I ran.
The head hit the ground behind with a wet, final sound I didn’t let myself hear.
My boots found the cracked earth, my legs found their rhythm, and I ran.
The world snapped back into focus in fragnts. The weight of my yo-yo in my pocket. The tallic tang of blood still wet on my skin. The blue notification burning behind my eyes, persistent and patient.
Level 2.
The words ant nothing yet. I shoved them aside.
Finn was still on his knees, three yards from the barrier. He hadn’t moved. Hadn’t crawled. Hadn’t even lifted his head. The black water on his hands had dried to a dull sheen, and he was staring at them like they belonged to soone else.
He was so close, he could’ve reached the barrier on his own and he simply... stopped.
I grabbed his arm. Hauled him up. His body ca loose jointed, boneless, a sack of flesh wearing an empty face.
"Up." I gasped. "Up, now, move."
His feet dragged. His head swayed. I was able to get him upright, and upright was enough.
Behind us, the silence broke.
Not with sound. With pressure, a sudden, rushing absence, like a dam giving way. I felt it in my chest, in the hollow space behind my ribs. The massive Corruptor was dead. Its body lay crumpled in the dust, headless and still. And for one breath nothing moved.
The lesser Corruptors had kept their distance while the King hunted. They’d circled the edges of its territory, waiting, patient, afraid to trespass on its feeding ground.
That was the natural order out here. The strong eat first. The weak wait for scraps.
But the King was dead.
And the weak had just realized there was no one left to stop them.
I heard it before I saw it. Just a shift in the ambient wrongness, a thousand hungry monsters awakening at once. The phosphorescent eyes that had watched from the shadows now advanced. Claws scraped stone. Bodies flowed through gaps in the wreckage, low, fast and hungry.
"Holy juices." Coco breathed from the barrier. His voice carried across the distance, thin with horror. "Holy damn, they’re all... RUN!"
I’m running, I thought. I’m running, I’m running, I’m...
Three yards. Two. Finn’s feet caught on sothing, a rock, a body, a piece of shattered glider, and he pitched forward. I caught him, my shoulder screaming, my grip slipping on his sweat slick arm.
Three steps away from the barrier.
Kira’s hand reached through the barrier. Her fingers stretched toward mine, the heat of Argent’s protection bending around her wrist like water around a stone. She was saying sothing, my na, a prayer, a curse, but I couldn’t hear it over the thunder of my own heart.
One step.
I shoved Finn through first. His body crossed the threshold and he collapsed on the other side, crumpling into Kira’s arms like a puppet with cut strings. She caught him, lowered him, her eyes already searching past him for .
I lunged.
The barrier swallowed whole.
The light was warm.
That was my first coherent thought. Warm, like standing too close to a heating vent on a winter morning. Like pressing your palm against a wall that’s spent all day in the sun. I’d forgotten what warmth felt like, real warmth, not the desperate, fleeting heat of exertion and fear.
I was on my knees. Soone’s hands were on my shoulders, my face, my chest, checking for wounds, for blood. Coco’s voice, high and frantic. Rolen’s low murmur. Kira’s breath, ragged and close.
"You’re alive." she said. Not a question. An accusation. Like I’d done sothing reckless and she was already furious about it.
"I’m alive." I agreed.
Her hands stayed on my face a mont longer. Then she pulled back, jaw tight, eyes bright. The black water in her system kept her emotions flat, muted, but I saw it anyway. The crack in her composure. The terror she’d been holding since the mont I turned back.
The ground beneath my knees was solid. Real. The barrier humd behind , a constant, bassy noise that I’d hated my entire life, the border of our cage, the wall that kept us in and the monsters out. I’d never been so grateful to feel its warmth on my back.
I looked up.
Finn lay a few feet away, curled on his side. Kira had draped sothing over him, a jacket, soone’s abandoned coat. His eyes were open but empty, fixed on nothing.
The black water had done its work too well. He was breathing. He was alive. But I didn’t know if the person who’d caught that canteen was still inside him.
Coco was crying. Silent, efficient tears that he wiped away with the back of his hand before anyone could notice.
Rolen stood at the barrier’s edge, staring out at the wasteland, his posture rigid. He didn’t turn around.
"You killed the massive Corruptor." Rolen said.
Not a question. His voice was strange, flat, but not with control. With the effort of keeping it flat.
"Seems like." I said. "I didn’t plan that, though."
Silence. His shoulders didn’t move. His hands, which I could just see at his sides, were curled into fists.
"They can’t be killed." He said it slowly, like he was sounding out the words for the first ti. Like he was testing them against reality and finding them wanting.
"That’s the one thing they teach you. The only thing that actually matters. Corruptors. Cannot. Be. Killed."
"I know."
"No." He finally turned. His face was pale, stripped of its usual careful neutrality.
His eyes moved across my face like he was looking for sothing, the lie, the trick, the hidden explanation that would make this make sense. "You don’t understand. I’ve watched them. I’ve studied every recorded Exile, every survivor account, every fragnt of data the Ones have bothered to share. No one has ever... there’s not a single docunted instance of..."
He stopped. Swallowed.
"You took its head off."
"Accidentally."
"Accidentally." He laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. "You accidentally did the one thing every human in every recorded generation has been trying and failing to do. You accidentally killed a walking extinction event. You accidentally..."
He ran out of words. Just stood there, staring at , his fists still clenched, his composure cracked clean down the middle.
Then he nodded once. Sharp. Final.
As if a nod could contain any of this.
The wasteland beyond the barrier was alive with movent. Dark shapes flowed through the wreckage, drawn to the sites of fresh death like sharks to blood. The King’s body lay where it had fallen, fifteen feet of void and absence slowly dissolving into the dust. Even in death, the lesser Corruptors circled around him, old habits, or maybe sothing deeper. Respect. Fear.
I killed that, I thought. The words felt foreign, too large for my mouth. I killed a King.
The blue notification still burned behind my eyes, patient and waiting. I hadn’t dismissed it. Hadn’t even tried.
Level 2.
Kira’s hand found mine. Squeezed once. Then let go.
"Welco back." she said.
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