The monster's head was heavier than I expected.
Warm blood, thick and black as crude oil, dripped through my fingers and fell into the cracked earth. The head in my hands was enormous, something that looked almost human, crowned by a single, depthless eye that now stared through me into the nothingness. Its form seemed to shift even in death, its edges blurring with a dying static between solid flesh and void. The eye blinked once. Twice. Then went still.
Three seconds ago, that eye had been fixed on me from a height that blocked out the sulfurous green sky. The pressure of its gaze had stolen the air from my lungs. I'd raised my hand, clutching a worthless pebble, thinking maybe, just maybe, I could swap that terrible eye right out of its socket. A desperate, stupid, final distraction.
And I missed..... I think?
Instead of a pebble, I now held the entire damn head!
My arms screamed, tendons threatening to snap under the monstrous weight. I stood frozen, and I saw the headless body of the creature, the massive Corruptor, stand for one endless, impossible moment.
Then its broad shoulders swung. Its tree trunk legs faltered, and it fell. It didn't just collapse, it came down like a tower cut at the base, hitting the ground with a final, wet thud that kicked up dust and shook the earth beneath my boots.
Silence.
No more hissing. No more screaming. Just the hollow whine of the wind through the alien canyons and the frantic drumbeat of my own heart.
'What.'
The thought was flat, empty. A single word echoing in the void of my shock.
'What did I just do?'
I looked down at the head. Its single eye, a pool white and black liquid, stared at me. From our very first lessons, they drilled the immutable law into us. Corruptors cannot be harmed. Not by blade, not by fire, not by any ability a human had ever manifested. They weren't even considered monsters, they were forces of nature. Walking disasters. You don't fight a landslide. You just pray it doesn't bury you.
And I had just… taken its head off. With a thought. With a power meant for moving crates from a loader to a shelf.
A hysterical bubble of laughter stuck in my throat. Of course. Twenty years of lifting, carrying and stacking. The Universe, in its infinite cosmic irony, looked at my life and said, You know what this kid needs? The ability to keep moving shit around. I'd gotten the power of a glorified warehouse clerk on the day of my execution.
Until now.
The silence was wrong. It was the silence of a breath held too long. My own, and the world's. Everything around me stopped moving for a second. Nature seemed to be proccessing the fact that I had broken a fundamental law.
The air itself tasted different, sharp, electric, like the moment a conduit overloads. Something vital had just been severed, and the universe was recalibrating around the piece that went missing.
A chime, soft and crystalline, echoed not in my ears but directly inside my skull.
Light, white and serene, painted the air before my eyes, forming lines of text I had to blink away to read.
[You Slayed: King Emi - Level ???]
[Corruption Fades.]
My breath stopped. Level? We didn't have levels. We had… nothing. You were born, you lived, you got a useless power at twenty one, and you died. That was the script. The absolute, unchangeable law of our cursed existence.
The text shimmered, resolved.
[Xp Threshold Met.]
[Leveling up.]
The world dissolved into light.
[Advancement Complete.]
[Allaran -> Level 2.]
[New Thresholds Unlocked.]
[Spatial ability Improved.]
[Continue your journey.]
And then, it hit me.
Everything had changed.
Level 2.
The words meant nothing and everything. We'd been told stories, old whispers from the First Exodus, that the system could grant growth. That there were… levels. But no one had ever earned a single point of experience, because nothing out here could be killed. The monsters were eternal, unkillable.
Until I just killed one.
A cold, sharp clarity cut through the shock. It wasn't invincibility. It was a bypass. My power, Switch, didn't try to damage it. Didn't try to cut or burn or pierce. It simply… changed the location of two things. The monster's head and the pebble in my hands. The universe didn't register it as an attack. It was a rearrangement. And the monster's legendary defenses had nothing to say about that.
A wild, dangerous hope, hotter than the blood on my hands, ignited in my chest.
'If I can kill one…'
The head slipped from my numb hand. It hit the dirt not with a sound, but with a wet, final, ungodly thud that seemed to travel up through the soles of my boots. And I looked. I truly looked, for the first time since the world had dissolved into a carnival of death and terror. The silence after the fall was louder than any scream.
The valley floor was a graveyard. Finn, the Navigator, the man who could feel the direction of the Citadel, lay broken against the ground. His eyes were wide and empty. Mira had left nothing to prove her existence but a single boot. Of the fifty three of us teleported out, I saw maybe four other shapes, still and silent in the gloom. The rest were gone. Taken. Eaten.
I was alone.
No. Not alone.
From the shadows of the canyon walls, another pair of dark, glowing eyes ignited. Then another. And another. A low, chittering growl rippled through the air, the sound of Corruptors moving.
They'd come for the noise. For the death. They were coming for me.
The hope turned into sheer, primal terror. I had an ability I barely understood. And I had to use it somehow to stay alive.
My hand dove into the pocket of my worn out uniform, fingers closing around the familiar, smooth metal of my yo-yo. A stupid habit from childhood. A fidget toy. Right now, it felt like the only real thing in the world.
I turned and ran toward the safety of the barrier, the monster's blood drying on my skin, a silent blue notification burning behind my eyes.
[Level 2.]