[He can almost feel it. The weight of can't you guess how this ends? is somehow even stronger than when it was when dealing with the actual time traveller.]

I set it up to catch them in Sae's Palace. I caught him. Had him exactly where I wanted him.

I shot him.

[A slight pause, and his expression softens, just a hair.]

Or I thought I did. They got one over on me - I shot Sae Nijima's cognition of him, while the real one was spirited away. At the time, it filled me with a fury I hadn't known since I found out Shido's identity in the first place, but looking back, I'm almost proud of them.

After that, we both invaded Shido's Palace separately, they caught up to me, we fought, and then Shido's cognition of me left us all between a rock and a hard place. I locked them out and cleared the last obstacle.

[Which is a roundabout way of saying...]

If it had been only one of the cognition of myself or the collapsing Palace, I would probably would have survived. But not both.