"Finally," said a voice. It wasn't one I recognised, but I could hear the impatience within it. The single word was spoken so coldly it may as well have been ice.

  "Huh?" I answered. Not the most eloquent response, but I didn't really have much to work with. Hadn't I just gone to sleep? Inside a dungeon, even. There shouldn't have been anyone else there!

  "Oh, I'm sorry," dryly droned the voice in a way that didn't sound sorry at all. "Do you need a few minutes to get your bearings?"

  The words were reasonable enough, but the impatient tone remained the same. I could practically hear the speaker's eyes rolling.

  Despite not really wanting to engage with such a rude speaker, I nevertheless did as suggested and spent some time trying to get my bearings.

  I wasn't within the dungeon. In fact, I had no idea where I was. There was nothing but darkness above, without sun, moon, or stars. I was lying on a cold surface, but it seemed to have no texture. Certainly not the dirt of the dungeon. 'Surface' was honestly the best description I could come up with. It also seemed to cut off only a few metres in each direction, a minuscule island in a great black void. The closest thing I'd seen was the [Black Arena] Skill of the black knight, but even that had a little architecture to spruce the place up.

  The speaker stood next to my prone body, glaring down at me with condescension. But his expression wasn't what I was struck by.

  "The hell?!" I exclaimed as I clumsily clambered to my feet. "You are..."

  "You?" spat my double. It wasn't as if I'd spent much time staring into mirrors, but I'd run across enough of them to recognise my own face. The speaker was me.

  Or perhaps, from his tone of voice... Maybe I hadn't escaped any repercussions from hitting the two-hundred-and-fifty Memory milestone after all. It appeared my flippant thoughts from a few days earlier about talking to myself were not as far fetched as I'd expected.

  "Yes. I am you. The real you, and not some crippled piece of garbage," sneered my copy, confirming my guess. "I suppose I should thank you for repairing my soul to the point I was able to awaken properly, but now you've served your purpose. Go away."

  "No."

  My copy raised an eyebrow. "You seem to think you have some sort of choice in this matter. You are sorely mistaken. You are nothing but a false personality, arisen accidentally following a brief bout of amnesia. You are nothing but a mental illness, and now I reject you."

  "Fuck you," I replied, which again lacked eloquence, but I felt it needed to be said. "You think my parents are fake? My relationships? My life?"

  "What relationships?" shrugged my evil twin. "You use people and discard them once their usefulness is expended, as is correct and proper. How often do you think about your 'parents'? An occasional urge to go visit, but have you ever really missed them? And your life? Do you not have any idea how pathetic you've been, dancing in the palms of others from the day you were born? You harp on about freedom, yet have done nothing to seize it, and even now you willingly follow the whims of the false gods."

  "False?" I asked. "No, wait. That's not the important thing here."

  Past-me snorted. "Actually, it's very important. You have no idea what they are, just like you have no idea what awaits you at the tower, or for what reason it was built. Nor do you know what the traitors and the thieves did to me. Did to us. But don't worry; I had my revenge long ago, and now that I'm back, I'll soon reclaim everything that was stolen."

  I resisted the urge to snap back. It was true enough that I knew nothing about the tower, but right now, that took a back seat to simple survival.

  This whole situation made no sense. We weren't two people battling for control of a single body. We were literally the same person. He couldn't 'reject' me any more than I could reject him. The closest he could get would be to destroy the memories I'd built up over the past sixteen years, just like the way I'd deliberately tried not to remember being him. So how were we talking like this? He seemed to remember everything, while I didn't. How were there two distinct individuals with different sets of memories?

  For that matter, if he wanted rid of me, couldn't he kill me here and now? Yet he'd waited for me to wake. Waited impatiently. He didn't strike me as the sort of person who would hang around waiting for others, which meant that despite his threats, he had no say in the matter. Whatever he was, or wherever we were, there seemed to be limits to what he could do.

  "You... are lying..." I said carefully. "You aren't me. I am."

  "Do you have any idea how stupid you sound?"

  "Yes, but don't blame me if this situation hasn't arisen often enough for language to have good words for it."

  "I don't think language is your problem."

  "Why are you so... I don't even know. Bitter? An arse?"

  "Oh? Take your pick. Subordinates I trusted betrayed me and stole my greatest experiment. My most prized pupil almost killed me—did kill me, by any reasonable measure—and now there's a na?ve imbecile running around believing himself to be me."

  "No. I mean, they're all valid reasons, but from the scraps of you I've seen so far, I've had the impression you were an arse from the beginning."

  Surprisingly, the other me's sneer vanished, replaced by a distant look of melancholy. Not that it lasted long before the look of disgust resumed its place. "No, not from the beginning," he spat. "There was a time when I was every bit as na?ve as you are now. But the world cured me of that soon enough. The weak are exploited by the strong. Always have been, and always will be. Either you exploit, or else you are exploited. Do you truly believe you are strong enough to protect your parents, your friends, your acquaintances? You've barely clung to life yourself."

  "Perhaps not, but all that means is that I need to get stronger. I am 'Robin', and 'Robin' I will remain."

  My evil twin glared at me, then shrugged in obvious amusement. "No. You won't. You are me. Me as I was at your age. Young, na?ve, and ripe for the harvest. The harvest will come. Even if you never regain our memories, events will repeat. People will come, envious of your power, and those you hold dear will suffer because of it. You will watch family and friends die, and then, memories or not, your mindset will return to what it was before."

  "On one point, at least, we agree: power is important. How many levels have I gained in the past few days? By the time I return, how much will I have grown? Who will be able to touch me?"

  "That's the entire damn point!" screamed the other me, suddenly rather angry. "If people think you're untouchable, they'll seek other means of controlling you. Softer targets. Well, it doesn't matter. It's not as if they're our real parents. Spending their lives to teach you an important life lesson will be an acceptable trade."

  "Just go away already, won't you? We're obviously not going to agree, and equally obviously, you have no power over me here. If you did, you wouldn't be wasting time talking."

  "You are amusingly correct," replied my evil twin, but the sneer never dropped, which wasn't a good sign. Why would my refusal to die amuse him? "Such a shame that you have no idea where 'here' actually is. Or, perhaps more importantly, where it is not, despite how bloody obvious it is. Oh well. It's no matter. You'll find out soon enough. Besides, even if you make it to the tower, you won't be able to accomplish anything without my knowledge. Just make sure you don't screw things up and die before you arrive."

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  I didn't respond, mostly because I suspected he was right. I had no idea how to even interact with the device, let alone what I'd need to do to prevent the planetary collision. I was hoping I'd be able to work it out once I saw it, but if he thought otherwise, then there was a good chance I wouldn't find things so convenient.

  With his final prophetic promise made, the other me faded, and with him the dark island. Belatedly, it occurred to me to question how I could see. There hadn't been any light sources in the space.

  Nor had there been mana. Something else that hadn't occurred to me at the time, but was obvious once the real world came back into view, almost blinding me with the glare of the jungle.

  Wait... The jungle? But hadn't I been sleeping in the dungeon?

  I blinked a few times as my brain finally registered what I was looking it: the pack of braccus raptors.

  Every one of them was dead.

  But as for how they had died... A couple were frozen into blocks of ice. A few more had no flesh remaining, reduced to clean skeletons. One appeared to have deflated, as if something had sucked out all the meat and bone and left just the unblemished skin. One was pinned to a tree by needles of rock. Some were just simply dead, with no obvious wounds. A couple were neatly decapitated in a way that could have been [Wind Scythe], but there were none with electrical burns. Likewise, my daggers were still sheathed at my side, with no signs of having been used.

  Had past-me done this? Had he been in control of my body while I'd been sleeping? But how? I didn't have the Skills to do this! I didn't even know what Skill could skin a monster so neatly!

  Just barely resisting the urge to panic, it occurred to me that there was a simple way to confirm if 'I' was responsible for this destruction.

  Oh. Well, then. That was... not good.

  So, past-me had not only been piloting my body, earning me an extra level in the process, but he'd dumped a hundred stat points into Memory. On top of that, there was a new Mark, the details of which I almost didn't want to read.

  I failed to resist a small shudder. If that was accurate... Would he come out every time I slept? That was a nightmare! Perhaps, from his point of view, he had the same problem: whenever he slept, I woke up. But here, on our own, wasn't he in a better position by far? This time, he'd just murdered some monsters and spent some stat points, but given that he could apparently use magic without Skills, presumably it wouldn't be too hard to restrain me in a way I couldn't escape from until he took back over?

  And if he could spend stat points, presumably he could do anything with the System that I could. He hadn't felt the need to spend skill points, or even all my stat points, but he obviously didn't need to. I had no idea how he did what he did!

  Perhaps I'd been rather badly mistaken. I'd thought the threat I'd face here in the Jungle of Braccus was the wide array of high-ranked native monsters. I'd felt so confident spouting my lines to Sir Quix about gradually raising my Memory and recovering my previous life experiences without losing my current personality, but I hadn't accounted for System interference, apparently giving consciousness to my lost memories.

  The biggest monster in this jungle had been me all along.

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