"Come on… not now!"
Zee cursed under his breath, smacking the torch hard against his palm. It shrieked with a sickly buzz as the runes inside warped and crawled across the glass before guttering out into dead black.
He'd be lying if he said the darkness of the Soul Prison didn't scare the soul out of him. The job demanded only one thing: bravery. A requirement he'd foolishly believed could be met by erasing the emotion altogether.
Now, for the life of him, he couldn't remember what bravery meant, what it did, what it looked like, or how one was supposed to reclaim it.
Solgrave never asked for more than that emptiness. And the privilege of choosing a life in the false heaven called Earth was enough to seal his silence.
Many called Zee a fool. And they weren't wrong. Yet he believed that staying true to oneself would always outlast lies told for power.
'Truth had never been kind to those who carried it without ego,' he once heard Yash say.
And if Zee—the last one foolish enough to believe in it—died quietly among souls drunk on power, then perhaps the world had never wanted the truth to begin with.
Still short of Flicker status and having devoted his entire soul to ideals rather than power, Zee was forced to rely on relics of a forgotten age.
His torch, graced by a Harbinger Soul, sustained by the last breath of a soul-creature, and inscribed with runes born of a craft beneath Sani, burned as his final bulwark against the dark.
"Okay—there isn't any power greater than the 'One True Power,' but still," he reasoned aloud, letting his many voices bicker, hoping the truth hiding in the shadows would grow bored and leave.
Zee set the torch on his beanbag of a belly, aimed it forward, and brought his tiny yet shockingly robust hand down like a ceremonial hammer.
!Thunk!
His stomach wobbled and slurped inward, swallowing the torch whole until it clicked neatly into his belly button as it had always belonged there.
Zee took a step.
!Fwoom!
Another…
!Fwoom!
Each bounce of his gut jolted the torch to life, lighting the way while his hands remained blissfully free for far more critical work, like gesturing dramatically or stealing snacks from the bottomless sack tied to his loose pants.
"No practical use, my ass," he chuckled, proudly drumming his belly. The torch flickered in agreement.
Unlike his muscle-bound peers, Zee clung to the version of himself he would've been as a powerless mortal; an Earthling protagonist with no strength to boast of, only conviction, bad timing, and a handful of impossible traits that defied biology.
He wasn't stupid… Just a knucklehead.
Every step sparked a pulse of light, exposing the ever-shifting prison corridor in fractured glimpses. Ancient bricks closed in from all sides, the narrow hall trapped between rows of thick iron bars like a throat made of steel.
Zee trudged through the forbidden floors of the Soul Prison, deciding this officially ranked as his worst assignment to date.
"Talk about bad luck," he whispered. He didn't require oxygen, yet panic forced the reflex back into his lungs.
Using the torch's dying flickers, Zee stitched together a mental map of the corridors. He was one turn away from the exit when the light sputtered out completely, and no amount of frantic belly-jiggling coaxed even a spark.
"No problem," he lied to the dark. "I got this… probably."
He stretched his arms out first, making sure he wasn't anywhere near the cell doors—then quickly stuffed them back into his pockets. Rookie or not, He wasn't an idiot.
Now if only he could carve that fact into his soul.
He drew a steady breath and advanced one cautious step at a time. His eyes adjusted slowly, details surfacing with each measured movement.
Zee kept to the exact center of the corridor. The cells lining either side were darker than they should have been. Light didn't fade there; it was consumed. Only the rusted bars remained visible, framing yawning voids of absolute black beyond them.
He had no intention of checking on the prisoners. If they truly needed help, they wouldn't have swallowed the very concept of light Warden Solgrave had designed.
Each step echoed too long, rebounding between the walls before crawling back to him, thick enough to suggest another presence pacing in lockstep.
If he were a bat, he'd have fled already.
Too bad the only body transfiguration he'd ever mastered was his stomach.
Still… something was wrong. The silence pressed in—unnatural, patient. Far too calm for a Soul Prison. Far too quiet for a place overflowing with the damned.
Zee dressed the way he did on purpose: A broken torch dangled uselessly from his belt, clanking with every step. A cap three sizes too small perched atop his massive head, as if it had given up trying. Two belts, forcibly fused into one, struggled valiantly to restrain his belly, while his pants were yanked so high they looked aspirational, the buckle proudly engraved with the initials "S:S."
It was a walking invitation to ridicule. And that was the point.
Mockery was loud. Mockery drew eyes. Mockery kept people laughing instead of whispering.
Because in a place like this, a noisy prison was safer than a quiet, scheming one.
Zee kept moving, slow and steady, eyes sweeping the darkness as it crept outward. His vision improved little by little, while his body reacted before his mind could interfere, thanks to a crudely prepared Slot; years of exposure had condensed into a snap, teaching it to leech ambient Sani without consent. It was inefficient, but safe, as triggering a Slot manually, even for a heartbeat, was an invitation to die.
A faint glimmer shimmered against the suffocating darkness of the floor, and Zee lunged for it without a second thought, instincts screaming louder than reason. For a man his size, he was alarmingly fast, even without tapping into Sani.
He skidded to a halt beside the glow and dropped to the floor, gasping. "Hey… little fella…" he wheezed. "You have no idea… how happy I am… to see you."
The light came from a tiny, blinding-white flame, drifting between dimensions as if undecided where it belonged. Within it, fleeting hands sparked into existence, as did round, curious eyes; each forming for a heartbeat before dissolving back into light. It barely illuminated the corridor, but for those lost in this forsaken abyss, it was hope made visible.
Zee popped the torch free from his belly, unscrewed its crown, and coaxed the flame inside before locking it away. Once sealed, the Blip flickered and darted like a trapped firefly.
"I don't know why you found me," he whispered, smiling, "but debts like this shouldn't go unpaid." His smile flipped into a frown. "How does one even do that?" He wasted a snap on the thought before shrugging. "Eh. I'll just ask the Warden."
Zee rose, steadied himself, and scanned the prison once more, the light exposing secrets long swallowed by the shadows. The exit lingered behind him, close enough to taste. But for some strange reason, obligation outweighed relief, and a sudden sense of duty pulled him forward instead.
He wasn't done yet. If the Warden was watching, Zee intended to give him a reason to look twice.
The magnified white flame cuts through the murk inside the nearest cell. Inside, blood had been flung across the walls in a deliberate, ritualistic pattern. The lone inmate was pinned upright—his own arm driven through his massive chest and buried into the stone behind him, suspending his body several feet above the floor. Blood dripped steadily from his dangling feet, collecting in a dark pool below.
Zee understood the scene at a glance: Trapped for too long, the creature had turned its violence inward, feeding the urge with itself.
He understood it… but felt nothing for it.
Emotion had been intentionally excluded from his body's design—a pointless subsystem, especially for a prison guard tasked with overseeing the damned.
Zee swept the torch through the rest of the cell. Nothing else moved. Nothing else lingered.
Yet he did not step closer, for he knew better now.
Training—or perhaps instinct—warned him there was never a reason to approach without cause. And even then, maybe not. Not even if the reason was a damn good one.
A foul stench drifted toward him, riding air currents that shouldn't have existed this far underground. Zee shut off his sense of smell on instinct. Those systems were built to savor rain-soaked earth and good food—not whatever this was.
Keeping a careful arm's length, he pulled a small radio from his pocket and swept the torchlight across the cell door, reading the numbers etched into a rusted plate: 1997.
"Prisoner one-nine-nine-seven is dead," he said into the radio, voice flat, as though death here ran on a schedule. "…again."
A burst of static answered him. "Roger that. Cleaners inbound. Stay clear of the cell. Keep your keys on you. Stay centered, kiddo."
"Yeah, yeah—prison rules one-oh-one. I'm a rookie, not a dumbass," Zee scoffed as he stepped away from the cell, unaware that the shadows behind him rearranged themselves.
The staircase that had stood behind him moments ago was gone, swallowed by the void like a black hole devouring light. When he turned back, the corridor plunged into darkness once more.
"I was just able to—" Zee stopped mid-sentence and looked down at his torch.
The Blip's glow was fading, its unnatural body, forged entirely of light, slipping through the cracked ruin of its casing in a quiet attempt to escape its confinement.
"Hey—come back here…" He yelped, lunging after it.
The Blip passed straight through him, an ethereal thing with no physical anchor in any reality.
Refusing to lose his last source of light, Zee chased after it, jumping recklessly and reaching out into empty air. Blind to the shifting layers pulling him deeper into the prison, farther from the exit—
The exit that still lingered behind him, trying to catch him before he was truly lost.
The Blip broke into a scatter of smaller motes, twinkling around him in brief, defiant flashes before vanishing completely. Darkness reclaimed the corridor at once, and with it came a sound: a low rumble that tore through the silence like a fault line splitting open.
The sudden absence of light, paired with that intrusive noise, awakened something in Zee that should not have existed.
A deleted emotion.
The sound returned, first as a whisper, crushed and uncertain. It tightened into a squeak, then stretched into the strained effort of something learning how to wail. When it finally found its shape, it became a little girl's whimper: soft, trembling, and terrifyingly human.
Zee hesitated, then took a careful step toward the cell. His eyes strained against the dark, narrowing until they caught her—
A little girl.
A prisoner.
Sentenced for ending all of life in Heaven.
———<>||<>——— End of Chapter Thirty-Nine. ———<>||<>———