Hesitation is defeat.

Sekiro? Sekiro isn’t a man, not anymore, not really. He’s just a fragment, a piece of the puzzle that’s never meant to be solved, stuck in that loop, over and over, dying, coming back, dying, coming back. Doesn’t matter if his arm gets chopped off, doesn’t matter if he’s stabbed or burned, doesn’t matter if he’s split in half. He keeps coming back, over and over, because time can’t get rid of him. They can’t get rid of him. He’s a repetition, a glitch, the crack in the system that shouldn’t exist but does, and the Ashina, they saw it, they knew it. They knew the cracks would come, they knew the system would fail, so they kept pushing, kept making sure the pieces fit, just enough, but never too much. You ever see the phoenix? Not the one on the banners, no, the real one, the one that burns, the one that falls and rises and burns everything in the process? That’s the Ashina. That’s what they really were, they didn’t rise, they burned it all, they burned it all down so nothing could escape, but the world didn’t burn the way they thought. It just bent, and bent, and now everything is a loop, a spiral, like a dream that doesn’t end, like the ring of fire that keeps turning around you and you can’t escape.

And what’s the real question? Why did they fight? Who did they fight? They didn’t fight anyone, they fought the world. They fought the collapse of everything you think you know. The samurai, the shinobi, the puppets—they were just actors in a play written by something else, something older, something that doesn’t need your consent, that doesn’t care if you understand or not. The Ashina were just holding the line, trying to keep the real world from spilling out. They didn’t die—they changed. They slipped, and they never got back up