If you want to read more about any of my stories or just to support me then here is my patreon:
Patreon.com/Doflamingo4
________________________________________________________________________________
Third POV:
Darkness swallowed everything.
Not the soft darkness of a bedroom at night, not the comforting blanket of sleep—this was something else. Something absolute. A darkness that felt thick, almost tangible, pressing against his skin like cold water at the bottom of an ocean trench. It was the kind of darkness that didn't just hide things—it erased them, devoured them, made the very concept of light seem like a distant, impossible dream.
Then—
CRASH!!!
Akai's body slammed into solid ground with a force so violent it echoed like a cannon blast through the abyss. The impact wasn't just heard—it spread, a deep, bone-rattling
BOOOOM
trembled through the unseen space around him, a seismic wave of pure destruction that rippled outward into the void. Dust erupted upward in a thick cloud, scattering like ash in a dead world. The ground beneath him cracked outward in jagged lines, like something fragile had been struck by something far too heavy. The fractures spread in a violent spiderweb pattern, the sound of splitting stone cracking through the silence like thunder rolling across an empty sky.
For a moment—nothing.
No movement.
No breath.
No sound.
Just a broken body lying in absolute darkness.
The dust settled slowly, tiny particles floating downward like snow made of decay, blanketing his motionless form. His limbs were splayed at unnatural angles, his face half-buried in the shattered ground. He looked less like a person and more like a discarded doll, thrown aside by some careless giant. The air itself seemed to hold its breath, waiting, watching, as if the void itself was curious whether the fragile thing that had fallen into it would ever move again.
Time passed… slowly… painfully…
Seconds bled into minutes, marked only by the faint, irregular drip of something—maybe blood, maybe something else—falling from his body onto the cracked stone below. Each drop echoed in the silence like a funeral bell, a countdown measured in lost life.
A faint twitch.
A finger moved.
It was barely a twitch, really—a microscopic tremor of the index finger of his left hand. But in that stillness, it was a revolution. A declaration. A single, stubborn nerve firing against the overwhelming command of his broken body to simply… stop.
Then a breath—ragged, uneven, like something dragging itself back from death.
It started as a wheeze, a thin thread of air forced through a throat that felt like it had been lined with broken glass. Then it deepened into a gasp, desperate and raw, as his lungs remembered that they needed to function. His chest rose and fell in a jerky, uncoordinated rhythm, each expansion sending fresh spikes of agony through his shattered ribcage.
Akai's consciousness crawled back piece by piece, like shattered glass being forced together. One moment there was nothing—a void within a void, a darkness inside his own mind that mirrored the world around him. Then came sensation: the cold hardness of the ground beneath him, the gritty texture of dust on his tongue, the overwhelming, all-consuming presence of pain. His thoughts returned not in a flood, but in fragments—confusion, then fear, then a dim, flickering recognition of where he was and what had happened.
Pain followed immediately—raw, merciless, absolute.
It wasn't a single pain but a symphony of them, a chorus of agony conducted by every nerve ending in his body. His ribs screamed with each shallow breath, a sharp, stabbing sensation that made him want to simply stop inhaling altogether. His spine burned with a deep, grinding ache that spoke of something seriously, dangerously wrong. His arms felt like they had been torn apart and poorly stitched back together, each tendon and muscle fiber shrieking their protest at even the thought of movement.
Even breathing felt wrong.
Not just painful—wrong. Like his body had forgotten the basic mechanics of it. His diaphragm hitched and stuttered, his lungs expanded unevenly, and with each exhale came a faint, wet rattle that he was almost too afraid to acknowledge. Something was loose in there. Something that shouldn't be.
His eyelids fluttered open.
Darkness.
Endless, suffocating darkness.
He blinked once.
Twice.
A third time.
Each time he expected his eyes to adjust, to find some sliver of light, some hint of shape or form in the vast emptiness around him. But there was nothing. No light. No shape. No sense of direction. It was as if the world itself had been erased, leaving only him behind. He couldn't tell if his eyes were open or closed—the experience was identical. For a terrifying moment, he wondered if he had gone blind, if the fall had stolen his sight along with everything else.
He tried to lift his head, and his neck screamed in protest. A fresh wave of dizziness washed over him, and for a moment the darkness spun, directionless and disorienting. He let his head fall back down, his cheek pressing against the cold, cracked stone. The dust on the ground smelled like ozone and something older, something ancient and forgotten.
"A…kh…"
His voice cracked, dry, barely human. The sound that came out of his throat was more of a rasp than a word, a vibration of vocal cords that had been battered and bruised. His tongue felt like sandpaper, his lips split and dry. He tried to swallow and found there was nothing to swallow with—his mouth was a desert, his throat a parched wasteland. He tried to move—just a little—and agony exploded through his body like lightning.
It started in his spine, that pain, and radiated outward in a flash of white-hot fire that seemed to set every nerve ending ablaze. His muscles seized, his fingers clawed involuntarily at the ground, and before he could stop himself, before he could clamp down on the sound—
"AKHHHH…!!! MY FUCKING BONES…!!!"
The scream tore out of him, echoing into nothingness, swallowed instantly by the void. There was no reverberation, no bounce-back of sound. His voice simply… vanished, absorbed by the darkness as if it had never existed. That silence was almost worse than the pain—the feeling of being so completely alone that even his own screams were taken from him.
His body trembled uncontrollably. Every nerve felt exposed, every inch of him reminding him that he should not have survived that fall. His teeth chattered despite the lack of cold, a purely physiological response to the shock that was still coursing through his system. His hands shook where they lay splayed on the ground, the fingers curling and uncurling in spasms he couldn't control.
And yet—he had.
He was here. Broken, battered, barely conscious—but here. Alive. The thought was almost absurd. He had fallen from a height that should have turned him into a stain, a red smear on whatever this ground was. But instead, he was breathing. Thinking. Feeling every single excruciating detail of his own survival.
He didn't know whether to be grateful or horrified.
DING.
The sound cut cleanly through the darkness.
It was crisp, sharp, utterly incongruous in this place of silence and void. His heart—already racing—seemed to skip a beat, then hammer harder against his bruised ribs. A faint blue glow flickered into existence before his eyes—the only light in that endless void.
The glow was soft at first, like moonlight through clouds, but it grew steadier, brighter, resolving into the familiar shape of the system screen. It hovered in the darkness, a small island of information in an ocean of nothing. The blue light cast faint shadows on his own broken form, illuminating the dust on his clothes, the pale sheen of sweat on his forehead, the unnatural angle of his left arm.
[Quest Failed.]
[Time Elapsed Since Fall: 10 Hours]
[Punishment Countdown Updated: 62 Hours Remaining]
Akai stared at the screen, his pupils adjusting to the dim glow as if it were the sun itself. The words blurred and sharpened, blurred and sharpened, as his eyes struggled to focus. Ten hours. He had been lying here, unconscious, broken, for ten hours. The number seemed impossible, and yet the dryness of his mouth, the stiffness of his limbs, the deep, settled ache of his injuries—all of it testified to the truth of it.
"…Holy shit…" he rasped.
His lips twitched into a painful grin.
The expression hurt—his lip split further, and he tasted copper—but he couldn't help it. The absurdity of it, the sheer, ridiculous absurdity, pushed past the pain and found something that might have been humor in the darkest corner of his mind.
"10 fucking hours…?? I never slept like that even in history classes…"
His voice echoed weakly, humor barely holding itself together under the weight of pain. The joke fell flat in the void, swallowed like everything else, but it felt important to say it. To make a joke. To remind himself that he was still him, still Akai, still the person who made stupid comments when things got bad. If he stopped making jokes, what would be left? Just a broken body in the dark. Just pain and silence and waiting to die.
He blinked slowly, eyes shifting beyond the screen—searching.
Nothing.
No walls.
No ceiling.
No horizon.
Just darkness.
He turned his head, a movement that took three attempts and left him gasping, and tried to see in every direction. The blue glow of the system screen illuminated perhaps three feet around him—the cracked ground, the dust, his own battered body—and beyond that, nothing. Not a gradient of diminishing light, not a gradual fade into gray. Just… nothing. A hard edge where light ended and absolute, impenetrable darkness began.
It was as if he was floating in the center of a sphere of nothing, the screen his only anchor to reality.
"…And why the hell is it dark here?" he muttered, squinting.
"I know I'm not blind…"
He stared into the void, willing his eyes to find something—a shape, a texture, a single point of reference. There was nothing. He raised a trembling hand in front of his face, silhouetting it against the glow of the screen. His fingers were there. He could see them, bruised and bloodied, against the blue light. But beyond them, beyond the small circle of illumination, the darkness waited like a patient animal.
He let his hand fall back to the ground, the impact sending a jolt of pain up his arm that made him hiss through his teeth.
He gritted his teeth and forced his arms to move. His muscles screamed in protest, bones grinding in ways they shouldn't. He had to do this. If he stayed lying down, he would stay broken. If he stayed broken, he would die here. The timer was ticking—62 hours—and he couldn't face whatever was coming while sprawled on his back like a wounded animal waiting for the predator to arrive.
He planted his palms flat on the cracked ground. The stone was cold and rough, the edges of the fractures digging into his skin. He took a breath—a mistake, as his ribs reminded him—and pushed.
His body shook violently as he tried to sit.
Every second felt like torture.
His arms quaked, the muscles trembling with the strain. His core—what he could feel of it—screamed in protest, his abdominal muscles tearing against the effort. His spine ground against itself, and for a moment the world went white with pain, the edges of his vision dissolving into static.
But he managed it.
Barely.
He sat there, hunched, breathing heavily, staring at the only thing that existed in his world right now—
The system.
His back was curved like an old man's, his head hanging low, his chest heaving with each ragged breath. Sweat dripped from his forehead onto the ground below, mixing with the dust and something darker that might have been dried blood. He felt hollowed out, scraped clean, every ounce of energy he had going into the simple act of remaining upright.
He sat like that for a long moment—or maybe an hour; time was hard to measure in this place—just breathing, just existing, just holding himself together by sheer force of will.
Then, slowly, he lifted his head.
His eyes found the screen again, the blue
He had played enough games, read enough stories, seen enough horrors to know what that usually meant.
His eyes hardened slightly.
"Alright…"
A pause.
He let the word hang in the air, let it be his stake in the ground, his declaration that he was still here, still fighting, even if all he could do right now was speak.
"I bet I have a punishment…"
His voice was low but steady, the rasp giving it a rough edge that might have sounded like determination, if you listened closely enough.
"What is it?"
For a moment—nothing happened.
The screen glowed. The darkness pressed in. The seconds ticked by, marked only by the thudding of his own heart in his ears.
Then—
DING.
The screen shifted.
New text appeared.
Simple.
Brutal.
[Punishment Assigned]
Objective: SURVIVE.
Below it, a timer began ticking relentlessly:
[61:33:15]
Seconds moved.
61:33:14
61:33:13
Akai stared at it.
The blue numbers seemed to pulse with each passing second, counting down to something he didn't understand but instinctively feared. The word SURVIVE hung above them like a sentence, like a judgment, like the opening note of a song that could only end one way.
Silence.
Then—
"…Good Lord…"
A breath escaped him, somewhere between disbelief and laughter.
He shook his head slowly, the movement sending fresh spikes of pain through his neck and shoulders, but he barely noticed. His eyes were fixed on the timer, watching the numbers change, watching his own future tick away one second at a time.
"You're kidding, right?"
He looked around again, as if expecting some hidden camera to appear, some explanation, some loophole. But there was only darkness. Only the screen. Only the timer.
61:33:09
61:33:08
The darkness pressed closer, or maybe that was just his imagination. He couldn't tell anymore. The boundaries of his little circle of light seemed to shrink as he watched, or maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him, exhausted and traumatized and desperate for something that wasn't there.
He shifted his weight, trying to find a position that didn't hurt quite so much, and his broken arm brushed against his side. The pain brought him back, focused him, reminded him of where he was and what he was facing.
61:33:01
He had 61 hours to survive.
Survive what?
The timer kept ticking.
The darkness remained.
And something, far beyond his sight… felt like it was watching.
[ End of Chapter 14.]
To Be Continued...
_________________________
Please... Don't forget power stones...
__________
If you want to read more about any of my stories or just to support me then here is my patreon:
Patreon.com/Doflamingo4 .