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“Dickson, if you’re so determined to stop us, then we will kill you.” Shulk’s words are a warning, and they are a plea. A plea that, despite the determination steeling Shulk’s voice, he hopes his foster father will respond to. He had always been uncannily accurate at reading Shulk’s emotions, after all, and it is a fact that Shulk is relying on now.
But no.
His pleas go unheeded.
Dickson draws his sword; Shulk unsheathes the replica Monado. Its weight, unbalanced and unfamiliar in his hands, throws him off, and with a shock he realises how reliant he’d become on the real Monado. The way that it had fit perfectly into the groove of his clenched fists, and responded to his intentions as though it were another limb. To be without it now unsettles him. It shakes his confidence.
Erase all doubt from your face.
Wield your sword at the ready.
Swing from the shoulder.
Focus on your opponent, not their weapon — read their next moves.
They were all things that Dickson had taught him, back when he had first taught Shulk how to fight. It sickens Shulk to have to weaponise those same skills against the man who had taught them to him. When Dickson rushes at them, Shulk pretends to be ready.
Despite the relative unfamiliarity of the replica Monado, Shulk fights without thinking. Reading Dickson’s movements, dashing out from beneath anticipated blows, the air displaced by the arc of his sword whipping Shulk’s hair from his face and brushing his skin.
He has no choice; Dickson is fast. Too fast. Shulk can barely keep up. No time for second-guessing himself. No time for doubt. Here, hesitation equals grievous injury — or death.
Inexplicably, Shulk is reminded of the sparring matches they’d had in the past, when Shulk was younger and only just learning how to swing a sword. It’s obvious now just how much Dickson had been holding back. His strength and speed is terrifying. Visions assault Shulk: lethal blows caving skulls and shattering bones and staining the terrace crimson. The relentless, dizzying onslaught leaves Shulk barely enough time to react to block the blows that never stop coming, let alone to warn the others. His head spins as the visions blur with reality, leaving Shulk unable to discern what is happening from what has yet to happen. Where are his friends? Alive, or dead? There — a flash of fiery hair; there — the glint of sunlight off of a sword; there — dark blood spattered across the cobblestones. There is no time to catch more than a glimpse of the chaos, because Shulk has no time to focus on anything other than parrying the deadly blows that Dickson rains down on them.
He’s in his Giant form, and Shulk is glad for it. It’s easier, he thinks, to fight Dickson this way; easier to separate their current adversary from the man who had raised him. As long as he can maintain that separation, he might just be victorious.
They can’t be the same entity. The same man who had raised Shulk, the only parental figure he had ever known, can’t be the same person who was fighting to kill. Someone who had expressed an explicit desire to kill them — to kill Shulk. Someone who had almost done so when he had shot Shulk in the back. Shulk simply cannot reconcile that reality with his memories of the only parental figure he had ever known.
And then Dickson says those words Shulk has heard countless times over the years; the words Dickson used whenever Shulk wasn’t giving a task his full effort and they both knew it, and Dickson sought to goad Shulk into giving it his all.
“Is that all you’ve got?”
Except this time, it’s said not with wry amusement, but with mockery; a sentence that begs whether the fruits of Dickson’s labour in teaching Shulk to fight had ever amounted to anything, and it distracts Shulk long enough for Dickson to land a weighty blow on him. He staggers backwards, clutching the wound on his shoulder, and when he looks up he sees not Dickson the Giant but Dickson the Homs.
Dickson the father.
The howling chaos of the battle screeches to a halt around them. As it does when he gets a vision, time slows, and Shulk finds himself suspended in an eerie stillness as he is confronted not with his future but with his past. He stares up into that familiar face — skin leathery from the sun, lips curled in a smirk, teeth clamped around a cigar. The troublesome glint in Dickson’s eye that appeared when he had some plan cooked up. The expression of smug pride whenever Shulk had done something particularly well and impressed the not-easily-impressed Dickson.
Shulk falters.
He can’t do this. He can’t do this. Dickson had rescued Shulk off of Valak Mountain, had taken him in when nobody else in the colony would, had raised Shulk with all the attention and care that he’d imagine a real father would have. He’d made Shulk feel loved and cared for, and this is how Shulk repays him?
Shulk’s grip on the replica Monado loosens.
Despite all the awful things that Dickson had done, and all the awful things he is saying — mocking Shulk, threatening Fiora — Shulk cannot reconcile them with the memories of the man who had raised him.
“Can’t use memories to kill anyone,” Dickson sneers, and Shulk thinks this is wrong; every memory he has of his childhood, every memory of feeling safe and protected and loved precisely because of Dickson feels like thousands of tiny knives digging into him, distracting and excruciatingly painful. Whenever he tries to dig one out another one takes its place, and no matter how hard he tries he cannot remove them all or numb himself to their pain. Even if Dickson does not kill him, this will.
Dickson had been as good as Shulk’s father, and he had treated Shulk like a son. Though he’d been gruff, and stern, he’d also been kind. When Shulk had been a very young child, his separation anxiety had been so overpowering that he would sleep curled on Dickson’s bedroom floor — and Dickson had let him, for weeks, until he eventually moved Shulk’s bed into the room. Dickson brought him books on varied and obscure topics from his trips around Bionis, and sat with Shulk as he sounded out the words and asked an endless litany of questions about the people and places enclosed in those pages. He had cut his hair and mended his clothes and scrubbed the leftover porridge from Shulk’s face before sending him off to school in the morning, and he had given Shulk shoulder rides, and forced him out of the lab when he hadn’t eaten or seen the sun for days. That had to have come from somewhere. It can’t just have been in service of Zanza.
If Dickson really had just raised Shulk for the sole purpose of resurrecting Zanza, he wouldn’t have gone to the lengths that he had. He wouldn’t have felt obligated to do more than keep Shulk housed and fed, and maybe taught him to swing a sword a little. And yet — Dickson had done so much more than that. He had done everything more.
Despite everything that Dickson has since revealed himself to be, it leaves a sour taste in Shulk’s mouth to fight him. It feels like a betrayal — as though he is throwing all the kindness that Dickson has showed him over the years into his face.
Dickson takes advantage of Shulk’s hesitation to slam the hilt of his sword into Shulk’s side. He staggers sideways, legs giving way beneath him, and fights to draw air into his lungs. When he goes to raise the replica Monado, his arms shake. It takes all his energy just to hold it; though it’s no heavier than the real Monado had been, it feels like a leaden weight dragging him down — or, maybe, it’s the thought of what he has to do with it. Dickson’s blood flecks its metallic surface. Each drop is visceral evidence of Shulk’s betrayal.
He cannot do this.
“What’s this? Little boy lost his Monado and can’t do a thing without it?” sneers Dickson, as Shulk fends off a blow intended for Fiora. The sheer force of Dickson’s strength is too much, and Shulk buckles.
“It’s time to learn your place!”
Shulk drops to the weather-worn stone of the terrace, limbs drained of the strength to even prop himself up with the Monado. Maybe Dickson is right. Maybe this is his place: to die on the terrace of Prison Island, as Melia’s father had, just another victim of the passage of fate.
What was it that Dickson had taught him?
No point in fighting if you don’t know what you’re fightin’ for. If you ain’t got the conviction then you ain’t got a fight.
He should get to his feet. Swing the replica Monado as though it were in any way an adequate replacement for the real one, and fight until the bitter end, whatever it may be, whatever form it may take.
But he can’t bring himself to. He had been raised for the sole purpose of being Zanza’s vessel, standing guard over the latent god, and of wielding the Monado against the Mechon. Without them, he’s nothing. Less than powerless. He has outlived his usefulness, and everything that Dickson had raised him to be.
He had taken pride in the thought that Dickson had raised him to be clever, and curious, and kind. That he had been raised to question everything, to uncover the truth of all things. That, above else, Dickson had raised Shulk to be fiercely protective and unwaveringly supportive of his friends.
But that was all as much a lie as Dickson’s care for him had been, and so Shulk is left with nothing. The foundation on which Dickson had built Shulk up has crumbled beneath him, and as he finds himself amidst the rubble of the person he had thought he was, the only thing for him to cling to is a question for which he lacks an answer: what is he even fighting for? He cannot fight Dickson for the sake of fighting him. And why fight for his life when his life had been naught but a lie?
He ought to just admit defeat. To relinquish the replica Monado and surrender himself to the passage of fate. If he doesn’t know what he’s fighting for then he has already lost. He is only prolonging the inevitable.
But where his convictions have failed him, those of his friends have not. They rally around him, fighting past their injuries to fight the adversary that rises before them, shouting encouragements that drown out the doubts swimming inside his head.
And it’s when Dunban confronts Dickson head-on, shielding Shulk from what would have been a lethal blow and standing resolute against his old friend and fellow solider, not an ounce of remorse inscribed in his grave expression, that a wave of conviction crashes over Shulk. He cannot fight Dickson. But he can fight for his friends. For the sake of those who are fighting for him.
He staggers to his feet. Tightens his grip on the Monado. Steels his resolve. And, alongside Fiora, he approaches Dickson once more, secure in the knowledge of what he is fighting for.
This time, the battle ends when Dickson reverts to his Homs form — not just for Shulk, but for everyone — and concedes.
Momentary relief floods Shulk. Though Reyn antagonises Dickson, Shulk holds him back.
But the relief is short-lived. A lurid gash wounds Dickson’s chest. When he strides away from them, a languid hand dismissing them, his gait is unsteady and his motions stiff. When he spits one last taunting insult, his words are slurred. Though he hides it well, Shulk knows him just as well.
He turns his back. He cannot look at Dickson any longer.
They are victorious, but it feels like anything but. It’s as though the wires had gotten crossed, and so their victory somehow still feels like a loss — and in a larger, more significant way than had they actually lost to Dickson.
“Shulk… his wounds…” Fiora says gently as they walk away, but Shulk doesn’t need her to point out the inevitable conclusion. He knows — with the same certainty that he knows that Fiora walks beside him now, and that they will stop Zanza or die trying — that Dickson will not walk away from this. He had always been a sore loser, after all, and though the stakes were higher now than they had ever been before, at its core what has played out on this terrace is nothing more than a sparring match between father and son.
Shulk had just never expected it to end like this. It strikes him that his final memory of Dickson will forever be the two of them on that terrace, the wind howling around them, tearing vicious words from Dickson’s lips that he had chosen precisely because he knows they are the ones that will hurt Shulk the most. His final memory will always be of that fatal injury tearing Dickson’s chest open. The wound that Shulk himself had inflicted.
Will that memory overwrite all those that Shulk had built with Dickson over the years?
Only time will tell.
*
They arrive in Memory Space, stars wheeling wildly far below their feet, and fight their way to Sentient Genesis, where the endless vacuum of space roars ceaselessly around them.
They face down Zanza. Shulk draws his Monado, and fights. It’s easier — there’s a single-faceted, crystalline fury for Shulk to pour himself unquestioningly into, his feelings towards the genocidal god pure and uncomplicated. He can surrender himself to his all-consuming desire to fight, to win, without second-guessing what that means. Grief is the anchor to which that desire is tethered, holding Shulk firm in his convictions despite how desperately Zanza tries to sway him. It is indescribable, the void that has been formed from Shulk having lost Dickson, not only to the fight on Prison Terrace, but to the influence of Zanza, and all that has been ripped away from them both because of it.
And yet, that grief is their saving grace, for even in death Dickson offers one final gift: the conviction to fight, and the strength to face down the unthinkable. There is nothing, not even a god, that can be any worse than what Shulk has already overcome on Prison Terrace.
It all comes down to a battle of conviction: the grief of a Homs verse the desperation of a god. Though Zanza fights with a furious and relentless power, Shulk is just as furious and just as relentless. He cannot allow even a single life more to be destroyed and discarded by the entity that so mistakenly calls itself their god. And though it is a gruelling battle, Shulk still finds it easier. In fighting Zanza, he knows what he is fighting for.
A world without gods. A world in which all Homs can live their lives freely. A world in which nobody else will ever have to experience the horrors that Shulk has.
Ultimately, they are victorious against Zanza, too. It is a victory that feels like a victory. And yet, when they win, it is not victory that Shulk thinks of. When he lands the final blow against their false god, erasing him from existence, it is neither the Homs he thinks of, nor the Bionis. He thinks not of Fiora, nor Dunban, nor Reyn — nor any of the people they have met and friends they have made on their journey.
No.
As Shulk lands the final blow against Zanza, he thinks of Dickson.