The monster's head was heavier than I expected.
Warm blood, thick and black as crude oil, dripped through my fingers and fell into the cracked earth. The head in my hands was enormous, something almost human, crowned by a single, depthless eye that now stared through me into nothingness. Its form still seemed to shift even in death, its edges blurring with a dying static between flesh and void. The eye blinked once. Twice. Then went still.
Three seconds ago, that eye had been fixed on me from a height that blocked out the sulfurous green sky. The pressure of its gaze had stolen the air from my lungs. I'd raised my hand, clutching a worthless pebble, thinking maybe, just maybe, I could swap that terrible eye out of its socket. A desperate, stupid, final distraction.
And I missed… I think.
Instead of a pebble, I now held the entire damn head.
My arms screamed, tendons threatening to snap under the monstrous weight. I stood frozen as the headless body of the creature, the Corruptor, remained upright for one endless, impossible moment. Then its broad shoulders shifted, its tree trunk legs faltered, and it fell. It didn't just collapse. It came down like a tower cut at the base, hitting the ground with a wet, final thud that kicked up dust and shook the earth beneath my boots.
Silence.
No more hissing. No more screaming. Just the hollow whine of wind through the alien canyons and the frantic drumbeat of my own heart.
'What.'
The thought was flat. Empty.
'What did I just do?'
I looked down at the head. At that single eye, now dull and lifeless.
From our first lesson, they drilled one rule into us.
Corruptors cannot be harmed.
Not cut, not burned, not touched. You don't fight them. You survive them.
And I had just taken its head off. Not with strength, but with a thought.
A hysterical bubble of laughter stuck in my throat. Of course. Twenty years of lifting, carrying and stacking. The Universe, in its infinite cosmic irony, looked at my life and said, You know what this kid needs? The ability to keep moving shit around. I'd gotten the power of a glorified warehouse clerk on the day of my execution.
Until now.
The silence pressed in, wrong. Like a breath held too long. Mine and the world's. Everything around me seemed to pause, as if reality itself was taking a second to process what had just happened.
The air tasted sharp. Electric. Like a conduit about to overload. Something vital had been severed, and the world was adjusting around the absence.
A chime, soft and crystalline, echoed inside my skull.
Light gathered in front of me, white and serene, forming lines of text I had to blink to focus on.
[You Slayed: King Emi - Level ???]
[Corruption Fades.]
My breath caught.
Level?
We didn't have levels. You were born, you lived, you got a useless power at twenty-one, and you died. That was the script. Stories said levels had existed once, that the old world had understood growth, advancement, power earned through survival. But no one in living memory had ever earned a single point of experience. Nothing out here could be killed.
Until thirty seconds ago.
The text shimmered.
[Xp Threshold Met.]
[Leveling up.]
The world dissolved into light.
[Advancement Complete.]
[Allaran -> Level —]
The line held. No number followed. The dash lingered, as if this thing had reached an answer but decided not to say it.
[Continue your journey.]
I stared at the gap where the number should have been. My thoughts focused on it, refusing to move past.
Notifications. Levels.
That wasn't part of the world I knew.
And yet…
I looked at the corpse again.
Neither was this.
A cold clarity cut through the shock.
Switch, my ability, didn't cut or break through anything. It simply swapped the position of two objects. The pebble in my hand and the creature's head. No force. No damage.
It wasn't strength. It was a bypass.
I hadn't hurt it. I'd just… put its head somewhere else.
And whatever governed this world didn't register it as an attack.
It was a rearrangement.
Which meant all those legendary defenses had nothing to defend against.
A wild, dangerous hope flared in my chest, hotter than the blood coating my hands.
'If I can kill one…'
The head slipped from my numb fingers. It hit the dirt with a wet, final thud that seemed to travel up through the soles of my boots. And I looked, really looked, for the first time since everything had turned into a blur of death and noise.
The valley floor was a graveyard.
Finn, the navigator, the man who could feel the direction of the Citadel, lay broken against the ground, his eyes wide and empty. Mira had left nothing behind but a single boot. Of the fifty-three of us thrown out here, I could only make out a handful of shapes in the distance, still and unmoving.
The rest were gone.
Taken.
Eaten.
I was alone.
No… not alone.
From the shadows along the canyon walls, a pale grin split the darkness. Then another. And another. A low, chittering growl spread through the air as shapes began to shift in the darkness.
They'd heard it. The impact. The death.
They were coming.
All of them.
The hope in my chest twisted into something colder, sharper.
Fear.
I had an ability I barely understood, and it was the only thing standing between me and whatever was moving out there.
My hand dove into my pocket, fingers closing around smooth metal. A stupid habit from childhood. A fidget I'd never dropped.
Twenty-one years old, running for my life, clutching a child's trinket like it might matter.
Right now, it was the only real thing left in the world.
I turned and ran toward the barrier, the monster's blood drying on my skin.
A chitter cut through the canyon behind me.
Closer.
Too close.
Fast.
My grip on the yo-yo tightened until the metal bit into my palm.
Behind my eyes, the dash still burned where a number should have been.
The system knew what I was.
It just wasn't telling me yet.
'Fine.' I muttered, breath shaking as I ran. 'I'll figure it out myself.'
The barrier shimmered somewhere ahead, closer, almost there.
The sound behind me was no longer chittering.
It was a shriek.