Chapter 11: System!??

The scream came out of nowhere and everywhere at once, the same wrongness as before but larger now, desperate, and it hit her mid-word.

The chant broke.

Lian saw it happen ,saw the exact instant the working sliped out of her control, she couldn’t complete the incarnations , and the chains of light wrapped around the creature’s throat and arms flickered once, twice, thinning like a rope fraying under weight it was never meant to hold.

The creature tore free on the third pull.

It didn’t run at her at all. It turned toward Lian instead. It had never actually stopped thinking about him.

"I’ll—" a wet click, breath dragging wrong through whatever passed for its throat, "—k-kill you. F-first."

He didn’t see the blow coming. His back hit the tunnel wall before he even realized his feet had left the ground. Something in his chest gave way a deep crack, His ribs were shattered and his breathing became uneven

The creature laughed, a clicking sound low in its throat, heh-heh-hehhk.

"I will devour you both."

He was on the ground. The floor was cold against his cheek. That was all he could really process right then.

The pain arrived a half-second later, all at once, total.

He "Gasps! Aaaagh! Urrgh... oh, oh, oh!"

He tried to breathe and the attempt itself was agony, a grinding, shifting wrongness in his chest that made his vision white out at the edges. Blood filled his mouth, warm and metallic, and one clear thought cut through everything else "this is it, this is actually it, I’m going to die on this floor and I never even got the trash bag".

His hand found his own thumb without him deciding to move it.

The mark was burning.

This wasn’t the low hum from before. It was heavier, a heat with real weight behind it, spreading like lava up through his wrist, his forearm, his shoulder, until his whole arm felt like something being poured instead of something attached to him.

He screamed. He didn’t decide to. It tore out of him raw and continuous, and somewhere under the sound of his own voice he heard himself thinking, with a clarity that felt separate from the pain entirely, make it stop, make it stop, I don’t care what it costs, just make it stop.

It spread down his arm, across his chest, into the wreckage of his ribs, and the grinding pain there just stopped. Not fixed. Replaced. A thin dark line pushed out from under his thumb, splitting again and again across his hand, up his wrist, under his sleeve. Every bit of skin it touched burned. His body wasn’t fully his to argue with anymore.

He caught his own reflection in the thin sheet of blood already pooling beneath him.

His eyes had gone wrong. The white of them had drowned into a black so total it looked like two holes cut into his face, and where his irises should have been, something burned instead a deep, banked amber-gold, like embers a breath away from catching.

He laughed.

It wasn’t his laugh , it felt too odd . He watched himself stand up like he was watching someone else do it. His body wasn’t waiting for his permission anymore.

The creature’s scream this time didn’t sound like pain exactly. It sounded like something realizing, too late, that it had misjudged what it was standing in front of.

Lian didn’t remember closing the distance. He only remembered pieces after a limb in his grip he shouldn’t have been strong enough to hold, a snap as it tore free, the creature’s shriek splitting into two notes at once, coming from everywhere behind him, beside him, somewhere inside his own skull until his ears rang high and thin and kept ringing even after the sound stopped.

"You don’t even have a real name," he heard himself say, distant and amused, watching it drag itself backward on the limbs it had left. "You’re just hungry. That’s all you ever were."

He took the second limb the same way. Then the third.

By the time he dropped to his knees in the dirt, the wreckage was just a heap of unidentifiable meat and splintered bone. But the terror had burned itself out, leaving him hollowed and reckless. He unhinged his jaw. He didn’t just breathe it in; he took the remaining slop down in one massive, suffocating gulp.

He looked down at his own hands, steady, glowing faintly at the knuckles where the dark line ran under his skin.

"Ahhh." A short, unfamiliar laugh, already fading at the edges. "My time’s up."

The dark drained out of his eyes all at once, and his knees buckled before he understood the heat was already gone, leaving him hollow, shaking, and achingly human again, folding down onto the ground next to what little remained.

The book sat in his desk drawer at home, exactly where he’d left it.

The room was empty when the drawer shook, once, hard enough to rattle the handle. Light leaked out from under the lid. The cover were cool for days finally went warm.

A blank page turned on its own.

Characters bled up out of nothing, dark and wet-looking, in a hand that belonged to no one currently alive to have written it most of it refusing to hold still long enough to read, strokes sliding into each other, canceling themselves out, leaving only a scattered handful of words a person could actually pick out of the mess:

...activated...

...condition met...

The rest never resolved into anything. The page went still. The drawer settled. Nothing in the room looked as though anything had happened at all.

He woke to his own blood, cooling against his cheek.

His ribs didn’t hurt. He pressed a hand flat to his side, disbelieving, and found only smooth, unbroken warmth where something had been shattered a few minutes ago his shirt torn open around it, soaked through, evidence of an injury his body no longer had.

"Old woman—"

He crawled first, not trusting his legs. The ground scraped his palms raw. When he finally reached her, the sight of it took whatever strength he’d clawed back and spent it all at once.

Her stomach hadn’t closed. It wouldn’t.

"Why are you crying, you brat," she said, and her voice came out thin, almost fond, like his tears were an inconvenience she didn’t have the energy to properly scold him for.

"B-but you’re—" His voice broke entirely. "You’re gonna die. Because of me. I did this to you—"

"Call me by my name."

He blinked at her, not understanding.

"Wen Ruo," she said, before he could ask. "You’ve never once asked it. Say it back to me."

"Wen Ruo," he managed, the name splitting in his mouth around the sob he couldn’t hold down. "I’ll remember you. My whole life. I swear it."

Something in her face eased, the tired lines of it going soft in a way he hadn’t seen since the moment she’d first stepped out of her shop to call him a brat for staring.

She smiled.

Then she simply wasn’t there anymore, the way a held breath is finally released rather than torn away and Lian knelt over her in the settling quiet and screamed until his throat gave out, grief and fury and guilt so tangled together he couldn’t have named which one was doing the screaming.

He didn’t know how long he’d been kneeling there when the air in front of him shifted.

A shape unfolded in the air, rectangular, its edges bleeding into a faint reddish static, like a signal fighting to hold its own outline. He stared at it through eyes still swollen from crying, he couldn’t believe what he saw

Am I dreaming?

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

S-crifice hßr, and sh.....will c□ntinue — w​ithin u̷ß.

Sh̷e need n0t be g one. 0nly ch4ng̷ed.

W​ill y̸ou let h_r go tw­ice?

[yes] [No]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He read it three times before his mind would agree to what it was actually asking.

His brain went completely blank unable to think what to do, overwhelmed by emotions