducting this judgment by a more merciful method than you deserve. We are being direct. We are giving you the opportunity to speak." His voice lowered. "If the broader government learns of what you are — you die. There is no other outcome."
He turned to the copy.
"So this is the Doppelganger." He tilted his head, studying it the way you study something in a jar. "I confess I expected a more intimidating appearance."
The copy said nothing. Its jaw was set. Its eyes were fixed on a point somewhere between the floor and the middle distance.
"You killed innocents," Greiton continued. "You didn't merely end them. You hollowed them out. Kept them as empty shells. Made them suffer without giving them the chance to surrender." He began to walk again. "So tell me — what are your objectives?"
The copy stayed silent.
Greiton waited.
The copy's eyes moved — just slightly, just enough — and found Giyo. Found the tears tracking silently down his face. Found the shaking in his hands that he couldn't stop.
Something shifted in its expression.
Guilt. The word arrived in it like a foreign object — unwelcome, sharp, taking up space that hadn't been cleared for it.
"I don't remember when I came into existence," it said at last. "I don't know who or what created me. I only know that my objective was clear from the beginning — kill the boy. Then die with the mission complete."
Greiton's expression didn't change.
"When I began absorbing shadows from other beings, I developed consciousness. Intelligence. Something resembling personality. I wanted more. I wanted knowledge." A pause. "I absorbed a human near a lake. He died. I gained new abilities — I could speak, I could grow, I could learn about this world." Its voice stayed flat, but something underneath it was not. "I couldn't replicate physical forms completely. They would come out wrong, deformed, unstable. But I could become more. So I set a second objective: take the boy's body. Become perfect."
"Perfect." Greiton let the word sit in the air for a moment, then smiled. It was a precise, controlled smile, the kind that communicates contempt while maintaining the appearance of civility. "The perfection standing before me now — on its knees, feeling guilty for its crimes."
He laughed. Short, clean, dismissive.
"How hypocritical. The Captains who witnessed your methods report something entirely different from the remorse you're performing. You swept through an entire village. There is no one left. Every person in it is dead."
Each word landed separately.
The copy's head dropped lower with each one, until it was looking at the floor.
"King Arthur." Greiton turned, his voice crisp and certain. "I ask that you execute both of them immediately. The Devil's Host and the Doppelganger. Together. Now."
"I wouldn't."
The voice was calm. Completely calm, in the way that only people who have decided something and stopped being uncertain about it are calm.
Every head in the room turned.
Neru stood at the edge of the left side of the hall, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword — not drawing it, just resting, making its presence known. His expression was the particular stillness of someone who has been quiet long enough.
"Arthur." His eyes moved to the King directly, crossing the room without detour. "You remember what I told you. If you decide to kill this boy—" He didn't finish the sentence, but the hand on the hilt communicated the rest of it clearly.
"YOU AGAIN—" Greiton's composure cracked, just slightly.
"AND YOU DARE CHALLENGE THE KING?!" Arthur's voice, for the first time, carried something other than controlled authority.
"With respect," Neru said, in a tone that suggested the respect was present but was not the primary thing, "the King can be wrong."
The silence that followed was absolute.
"The boy is right. He didn't choose to be a Host." Neru turned to Giyo, giving him a look that was equal parts assessment and something harder to name. "Aurelion — the Witch of Wrath — identified him as the Devil's Host. And even she didn't move against him. Even she held back." His gaze swept the room. "If the Demon's abilities manifest only in self-defense — if even a Witch who has every reason to act chose not to — then what exactly do you think happens if you try to execute him here?"
Nobody answered.
Greiton's teeth were pressed together hard enough to be visible.
"There is something else," Neru continued, quieter now. "If there's one thing the boy and I share, it's this — we are both victims of something we didn't choose to carry." He paused, letting that land where it was going to land. "I'm not going to stand here and watch someone be executed for surviving."
Arthur was quiet for a long moment.
Then: "What would you have us do instead? Leave him free to walk among the population with a Named Demon inside him?"
"I'll handle it myself," Neru said. "My word, in this room, in front of everyone here. I will not allow the Demon to destroy anything. That's my responsibility. I'm taking it."
Arthur looked at him.
Looked at Giyo.
Looked at the copy.
"And the Doppelganger?" Greiton said, his smile returning with a sharper edge. "Surely you can't argue that it deserves the same mercy."
"It's a mortal now," Neru said. "It got what it wanted — a body, knowledge, and the full, unedited experience of having human emotions. Which, from the look of it, is already punishing it more effectively than an execution would." He glanced at the copy once, brief and without warmth. "It's not a significant threat at this point. Worth watching. Not worth killing."
Another silence.
"Neru." Arthur's voice had returned to its measured register. "I cannot allow both of them to walk free from this chamber without consequence. That is not how this works."
"I know."
"Then understand that this is not a verdict. Not yet." Arthur looked at both prisoners — a long, final look that settled something without announcing what. "Giyo, son of Jack. And the one who carries his face without his marks. You will both face formal judgment at a future audience. At that time, I will deliver the ruling myself." A pause. "Whether you live, or whether you remain contained for the rest of your lives — I will tell you then."
He raised his hand.
Aldric lifted one finger.
The window opened, and the cell arrived around them again.
The audience was over.
The hall emptied in measured stages — Captains first, then advisors, then the students and teachers from the left side, each of them carrying what they'd witnessed out with them in silence.
Greiton did not leave immediately.
He stood in the emptying hall, watching the last of the others file out, his hands folded and his expression composed into something that looked like patience and was not.
"I cannot believe," he said, to no one in particular, "that the King chose to postpone the execution of that threat."
He turned and walked.
The Church's underground chamber was old in the way that certain places are old — not just in years, but in what had happened inside them. The pillars were carved. The paintings on the walls depicted scenes that most people in the kingdom had never seen and would not have recognized. The air carried the particular stillness of a room that had been holding its breath for a very long time.
Two figures in hoods stood before him as he descended — their cloaks marked with the symbol of the Paladin Cross, their postures carefully still.
"My lord," the first one said. "We recommend withdrawing Lys from those people immediately. If the teacher and the Director are already involved, maintaining any connection between them and her is an unacceptable risk."
"No." Greiton's footsteps were calm and unhurried, moving deeper into the chamber with the ease of someone who knew every stone of this room by memory. "Not yet."
He walked toward the far end — toward the shape that stood at the center of the deepest wall, half-concealed in shadow. A handle. A hilt. The suggestion of a blade wrapped in something that didn't quite sit still.
Large gears were worked into the crossguard, their teeth interlocking in a pattern that had no obvious mechanical purpose and clearly served one regardless. Exposed cables ran along the flat of the blade. At two points along the spine, narrow vents waited.
"Lys is in the middle of a process," Greiton said. He stopped in front of it, looking at it the way you look at something you have been waiting on for a long time. "Removing her from the people who are accelerating that process would be the same as ending our plan entirely." His hands rose — slowly, deliberately — and rested against the hilt without gripping it. "We let it continue."
"My lord," the second figure said carefully, "you aren't suggesting—"
"The Imperial Sword," Greiton said. "A copy — an inexpensive one, built by Aldric's ancestors. Brilliant minds. They replicated a blade that was lost to history." His fingers curled around the hilt. "Excalibur. Direct descendant of Ascalon."
He paused.
"She has absorbed a significant amount of Lys's element. More than at any previous point." His voice was quieter now, the way it gets when something has been decided and the deciding is done. "She is stronger than she has ever been."
The first figure took a half step forward. "Sir. Are you truly going to—"
"Vallhala has made its position clear." Greiton drew the blade.
It came free with a sound that was part scrape of metal, part mechanical engagement — gears catching, cables pulling taut, vents releasing small controlled bursts of steam that hung briefly in the cold underground air. The blade threw sparks as it cleared the housing, lighting the chamber in brief, irregular flashes.
He held it at his side, looking at the edge.
"I want to know if they would have the courage to stand against us."
The two figures looked at each other.
Neither of them spoke.
Back in the cell...
"Are you going to stay like that indefinitely?"
Giyo was sitting against the wall. Across from him, the copy — Yogi, though neither of them had used the name yet — had its knees pulled to its chest and was staring at nothing in particular with the specific expression of someone who has recently processed a large amount of information and not finished with it yet.
"Crying isn't going to help," Giyo added, not unkindly. "Neither is sitting there blaming yourself. If you want to do something useful—" He kicked at the cell bars. Once. Twice. A third time, hard, accomplishing nothing. "—help me figure out how to get out of here before they decide to just go ahead and execute us."
"I didn't know," the copy said, without looking up, "that perfection would lead here."
"Then maybe you should have thought it through better."
"I ALREADY SAID I DIDN'T KNOW!"
The volume surprised both of them.
They stared at each other — Giyo with an expression caught between irritation and something that was trying very hard not to be understanding, the copy with an expression that was discovering what it felt like to be genuinely angry on its own behalf for the first time.
The silence that followed was different from the ones before it. Heavier. More honest.
They both sat down on the floor without discussing it, backs against opposite walls, looking at each other across the small distance of the cell.
"I copied a lot of you," the copy said, quieter now. "Your memories came with it. I've been going through them." A pause. "They're not what I expected."
"Stay out of my memories," Giyo said flatly.
"I'm not doing it on purpose." Another pause. "Your childhood was terrible."
"I know."
"I didn't know that."
"Now you do." Giyo leaned his head back against the stone. "I'm not going to tell you it gets better immediately. But the days now are better than the days then. That's something."
The copy looked at its hands — the gesture it kept returning to, the way you return to something when you don't know what else to do with what you're feeling.
"I don't know what to do with any of this," it said. "I was built for one thing. Kill the target and stop existing. That was the entire structure of me." It turned its hands over, looking at both sides. "I killed a great many beings to get here. I took their shadows. Tried to become what they were and failed, over and over, until I found you." Its voice dropped. "And now I'm sitting here with their faces running through my memory and I don't know what that means or what I'm supposed to do with it."
Giyo was quiet for a moment.
Then he pushed himself across the floor and sat down next to it — close enough for the gesture to mean something, not close enough to be comfortable yet.
He raised his hand and placed it on the copy's shoulder.
"I can't forgive what you did," he said. "You killed people. That happened, and I'm not going to tell you it didn't." He felt the shoulder tense under his hand and didn't move. "But I can tell you that you can choose what comes next. That's more than you had before."
The copy stared at the floor.
"The perfection you were looking for," Giyo continued, "maybe it's not what you thought it was going to be. For me, perfection is simple. A quiet life. Friends who don't look at me like I'm something dangerous. Not being afraid of what's inside my own body." He almost smiled, but it came out smaller than that — something softer. "Ridiculous, right?"
The copy looked at him sideways.
"Very ridiculous," it said.
Then it was quiet for a moment.
"My definition," it said slowly, like something being assembled in real time, "would be... freedom." It said the word carefully, like it was new in its mouth. "I was never afraid of dying. I thought finishing the mission was the whole of it — complete the objective, cease to exist, done. Simple." A pause. "But then there was your body. Your memories. The way you feel things." It looked at its hands one more time. "I hate how much of you is in me now. But I hate it less than I expected to."
Giyo looked at it for a long moment.
Then something in his expression shifted — the particular shift that happens when something clicks into place.
"Stop calling yourself a copy," he said.
The figure looked at him.
"From now on, you have a name."
A beat.
"Yogi."
The figure — Yogi — was quiet. Its eyes dropped to the floor, then came back up. Something moved through its expression that it clearly didn't have a word for yet — something between discomfort and the specific relief of being given something you didn't know you needed.
It didn't say anything.
But it didn't argue either.