"it's dark."
"It's freezing."
"Why am I alone?"
Familiar voices echoed in XN—yielding to the entity. Voices of a boy in an isolated room, with darkness for company.
XN was disconnected from the external world.
[Sigh!]
"All my efforts to win their trust… what a waste!" XN exclaimed with discontent.
His voice echoed through the space where he stood, before fading into the unknown.
That's when he noticed.
"Wait… where am I, now?"
The sky and floor were alike—peak darkness, almost as if he stood on emptiness. His surroundings mirrored it.
"I can't even see my hands," he said, looking at them.
He gradually regained his calm. An opportunity for concern surfaced.
"I wonder how they're doing, out there."
At the mention of this, a dissociative view of the residents appeared before XN. A purple filter overlayed frightened figures.
"This must be what the entity sees," XN concluded.
He continued his observation.
"Reynolds, Sora… Valora…"
"I guess Manson was right after all."
Then—
"Hold on…"
A thought suddenly sprouted in XN. A hint he hadn't noticed until now.
He could see the world through the entity's eyes, access its memories, while simultaneously controlling his own thoughts.
Gradually, the puzzle began to piece together.
"Maybe we don't share a single conscience."
Suddenly, a narrow corridor gradually formed: the floor first, then walls and ceiling. Dim bulbs on the ceiling revealed doors lining the lengthy corridor. Their sizes diminished as they faded into the far darkness.
XN, curious yet cautious, walked through the eerie corridor, hesitant to open a door.
He stopped at a door with a green exit sign above it. He placed his right hand on the lever, ready to press it open, when—
"Gunshots?"
Songs of war intonated with familiar sounds played by destructive weapons—guns. Sounds XN recognized from a memory.
"Could this really be…"
His eyes widened with anxiety. As his saliva descended his gut, tension rose. Who knew—
"What could be behind this door?"
The door creaked, pushed open by XN.
Red lights rushed into the corridor, blinding him. He guarded his eyes with his left arm by reflex.
The sight of Nice blurred in as XN's vision stabilized.
Opposite Nice, heavily armored soldiers aimed their weapons at him. Farther behind, researchers moved frantically from desk to desk, instructed by a single lead researcher.
"This scientist… there's something unsettling about him."
A threat crawled along the lab walls with purple eyes—Nice. Behind, an ominous aura—released by Fionna—steadily swallowed the lab.
The soldiers began to suffocate as the ominous threat closed in.
The atmosphere thickened with dark ash smog. Within it, XN noticed faint purple threads of energy lost in the haze.
Rapidly, gunshots were replaced with deafening hisses.
The soldiers' armor began to disintegrate, thin purple threads of energy escaping from the consumed edges.
In the midst of the panic, a composed male voice pierced through.
"This is bad!"
The head researcher seemed tense, yet his calm voice remained unflinched. After a brief moment of contemplation, his tone burst out aggressively.
"Control the anomaly!"
Confused by the sudden change in demeanor, XN's focus intensified.
"What am I missing?"
He scoped around for a short while when his head unexpectedly froze.
Chills ran down XN's spine. Cold sweat squeezed from his pores.
He saw it. He finally understood.
"How could this even be?"
"How did I miss this?!" he murmured.
The researcher knew Fionna's ability couldn't consume metals. Indeed, she was responsible for the corporal dehydration of the lab's occupants.
The pieces fell into place. The researchers hadn't known about Nice's ability until now. The head researcher figured it out—but too late.
Nice's ability is to—
"...corrode metals."
XN began to join the dots. His thoughts raced as he struggled to assimilate the information: the purple threads of energy, Nice's purple eyes, corrosions, the entity's purple sight, its appearance, a lab.
If all this made sense, then—
"The entity… is it…"
His voice trembled under the weight of truth. In the scene, Nice and Fionna's eyes locked on XN.
"What's on their mind now?"
XN had been just by the door the whole time.
The floor began to vibrate violently, and the atmospheric pressure increased.
Unlike Nice and Fionna, the other occupants were asphyxiating.
"Of course. This must be the ship I explored in the wasteland!"
An imminent consequence accompanied the revelation.
"If that's the case, this must be the scene where it crashes."
As XN pondered, the pressure intensified, and the ship saturated with smog. Lamentations and coughs arose in the chaos, suppressed by the loud sirens.
The panic grew uncontrollable. There were more answers to find in the memory. However—
"What if I die here?" XN anxiously questioned himself.
XN understood he was vulnerable to the ship's physical effects. There was no guarantee he would survive the crash.
However, some questions remained unanswered.
"I need to know what happened to Fionna… and Nice."
XN couldn't wrestle with his survival instincts and his gluttonous curiosity simultaneously.
A choice had to be made.
For a brief instant, rising adrenaline in XN swallowed the noise of panic. He could barely hear his heartbeat. His breath was as cold as his extremities, and everything happened in slow motion.
In the stress-induced calm, an unsettling sensation of being observed drew XN's attention. On his left, the dying eyes of a furious, suffocating scientist preyed on him.
"I had forgotten about this scene…"
In his left hand, the head scientist clenched something—a rectangular metallic object.
The pressure from the ship's descent began dismantling its structure. Metallic components, corpses, and some researchers were being sucked out of the ship.
XN could barely move.
Then all the noise abruptly swirled into a swoosh.
Silence reigned again, and the memory vanished.
In the emptiness surrounding XN, a strange weight burdened his heart. His feelings were disoriented, as though he possessed someone else's heart.
He squeezed his gray T-shirt at the chest while silence explained his frustration. His face remained beneath his hair, hiding the sad features on his exhausted face.
His body progressively folded into a catatonic position.
Shortly after, he asked,
"Hey… tell me something."
"What are you defending?"
A few minutes ticked by. XN remained unanswered.
His eyes nearly succumbed to fatigue—almost closed. A translucent luminous purple profile appeared, mirroring XN's position.
They stared at each other for a while, then a child's voice escaped from the entity.
"What is the drive behind your question?"
A soft smile stretched across XN's left face.
"You killed Vlad without hesitation, yet you let me protect Manson," XN began.
"And now you're about to kill these people."
Without overthinking, the entity asked,
"What's the point of intersection?"
XN pulled the strand of hair that lay in front of his left eye, then spoke in a frail voice.
"You fight just when I face a crowd whose hearts are burdened with wrath or disgust."
XN's pale expression steadily turned to relief as he observed the profile shape shift into a child with no identifiable facial contours.
An awkward silence trailed before XN pursued.
He released a soft breath and sat up. The entity mimicked his adjustment.
It flexed its biceps as it raised its right hand toward XN.
It remained quiet, as though trying to communicate.
Not understanding what was expected, XN turned his back. He looked behind, guided by the entity's index.
There sat two children—Nice and Fionna. They were teenagers. A soft light highlighted their profiles, and the children touched each other with their index fingers, broken smiles on their faces.
"I see."
XN had assimilated the situation. He didn't need words to comprehend the entity.
As he turned back, the purple profile had vanished, and the darkness steadily faded, chastised by the light of XN's awakening.
A thundering sound amplified with the approaching light from one end—XN's right. On his left, a long corridor formed by a hollow in the darkness led to the throne room—where XN had first encountered the entity.
A violent gust blew from the throne room against XN at intervals. The floor gradually developed into sun-dried sand, pebbles chattering with each gust.
Steadily, the outer world was reconstructed. XN was regaining consciousness. He looked back at the throne room as his conscience rematerialized under the passage of light.
Time froze for a while. XN stood at the margin of two contrasts—darkness and light.
"Nice meeting you… Nice."
His words echoed, switching off the bullet-time.
Troubled by the aftermath of his absence.
For hours now, XN had neither seen nor heard the residents of Nekrolyma. Perhaps it was due to the entity's sudden withdrawal.
The trouble was no longer the possession, but the aftermath, and he was about to face it.