Eleven minutes.
Kael pulled off his shirt and dropped it on the path. The trousers came next. Then the shoes. He placed each item carefully, visible, arranged the way clothes fall when someone undresses in a hurry rather than when they're deliberately planted. A shirt half-folded. Trousers crumpled. One shoe on its side. He'd learned from the store that details mattered, the difference between a display that looked arranged and one that looked lived-in was the asymmetry.
He stepped off the path in his boxers and retreated into the undergrowth.
The footsteps were closer now. Through the branches, he could see a man on the path—middle-aged, heavyset, carrying an axe over one shoulder and wearing the rough-spun clothes of someone who worked outdoors. A woodcutter, probably. Heading back to the village.
The Super Dimensional Eye confirmed it before the man came fully into view.
The footsteps belonged to a middle-aged man with a woodcutter's axe over one shoulder and the posture of someone who had stopped enjoying the walk home a long time ago. He was heavyset, slope-shouldered, and moved with the slow resignation of a body that had been doing the same work for decades.
Through the Super Dimensional Eye, Kael saw his information appear:
Barden. Male. 46. Villager of Ella Village. Woodcutter, Level 3.
No combat profession. No manufacturing profession. Just a man with an axe coming home from work.
The eye's status display, hovering at the periphery of his vision like a watermark, showed different numbers than before.
Level 2. Experience: 0/2. Energy points: 0.
The death prediction had cost his only energy point, and that expenditure had apparently been enough to push the ability past its first threshold.
The function list had grown.
Functions one through six were the same: identification, time, status, skills, ability details, death prediction. But a seventh entry had appeared at the bottom:
7. Read the surface thoughts of targets below a certain threshold.
Kael stared at it.
He was thinking about what "surface thoughts" meant in practice. Surface implied there were depths the ability couldn't reach. Below a certain threshold meant stronger minds were immune. And the word "targets" meant he had to direct it, it wasn't ambient, wasn't passive. He had to choose to look.
He tried it on Barden.
He could hear the man thinking.
'Another day, same path, same aching shoulder. And when I get home it'll be the same face and the same tasteless food and the same...'
The woodcutter's thoughts drifted into territory that Kael didn't need and didn't want. Petty resentments. Domestic fantasies that were none of his business. The private ugliness of a person who didn't think anyone was listening.
Kael stopped listening. He'd learned what he needed. This man was exactly what he appeared to be. No hidden combat abilities. No suspicion. Just a tired woodcutter thinking tired thoughts on his way home.
Ten minutes and forty seconds.
Kael had already removed his shirt. Now he took off the trousers, the shoes, the socks. He folded everything with mechanical speed and placed the bundle on the path, directly in the woodcutter's line of approach. Then he retreated into the undergrowth in nothing but his boxers and crouched behind a fallen log.
The woodcutter rounded the bend thirty seconds later. He saw the clothes. He stopped. He looked left, looked right, and called out in a voice that was trying hard to sound honest: "Anyone lose some clothes? These yours?"
Silence.
The woodcutter looked at the clothes again. They were strange, foreign fabric, unusual cut, buttons instead of ties. Valuable, probably. He checked the path one more time, then stuffed the bundle into his bag with the speed of a man who had done this math before and always arrived at the same answer. He walked the rest of the way out of the forest noticeably faster than he'd entered it.
Kael watched him go. Then he checked the time.
Nine minutes and ten seconds.
—
He needed to move deeper into the woods. Not to hide, if the hunter could track him by anything other than appearance, hiding was meaningless, but to put distance between himself and the village so that when the fire came, the thermal wave wouldn't reach him.
He moved quickly, barefoot, ignoring the stones and roots that cut into his soles. The forest floor was damp and cold and every step left a mark, but footprints didn't matter if he was right about the hunter's methods, and nothing mattered at all if he was wrong.
Seven minutes.
He found a dense thicket of undergrowth near the center of the woods, low shrubs, heavy canopy, the kind of place where the light barely reached the ground. He pressed himself into it, ignoring the branches that scraped his bare skin and the insects that found him immediately.
The mosquitoes arrived first. Then something larger, with wings, that he didn't recognize. He let them land. He let them bite. Stillness was more important than comfort, and comfort had never been high on his list of priorities.
Six minutes.
This was the part he couldn't calculate. He'd made his bet. The clothes were on the woodcutter, walking into the village. If the hunter identified travelers by their foreign clothing, it would find Barden instead of Kael. If it identified them some other way, by soul, by energy signature, by the golden eye now lodged in Kael's skull, then none of this mattered, and he was going to die in a thicket in his underwear with mosquito bites on his arms.
He had a backup plan for that possibility. It wasn't a good one. But it was there.
Five minutes.
Kael closed his eyes and waited.
—
What happened next happened inside his head.
A voice. Not his own. Not the entity's. Something else entirely, lighter, closer, as if someone were sitting inside his skull and had just leaned forward to speak.
'oh. Oh, you're awake. You're already awake.'
His body went rigid. Every instinct he had fired at once, locate the threat, assess the angle, prepare to move, but there was nothing. The forest was empty. The voice had come from inside him.
'Hello? Can you—can you hear me?'
The voice was female. Young. Not a child, but not fully adult either, somewhere in the uncertain middle, with the cadence of someone who was used to talking and not used to being heard. It sounded startled. It sounded, Kael realized, almost as alarmed as he was.
Four minutes and thirty seconds.
'Who are you?'
He thought it rather than said it, testing. The response came immediately.
'I'm—okay, this is going to sound strange, but I'm the Super Dimensional Eye. Or, well, I'm the consciousness inside it. I have a name. It's Xi. Like the letter 'Z'. Please don't make it weird.'
A consciousness. Living inside his eye. Speaking directly into his thoughts.
Kael processed this in approximately one second and filed it under "things that are terrifying but not immediately lethal." He had more urgent concerns.
'Xi. I have less than five minutes to live. I need you to be quiet.'
Silence. Then:
'I'm sorry, you have what?
Kael did not answer. He was counting. Four minutes and twelve seconds. The woodcutter would have reached the village by now. He'd be walking through the central clearing, maybe stopping at his house, maybe—
'No, wait. Wait wait wait. You can't just say 'less than five minutes to live' and then go quiet. What's your name? What's happening? Where are we? Why are you—are you in a bush? Why aren't you wearing clothes?'
Every question was exactly the question a reasonable person would ask in this situation, and every question was the worst possible thing to ask right now. Kael felt something tighten behind his eyes. not pain, more like pressure, as if the eye itself were straining to accommodate two inhabitants at once.
He tried a different approach. Instead of answering, he focused on the death scene, let the image rise in his mind, the village from above, the pillar of fire, the cracks in the earth, the timestamp counting down.
Xi went quiet.
The quiet lasted three seconds, which was long enough for Kael to know she'd seen it, and short enough to know she'd understood it immediately.
'That's you,' she said. 'The person who's supposed to die in that picture is you.'
'Yes.'
'And you're hiding. In the woods. Without clothes on.'
'Yes.'
'Because you think the thing that's coming will identify you by your clothes, and you gave them to someone else.'
Kael blinked. He hadn't explained the plan. He'd shown her the image and she'd worked it out in three seconds.
'Yes. That's correct.'
'And if it doesn't identify you by clothes? If it can sense you some other way?'
'Then I die in a bush.'
Another silence. Shorter this time.
'You gave your clothes to someone. And that person is walking into the village right now. The village where the fire is going to happen.'
Kael said nothing.
'The fire that kills everything it touches.'
He still said nothing. Xi's voice, when it came again, was quieter.
'You know what's going to happen to him and yet you did it anyway.
There was no judgment in her voice. That was the strange part. She wasn't accusing him. She was just… seeing it. He hadn't let himself think about the woodcutter walking into the village with foreign clothes in his bag and less than three minutes to live and no idea that his tired walk home was going to end in a pillar of fire.
Two minutes and forty seconds.
I''m not saying it's wrong,' Xi said.'I'm just noticing that you didn't hesitate.'
Three things about Xi crystallized in that single observation. She was perceptive. She was honest. And she had the instinct to say the precise thing that would get under his skin at any precise moment.
Kael didn't respond. He didn't have time to respond, because the sky broke open.
—
The sound came first. A crack so enormous it felt less like noise and more like the air itself being torn in half. Kael's hands went to his ears instinctively, too late, and the pressure wave shuddered through the trees hard enough to shake loose a rain of leaves and dead bark. Birds exploded from the canopy in every direction, a chaos of wings and screaming.
Then the impact. A concussion that traveled through the ground like a hammer striking a drum—Kael felt it in his knees, his spine, his teeth. Something massive had hit the earth near the village. The treetops swayed. A branch cracked somewhere nearby and fell with a slow, creaking finality.
'What was that?' Xi's voice had gone thin. 'What just happened?'
Kael didn't answer. He was counting. One minute and fifty seconds.
'Something is landing near the village. It came from the air. It's what kills me in the death scene.'
'And we're just… sitting here.'
'Yes.'
'In a bush.'
'Yes.'
Without clothes.
'You've mentioned that.'
'I'm going to keep mentioning it because I think it's important context for how we die.'
Despite everything, the countdown, the shaking ground, the fact that he was crouched in a thicket waiting to find out whether his gamble had condemned him or saved him. Kael felt something move in his chest. Not amusement, exactly. Something adjacent to it.
Fifty-eight seconds.
Then the fire came.
Even from this distance, a kilometer, maybe more, the heat was immediate. It hit his skin like opening an oven, and the light turned the forest orange. Through the canopy, he could see it: the pillar of fire, exactly as it had appeared in the death scene, rising from the village into the sky with a roar that was less sound than force. The air itself seemed to flex around it.
Trees at the edge of the forest, the ones closest to the village, began to smolder. Not catch fire, there was no direct flame, but the sheer radiant heat was enough to make the bark smoke and the leaves curl. If Kael had been at the forest's edge instead of its center, the heat alone would have killed him.
'Oh god,' Xi whispered.
Thirty seconds.
The pillar burned. The sky turned red. And Kael counted.
At twelve seconds, there was a second concussion, another sonic crack, another pressure wave through the trees, and the fire cut off as abruptly as it had started. A rush of wind followed, violent and cold, the vacuum left by something massive departing at tremendous speed. The wind stripped leaves from branches and flattened the undergrowth in a single direction, and then it was gone, and the forest was quiet.
Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
Zero.
Kael exhaled.
He was still here. Still breathing. Still crouched in a thicket with scratches on his arms and mosquito bites on his legs and the copper taste of adrenaline in the back of his throat. The timestamp in the corner of his vision had passed the moment of his predicted death, and he was on the other side of it.
Kael stood. His legs were shaking, which surprised him. He looked at his hands and they were shaking too. A fine, involuntary tremor that he could not will away. His body was doing what his mind would not. Acknowledging what had just happened.
He flexed his hands until the tremor slowed, and then he started moving.
—
He waited in the woods while the smoke cleared. Through the thinning trees, he could see the village, parts of it still standing, parts of it smoldering. The fire column had been concentrated. Devastating within its radius, but not indiscriminate. Most of the houses were intact. He could hear voices in the distance: shouting, crying, the sounds of a community absorbing a disaster.
'Are you going to go help them?' Xi asked.
'Not yet.'
'Why not?'
'Because I need clothes first. And because the villagers need to leave before I can enter without being noticed.'
'You're going to steal from a disaster.'
'I'm going to survive a disaster. There's a difference.'
—
While he waited for the villagers to scatter, Kael began the conversation he'd been postponing.
'You said your name is Xi. You're the consciousness inside the Super Dimensional Eye.'
'Yes. I know this is a lot to process. You've got a whole person living in your eye. It's not ideal for either of us.'
'Can you hear everything I think?'
'I can hear what you direct at me. Like right now. When you're thinking to yourself, it's more like… background noise? I get impressions. Feelings. Not specific words unless you aim them.'
This was important. Kael turned it over, testing it against what he knew about the eye's functions. If Xi could hear directed thoughts but not private ones, then he still had an interior life she couldn't access. A room with a door.
He tested it. He thought, deliberately and privately: I don't trust you. No response. No reaction. Then he thought, directed outward: 'Thank you for explaining.'
'Of course. I know this is a strange situation. I've done this before, been paired with someone, I mean, but it's always strange at first.'
'You've been paired with other travelers?'
'A few. In other worlds. Lower difficulty, mostly. You're my first Impossible.I'm trying not to think about what that means.'
'How much do you know about this world?'
'Honestly? Nothing. Each parallel world is different. I know how the eye works, and I know some general things about how the system operates, but this place? I'm as lost as you are.'
She sounded embarrassed about it. There was no exaggeration, no theatrical self-deprecation. Just the mild discomfort of someone admitting they couldn't help when they wanted to.
'That's fine. I wasn't expecting a tour guide. Can you tell me about my curse?'
'Purgatory of the Heartless?' She said it carefully, the way you say the name of a disease after looking it up. 'I've read the description. I haven't encountered this specific curse before.'
What's your reaction to it?
He asked because he wanted to see what she'd say.
'I think it's cruel.'
Kael stood in the forest with the smoke drifting above the canopy and a stranger's voice in his head who had just said the thing he'd thought an hour ago and hadn't been able to say to himself.
'The villagers are leaving. I'm going to get clothes and food. We can talk more after.'
'Okay,' Xi said.
—
In the village, small fires still smoldered. The southwest corner was a blackened crater, foundations exposed, timber reduced to charcoal, the ground itself glazed in places where the heat had fused the dirt to glass. The surrounding houses stood intact but scarred, their walls blistered on the sides that had faced the fire.
Kael moved through the empty streets. The villagers had fled to the fields or the far side of the forest, he could see distant figures huddled at the tree line, pointing, talking. Nobody was looking at the village itself. Nobody wanted to come back yet.
He found a clothesline behind one of the intact houses. A tunic, roughspun, brown. Trousers that were too wide at the waist but close enough. He took them, put them on, and felt the fabric settle against his skin like someone else's life.
In a kitchen nearby, he found bread and dried meat in a cloth-covered basket. He took what he needed and no more. The eye told him the names of everything he touched, the grain variety of the bread, the animal the meat came from, the age of the basket. Information. Relentless, impersonal, accurate information. It was the eye's only mode, and right now Kael was grateful for it, because information asked nothing of him in return.
'Can I ask your name? Properly?'
The voice had waited until they were clear of the village, walking back toward the forest with stolen food and stolen clothes. The timing was deliberate. She'd been watching him work and had chosen the moment when the task was done and the silence had gone on long enough to become a question in itself.
'It's Kael.'
At the edge of the forest, Kael sat with his back against a tree and ate. The bread was dense and slightly stale. The meat was salty and tough. He ate methodically, without pleasure, refueling a machine.
'So what happens now?'
'Now I figure out the curse. I find a way to make someone in this world develop feelings for me and confess those feelings sincerely, within thirty days, without accepting the confession.' He said it flatly. Laying it out the way he'd lay out a problem set.
'That's...' Xi was quiet for a moment.
He finished the bread. He stood up. And he turned his attention to back the village.
The curse was a problem, and problems were the only language he'd ever been fluent in, and there were twenty-nine days and some hours left on a clock that would kill him if he didn't find someone to break their heart against him.