Air slammed into him. Pain bloomed all over again. Eros's eyes snapped open. The taste of dirt and old blood filled his mouth. The net still lay across him, ropes biting his wrists. The knife was gone, but its memory lingered. The world was a smear of motion: boots, legs, hands, ash.
He didn't think.
Heat flared in his abdomen, sharp and alive, like a brand pressed to the scar winding along his belly. The warmth wasn't gentle. It surged outward in a wave that made his skin buzz and his vision harden. The heaviness in his limbs, the fog wrapped around his thoughts—both recoiled as if burned.
The scar, he realized in the part of his mind not yet swallowed by fire. It's not warning me. It's burning the drug out.
He grinned. The expression looked terrible on his face.
"Did he just—" one of the men began.
Eros surged upward.
The net tore. It wasn't clean or clever. He simply ripped, and when it refused to give, he screamed and ripped harder. Ropes snapped. His wrists bled. The man who had stabbed him yelped and stumbled back, fumbling his blade. Eros struck him with the axe.
The weapon's head smashed into cheekbone, glanced, and crushed his ear. The man dropped like a puppet losing its strings. Eros wrenched the axe free, turned, and hurled himself at the next body that moved. A club whistled past his head. He didn't dodge so much as collapse at the wrong angle; the wood missed and shattered another man's knee behind him. The man screamed. Eros planted a foot, shoved, and felt the joint go. He brought the axe down and the screaming stopped.
Someone grabbed him from behind, arms locking across his chest, a shout by his ear. Eros snapped his head back, breaking a nose. Pain flared behind him, the grip loosened. He bit the hand that still clung to his shoulder, hard enough to taste iron. The man howled. Eros spun, swung, missed, then slammed his forehead into the man's mouth. Teeth split skin. It didn't matter whose.
This wasn't a fight from stories where heroes bled beautifully. It was messy. It was tripping, grappling, choking, breaking whatever part of a body came close. It was an animal tearing its way out of a trap.
"Back!" someone shouted. "He's not—he's not—"
"Human?" Eros snarled, not sure who he mocked. The word felt dry and absurd in his mouth.
The scar on his belly seared. Every trace of the drug's heaviness burned away. Clarity slid into the hollow it left behind, sharp as glass. It didn't make him calm. It just made space for more rage.
A man rushed at him with a spear. Eros charged straight into it. The point cut his shoulder. He kept going, grabbed the shaft with both hands, and dragged the slaver toward him. They slammed chest to chest. Eros released one hand and buried the axe in the man's neck. Bone gave. The slaver sagged and slid down the spear like a rag on a pole.
Bootsteps thundered behind him. He dropped the spear and threw himself backward. The club meant for his spine cracked into the dead man's ribs instead. Eros pivoted, chopped low, and the club-man collapsed, clutching a leg bent the wrong way. Eros struck him again because he was still moving. And again.
When he looked up, he saw Halix trying to slip away.
The trader had already stepped back, daggers drawn, eyes too bright.
"Don't," Eros said.
Halix froze. "I… all right. Let's not make mistakes."
"You already did," Eros answered, stepping forward.
Halix's mouth twitched like he wanted to make a joke about the weather. None came. "Listen. You don't understand how things work here. There are rules."
"I'm learning them," Eros said. "Rule one: if a man smiles this much in hell, he's lying."
Halix tried a different smile. It fit worse. "I saved your life back there with the wolf."
Eros halted three steps away. Behind him, he heard the last slaver dragging himself through the ash, his breath a wet whistle. Eros didn't look back.
"You sold it," Eros said.
He seized Halix by the scarf. The cloth was coarse against his fingers. He yanked the man close until their foreheads nearly touched. He could smell metal, old leather, and the faint sweet rot of berries.
"How do you kill a god?" he asked, voice low.
Halix blinked, then laughed, brittle and wrong. "Kill a god? You can't even hold yourself together. You're just a boy with a stick who refuses to stay dead. That's not danger."
Eros's hands shook. Rage and exhaustion clashed in his chest like a storm. He didn't know if he hated Halix more for betraying him, or for making him hope, for one brief moment, that he wasn't alone.
His grip loosened slightly. "Tell me where to find one."
"Fine," Halix said, grin flashing back like a knife. "Look up."
Eros almost laughed. It came out as a rough breath. He felt stupid for asking. A sadness without a name gnawed at him. He wanted to split something open just to make it stop.
Halix's right hand twitched. Eros noticed too late, saw the glint of silver rising for his ribs.
He didn't think. Instinct dragged his arm. The axe moved. Halix's eyes widened with a stunned, insulted look, as if Eros had spoiled a punchline. The axe head struck above the sternum and slid sideways. The sound was wet and small.
Halix folded. He sat without meaning to. His daggers clattered to the ground. His mouth worked for a joke. None came.
Eros stepped back, hands trembling now for reasons that weren't rage. Behind him, the last slaver groaned. Eros turned and hurled the axe. It spun ugly, but it struck. The man went still.
Silence seeped back, thick and slow.
Bodies lay twisted in the ash. Nets sagged half-torn, like dead jellyfish. Ropes sprawled in snarls, sticky with blood. The air stank of iron, piss, and something old split open.
Eros stood among it all. His breath rasped. His shoulders lifted and fell. Each inhale felt like dragging weight. The scar at his belly pulsed with heat, then cooled, as if closing its eye.
He looked at his hands. Red. Not all the blood was monster-black. It looked wrong on his skin, and at the same time, perfectly right.
Part of him shuddered in disgust. Another part, darker, heavier, felt something he didn't want to name. Satisfaction, maybe. Justice disguised as something cleaner.
They deserved it, he told himself. Traitors. Slavers. If this world has rules, I like these ones.
Then another thought stumbled in, clumsy as a drunk through glass. What if they were real? Not book-things. Not echoes. People. What does that make me?
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Halix. The man slumped against a broken wall, scarf crooked and soaked. His hands twitched once, then stilled.
Eros wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist and realized he had been smiling. He smothered it, sick with himself. He bent and picked up the axe.
He checked the bodies. Not for mercy, but to be sure none would get up and try something foolish. It was a new habit. He hated how quickly it was becoming one.
Last, he crouched by Halix. The man's eyes were half open, staring at the sky as if surprised by its size.
"I would have left you alive," Eros said. He didn't know if it was true. It sounded true in his head for a breath, then didn't.
You would have sold me twice, he didn't say.
He stood. His legs shook once, then held. The world felt real enough to hurt. He swallowed. It tasted of iron, berries, and ash.
"Reader," a voice said, clear and calm, nowhere and everywhere at once.
Eros stiffened.
"You have advanced in the plot. Claim your reward."
The words fell like stones into water. The air barely shifted. The corpses didn't stir.
Eros lifted his head, furious that the voice chose this moment, this small, ugly human moment, to intrude.
"Thanks, Santa," he muttered, and laughed at how childish it sounded. He almost looked around for the book, then remembered he could call it. Almost did. Didn't.
His stomach twisted. He stood among the dead for a long breath, then another. He tried to think of something that didn't lead back here. Failed.
I wanted to survive, he told himself. I'm doing that. This is what it looks like. I won't pretend otherwise.
Something creaked. He spun, axe raised, ready to strike.
It was only a net snagging on a stone in the wind.
He exhaled, tasted iron again.
Time didn't pass so much as collapse and blur with other times. Little moments rippled around him—flashes that might have been memory, or tricks from the book when it grew bored.
He pictured the three flames on the page. He had seen one go out again. He couldn't bear many more of these lessons. He couldn't endure more resurrections.
He should probably claim whatever reward it offered. The book never gave without taking, but here he had already paid.
He crouched, wiped his axe on a dead man's coat. The coat was decent, sturdier than his rags. He pulled it on. He searched Halix's pockets with a bitter taste in his mouth. Found more berries, a flask that smelled sharp, a coil of wire, a whetstone, a needle and gut-thread, and a scrap of cloth with a crude charcoal map.
He stashed it all. He told himself scavenging wasn't the same as looting. He told himself it was survival. He told himself a lot of things.
Something in his belly pulsed again. He pressed a hand to the scar, realized the heat was gone completely. Whatever the berry had tried to do now belonged to him, not to Halix. A defensive echo. A burning out.
Fine, he thought. One scar against poison. One for birds. Collect them all.
He looked up at the sky and hated how small he felt beneath it.
"Claim your reward," the voice repeated, smooth as a blade.
"I heard you," Eros said. He filled his lungs and let out a humorless laugh. "I'm coming."
He didn't want to summon the book here, with corpses as witnesses. But there would be no clean place in hell.
He reached for the Reader's Notes with that same piece of will, like flexing a muscle without a name.
Ink and paper answered. The diary flickered into existence above his palm, pages ruffling themselves as if impatient.
He looked at the embers, the flames—three of three. So that's my limit so far… and I recovered two of them.
The paper waited. Ink glimmered faintly, like a heartbeat he could see.
"Reward," Eros said. "Fine. Let's see what you think I deserve."
He tried not to glance at Halix. Failed.
If this gives me something good, I'll hate it. If it doesn't, I'll hate it more. Either way, I'm still here.
He clenched his jaw and leaned in to read.