The words hung in the air above the stone, white-grey and patient.
[Clear Condition: Survive for 1000 Years]
Jin read them three times. Then he laughed, alone in the cave, and the sound bounced off the dark blue crystals and came back to him sounding like someone else.
Captain Daewon once ordered me to hold a bridge alone for an hour while the rest of the squad went round the back. I held it. Barely. I've still got the scar on my shin.
A thousand years is a lot longer than an hour.
And I don't even have a bridge.
The words faded. The cold of the stone seeped through his shirt, and the crystals hummed in the walls. He touched his chest. No hole. No blood. Not even a tear in the cloth, which was more than he could say for most of his shirts.
"Okay," he said to nobody. "Okay. Think, Jin."
Something moved in the tunnel.
He was on his feet with his hand at his hip before he'd decided to stand. His old iron sword lay beside the stone, laid out neatly, as if someone had put it there for him.
Somebody tidy.
He didn't like that thought, so he picked up the sword and stopped having it.
The thing in the tunnel was small. Grey skin, a crooked back, one ear torn half away. A goblin, like the ones that had poured out of the trees in the forest. It crouched in the dark and stared at him with yellow eyes.
They looked at each other.
Then it shrieked and ran.
Fair enough. I just came back from the dead. I'd run from me too.
* * *
He followed it, because the tunnel only went one way, and because standing still had never once made anything better.
The crystals thinned as he walked, and grey light crept in from ahead. The air changed. It smelled of ash and old rain. He rounded the last bend and stepped out of the cave mouth onto a hillside.
The world tipped sideways.
Jin grabbed the rock wall. His stomach rolled. The ground swung under his boots like the deck of a ship, and a thick, warm fog rolled into his head, the kind that comes after the third cup of cheap wine.
I've been drunk exactly twice in my life, both times Takumi's fault. This is worse.
Poison?
It was the same thought he'd had when the first System window appeared, and the answer was the same: no. Poison had never worked on him. Not the mushroom at sixteen, not the bottles Priest Hwan had made him drink while he watched with his dead-fish eyes and wrote things down. Curses slid off him. His body had never once let anything into his head without asking first.
So whatever this is, it isn't knocking. It just walked in.
He stood there breathing until the ground stopped swinging. The fog didn't leave. It settled, like a guest who'd decided to stay for dinner.
Then he looked down the hill, and forgot about it for a while.
There was a town below him. What was left of one, anyway. Roofs caved in. Chimneys standing alone like old teeth. A road of cracked stones curved down the hill, past a chapel with its bell hanging crooked in the tower, into a square with a well in the middle. Beyond the town there was nothing. No fields, no forest, no horizon. Just grey, as if somebody had painted the town and got bored before they finished the edges.
The sky was the colour of cold ash, with no sun in it. Jin looked for one for a long time.
No birds. No smoke. No bodies, either, and he'd seen enough burned villages on the frontline to know there were always bodies.
He walked down.
* * *
The strangest thing about the town wasn't the silence. It was that he knew it.
He had never been here. He was sure of that. But his feet knew where the road would bend before it bent. He knew the chapel steps would be chipped on the left side, and they were. He knew that if he turned down the narrow lane past the well, there would be a shop with a wooden sign shaped like a sword, and when he turned down the lane, there it was, hanging by one nail, the paint long gone.
He stopped in front of it.
Every time he reached for the reason, the fog thickened, as though the memory sat behind a door and someone was leaning on the other side.
"Captain, does this place look…"
He turned. There was nobody there.
Two years of turning around and finding a beard behind me. You'd think dying once would break the habit.
Daewon, Takumi, Elise, little Shaun. He had told them to regroup outside. He had bought them time.
If they got out, it was worth it. If they didn't…
He didn't finish the thought.
I'm good at not finishing thoughts. It's one of my best skills, after not dying.
Well. It used to be.
* * *
The goblin with the torn ear was on a rooftop above the square.
It crouched on the edge of the broken tiles, watching him, and this time it wasn't running. It was talking. Not shrieking: talking, in the same strange, clicking tongue Jin had heard in the dungeon, back when there had been no time to wonder about it.
From the windows around the square, something talked back.
"Ah," Jin said. "So you went to get your friends."
They came out of everything at once. Out of the windows, out of doorways with no doors, up out of the well itself, scrabbling over the stones. Goblins, a dozen, two dozen, more.
The first one reached him with its claws out, and he cut it down before it landed.
Daewon was right, back in the forest. They're not so different from men. They come straight at you, they're faster than they look, and they die when you hit them properly.
The second died too. And the third.
He backed up until the stone lip of the well pressed against his legs. Never fight with nothing behind you. Captain's rule. Daewon had said it so often that Takumi carved it into his shield as a joke.
Four. Five. His arm was warm now and the sword was moving on its own, the way it does after ten thousand repetitions. For one stupid moment he thought: I can do this.
A shape flickered at the edge of his eye, coming in fast from the left.
"Elise, left!"
No arrow came.
Of course no arrow came. Claws raked his arm, and he felt the heat of it a heartbeat before the pain. He stumbled, swung wild, felt the blade bite into something.
And there, with his back against a well in a dead town, he finally understood what he had been too busy, or too proud, to understand for two years.
They called me the Undying Cockroach, and I let them. But it was never me keeping me alive. It was Daewon's shield in front of me. Elise's arrows over my shoulder. Takumi's darts in the neck of whatever was about to kill me. Even Shaun, yelling warnings in that cracking voice of his.
Without them, I'm one man with an old sword.
The ground shook.
Something big shoved its way out through the chapel doors, knocking the frame loose. An orc, twice his height, grey-green and scarred, dragging a club made from half a wooden beam.
Jin lifted his sword. It met the club.
The old iron blade snapped clean in two.
Two years of war, and it picks now to retire.
Then the club hit him, and for a while there was nothing but the ground, and the weight of them, and the noise.
The System hadn't lied about the pain.
The last thing he saw was the goblin with the torn ear, leaning in close, head tilted. Curious. As if it wanted to see what he would do next.
Then the fog won.
* * *
[HP has reached 0]
[Resurrecting]
Jin woke gasping on cold stone, under dark blue crystals, with his sword lying beside him.
Whole.
He sat up and touched his arm. His chest. His face. All there. Not a scratch.
"I'm alive," he said, and for about three breaths it was the best feeling of his life.
Then he remembered the words.
[Death does not exist, but you will still feel all the pain.]
His hands had started shaking. He didn't remember telling them to.
* * *
He went back out.
What else am I going to do? Sit in a cave for a thousand years?
He was careful this time. He went down the hill slowly, kept to the walls, checked every window. The fog sat in his head the same as before. The town was the same as before.
The goblin with the torn ear was on the same roof. It looked at him as if he were the one who'd done something strange.
He skipped the square and went for the chapel instead, thinking he could get above them in the bell tower. Three steps inside, the floor gave way. It wasn't rotten wood. It was a trap: a pit hidden under the boards, the kind someone builds on purpose, with care.
That was the second death.
The third came before what his stomach insisted was lunchtime. Jin decided, later, that he would never talk about the third one.
* * *
He sat on the cold stone afterwards and tried to do the sum.
Three deaths before lunch. Ten a day, maybe, if he got better. Five, if he got a lot better. Days in a year. Years in a thousand years.
I'm not a scholar. I'm a village boy turned soldier who can count coin and arrows. But I don't need to be a scholar to feel the shape of that number.
It sat on his chest like the orc's club. He reached for it anyway, and the fog rolled in and took it from him before he could finish.
Maybe that's a kindness.
Back home, they had called him the Undying Cockroach.
They had no idea.