Chapter Eleven: Chains Made of Smoke

"The body can heal from anything.But when the soul breaks... it doesn't scar.It forgets it was ever whole."

Three days passed.

Blaze didn't dream.

Not because he stopped sleeping.

Because he stopped being.

I don't mean that literally.

His heart still beat. His limbs still worked. He trained. Ate. Spoke when spoken to.

But it was like watching a reflection walk around without a person behind it.

Something was missing. Something big.

And every time I looked at him, I felt like I was watching a machine that had just discovered it wasn't human anymore.

I sat across from him in the gym one afternoon. Light slicing through the windows, dust swirling in it like ghosts trying to find a place to rest.

He stared down at his hands like they didn't belong to him.

"Do you feel anything?" I asked.

"What kind of anything?" he said.

"Anger. Fear. Guilt. Pain."

He shrugged.

"Not really. It's like... I remember how I should feel. But it doesn't reach me anymore."

"You sound proud of that."

He looked at me, and for a second—just a second—I saw fear flicker across his face.

"I'm not," he said. "I just don't know how to get it back."

That night I called Dutch.

Told him everything.

How Blaze was drifting. How his eyes didn't track people in conversation. How he answered questions like someone repeating lines they learned in a play they didn't understand.

"You said I adapted," I told him. "But I didn't lose my humanity. Blaze is losing it."

"Then he's becoming what the loop wants," Dutch said flatly. "A vessel."

"A vessel for what?"

A long pause.

"Whatever comes after the last death."

Saturday. Another fight.

Smaller venue. Underground this time. Just cement walls and bad lighting and the stink of old sweat and spilled beer.

Blaze didn't flinch at the crowd. He didn't even notice it.

What scared me wasn't his coldness.

It was his calm.

He wasn't bracing for anything anymore.

It was like he already knew how it would end.

Fifteen minutes before the fight, he turned to me.

"He's going to die."

"Who?"

"The guy I'm fighting."

"No, Blaze. No one dies in this—"

"He dies," Blaze said again, flat and certain. "I saw it."

I tried to pull him from the fight.

Argued with the promoter. Even said he was injured.

Blaze just walked past us both and stepped into the cage.

I don't even remember the fight.

I only remember the scream.

The crowd scattered. Medics rushed in.

His opponent — Rico Sandoval — wasn't moving.

Blood pooled under his head.

His neck was twisted at an angle that made people vomit.

Blaze?

He stood over him.

Expressionless.

Hands lowered.

Waiting for the ref to raise his arm.

They called it an accident.

Said Rico slipped during the clinch and hit the cage wall wrong.

But Blaze didn't flinch. Didn't react. Didn't even watch the replays the next day when it aired online.

He just stared at the floor.

Like he saw something we didn't.

That night, Blaze came to my place. Stood in the doorway with his hoodie drenched from rain.

"He wasn't supposed to die like that," he whispered.

I sat him down.

"You knew it was going to happen."

"No," he said. "I remembered it."

"From where?"

He looked up at me with those hollow eyes.

"From the future."

That was when I realized—

Blaze wasn't just stuck in the loop.

He was seeing past it.

Remembering deaths that hadn't happened yet.

Learning from moments the rest of us hadn't even lived.

"The Witness showed me," he whispered. "He doesn't just watch anymore."

"What does he do?"

"He teaches."

"Teaches what?"

Blaze looked down at his hands again.

Then flexed them like he didn't trust them.

"How to kill without regret."

I drove to Dutch's house that night.

Pounded on the door until he opened it with a tired sigh and a loaded pistol behind his back.

"We need to stop it."

"It's too late."

"We can't let him become this."

Dutch looked at me like a man who had buried too many bodies to bother lying anymore.

"You ever think the Witness isn't making Blaze worse?"

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying maybe it's not corruption."

"Then what the hell is it?"

Dutch stepped aside.

Let me into the room.

On the wall behind his desk were photos.

Victims. Fighters. Accidents that weren't accidents.

One face showed up in every case.

Not Blaze.

Not Damien.

The Witness.

"He only appears to those who survive death repeatedly," Dutch said.

"So he's selecting them?"

"No. He's recruiting."

"For what?"

Dutch looked back at the photos.

"That's what scares me. I think the loop was never about survival. It was about finding killers who could live with what they've done."

The next morning, Blaze was gone.

He left a note on my counter. Just one sentence, in all caps:

"I NEED TO KNOW IF I'M THE ONLY ONE."

I tried calling him. No answer. Tracked his phone — it pinged near a gym two towns over, then nothing. Disconnected.

Hours passed. Then night. Still nothing.

I called Dutch.

"He's looking for another like him," Dutch said.

"Another loop survivor?"

"Or another killer who remembers."

"You said the Witness recruits. But for what?"

Dutch hesitated.

"You ever hear of the Ash Trials?"

"Urban legend. Fighters pushed beyond human limits. No sleep. No food. Loop-induced psychosis."

"It's not a legend," Dutch whispered. "It was a program. Decades old. Underground. Sponsored by warlords, cartel heads, private military contractors."

"You're saying Blaze is part of a breeding ground?"

"No. I'm saying the loop is a filter. And Blaze is passing."

Blaze came back two days later.

Bruised. Silent. Carrying a file folder soaked in old blood.

He dropped it on my table.

Photos slid out.

Grainy stills from security cams.

All of them showed fighters. And all of them had something wrong with their shadows — stretched, twisted, like they belonged to someone else.

In the last photo, one fighter was looking directly at the camera. Eyes white. Smiling.

"Who is he?" I asked.

"His name's Kane," Blaze said quietly. "He was in the dream. And I think he's next."

I flipped the photos back into the folder, but one slipped free — it showed Kane holding a medal.

Gold-plated. Old. Etched with a symbol that looked like an eye wrapped in barbed wire.

"He said something to me," Blaze whispered.

"In the dream?"

Blaze nodded.

"He said, 'You don't beat the loop. You just become its prophet.'"

And for the first time since this all began… Blaze looked afraid again.