Chapter 78: A Voice That Isn’t Mine

Darian opened his eyes to a ceiling that wasn’t the shelter’s ceiling.

He recognized the place after two seconds — the same building, the same cracked walls, but the corner he’d been sleeping in was different, as if someone had moved him while he was out cold. Beside him, on the floor, was the strange man — Kyle — still unconscious, his chest rising and falling very slowly, like someone coming out of surgery, not a nap.

Darian sat up slowly. His head was heavy in a way that wasn’t natural.

"You finally woke up." Kasashian was sitting on a broken chair by the door, the rusty English wrench he always carried resting on his knee. He wasn’t looking at Darian. He was looking at Kyle.

"How long was I out?" Darian asked.

"An hour and a half. He’s been out longer."

Darian looked at Kyle. "Will he wake up?"

"Not my job to know." Kasashian finally stood, standing over Darian like someone examining a wound, still unsure if it would heal properly. "My job is knowing that you’re now something other than what you were yesterday, and I still don’t know how much."

"I’m the same."

"Not exactly." Kasashian extended his hand, and without asking permission, took the back of Darian’s neck with two fingers. "Your pulse is beating with two rhythms. One is yours, and one isn’t. They chase each other, not synchronized. Like two clocks in the same room."

Darian felt his own hand move slightly toward his neck on its own, as if checking. "I don’t feel anything."

"Of course you don’t. The one who feels the two clocks doesn’t feel anything wrong with them — until one stops."

A message appeared on his wrist, the first in an hour.

```

[Compatibility Rate: 61%]

[Status: Temporarily Stable]

[Warning: Secondary Energy Source Not Locally Registered]

```

Secondary energy source. Darian knew without anyone telling him that the source was Kyle.

"This isn’t my system’s format," he said quietly.

"How do you know?"

"Because my system says ’damage’ and ’health,’ not ’compatibility rate.’ That word... isn’t from mine."

Kasashian said nothing. But he looked at Kyle again, like someone calculating something he still wasn’t sure about.

Darian sat down against the wall and tried to take a long breath. In the middle of it, he felt an image pass in front of him — not his memory. A room he’d never seen before, a stone door with red writing on it, and a voice saying a sentence he hadn’t said:

"Take your name. I won’t let you disappear without someone knowing you stayed."

The image vanished as quickly as it had come.

"What just happened?" Kasashian asked, seeing Darian’s face change.

"I don’t know how to describe it." Darian wiped his sweat with the back of his hand. "Like someone opened the door of a room that isn’t mine, and I’m standing inside it."

"Does that happen often?"

"First time."

Kasashian was silent for a moment, then spoke in the calm way that comes before a hard decision. "Darian. If this repeats while you’re mid-hunt, I need to know now — not when the problem hits."

"I’ll tell you if it happens."

"Not a question. A request."

Before Darian could answer, a sound came from outside — not running, not shouting. Something slower and heavier. The sound of something crawling on a concrete floor it wasn’t used to walking on.

Kasashian stood immediately. "A small one. It felt the disturbance here an hour ago."

"Is it coming for Kyle?"

"It’s coming for something glowing in this place that isn’t supposed to glow. That’s enough for them."

Kasashian held out the English wrench. Darian took it without thinking.

"Me?" he asked. "He can’t move."

"Exactly why you. I need to see if you’re still the one moving — or if someone else is holding your hand."

Darian went out into the dark corridor, and the English wrench felt heavier in his hand than the last time, illogically so. The thing was at the end — a hunched shape, cracked gray skin, moving with the wrong rhythm, like something trying to walk on legs that weren’t its own.

It wasn’t strong. Darian felt that without thinking, the same old instinct that came before any easy kill.

He moved toward it.

Halfway there, he felt his hand move faster than his own speed. Not comfortably faster — unfamiliar faster, like someone else had placed their hand over his and moved it for half a second. It struck the thing at a point he hadn’t known before, right under the jaw, and it dropped in a single moment.

Darian stood there, looking at the corpse, his hand still extended in a position that wasn’t his usual one.

"That wasn’t my strike," he said quietly.

Kasashian was standing a short distance behind him, having seen everything. "It was the strike of someone who knew the weak point of a creature like that before ever seeing it."

"I don’t know that point."

"But someone does."

Darian looked at his hand, then at Kasashian, then at the corridor leading back to the sleeping Kyle. He felt something warm inside him — not completely foreign, but not his either. Like wearing someone else’s clothes while they were still warm with their body heat.

"If it stays like this," Darian said, "it’ll end with me not knowing when I’m the one striking and when he is."

"I know."

"And you’re okay with that?"

Kasashian took the English wrench from Darian’s hand, calm, not judging. "I’m neither agreeing nor refusing. I just know the sleep he’s in now won’t last forever, and you accepted that he’d hold on to you before you knew the cost. Now you know part of it. The next decision is yours."

They returned to the room. Kyle was still asleep, but his face wasn’t as calm as it had been an hour ago — a small muscle under his eye was twitching, as if he were dreaming of something draining him even while unconscious.

Darian sat beside him, and without thinking, reached out and felt his pulse — to check if there were still two clocks, or if it had become one tired clock.

Still two.

That wasn’t as comforting as it should have been.