Time slows to a dull thud, matching the beating of your heart, the only sound besides your breathing in this empty space.

Your body jerks sporadically, and you know the red and the gray are trying to force you up, and force you to fight, but you're mentally moving beyond their influence.

They'd tried to use your anger against you, to force you to fight.

And it had worked...for a while. But they'd pushed you just a little too far. They didn't know you well enough to understand what happened when you got pushed too far.

You got very, very determined.

No matter what you've been through, you don't want to hurt anyone else.

Several minutes pass, and you feel yourself dying. Fighting like this has reopened your wounds, and now your life force is leaking away. Resignedly, you try to delay the inevitable by going into stasis.

You can only manage it partway, though, and the golden shield fights against the influence of what is controlling you. The mix of gold, gray and red surrounding you doesn't look pretty. But it's the best you can do, for now.

After a time, Sans reappears.

This time you see him, not...the person you'd been shouting about. The haze has had time to lift.

He looks you over carefully.

"ya still in a fighting mood?' he asks you.

The anomaly fights desperately to push you back into its vision of your memories, to reclaim you, but the pain medicine has really started to wear off now. Remembering what caused your injuries keeps bringing you back to the present.

* Aren't you angry about what he did to you?

"No." you mutter inside your head since you don't have control over your voice yet. "He saw you in me. You're making me fight. I don't want to."

Sans sees your inner conflict, and decides to give you a little push.

"hey, what did the hungry psychopath say to the skeleton?" he quips.

The anomaly forces you to growl menacingly, which just makes things funnier to the real you.

"do you want a pizza me?"

That makes you smile, and you're shocked to realize you're able to do it for real now.

Suddenly things don't seem so bad. The anomaly's remaining silver threads over your heart weaken as you laugh out loud. You realize you can just barely manage to push its influence aside to control your body and abilities.

You're not sure if you can speak coherently and surrender, so you speak with actions instead. You let down your shields, and put all your focus into not moving. You tremble with the effort of remaining still like a rock against the crushing waves of their mental pressure. "Sans," you whisper faintly.

Sans takes the hint and brings down a wave of karma on you. Chara's soul and the tendrils of the gray anomaly are badly damaged, and they loosen their hold on your soul. You feel them scream from the pain of touching his karma, but they don't want to let go of you.

For you, though, his karma doesn't hurt. It's kind of like taking a bitter medicine of herbs. It brings back lots of memories where you wish you would have done things differently, and been kinder and stronger, but it feels like a healthy kind of regret.

You take the opportunity to create a shield from deep inside the inner core of your being and enlarge it gradually, slowly driving the anomaly and Chara back from your soul.

Sans concentrates, his left eye glowing, and uses his gravity and karma attacks to push them away, trying to help you as best he can.

Chara jerks her soul away as the karma hits her soul again, fleeing away from further attacks, splitting off from the gray tendrils she'd been entwined in.

It tears at your spirit badly, but together with Sans, you force them both away, driving them back into the darkness.

Then you lock yourself away from their influence by solidifying and closing your shield behind them, taking relief in the absence of the thorny anger and the indifferent cruelty they'd been infecting you with.

Now beyond your strength, you transform your shield once more into its golden stasis form, barely conscious within. It feels like a droplet of cold fear runs down your back as you feel the anomaly's wispy tendrils knocking against your shield, trying to work its way back inside.

You lie on your back on the ground, shuddering as you watch its attempts to break inside. But you know the kind of soul attack it uses now, and you build up your shield's defenses against its attempts to break in and control you again.

You feel it give up and move away. You worry about its next move, and Sans, still out there and without a shield like yours, but there's nothing more you can do.