The sword slid out of my abdomen with wet, surgical precision.
I felt it, every inch of cold steel retreating through muscles and organs, dragging the last threads of my warmth with it. The blood didn't gush. It welled up slowly, almost politely, as if my body had grown bored of dying and couldn't even be bothered to bleed with enthusiasm anymore.
'Tuesday, I thought distantly, watching the red pool expand on the cold stone. 'It's always worse on Tuesdays.'
"For better or for worse," the figure in black said.
The voice carried no gender, no humanity — just the resonance of something that had been killing long enough to forget why it started. It sounded like a butcher who had stopped tasting the meat. The words didn't come from a throat; they came from the very concept of speech, echoing from everywhere and nowhere at once.
I coughed, the metallic taste of iron coating my tongue, and smiled.
"Don't you ever... get tired of this?"
It wasn't defiance. It wasn't bravery. It was just the weary curiosity you only feel after dying so many times that death ceases to be an event and becomes just another Monday. Or Tuesday. Or whatever day the universe decided I deserved to bleed out on a slab.
How many times had it been? A hundred? A thousand? I stopped counting when numbers lost their meaning — when time became a kaleidoscope of screaming and waking up in a bed that remembered nothing.
"You deserve worse than death," the figure replied.
Once, those words would have broken me. Now, they just made me want to know the "why."
The figure raised the blade again. That same overhead stance. Low guard, patient weight distribution, perfect economy of motion. I knew that technique too well.
The training hall. Afternoon light through the practice room windows. Her voice, patient and precise: "Like this, Kai. Economy of motion. Every movement is deliberate. Waste nothing."
De Vellandorian had taught me that guard. The same guard now being used to end me.
'Irony is a bitch. So was she, apparently.'
"What has the humble me done," I managed, blood bubbling at my lips, "to deserve getting murdered every time I fall asleep?"
I used to think of myself as a good person. A charming noble kid with dreams too big for his circumstances. Goals scribbled in the margins of Academy textbooks. A romantic who believed in second chances and meaningful sunsets. The kind of person who would stop to help a stranger. Who would remember your name.
...Who would—
The blade descended.
Quick. Elegant. A signature move practiced a thousand times. One slash opened my shoulder. Another carved through my collarbone. A third found the soft space between my ribs.
I didn't scream. My lungs were too busy filling with old pennies and failure.
The figure moved like water, an actor performing a play they hated but had long since perfected. Each blow was art. Each cut was a sentence in a language older than words:
'You are nothing.'
'You will always be nothing.'
'This is all you deserve.'
The final blow wasn't steel. It was a kick to the chest... measured, precise, putting me back where I belonged — the ground. I fell backward. The stone kissed my spine and expelled the last of my air.
"Disgusting and weak."
There was something in the voice then. Not quite satisfaction, yet not quite pleasure.
'Elation.'
For a fraction of a heartbeat, the voice changed. It became younger, gentler, familiar in a way that made my chest ache worse than the sword wound.
"Big brother... you promised you would remember..."
Then it was gone. The empty resonance returned.
"I've given thee courtesy enough."
My vision blurred. The world tilted. In that final fraction of a second before the darkness swallowed me, I saw the blade. Ivory-dark. Beautiful. Like a fang pulled from the mouth of a god.
The voice faded,
the world faded,
I faded.
...
I woke up gasping.
Not from fear, but from habit. My hands flew to my throat — still attached. My abdomen — whole. My chest rose and fell, lungs greedy for the air they had been denied seconds ago in another iteration.
Stop. I pressed my palms against my eyes until colors bloomed in the dark. 'Breathe. Count to ten. You're awake. You're back.'
Back to the game. Back to the Prison.
I sat up slowly, riding the wave of nausea. Dizzy, sick, but walking. I would always be walking. The morning light filtered through the window... artificial, but convincing. The Academy's environmental systems were masters of mimicry. They excelled at pretending this was a real world with real futures.
Last day. Graduation and my eighteenth birthday.
'Make money, retire early, get out.'
That was the lie I told myself every morning. Play the game, graduate with honors, start the business I'd been building in secret, and disappear where the system couldn't follow.
I swung my legs off the bed, my feet hitting the cold floor. Something crinkled.
A leather-bound notebook, worn at the edges. My journal... the one I kept hidden under the loose floorboard. The one the monitoring systems didn't know about. Inside were poems about light and fire, and sketches of weapons I had never seen but drew perfectly. Swords with impossible geometries.
And a list, written in shaky letters:
THINGS I'VE FORGOTTEN
Her name.
Why I'm afraid of mirrors.
What I did to deserve this.
How to cry.
Why the stars feel familiar.
Who taught me to fight.
What I promised.
I stared at number seven. The ink was fresh, as if I had written it last night. But I had no memory of it.
'What promise?'
I flipped the pages and found a pressed flower. Silver, metallic, impossibly preserved. It shouldn't exist. Flowers didn't grow with metal petals in any biology I'd studied. Beneath it, in a childlike hand:
"Big brother... you promised you would remember. Please remember!"
My hands started shaking. I slammed the journal shut and shoved it back under the floorboard.
'Not today. Graduation first. Escape second. Existential crisis last.'
...
I pulled up my interface with hands that had finally stopped trembling.
[Me]: Organize my agenda. Today's important.
[Assistant IO 70.1]: Good morning, Kai. Happy birthday. Your schedule has been optimized for graduation efficiency.
[Assistant IO 70.1]: Ceremony begins at 10:00 AM. Attendance is mandatory for diploma certification.
[Assistant IO 70.1]: Have a blessed day. May humanity's light guide you forward!
'Mandatory.'
I hated that word.
Graduation meant freedom. Not just from the walls, but from him. The person I had been before the loops started. Today I would walk out as Kai Sterling — a mediocre student with a forgettable face. The thing that whispered my name every night would starve, because Kai Sterling had never been anything. He had never built or burned or killed.
Being Kai was safe. Even if he was a lie.
...
I walked the familiar roads one last time. The cafeteria smelled of synthetic bread — chemical and wrong. I had eaten it for four years and never gotten used to the taste. In the gardens, bioluminescent trees swayed in artificial wind, their petals falling in perfect, meaningless loops. It was a music box that wouldn't stop turning even after the song ended.
The Grand Auditorium stood open. Golden light spilled out like a promise.
Students milled about in their robes. None of them could feel it—the wrongness threaded through every fiber of this place. The subtle dissonance, like a note played slightly off-key in a symphony.
I passed the cafeteria corner table. Empty now.
'Our table.'
Three years ago, she would sit there every morning. Tea that smelled like starlight. Silver hair catching the artificial dawn. She told me stories about the world outside. About freedom.
"You don't have to do this alone," she had said once, her hand on my shoulder. I believed her. For three years, I believed her.
Now, the table was always empty.
...
Inside the auditorium, she stood on the stage.
De Vellandorian. Valedictorian. My first mentor. My first betrayer.
Even now, she was beautiful. Artificial sunlight caught in her silver hair. Her voice rang out clear and strong: "…and so we stand at the threshold. Not as children, but as pioneers…"
'Liar'.
The thought came from the part of me that died every night. The part that knew. I stopped pretending to listen. Classmates' names slipped away like water. Names, faces... I forgot a little more after every reset.
"…let us build something worthy of our sacrifices…"
Suddenly, her voice stopped. Not dramatically. It just... paused. Like reality had been put on hold.
The air changed. It wasn't heat or cold; it was wrongness. Something fundamental was missing. I looked down at the shadows on the marble floor. Cast by hundreds of students, the stage lights, the artificial sun... they were all pointing the wrong way.
They weren't pointing away from the light. They were pointing toward me.
Every shadow in the auditorium bent in my direction like iron filings to a magnet.
'No.'
I knew this. From before Kai. From when light bent because I wanted it to. I clenched my fists. Around me, students murmured, oblivious. None of them saw the photons choosing me over physics.
'Liar,' something whispered inside me. Not Grace. Something older.
I forced my hands open. The shadows snapped back. Just a glitch, I told myself. System malfunction. That lie tasted worse than the bread.
...
A whisper echoed in my ear. Not sound, but a speaking directly to my marrow, old, patient... and full of longing.
"One day, everything will end."
Ice flooded my veins.
CRACK.
It was a sensation, as if reality had developed a fracture. The world was glass, and someone had tapped it with a hammer.
The auditorium exploded into chaos. De Vellandorian stumbled on stage, her composure cracking. We all felt it. Something was here. Something Other had forced its way inside.
Then, light. Not from the windows. Runes materialized in the air—thousands of glowing symbols in a language that shouldn't exist, spinning like the gears of a cosmic machine.
In the center of my vision, burning bright:
[GRACE]
Then, people started vanishing.
A girl flickered like a corrupted video file and disappeared. A student dissolved into pixels of light mid-scream. Panic stripped away the last of their humanity. They ran for the doors, but it didn't matter. One by one, they were erased.
Until the auditorium stood empty.
Until I was left alone.
The runes rearranged themselves into a message. The glyphs were alien — sharp and angular. But I understood every word. My bones had been waiting for this language.
Name: Light
Level: ????
Class: [CORRUPTED DATA]
Description: A lone wolf pup found after extended dormancy. The fire still burns within.
Status: Marked by [███████]
'Light.'
The name the figure in black whispered as it killed me. I spent eighteen years trying to forget it, only to realize I had been running from something that was waiting inside me all along.
The screen flickered.
[Grace]: Survive and escape the Prison Game.
[Special Conditions Detected]
[Calculating appropriate trial…]
[Trial assigned.]
[Wish you luck, Firekeeper.]
[Nightmare Sequence: Commencing.]
"I found you, Firekeeper."
Outside, the sky cracked. The dome that had enclosed our world shattered. Through the fractures, something vast with six colossal wings began forcing its way in.
I couldn't look. My hands were unmaking themselves, piece by piece. Not dissolving — transforming.
I tried to scream, but my body wouldn't obey. It wasn't mine anymore. It never had been.
The last thing I saw in the polished marble floor was my reflection. My face, my eyes, but something ancient and burning looked back. It smiled with too many teeth and whispered in a voice I had spent lifetimes silencing:
"Welcome home."
Then, everything ended.
I.O.[ERROR: SUBJECT LOST]
[RECALCULATING…]
[LOCATION: UNKNOWN]
[FIREKEEPER STATUS: UNKNOWN]
[GRACE: ATTACKING]
[ONE DAY, EVERYTHING WILL END.]
[BUT NOT TODAY.]