I take a cautious step forward, my hand hesitating mid-air.
For the first time since I plunged back into this nightmare timeline, I feel a profound, crawling sense of absolute dread that has nothing to do with combat or survival.
I reach out to touch the corrupted crystal, but an invisible barrier stops my fingers. The System overrides my physical action with a single, unyielding prompt.
[Activate Skill Rescue? Y/N]
What the hell would a monster's Echo show me? Would it even work the same way? The skill was designed to extract memories from fallen humans, not from beasts.
I pull my hand back, staring at the jagged black crystal.
The sickly magenta smoke curling off its surface looks exactly like the glitch that tore across the departure board. Like the flicker on the aluminum foil when Lola touched it.
I've been seeing this color since we boarded that train. And now it's bleeding out of a monster's soul.
This is wrong. This fundamentally breaks the rules of Thirstfall.
But every instinct I have, the same ones that kept me alive for a decade in the Deep, are telling me that walking away from this Fragment would be the worst mistake of my second life.
I grit my teeth, mentally smash the Yes prompt, and grab the crystal.
[Rescue Skill Activated]
My mind is violently ripped from my body, plunging into a hurricane of corrupted memory flashes.
Rough, cheap cotton sheets scraping against skin that isn't mine. I'm staring up at a sterile white ceiling. Buzzing fluorescent lights blind me. The overwhelming chemical stench of cheap disinfectant burns my nose so hard my eyes water.
I know this smell. It's an Earth hospital.
The image shatters. Now it's only sound. The rhythmic beep of a heart monitor, but the cadence is wrong.
Painfully slow…
Skipping beats…
Through a heavy wooden door, I can hear the muffled, exhausted voices of adults talking.
I can't understand the exact words, but I understand the tone. It is the unmistakable, heavy cadence adults use when they've decided to stop trying.
Another crack.
I am looking down a hospital corridor, but the perspective is wrong. Too low. The height of a child sitting in a wheelchair. I look down at my hands—they are small, fragile, clutching a plastic toy train.
The hospital walls are covered in cheerful, cartoonish train decals.
But the colors are bleeding. Over-saturated, twisted, and rotting at the edges. The exact same sickening magenta and green corruption that has been haunting me since Platform 3.
I want to pull out. Every fiber of my veteran consciousness is rejecting this experience. But the Rescue skill doesn't have a pause button. The memories come whether I'm ready or not.
The visuals die. Only emotion remains.
No images.
No sound.
Just a crushing, suffocating wave of pure, childish terror. It isn't the fear of a monster or the fear of pain.
It is a fear that doesn't have a name because the mind experiencing it is too small to process the concept.
It is the absolute, paralyzing fear of abandonment.
The raw terror that the voices behind the door are going to walk away and never come back.
A large hand holding a small hand. But the adult female hand is trembling violently. The child feels the shaking, and a wave of profound confusion drowns the terror.
Why is she scared? She's the one who's supposed to protect me.
I have felt this before. Not in the Deep. Not in combat. I felt this exact confusion when I was five years old, sitting in a hospital waiting room, watching my mother's hands shake while she signed forms she couldn't afford.
The parallel hits me like a physical blow.
And then…
Peace.
Absolute, deafening silence. The heart monitor stops. The blinding fluorescent lights vanish. There is no more pain. There is no more fear. Just a warm, empty darkness that embraces instead of suffocates.
And within that profound peace, a final, gentle sensation: a pull. Like being carried away by a soft, invisible current toward somewhere unseen.
And then... nothing.
I'm violently slammed back into my own body in the dusty ruins of the Gatekeeper's hall.
My knees buckle. I hit the concrete hard. My hands claw at the stone as I dry heave, and then I vomit everything left in my stomach onto the floor. My entire body is trembling uncontrollably.
I stay on my hands and knees in the dirt, breathing in shallow, ragged gasps.
Behind me, I can hear Oliver calling out, asking if I'm okay. Lola is saying something. I can't process their voices.
The world sounds like it's underwater.
It's not the death.
I've seen death…
I've caused death…
I've held dying men in the Deep and felt nothing but the clinical calculation of whether their Echo was worth extracting to their families.
It's the peace. The peace was real. That child finally stopped suffering. After all the fear, all the confusion, all the lonely terror of a mind too small to understand its own ending.
They found rest…
And then something reached into that rest, ripped them out, dragged them across dimensions, and twisted them into a colossal mechanical atrocity that guards a subway turnstile in an abandoned station at the bottom of the ocean.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. I force myself to stand on legs that don't want to hold me. I turn around and stare at the smoking wreckage of the Gatekeeper's throne.
The twisted railway steel. The locomotive boiler torso. The clock face where a head should be.
The toy trains.
The toy trains circling the base of the throne. Just like the toy train the child was clutching in the wheelchair.
My blood turns to ice.
It wasn't decoration. It wasn't a game mechanic. The entire puzzle—the trains, the clock, the lanterns—was built from the fragments of a dying child's last memories.
I look down at my hands. These hands held Eventide. These hands carved through Shadow Shellcats. These hands helped destroy the Gatekeeper.
These hands killed what was left of a sick kid from Earth.
I close my eyes.
If that was a child... then what have I been killing for 10 years?