For a while, the only thing he could remember clearly was the hood.
That yawning, familiar nothing under it. The way the dark had looked back at him like it knew his name before he did.
Why am I so drawn to that nothingness?
The question followed him down into sleep. The fatigue that rolled over him in the void felt the same as in the cruiser—except deeper, heavier, like someone had turned his gravity up from the outside this time. Limbs went soft. Thought thinned. The last thing he registered was the weight of Draco's Shroud in his hand and the quiet certainty that whatever he'd just seen under that hood was going to come back to haunt him.
Then the world went away.
—
He woke to warmth.
Sun pressed against his eyelids, stubborn and bright. A breeze nosed at his hair. Somewhere close, water spoke in low, patient syllables. It took his brain a second to decide this wasn't a particularly cruel dream.
Nhilly frowned and pried his eyes open.
He lay on his back on a narrow, rocky path. The stones under him were warm, baked through by the sun. When he pushed himself up, grit scraped his palms and his muscles complained in a chorus that told him, very clearly, he still had a body.
"Still me," he muttered. "Unfortunately."
Then he actually looked.
The landscape punched the breath out of him more effectively than any monster could have.
Mountains rose ahead, layered one behind another like the backs of sleeping giants. Their peaks were dusted with snow that caught the sunlight in sharp, clean lines. The sky above them was so blue it felt fake—no smog, no city haze, just a wide, endless sweep with a few lazy clouds painted in for decoration.
Below the path, a meadow spread out in messy greens and yellows. Wildflowers nodded in the breeze, tiny flashes of colour against the grass. A thin stream wound its way through the valley, water clear enough that he could see polished stones on the riverbed from up here.
The wind brought the smell of pine, cold stone, and something green and alive that Earth's cities had mostly forgotten.
For a moment, Nhilly just sat there and let his brain lag behind his eyes.
After the void—the cold that crawled under his skin, the quiet full of things that weren't quiet—this felt wrong. Too gentle. Too picturesque.
"Look at me," he thought bitterly. "Standing here like some tragic hero in a painting. What a cliché."
He snorted under his breath.
Still, underneath the self-mockery, something small and traitorous stirred. Not hope. That was too big a word. But maybe the faintest sense of… possibility. Of having been moved to a new board instead of swept off the table.
He dusted off his trousers and pushed himself fully to his feet, wincing as muscles he didn't remember owning complained. Draco's Shroud hung at his hip, unassuming in its scabbard, weightless in a way that made no physical sense.
"Alright," he murmured. "Let's be responsible about this for once."
He turned in a slow circle, taking in the view more critically.
Steep mountain line to the north and west. Rolling valleys and forest to the south. No obvious walls in sight, no banners, no smoke plumes big enough to scream "civilisation." Just raw landscape and the kind of silence that meant nothing large was stomping around nearby.
"Judging by the terrain…" he said, half to himself, half to whatever thing in the sky was laughing at him, "this should be the western continent."
Every kid on Earth had had the map drilled into them.
East: nightmares, high-rank cores, places where even the Returnees shrugged and said, "don't." South: wild, unstable, too many high rank Scenarios and not enough survivors. North: frozen nightmares and worse.
West?
West was where people tried to pretend Yarion could be lived in.
Dissapants had domesticated monsters here. Built towns and cities. Learned how to herd things with cores instead of cattle. The western bestiary in school books had always sounded almost reasonable—most creatures no higher than White Dwarf, Neutron cores rare, Black Dwarfs practically urban legends.
On the globe diagrams, the western continent had looked like a small mercy.
"Peaceful, relatively," he said. "Which means this is probably the best spawn I could've asked for."
He let the wind wash over his face, the sun soak into his shoulders.
"This is… good," he allowed, cautiously. "Could've woken up inside something's stomach."
According to every lecture, the safe play was simple: find a town. Towns meant walls, walls meant contracts, contracts meant work, food, and the illusion you were less likely to die in your sleep.
Huge cities in the west had grown rich on that illusion. Massive walls, formal gates, banners with the radiant sun of whatever human authority currently held the line. Find the banners, find other people, try not to be fed to anything with more legs than you.
"Best course of action: find a town," Nhilly muttered. "Only problem: mountains. And me."
He squinted up at the peaks again.
No obvious passes nearby. The path he was on hugged the side of the slope, zig-zagging upward in a way that promised hours of climbing before so much as a hint of a watchtower.
"I'm going to starve to death on a hiking trail," he said. "Of all the ways I planned to go, that wasn't on the list."
He rubbed the bridge of his nose.
"I came prepared to die," he reminded himself. "Just… not through cardio."
Silence answered.
He sighed. "Fine."
He stepped a little closer to the edge of the path, peering down at the valley and the river glinting far below.
"I could use my Star's power to fly over these mountains," he said, mostly to see how ridiculous it sounded out loud. "Walk around? No. Train, build up stamina? Obviously absurd. Throw myself into the sky with gravity? Perfectly reasonable."
The sarcasm helped. A little.
He closed his eyes.
Gravitic Shift sat inside him now like a coiled muscle. It didn't feel like an external thing—not like the relic sword. More like a new joint someone had installed without asking, waiting for him to try bending it.
He focused on the sensation from the void. The moment when the weight of him had changed in the dark. The subtle tug along his skin when the Star had branded itself into his bones.
"I want to go up," he thought. "Lower my gravity."
Nothing happened for a heartbeat.
Then the floor got… less interested in him.
It was subtle at first. The pressure of his feet against the stone eased, like someone had taken a bag off his shoulders. His knees felt oddly light. His stomach did that small, traitorous flip it always did in the split second before an elevator started moving.
Then gravity stopped acting like it cared as much.
His boots left the ground.
Nhilly opened his eyes.
The path was sliding away under him. Rocks and wildflowers and stray tufts of grass shrank as he rose, slow but steady, like a badly controlled balloon.
"Oh," he said.
Then, louder, a thin laugh breaking loose from somewhere tight in his chest:
"Ahahaha… this is incredible."
The mountains were level with him in seconds. Air cooled, cutting pleasantly against his skin. The whole valley unrolled beneath him like a painting. For a moment, weightless and moving, he let himself feel it.
A Nebula Star. In his chest. In his skin.
He'd been nothing his whole life. A man whose name was a joke, whose grand plan for the day he disappeared had been to make a phone call on a broken screen and wait for erasure.
Now he hung in the air on his own terms, riding a force usually reserved for planets.
The moment lasted maybe three seconds.
Then his stomach lurched.
He was rising. Fast.
The path he'd left was already far below. The valley was flattening out into shapes instead of details. His centre of balance had gone on strike. His body spun a lazy quarter-turn, then another, until the sky and mountains began swapping places in his vision in a way his inner ear took very personally.
"Wait," he said.
The Star ignored him.
He tried to correct his posture mid-air like he would on solid ground—shift weight, adjust stance. There was no stance. There was no friction. His limbs flailed. His head spun. Blood rushed into his face and ears.
"Oh, fuck," he muttered as nausea curled in. "Of course. Get a gravity Star and can't even manage basic 'down'."
He squeezed his eyes shut.
"Increase gravity," he thought, sharply. "Back to normal. Now."
The universe obliged with unnerving enthusiasm.
One moment he was hanging. The next, the world yanked him downward.
The air punched past his ears in a rush. His stomach did its best impression of staying behind. The valley, which had been politely distant, came storming up to meet him at what his panicking brain unhelpfully estimated as "terminal velocity plus embarrassment."
Two meters above the stones, survival instinct screamed loud enough to override nausea.
"Lower it!" he thought, wild. "Just for a second—"
Gravity relented.
For a breath, he hung, weight returning like a half-remembered word. He hit the ground with much less force than he should have, knees buckling. The impact still made his teeth click together, but he did not explode into paste.
Small wins.
He collapsed onto his back, gasping, heart racing, limbs trembling with a cocktail of adrenaline and delayed terror.
"Okay," he wheezed at the sky. "We're not… doing that again. Not… like that."
The clouds drifted above as if nothing interesting had happened.
He stared up at them until his heartbeat stopped trying to escape through his throat.
I need to practice, he thought. Or I'll kill myself before any monster gets the chance.
Preferably somewhere that won't turn me into a meat crayon if I misjudge the timing by half a second.
The sound of water, steady and close, finally threaded back into his awareness. He rolled onto his side and pushed himself upright, following it.
The path dipped down toward the valley, curving past a stand of pines that whispered to themselves in the breeze. Between their trunks, the river glittered—a ribbon of glass thrown through the grass.
Up close, it was even clearer.
He crouched at the bank, one hand braced on his knee, the other hovering just above the surface. The water moved slow and sure, curls and counter-currents drawing delicate patterns over the stones.
Something moved within it.
Fish—that was the closest word, though they'd get a biologist punched. Their bodies were almost completely transparent, outlines made of fine, glassy membrane. Inside each, floating where a heart might sit, circled a small, orange shape.
At first glance, it looked like a gem. Then he realized it had petals.
Tiny roses. Burning.
A bloom of orange flame folded in on itself, contained perfectly inside the clear shell. Each petal glowed softly, pulsing in time with a rhythm he could almost hear.
Nhilly watched one drift past, fascinated in spite of himself.
"Of course," he murmured. "Fish full of flowers. Why not."
He tracked another as it turned, fins twitching, little rose-heart spinning lazily inside its glass body.
"I wonder if you're edible," Nhilly mused, watching one glide past. "Almost feels wrong to kill something so mythical. But… I'm hungry."
Hunger had been a background hum since he woke up; now that he'd stopped moving, it stepped forward and cleared its throat.
With deliberate precision, he summoned Draco's Shroud.
The relic sword dropped into his hand with that same silent, inevitable weight. The black blade slid through the water with barely a ripple. He picked his target, exhaled, and thrust.
The fish never had a chance.
The glassy body pierced cleanly; the tiny rose-heart flared once and went out. Nhilly lifted the sword, the strange creature flopping weakly on the dark steel for a moment before stillness claimed it.
He held the blade up, fish dangling, and gave the empty riverbank a small, mocking bow.
"Ta-da. Culinary excellence," he said aloud, smirking at his returned reflection in the water's surface. Not bad for someone who can barely survive a fall.
On Earth, the mirrors had already started letting him go. Here, the river gave him back without argument. Wet hair, tired eyes, a man with a ridiculous sword and a dead star-fish.
"Upgrade," he decided.
After drinking deeply from the river—cold, clean water that scraped the back of his throat in the best way—Nhilly wrapped the rest of the catch in his jacket and set about making a fire.
"Gotta admit…" he muttered, arranging twigs and dry grass, "I am good at this. It's almost unfair how competent I am when I care to try."
It took longer than he wanted to admit to get the flame going, but eventually a small, stubborn fire caught and grew. He cleaned the fish as best he could, trying not to think too hard about which parts might be poisonous.
"First, a pinch of salt," he narrated solemnly, even though he had no salt. "Not too much—oh, precise, perfect. Now, a careful sear over the embers. Look at that crust… exquisite. Truly, a masterclass."
The smell that rose was… not terrible. Not amazing. But definitely food.
He ate in quick, focused bites, ignoring the faintly floral aftertaste and the way the texture couldn't decide if it wanted to be meat or jelly. It was warm. It was filling. It stayed down.
When he was done, he leaned back against a flat rock, watching the sunlight dance across the water, belly no longer gnawing at him from the inside out.
"Not bad, Nihilus. Not bad at all," he said with a wry grin, speaking to no one but himself. "I may be nothing in the world, but at least I'm not useless."
For a few breaths, with a relic sword at his side, hot food in his stomach, and a scene that looked like it belonged in a travel brochure instead of a death game, he let that small, absurd victory sit.
The world could be vast, the mountains insurmountable, the dangers unknown—but for the first time in a long time, Nhilly felt… capable.
The feeling didn't last, but it didn't vanish entirely either.
When the last of the embers died down, the river still glimmered beside him, calm and indifferent. If he was going to fall, this was the place to do it.
Deep enough to cushion impact. Not so deep he'd drown if he blacked out for a second. Rocks smooth, rounded by time. No obvious predators waiting with knife-teeth open.
"Practice pool," he decided. "Congratulations. You're now part of my reckless life choices."
He pushed himself to his feet, feeling the pull of tired muscles and the faint echo of his earlier flight.
"Alright," he said to the river, the fish, the mountains, himself. "Round two. But with fewer attempts at accidental suicide."
He took a breath.
"I can't rely on luck," he told the empty air. "Not anymore. If I'm going to live long enough to be murdered by plot, I might as well learn how to fly without throwing up."
Gravitic Shift waited, quiet, at the edge of his awareness.
He reached for it again.
For the first time since arriving in Yarion, the fear of dying and the fear of living sat side by side in his chest and, very tentatively, shook hands.