Dominic did not expect the other him to vanish.
He reached the final step, breath held, every muscle in his body tight for a fight, a trap, a curse, anything.
Instead, the kneeling figure looked up.
And broke apart.
Not into flesh. Not into dust. Into mana particles. Pale, gold-lit fragments that lifted from the ruined armor and the bleeding body like fireflies being pulled apart by wind. The heavy samurai-styled shell collapsed inward with no sound at all, and before Dominic could even step back, those particles rushed into him.
The chamber went silent.
Dominic froze.
Then the world split open inside his skull.
He staggered, one hand flying to his head, and nearly dropped to one knee on the altar steps. Janet shouted his name from below. Alex moved at once, psychic spear already rising, but Dominic lifted one shaking hand without looking back.
"Wait."
The word came out strangled. Because he was no longer seeing the burial chamber. He was seeing another life. Another Dominic's.
It came in broken glimpses, pieces of memory slamming into him with the force of impact. Light, sound, pain, fear, duty, grief. A whole existence torn up and poured into him in flashes too fast to hold and too sharp to ignore.
He saw another Earth. Not theirs.
A world where the sky looked the same but everything beneath it had drifted down another path long before any of them were born. Cities rose with designs that made modern skyscrapers feel crude. Towers bent to catch starlight. Highways of pale metal crossed over seas of crystal-lit buildings. The people of that world drew power not from oil, wind, or atom, but from the cosmos itself.
Astronomy-based technology. Energy gathered from the heavens. The weird devices on top of the ruined houses outside suddenly made sense. Those linked metal orbs and circling rings were not decoration. They were batteries, collectors, harvesters of cosmic force, the same way solar panels on their Earth drank sunlight.
He saw them shining on rooftops while another Dominic ran through streets lit by star-made lamps. He saw news screens in a language his mind did not know and yet somehow understood through memory. He saw uniforms, training halls, war briefings. That world had already been torn by conflict even before the dungeon came. Nations divided, cities scarred, the powerful became greedy and the small learnt bravery. Humanity proud, wounded, and very used to living close to war.
Then the dungeon appeared.
And unlike their Earth, it was not gentle.
No classes awakening with enough breathing room to adjust. No slow spread of chaos. No years of grim adaptation mixed with society trying to stay itself.
War began at once. A true one, world wide war against an enemy from beyond human comprehension, against the Pillars.
Dominic's borrowed memories sharpened until they became agony.
He saw the Phoenix rise in a wall of fire that swallowed a skyline.
He saw the White Tigress freeze an entire continent, ice spreading over nations so fast the sea itself became part of the grave.
He heard the Sky Emperor roar and felt the whole globe tremble beneath it.
Yet humanity persisted. Not easily. Not nobly. Desperately.
They fought because there was nothing else left, they learnt to cooperate with their old enemies because there was a bigger threat across the horizon. And among them... rose a hero. Unknown to Dominic by name. Never clearly seen, always in white armor. A figure that moved through battle like judgment, wrapped in so much power that people turned toward them the way drowning men turned toward shore. The slayer of Bai Hu. The one who stole a goddess' power. That was what they were called.
The title burned through Dominic's head with the force of myth.
He saw armies rally behind that hero. He saw monsters die in numbers too high to count. He saw hope.
And then the memory tore itself apart.
As if something had ripped the middle out of a film reel and only left him the ending. Now he was in this tomb.
The same chamber.
The same chamber, not as old as this one, still intact and untouched by the cruelty of time, being lit with a cold blue light from hidden systems in the walls.
The cryo-coffins were sealed then. There were rows of them. Inside each one lay a sleeping human wrapped in frost and silence. The other Dominic moved among them in that heavy armor, blood already on him, already carrying that strange tower shield with the carved mask face on it.
He was ushering the last survivors in. Children. Adults. The wounded. The terrified.
He spoke to them with a calm Dominic had never heard in his own voice. Not because he felt no fear, on the contrary, because there was no room left for fear when everyone else needed him steady.
The pods closed. The chamber sealed. And the other Dominic turned back alone. He planted himself before the altar. Before the stairs. Before the last road into the burial hall.
Enemies came, but not as one clear army. The memories blurred there, advancing enemies were smeared into waves of shadowy figures not because the other Dominic forgot, but because there had been too many attacks, too many repeated waves of hopeless retaliation, too many times he had stood and struck and watched darkness come again.
Still, one image cut through. He braced behind the great shield. Punched the back of it with his fist. And from the eye and mouth of the carved mask on its face, destruction burst forth in a beam so violent it turned the chamber white.
God's Roar Canon. The name came with the memory. It was his signature. That Dominic's signature. His last answer to a world ending around him.
Again. Again. Again. Each blast bought only minutes. Each victory became a rest too short it felt more torturous than relief. Each defense became another failure delayed.
And in the end, he was overwhelmed.
Dominic saw himself from that other life standing in this very chamber, shredded open, golden blood running from deep wounds while the enemy finally broke through. Not monsters with clear faces. Not soldiers he could hate cleanly. They were blackened shapes that refused to stay fixed in memory, as if even the dead man's mind had stopped bothering to distinguish one hopeless attacker from the next.
He fell to one knee right after the last enemy, shield still planted, body refusing to quit after life should already have left it. He knew he had merely a minute or two to catch some breath before the next wave of terror flooded the tomb.
Then the cryo-coffins opened. Dominic's heart clenched inside the memory. The survivors had awoken, but they were not the other Dominic's salvation. Their bodies twisted in the cold light of the tomb into shapes that made his stomach drop even before his own mind caught up.
Greenish-blue skin. Backward-turned knees. Red eyes devoid of all but the hunger for death.
The Soerai! The sleeping humans had become the Soerai.
Whether through time, corruption, dungeon influence, or some worse fate he could not yet understand, the survivors this man had bled to protect had woken without their minds. They had woken changed. Woken wrong.
The dying Dominic on the altar tried to warn them. Tried to tell them something important enough to drag out with his last breaths.
"Stop the gr..."
The memory twisted there, the sound cutting off as one of the newly born Soerai lunged. The plea was drowned in pain, in static, in the ruined body finally being torn past recovery by the very people he had died to save.
Then all of it ended.
Dominic came back to himself on the altar. Back in the dark chamber. Back with Team Nemean below. Back with cold air in his lungs and his own hands shaking.
Tears were already falling before he understood he was crying. Not from pain. Not exactly. Grief too big and too sudden to belong to one life alone had brought tears to his eyes.
Below him, Janet had gone pale. Alex stood frozen for one rare heartbeat, psychic spear lowered without her meaning to. Joanne's lightning had died out at her fingertip. Jake and Jack both stared up in silence. Emma looked stricken in a way none of them had seen before, as if the elegant mask she wore for most problems had simply failed to cover this one.
Dominic stood at the top of the altar, crying for a man who had been him and not him, for a whole other world that had fought and lost, for the survivors who had become monsters, and for the terrible understanding that had just opened inside his chest.
The Soerai had once been human.
And somewhere in the middle of the tears and the horror and the secondhand memories still burning through him, Dominic knew one more thing.
The world of the other Dominic was too alien, too different from their own to be called a time-loop.