The horror of her words caused me to pause. Already gone?

My gaze locked on Kesstel, watching as he rushed to close the distance between us. How could she even say that when I could see his body moving? See the blood veins lifting on his neck as he moved to attack me again. There was blood pumping through his body, a zombie wouldn’t have physical reactions like this.

It wasn’t just my eyes that rejected the possibility; everything in my heart and mind screamed in denial. Kesstel wasn’t so weak that he’d die just like that, his soul slipping off into oblivion without a fight. The parasite said that Kesstel could feel all the pain I inflicted on him. It might have been lying just to dig at me, but I was going to take it as truth.

He’s not dead, I told Goddess with conviction. I refuse to believe that he is. As long as I take that other energy crystal out, he’ll wake up.

Maybe. Maybe not. It might kill him, Goddess said. Not to mention, the crystals are so close together. I don’t know how you can destroy one without damaging the other.

I can do it, I thought, resolutely. There wasn’t an option not to. He was too strong for me to get around. As long as Kesstel was standing, the parasite would force me away from the heart. Maybe my voice could get through to Kesstel, but I wasn’t banking on that. If I wanted to have any hope of destroying the parasite, that second energy crystal needed to be removed.

Kesstel attacked me again.

I turned and met him head on. Both blades flashed bright, his blue and mine white, when they collided. I could feel the parasite’s magic, stabbing and burning, as it tried to overpower the misty magic in the kindjal. It felt disgusting, like a million tiny bugs trying to burrow into the crystal blade and poison the pure mist inside. Instantly, it wasn’t just a contest of physical strength. Each power struggled to overthrow the other. Goddess’s power against the parasitic planet’s.

Vile creature! Goddess roared in my mind.

A sharp spike of magic pulsed from the kindjal, sparking a massive magic lash as the two powers collided. Kesstel and I were thrown in opposite directions. I gasped as the residual magic washed over me, making my whole body sting. Still, I twisted in the air to avoid the sharp crystals trying to stab me. My toe tapped on the side of a crystal and I shot back after Kesstel. Now that I decided to win this fight, there was no more time to hesitate.

“Resisting is useless!” He roared and swung horizontally at me, trying to cut me in half.

I ducked and dipped right under his attack. My back sizzled from the blue magic still emitting from his blade, but I swung out, aiming for his left side. The tip of my sword caught his side, puncturing his breastplate and slicing out to the side. Unfortunately, he’d shifted fast enough that I was off mark. The bleeding cut was four inches too low and to the side.

It was barely more than a scratch to him, but knowing that I was the one who did it, my heart instantly bled. If Kesstel’s cuts were like the Red Orc’s, the power of the kindjal not only burned on touch, it repressed his healing ability. I needed to take him down, so it worked in my favor. But it was going to be very painful for him.

The hard angle on Kesstel’s elbow smashed into my back as I shot past, just to the left of my spine. Pain exploded in my body as a rib popped. The force of his move threw my balance off and I lurched towards the crystals below. At the last second, I Warped out of the way of the sharp points and appeared ten feet over his head.

Kesstel pressed his hand to his side then looked at the blood on his fingers as if it was interesting. “I didn’t think you’d attack him. Humans, more than other intelligent beings that I’ve devoured, have an idiotic habit of getting attached to things.” He looked at me with his glowing eyes as he rubbed his wet fingers together. “Or have you become so drunk on power that you’ll even attack your own?”

I gripped my swords and got ready to attack. “If you won’t get out of him by choice, I’ll beat you out of him.”

He sneered. “It actually wasn’t hard to take over this being’s mind,” he gloated as if talking about a funny secret. It was so bizarre to see. No matter how his mouth moved in humor, the upper half of Kesstel’s face stayed emotionally blank. “All he needed was a little push, to realize his deepest desires, and he tumbled off balance enough for me to step in. Would you like to hear his true thoughts? You might find them … enlightening.”

My eyes widened. What did that mean? A bad premonition twisted in my gut. I gripped my swords, ready to attack.

The blue light in Kesstel’s eyes reduced back to his irises. For the first time, I could see a clear emotion on his face. Determination. He was finally a Kesstel that I recognized, the same face I’d seen hundreds of times. He tipped back his head, eyes focused on me and his mouth pressed in a tight line.

My muscles instinctively froze, pausing the attack.

That slight pause was enough for Kesstel to reach out and grab a long shard of an energy crystal growing by him. With a jerk of his wrist, the shard broke off, creating a foot long weapon. In a flash he was at me, wielding his bastard sword in one hand and the energy crystal in the other.

The parasite’s attacks were heavy, each blow like a mountain determined to smother me, and full of magic. But this two-handed assault from Kesstel was completely different. He used very little magic, instead relying on speed and muscle strength. The sudden change of pace was hard to adapt to, but I did my best. After all, I was finally fighting a style I knew. I’d never fought him before, but I’d seen enough of his moves to keep out of the worst of his attacks.

Every single one of his slices, stabs, and cuts were acts with desperate fury. As if his very life depended on it. But the heaviest emotion of all was the deep sadness that laced every move. He desperately wanted to attack me, but it pained him so much that his eyes were wet. Still, he didn’t stop.

The longer we fought, the more his wild emotions bled into me. My heart hurt so badly that my eyes burned.

“Stop, Kesstel!” I yelled, one hand blocking his sword, the other deflecting the energy crystal he was determined to stab into me.

It was becoming more and more clear that he wasn’t actually trying to kill me. He was trying to stab me with the energy crystal. I was fast enough to block all those attacks, because I was most concerned about them. As a result, I was taking on injuries from his sword. As much as each cut burned as the blue magic tried to poison me, it was the best choice I could pick, given the energy crystals around me and in Kesstel’s hand.

Kesstel was taking on just as many injuries. My floating kindjals were hard pressed, keeping the ever growing crystals away from me, while my hands worked just as hard. Most of my attacks were aimed at his left side, but now I’d come to understand that I needed to wear his HP down to accomplish anything.

Kesstel shook his head, finally responding to my words. “No. I have to.”

A small seed of hope bloomed in me. He finally responded to me. Goddess was wrong, he wasn’t dead yet. And if he was responding to me, that meant the parasite’s control was weak enough for him to break out of it, right? “Kesstel, please stop. Don’t let the parasite control you.”

He shook his head, his expression twisted as if confused. “No. No. I have to.” He focused on me. “Don’t resist me!” he roared and lunged at me.

His vicious swipe caught my kindjal just above the guard and completely knocked it painfully out of my hand. He kept moving forward, using his whole weight to tackle me in a desperate act.

Shocked, I was thrown off balance and fell back against the wall of crystals growing behind me. Quickly, I created a cocoon of solid mist around me. The back of it hit the crystals, stopping my fall. The energy crystals behind stabbed at the barrier, trying to puncture through, but I hardened the shell as hard as I could.

In front of me, Kesstel’s sword disappeared into his Items Bag and he used both bands to grip the long crystal shard and stab it into the barrier, aiming at my stomach. The tip of the crystal hit my shield and stopped, Kesstel’s hands shaking with the force he was using to keep pressing.

My eyes widened as I threw every ounce of power I had into the barrier. The floating kindjals winked out of existence as I used the energy for them to fortify the mist. Kesstel was a higher level than I was, so my barrier wasn’t going to hold up against him for long. With energy crystals in front and behind, I couldn’t let it fall.

“Kesstel! Stop!” I yelled. “You’re going to kill me!” My whole body was shaking, both from the hundreds of injuries that heavily depleted my HP and the effort it took to hold up the barrier against the two forces.

He shook head again. Sweat was dripping down his tortured face. “No, I’m not. I just have to … I just have to…” He groaned in pain but didn’t stop pressing the crystal at me.

A thick stream of blood leaked from his left side, all from injuries that I put there. Twice I’d managed to catch him in the right spot, but both times, I didn’t stab deep enough to reach the second crystal. I was so scared of hitting the original crystal, I pulled out before the blade was two inches deep each time. I felt like I was unintentionally torturing him — and it was torturing me.

“Listen to me, Kesstel,” I tried to reason. “I’m Jyn. You have to stop.” Maybe if I touched him, I could help clear his head. Only I didn’t dare lift the barrier. The question was, if I took my attention off the barrier long enough to Merge with the mist, would it be fast enough to escape before Kesstel broke in.

“No. We have to be the same!” Kesstel insisted. His hands shook, the edges of the energy shard in his hands cutting through his gloves, as he pressed the crystal against my barrier. The tip of the crystal slowly edged a half an inch into the barrier.

My heart jumped at the sight and his words. “What do you mean, the same?”

He made a frustrated sound. “We’re different. As long as you don’t have an energy crystal, we could be separated.” He looked into my eyes. Tears pooled in his eyes and his eyebrows were tipped up in desperation. “I’ve lost all my other loved ones. I can’t lose you too.”

*****