THE GENERAL'S DISGRACED HEIR

David landed hard upon the mindscape's barren surface, the impact driving the breath from his lungs despite the non-physical nature of this realm. He rose slowly to his knees, then his feet, surveying the desolate landscape that stretched in all directions.

This place—a manifestation of his innermost self—appeared as a battlefield after the slaughter had ended, all glory and purpose stripped away to reveal only the aftermath of violence.

Above him, the sky hung fractured like a shattered mirror, its pieces somehow maintaining their positions without falling. Through the cracks between fragments, colors unknown to the human eye occasionally flashed—glimpses of something beyond the architecture of normal reality. Each shard reflected a different time of day: dawn bleeding into midnight, noon fracturing against twilight, creating a patchwork heaven that defied coherence.

The ground beneath his feet was neither earth nor stone but something between—a surface that yielded slightly with each step yet maintained its form. And upon this strange ground lay bodies. Countless bodies.

David recognized them all.

Here sprawled the assassin from Kiev whose throat he'd opened with piano wire—the man's fingers still clutched at his neck, eyes bulging with the same shock they'd shown in his final moments. Nearby lay the cartel enforcer from São Paulo, chest cavity excavated by the shotgun blast David had delivered at point-blank range. The broker who'd betrayed him in Shanghai rested a few meters away, the precise entry wound at the base of his skull exactly as David remembered creating it.

Interspersed among these grim reminders of his Earthly profession lay creatures from his current world—a dire wolf whose spine he'd severed during his first trial in the dimensional tower, its massive jaws forever frozen in a silent snarl. Nearby lay the shredded remains of demonic eldritch parasites, their grotesque forms torn apart by his Shadow Revolver, tentacles and ichor frozen in mid-dissolution.

The corpse of Number 4, the intruder who had brought chaos to Lysora County, lay sprawled with a perfect hole where his heart had been, pierced by the same devastating technique. Not far from him rested Shuan, the elder's son corrupted by demonic influence, his body nearly bisected by the shadow manipulation threads David had wielded with surgical precision, the young man's face still locked in an expression of betrayal and release.

Each corpse bore the exact wounds David had inflicted—a meticulous catalog of his capacity for violence across two lifetimes. None were innocent; all had been enemies, threats, targets. Yet seeing them displayed together like this, a macabre exhibition of his lethal skills, stirred something uncomfortable within him.

Is this how I define myself? The thought arose unbidden. By the lives I've taken rather than those I've saved?

Before he could pursue this unsettling line of thinking, movement at the horizon caught his attention. The boundary where land met fractured sky began to waver, distorting like heat shimmer over desert sand. The very fabric of this reality seemed to tremble, instability radiating outward from a single point at the far edge of his vision.

David narrowed his eyes, focusing on the disturbance. At first, it appeared merely as a line of light—a razor-thin illumination separating earth from sky. Then it grew, expanding upward and outward with alarming speed.

A wave. A tsunami of divine energy gathering height and momentum with each passing second.

The distant wall of golden-white power rose impossibly high, scraping against the fractured sky, causing shards to fall and dissolve where they contacted the surging divinity. The wave's surface wasn't smooth like water but textured with patterns that continuously formed and reformed—sacred geometries, ancient symbols, equations that described the fundamental structure of existence itself.

Pure, undiluted divinity. The raw essence of creation, untamed and approaching with inexorable force.

David had experienced divine power before—had consumed a fragment of Aurumaris, the Gilded Core, gaining a minuscule portion of celestial strength from that brief contact. That experience had nearly overwhelmed him, the merest taste of divinity setting his every nerve alight with exquisite pain and pleasure.

What approached now made that previous encounter seem insignificant. Aurumaris had been a candle; this was the sun itself, bearing down upon him with all its terrible radiance.

Instinct took control. David turned and ran.

His feet pounded against the yielding surface, his body weaving between the corpses that littered his mindscape. Each stride carried him further from the approaching tsunami, yet he sensed its advance accelerating, the gap between them closing despite his desperate flight.

Run. Faster. Get away. The thoughts weren't coherent strategy but primal fear—the recognition that what pursued him was too vast, too powerful to confront directly.

"Why do you always run when faced with the impossible?"

The voice—his own voice, yet deeper, colder, laced with contempt—stopped David mid-stride. He skidded to a halt, turning to face the speaker.

Ten paces away stood his darker self—not a shadow or mirror image, but the embodiment of every ruthless decision, every calculated risk, every compromise he'd made in the name of survival. This version of David/Mark wore the same face but carried himself with predatory confidence, eyes reflecting neither fear nor compassion, only the cold assessment of a killer who had long since stopped questioning the necessity of violence.

"Always calculating odds," his darker self continued, gesturing dismissively toward the approaching wave.

"Always looking for the percentage play, the angle, the advantage. When do you simply stand and face what comes?"

"When it's not suicide," David shot back, anger rising to replace fear. "That's oblivion approaching, not an enemy I can fight."

His darker self laughed—a sound devoid of humor. "Everything can be fought. You've proven that repeatedly." He gestured at the field of corpses surrounding them. "Each of these represented 'impossible' odds at some point. Each became another trophy in your collection."

"Those were different," David insisted, even as he felt the divine tsunami drawing closer, its light now casting long shadows across the mindscape.

"Were they?" His darker self stepped closer, expression hardening.

"Or have you simply forgotten what you truly are beneath the calculations and contingencies? The boy whose mother was taken? The man who carved a kingdom of shadow in the criminal underworld? The outsider who conquered a dungeon no one else could survive?"

The words struck with precision, each one finding vulnerable points in David's psychological armor. Memories cascaded through his consciousness—hiding in the closet while they took his mother, executing his first contract with hands that wouldn't stop trembling, standing victoriously in the Chamber of Ascension as Leviathan's Abyss collapsed around him.

"You've faced impossible odds before," his darker self pressed, voice lowering to an intimate growl. "Why run now? Because this threat isn't physical? Because you can't shoot it or stab it or outsmart it?"

The tsunami had grown so close that David could feel its heat against his back, divine pressure building like the moment before lightning strikes. He had perhaps seconds before it overtook him.

"Or," his darker self continued, lips curling into a knowing sneer, "are you afraid of what happens if you lose? Afraid of failing those who now depend on you, like you failed before?"