The air smelled like choices left unmade.
Sera hadn't said a word since we left the forest. She walked behind me, her face hidden beneath the hood of her torn cloak, as if shadow were safer than light.
"It wasn't your fault," I finally said.
She didn't respond. But her shadow, which had returned to its usual pace, trembled slightly.
We stopped at a clearing. The red moon was half-hidden by pale clouds, as if the sky too feared revealing too much. The ground bore marks… footprints that weren't ours. Three sets, all leading to the center of the clearing. One had already vanished, another was fading, and the third seemed to… stop right where I was standing.
It wasn't just a message.
It was a warning.
"Ryouhei," Sera finally broke the silence, her voice hoarse, trembling. "What if we're already dead? What if this version of us… is just an echo that shouldn't exist?"
I turned to her, offering a half-smile that didn't reach my eyes.
"Then it'll be a loud echo."
I unsheathed my makeshift weapon: a spear with broken circuits and strands of corrupted magic. A technological aberration that had no place in the original story. Just like me.
"If this 'Man Without a Shadow' wants to erase us, let him know we chose to be errors," I said.
That's when the atmosphere changed.
As if our words had triggered a narrative trap.
The sky split. A beam of light descended—but it wasn't sunlight. It was a line of code materializing into the real world, rewriting trees, earth, even the air.
And from the center of the clearing, something emerged.
Not the Man Without a Shadow… but one of his footprints.
A figure, nearly human. Its body was filled with living strikethroughs: unfinished sentences, deleted decisions, discarded endings. Its face was mine—but with empty eyes and a… programmed smile.
> "Ryouhei, version 5.3. Deleted for emotional inconsistencies."
"You're not real," I spat, gripping the spear.
> "Neither are you."
The fight was brief. But not due to lack of violence—each strike seemed to alter something around us. The ground turned into another place on contact with our struggle. Sera invoked a rejection seal—a spell designed to deny narrative rewrites—but when she activated it, a line of blood fell from her nose.
"He's using our choices against us!" she shouted.
I didn't answer. I just looked at him.
And I remembered.
I remembered why I stopped using my ability. Seeing the future was painful. Addictive. Limiting. But now… now I had to choose.
I activated the Eclipse of Three Moons.
And I saw what had to be done.
---
Defeating my alternate version wasn't the hard part.
The hard part was seeing how many times I had failed in other timelines. How many times I had lost Sera. How many times I had given up. The Man Without a Shadow wasn't just an external threat.
He was the accumulation of every time I chose not to exist.
And this time, I chose to keep going.
---
When the figure dissolved into floating lines of text, Sera collapsed to her knees, exhausted.
"Did we win?"
"No," I said, crouching beside her. "But we're in the version that's still fighting."
She smiled faintly. And this time, her shadow didn't tremble.