Multitudes

Red navigates the darkened, labyrinthine corridors of Bill's underground engineering lab, following the psychic pings of Bill fleeing from Rowan. Knowing Bill cannot outrun the rogue psychic—or his alakazam—forever, Red carefully merges with him to coordinate a plan. He finds the scientist's mind trapped in a looping, fractal mental block and caged by fear projected by Rowan's fractured subminds, which are swarming like durant. Before Red can project his battle calm, Rowan notices the intrusion and aggressively merges with him directly.

As Rowan's chaotic thoughts press in, Red drops his partitions, revealing a sophisticated, multi-layered psychic defense. Over the past months, Red secretly trained in psychic combat with Sabrina, Elite Rei, Elite Agatha, Jason, and Elite Will. By mirroring their unique mental states, Red created nested, semi-autonomous partitions capable of independent action. A partition holding Sabrina's strategic mind navigates Rowan's defenses, while one holding Leaf's genuine compassion beams deep, destabilizing love at Rowan, momentarily halting his assault by striking at the human fear hidden within his fractured mind.

The sheer weight of Rowan's counterattack crashes back against Red, flooding his senses with horrifying hallucinations of burning skin and alien limbs. Red deploys Agatha and Jason's mental states to tilt his perspective "sideways," viewing the madness with detached curiosity rather than terror, like hitting a mimikyu's disguise. As his partitions coordinate, Red absorbs the memories pouring out of Rowan: Rowan had investigated the unown swarms alongside "The Lonely One," a tulpa he created after a telepathic encounter with "The Dreamer"—the immensely powerful psychic who sent the apocalyptic visions. But when they touched the "Hungry One," the mad god controlling the unown, they were infected.

Driven by a blend of Rowan's desperate desire to warn the world and the Hungry One's urge to spread its corruption, Rowan orchestrated the lab attacks. Red's mind flashes back to his own secret meetings with The Dreamer. The enigmatic psychic, who felt responsible for inadvertently driving Rowan to madness, taught Red the theoretical mechanics of tulpas, allowing him to construct his current multi-mind defense. As Rowan launches a terrifyingly alien counterattack that begins systematically collapsing Red's shields, the partition holding Elite Will's mindset takes charge. Will had taught Red that throwing raw grief at a heavily partitioned opponent is ineffective; a true "killshot" requires finding the foundational drive that a person's worldview depends on and switching it off.

Red's remaining partitions work in unison to dissect Rowan's fractured amalgamation of minds, targeting his loneliness, his fear, and his desperate belief that he alone can stop the threat. Red dampens these emotions, disabling Rowan's attacks, but Red is physically and psychically stretched to his absolute limit. Suffering agonizing headaches, he realizes he has disabled Rowan but cannot hold him indefinitely, nor safely arrest him. With his partitions fraying, Red relies on Will's advice and targets Rowan's deepest, unshakeable core: the simple will to survive. Recalling the visceral, agonizing desire for oblivion he once felt from a suicidal survivor in a Vermilion City storm, Red reconstructs the feeling and projects it into Rowan. The sheer exhaustion of maintaining hundreds of partitions breaks Rowan's final resistance, and he embraces the oblivion, letting his partitions fall and pulling them both into unconsciousness.

Red wakes later in the dim emergency light. Barely clinging to consciousness through intense physical pain, he manages to fumble for a dropped radio and reports to Looker that the threat is neutralized and Rowan needs medical help, before the darkness claims him again.