By day, Kael Fael smiled.
He walked hand in hand with Leiya down sunlit avenues. He laughed — genuinely, sometimes — when she playfully tugged him toward the flower stalls or when she teased him about his new "civilian" clothes. He even let his hair grow a little, just long enough for the breeze to catch it when they strolled the upper gardens.
Leiya saw peace in him.
The tightness in his shoulders had eased. The flashes of violence behind his eyes were gone. He listened to her stories now. Stayed longer in conversations. Let himself breathe.
To her, Kael had finally found calm.
But when night fell — when Elandor grew quiet and its lanterns burned low — Kael vanished.
No one saw him leave.
Not Leiya. Not the guilds. Not even the Essence-warded scouts patrolling the city's outer rings.
Because Kael didn't just leave.
He disappeared into himself.
Beneath the cliffs east of the city, where the sea crashed against jagged rock and no Essence signature could escape the interference, Kael stood in a void he had carved into existence. A self-contained dimensional sphere — a training crucible composed of compressed elemental harmonics, stabilized by sheer force of will and mastery.
Inside it, the rules bent. Inside it, Kael could go beyond the limits of flesh.
And tonight… he would.
Kael extended one hand, and the air around him fractured. Not in sound — in presence. Reality distorted as if caught in a prism, splitting colors that had no names. His eyes narrowed. His breathing slowed.
He invoked it without words.
"God Essence: Multiplicity."
The world around him convulsed. A pulse surged outward — not a shockwave, but a release of identity.
Kael's soul, long forged through storm and fire and relentless fury, cracked open.
And from that fracture, they came.
First: a streak of lightning — then a blur of kinetic force — then a spiral of flame and a swirl of razor wind.
Four forms emerged, flickering into shape like born echoes of his will.
Not illusions.
Not projections.
Predators.
Each one stood tall, cloaked in Kael's battle stance, their bodies humming with elemental resonance. The Storm Echo crouched low, arcs of cyclonic wind dancing across its arms. The Flame Echo burned with an internal heat, every breath warping the air. The Lightning Echo flickered constantly, a strobe of lethal motion. The Kinetic Echo stood silent, unmoving, as if time dared not pass around it.
Kael stood in the center of them — breath steady, sweat already beginning to form at his brow.
"Let's begin."
The echoes didn't nod. They didn't acknowledge. They moved.
The Flame Echo attacked first, fists wreathed in cascading flares. Kael intercepted with a Kinetic parry, absorbing the impact and hurling the Echo into the oncoming Lightning clone. The two collided mid-air — then rebounded, adjusting their angle of attack like pack hunters.
Kael blurred sideways — Storm Vault Execution off a rock spire, launching himself backward — only for the Storm Echo to meet him with a mirrored Vault, intercepting him with a spinning heel strike that split the sphere's air pressure apart.
He slammed into the wall. Blood trickled from his lip.
"Good."
He darted forward, faster this time. Breakforce ignited in his palm — a crushing Kinetic impact intended to displace two of the clones at once. The Flame Echo met it head-on, erupting in a burst of concussive heat. The Lightning Echo ducked low and countered with a snapkick that blurred the air.
Kael dropped, rotated mid-fall, then used the Phantom Launch technique — vaulting off the Storm Echo's shoulder, redirecting himself in mid-air, then cleaving downward with a flaming knee strike onto the Kinetic Echo.
The impact cracked the floor.
"Faster," Kael growled.
He snapped his fingers — and four more Echoes emerged, less stable than the first, but still real. A second Flame. A second Lightning. A second Kinetic. A second Storm.
His mind burned now. Sweat soaked his back.
His pulse raced beyond what any medic would call survivable.
But he didn't stop.
Ten Kaels now battled across the sphere. He ducked, spun, struck, redirected. He let them adapt. He let them fail. He forced them to improvise. And in turn, he learned from them.
Each strike they landed taught him how to break his own form. Each dodge revealed a hole in his footwork. They weren't just copies.
They were his battle instincts, made flesh.
One Flame Echo launched a mid-tier fire storm barrage — he countered with a Kinetic wall, absorbed the impact, and instantly fed the pressure back into a Stormfire Spiral Barrage, striking from three angles. Two Echoes shattered. One reformed. The rest closed in.
An hour passed. Then two.
Eventually, Kael dropped to one knee. His eyes burned from overextension. Blood ran freely from both nostrils. His Essence pathways throbbed. His heartbeat was erratic.
But in that moment — surrounded by fading echoes of himself, the air buzzing with raw power — he smiled.
Because he wasn't training to be strong anymore.
He was preparing to become something inhuman.
He reabsorbed the last remaining Echo — inhaling not just its form, but its memory. Every movement. Every decision. Every instinct gained in combat flowed back into him.
Kael stood.
Alone again in the stillness of his sphere.
Then, with a thought, the dimension unraveled. The walls dissolved. The world returned.
The stars overhead still twinkled as if nothing had changed.
No one knew he had ever left.
No one knew the lengths he was going to.
And as he quietly slipped back into the city before dawn, his steps made no sound. His presence registered to no scout. His breath was perfectly even.
By sunrise, he was at Leiya's side again — smiling, laughing, brushing a windblown petal from her hair.
To the world, Kael Fael was at peace.
But beneath that calm, a storm of multiplicity stirred — and not even the gods knew what it would become.