Day Three.
Jude had stopped speaking sometime during the second day, not because the pain had lessened but because he'd run out of the energy required to produce sound. There was a particular mercy in that — he registered it distantly, the way you register weather through a window.
He sat on the basement floor without moving. Moving cost things he no longer had.
Constantine sat across from him, a cigarette between his fingers that he hadn't lit. The Pocky was gone — Jude had eaten the last of it on day two, which felt like a reasonable final meal, all things considered. Constantine kept turning the unlit cigarette over in his hand.
"You're not human," Constantine said. His voice had the careful flatness of someone controlling something. "Three days. No water, no food, and Mnemoth feeding on you the whole time. An ordinary person would be dead."
"I'm more resilient than I look." Jude's voice came out thin and hollow, each word costing something measurable. It was, objectively, remarkable that he could produce sound at all.
This was not a lie. His enhanced constitution had always been the gap between him and the system's catalogue of ordinary threats — intermediate-level physical augmentation, vitality far above the human baseline. He'd watched Mnemoth reduce its victims to empty shells in a day and a half, start to finish. He'd been in here for three days and was still — technically — present.
Constantine picked up a water bottle and held it out.
Jude looked at it for a moment.
"Drinking it extends the timeline," he said. "Longer timeline means more time for Mnemoth to feed. Short pain or long pain, Constantine."
Constantine put the bottle down.
"The shaman," he started. "If we brought you to him—"
"He had no options the first time either. That's why his own people became the sacrifice." Jude closed his eyes briefly. "You already sent Lester to find him. Let it play out."
The basement settled back into its particular silence — not quiet, exactly, but the absence of anything except Jude's shallow breathing and the barely audible sound of something else moving inside him.
Day Five.
Jude's vocal cords had given out somewhere during the night.
He discovered this when Constantine asked him something and he tried to answer and produced nothing. He reached for the system instead.
System: ten asset points per use.
He'd used it once before. It worked well enough — Constantine's expression didn't change when the answer came, which meant the approximation held.
He tried to open his eyes and found he couldn't see clearly. Days of dehydration had done something to his vision — the basement had become shapes and gradations of dark rather than any specific objects. He could sense the room more than see it.
But the day before, he had managed to look. And through the blur, he had made out four pale figures standing near him, still and silent, doing something that looked like prayer.
Are they still there?
He couldn't tell anymore. He hoped so, distantly, in the way that you hope for things when hoping is all that's left.
Sometime after.
Mnemoth stopped eating.
Jude noticed this the way you notice when a sound that's been present for days suddenly stops — not as relief, exactly, but as a new and unfamiliar absence. The constant interior motion, the feeding, the itching wrongness of something consuming him from the inside — it paused.
Then something different started.
It took him a moment, in his current state, to parse what he was hearing. The sound was coming from inside his own body, but the direction had changed. Mnemoth wasn't reaching outward anymore.
It was eating itself.
Of course it is. He would have laughed if his face had cooperated. Of course. It can't stop. That's not a behaviour — that's a definition.
Mnemoth was hunger. Not a creature that experienced hunger — hunger itself, wearing a shape. It couldn't choose not to consume any more than a heart can choose not to beat. It had run out of Jude to eat, and so it had turned to the only remaining option with complete, instinctive, cheerful thoroughness.
The buzzing inside him grew chaotic — ten thousand individual sounds no longer synchronised, each one fighting its neighbours, the whole vast assembly turning its appetite inward. The harmony he'd been hearing for days collapsed into a churning, dissonant mass of things consuming each other.
Jude lay in the dark and listened to the countdown.
Day Seven.
[System reminder: today is the seventh day.]
Jude processed this slowly. His thinking had the quality of movement through deep water — each thought arriving well after the impulse that generated it.
Seven days.
"System."
The familiar tone. He found it, strangely, steadying.
"How many days has it been?"
Seven.
"Is Constantine still alive?"
Yes.
"If he asks — tell him I'm not dead yet."
A pause, during which the gnawing sounds inside him continued their slow diminuendo.
"I've always meant to ask something. If I actually died — what would you do?"
Considering your items, assets, and current mission status, your actual mortality probability is 0.3%.
"That's not what I asked. What if — hypothetically."
No answer came. The system didn't speculate.
"I'd like to die tomorrow," Jude thought, with the slow logic of someone working through an arithmetic problem. "I'm not a fortune teller. Dying on the seventh day feels too neat. I'd prefer the eighth."
[Administering supplemental nutrition.]
Something cold touched his throat and spread outward — a sensation of moisture reaching cells that had been without it for days. His mind flickered, briefly, back toward something like alertness. Not much. But enough.
A sweetness followed, spreading from somewhere that was no longer his stomach, since he no longer had one in any functional sense. He didn't know what the system had given him. It wasn't a Snickers. The result, however, was a marginal extension of the timeline.
Day eight, he thought. Good enough.
In the growing silence of Mnemoth's self-destruction, Jude became aware of something warming up at the edge of his consciousness — a faint heat that hadn't been there before. The gnawing sounds had reduced to a handful of scattered, weakening signals. Most of the swarm had already consumed itself into nothing. What remained was faint and harmless and losing ground.
Hah, Jude thought. Finally met something you couldn't swallow.
He heard Constantine move.
The specific sound of a lighter being struck — the small mechanical click, the pause before the flame.
He thinks I'm dead.
It was oddly clarifying. Constantine had apparently determined that the no-longer-smoking rule was no longer applicable, since the person he'd been observing it for had stopped being a concern.
I knew it, Jude thought, without particular irritation. That addiction is going to outlive everyone he's ever met.
Footsteps crossed the basement toward him.
Constantine crouched down. Jude heard him reach for a pulse, find nothing convincing, and withdraw his hand. There was a long pause.
"You can rest now," Constantine said quietly. "You've earned it."
Something was placed between Jude's lips.
The cigarette.
Then Constantine lit it.
Oh no—
The smoke went in before Jude could produce any response — a thick, immediate rush of it, filling what remained of his available interior space, cutting off whatever fragile thread of oxygen had been sustaining the last of his function. Mnemoth, still present in its dying remnants, lost its final source of nourishment in the same instant.
The buzzing stopped.
Jude's vision went to darkness shot through with small bright points, like looking up at stars through deep water.
A tiny golden shape appeared somewhere at the edge of his perception — small and vivid and moving very fast — and then was gone.
[The Totem of Immortality activates.]
[Achievement unlocked: Beyond Life and Death.]
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