The sword slid out of my abdomen with wet, surgical precision.
I felt it, every inch of cold steel retreating through muscle and organ, dragging my threads of warmth with it. Blood didn't gush. It welled up slowly, almost politely, like my body was too tired to even bleed properly anymore.
"For good or for worse," the figure in black said.
Their voice wasn't male or female. It lived in that liminal space where sound becomes concept, where gender dissolves into pure, crystallized contempt. Like a monster in human skin.
I coughed, tasted copper of it and smiled.
"Do you ever get tired of this?"
Not out of defiance or even bravery. Just weary curiosity, the kind you only get after dying so often that death stops being an event and starts being a Monday.
How many times now? A hundred? A thousand? I'd stopped counting after somewhere in between. Time gets slippery when you're dying so much, waking up in a bed that remembers nothing of your screams.
"You deserve worse than death."
Once, those words would've broken me. Now, they just made me want to know why.
"And why's that?"
I managed to cough up, blood bubbling at the corner of my lips.
"What has the humble me done to deserve getting murdered every time I fall asleep?"
I used to think of myself as a good person, you know. A charming noble kid with dreams too big for his station. Goals scribbled in the adventute of stars. A romantic who believed in second chances and sunsets that meant something. The kind of person who'd stop to help a stranger, who'd remember your name after meeting you once, who'd—
The blade came down again.
Fast and elegant. Like completing a signature move they'd practiced a thousand times.
One slash opened my shoulder, another carved through my collarbone... and last, a third found the soft space between my ribs.
I didn't scream, couldn't, really. My lungs were too busy filling with smelly fluid.
The figure moved like water, like a actor performing a piece they despised but couldn't stop perfecting. Every strike was art. Every cut, was like It was saying:
'You are nothing.'
'You will always be nothing.'
' This is all you deserve.'
The final blow wasn't steel. It was a boot to the chest. Putting me back in my place – The flor. I hit the ground. The stone flor kissed my spine and with it impact drove what little air remained from my lungs.
"Disgusting and Weak."
There was something in that voice, not quite satisfaction yet not quite pleasure. Yeah, it was elation.
Maybe I should call it 'her' this time.
"A bitch," I spat, and even through the blood and the dying, even through the countless loops of this same godforsaken moment—
"A bitch has no right to tell me what I am!"
Damn, that felt good.
My vision blurred, the world tilted sideways. And then my head hit the stone, and kept going, rolling, severed.
The last thing I saw, in that fraction of a second before darkness swallowed everything, was the blade. Ivory-dark, beautiful, like a fang pulled from the mouth of something that should never have existed.
"I've given thee courtesy enough…"
The voice faded, the world faded, I faded.
...
I woke up gasping.
Not from fear or pain. Just habit now. My hands flew to my throat, still attached. My abdomen, whole. Chest was rising and falling, lungs greedy for air they'd been denied seconds ago in another place, another iteration, another death.
Stop. I pressed my palms against my eyes until colors bloomed in the darkness. Easy, breathe. Count to ten, you're awake, you're alive, you're back.
Back to the game. Back to the Prison.
I sat up slowly. The world swam, nausea rolled through my gut like a wave, and for a moment I thought I might vomit. But I'd learned, over countless times, how to ride it out. Dizzy, nauseous, but walking, always walking.
The morning light filtered through my window, artificial, but convincing enough. The Academy's environmental systems were good at mimicking dawn. Good at pretending this was a real world, with real sunrises, with real futures stretching out beyond the horizon.
Last day, supposedly. Graduation and to complete 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 a business I've been building in secret and disappear somewhere the system couldn't follow.
I pulled up my interface with that thought.
[Me]: Organize my agenda, today's important day.
[Assistant IO 70.1]: Good morning, Kai. Happy birthday. Your schedule has been optimized…
[Assistant IO 70.1]: Have a blessed day. May humanity's light guide you forward!
I stared at the words. Eighteen years old, eighteen years in this prison, eighteen years of dying in my sleep and waking up to pretend everything was normal.
Kai. That's what they called me here. What I called myself, most days. Supposedly it meant freedom, like water flowing, wind moving, all those poetic shit people carve into temple stones when they want to feel proud.
But I knew better. I knew what it called me.
Light.
...
The academy rose before me like a monument to hubris. Ancient stone walls fused with metalic conduits. Spires that pierced the artificial sky, their surfaces crawling with data streams visible only to those with neural implants. Underground vaults humming with technology older than the nation itself, maybe older than the Prison.
A fortress, q school, a cage dressed in scholarly robes.
An ending for some and beginning for others.
I walked the familiar roads one last time. Past the cafeteria, filled with the smell of synthetic bread and burnt coffee. Past the gardens, where bioluminescent trees swayed in artificial wind, petals falling in perfect, meaningless loops. Past the library, where stories of human knowledge and culture, all of it monitored, where controlled.
Students milled about in their graduation robes. Some cried, some laughed, most looked relieved. None of them knew, none of them could feel it, the wrongness threaded through every fiber of this place. The subtle disonance, like a note played slightly off-key in a beautiful symphony, so that no one noticed.
Or maybe they did feel it... maybe they just didn't care anymore.
At the end of it all, I reached the Grand Auditorium. The doors stood open, golden light spilling out like a promise of a bright Future ahead.
Inside, hundreds of seats faced a raised stage where she stood.
De Vellandorian, Valedictorian of this year, representative speaker, my first mentor, my first betrayer.
Even now, after everything, she was beautiful. Sunlight, artificial, but beautiful nonetheless, caught in her silver hair. Her voice rang out clearly and strong, each word precisely weighted, perfectly delivered.
"…and so we stand at the threshold. Not as children, but as pioneers…"
I stopped pretending to listen.
All around me, faces I should remember. Classmates I'd studied with, eaten with, survived with for years. But their faces blurred in my mind, names slipped away like water through fingers. I forgot a little more after every dream. After every death, after every reset.
But it's fine. I'm used to it.
'A prisoner, through and through.'
At least, that's what I believed.
...
"…let us build something worthy of our sacrifices…"
De Vellandorian's voice was cutted off. Not dramatically or suddenly. It just… stopped. Like someone had paused reality itself.
The air changed.
It wasn't heat, though my skin prickled like I was standing too close to a fire. It wasn't cold, though something deep in my chest went numb. It was wrongness, something fundamental was undeniable missing.
I looked down.
The shadows on the marble floor, cast by hundreds of students, by the stage lights, by the artificial sun streaming through stained glass windows... were pointing the wrong way.
Not toward the windows, not toward any light source. Toward me.
Every single shadow in the auditorium, like iron filings drawn to a magnet, bent in my direction.
'What the—?'
Around me, students murmured. Some cried quietly. A few embraced. Nobody seemed to notice.
"Finally. It's almost over."
"I can't believe it's really De Vellandorian."
"I thought Kai would end up doing it."
"Nah, you know him. Too focused on his business."
"Hey… don't you feel cold?"
"That's just nerves. Big day."
That last exchange snagged my attention. Someone else felt it.
Then, a whisper. Not from beside me, not from behind. From inside my ear.
A voice that bypassed sound entirely and spoke directly to something deeper than hearing.
Old, patient full of longing.
"One day, everything will end."
Ice flooded my veins. My spine locked, my breath caught. And then—
CRACK.
Not a sound, a sensation. Like reality itself had developed a suble fracture. Like the world was glass and someone had just tapped it with a hammer.
Everyone heard it.
The auditorium exploded into chaos. Gasps, screams, someone dropped their datapad and it shattered against marble. De Vellandorian stumbled backward on stage, her perfect composure finally cracking.
Because we all felt it. Something was here, not wrong, not broken. Other.
The Prison hadn't shattered... Something had forced its way inside.
Then, light. Not from the windows. Not from any source I could put a name. Runes materialized in the air. Hundreds, maybe thousands of glowing symbols in a language that shouldn't exist, spinning like the gears of some vast cosmic machine.
And in the center of my vision, burning bright enough to hurt:
[GRACE]
The word stood there. Then... people started vanishing.
A girl three rows ahead flickered, like a corrupted video file, and disappeared. Gone, Erased?
Another student screamed, the sound cut short as his body dissolved into pixels of light.
Fear, true panic. The kind that strips away the last of humanity and leaves only animals drive by extinct, desperate to survive. Ran for the doors, for the windows, for each other.
It didn't matter.
One by one, they vanished. Ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred. Until the vast auditorium stood empty, until the only sound was my own ragged breathing... until I was, alone.
...
The runes still hung in the air. Slowly, they rearranged themselves, spinning, interlocking, forming something like a screen, something like a mensage.
I read it.
The glyphs were alien, sharp and angular, nothing like any language taught in the academy, much less nothing like any human script I've ever seen. But I understood, every, single little word.
Like my bones had been waiting for this language, as if my soul had spoken it long before my body learned to breathe.
Name: Light
Level: ????
Class: [CORRUPTED DATA]
Description: A lone wolf pup found after extended dormancy. The fire still burns within.
Status: Marked by [███████]
I read it once, then twice, then a third time.
Light.
Not Kai, not the student, not the businessman, not the charming noble kid with dreams and goals and—
Just Light.
The name the figure in black whispered as they killed me, night after night, death after death. The name I've spent eighteen years trying to forget.
My hands trembled. Not from fear, from the fealing something was finally clicking together. From the horrible, sinking realization that I've been running from something that had been waiting inside me all along.
The screen flickered again. New text scrolled into view, slow, like it was reading a sentence trapped for too eons.
[Grace]: Survive and escape the Prison Game.]
[Special Conditions Detected]
[Calculating appropriate trial…]
[Trial assigned.]
[Wish you luck, Firekeeper.]
[Nightmare Sequence: Commencing.]
The words burned themselves into my retinas, to my mind, to... something deeper, something that remembered being called by that name in places this Prison had tried very hard to make me forget.
Firekeeper.
Outside, beyond the auditorium windows, the sky cracked, the artificial dome that had enclosed this world for as long as I could remember, shattered like It was the fraggiest things in the world.
Through the fractures, something vast with six colossal winges began forcing its way through. Slowly and patiently, as if wainting for this moment as if it was inevitable.
But I didn't look at it. I Couldn't...
Because something was happening to me. My hands, they were dissolving. No… unmaking themselves, piece by piece, like I was being carefully disassembled by an unknown.
No, it was like transforming.
I tried to move, to run, to scream... but my body wouldn't obey. Because it wasn't mine anymore, it never had been.
The last thing I saw, before the world collapsed into light and shadow and something other, was my reflection in the polished marble floor.
My face, my eyes, but something ancient and burning looked back, something that smiled with too many teeth, something that whispered in a voice I'd spent lifetimes trying to silence:
"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.]