Death wasn't darkness. It wasn't light either. It was... something in between. Like looking through a shattered mirror where each shard reflected a different, broken piece of reality, a piece of me. I was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, adrift in a liminal space cobbled together from the echo of impact and the shadow of my oblivion. My sense of self was a frayed thread, stretched thin across the abyss, stretched to infinity to… elsewhere, the other end of it touching something endless, vast and horrid.

  Perhaps it was the System, perhaps some other eldritch thing.

  Then, the familiar silver sparks cascaded through the non-space burning across the nothing that was me with brutal, sharp clarity.

  [Congratulations! Successful Self-Termination achieved. Bonus points for your extra-proactive approach to existential problem-solving.]

  [Achievement Unlocked: Calculated Plummet - Awarded for utilizing gravity as an escape vector with demonstrable intent. Style points: 7.5/10 (Could have added another flip).]

  [New Skill Unlocked: [Play Dead] - Allows user to consciously suppress vital signs and mimic biological cessation while retaining minimal sensory input and internal cognitive function. Warning: Prolonged use may attract scavenger-type entities interested in devouring and repurposing biomass. User discretion advised.]

  Another message flickered, seemingly an afterthought.

  [Reconstitution energy detected: 39%. Initiate baseline repairs?]

  No. The thought formed sluggishly, coalescing from the fragments of my scattered awareness. Don't fix... everything.

  The [Play Dead] skill. That was the key.

  If Krysanthea thought I was truly dead, irrevocably broken, maybe... just maybe... she'd lose focus. Maybe Nessy could escape, hide the tree… or something?

  I wasn't sure what this something was exactly.

  My hope was that the absolute finality of my death would break through Kristi’s certainty about me being her Alec.

  I focused, channeling the strange internal awareness the System granted me. I pictured the 39% Reconstitution energy not as a flood healing everything at once, but as a targeted stream, a delicate surgical tool. I felt the phantom sensation of neurons reconnecting, of shattered optical nerves weaving themselves back together in my left eye, of cognitive pathways reforming in the pulped ruin of my brain.

  But the rest... I held it back. I visualized the broken vertebrae in my neck remaining stubbornly disconnected. I pictured my heart still, silent, refusing the urge to restart its rhythm. I consciously suppressed the electrical signals that governed breathing, muscle twitches, any sign of life. I was a corpse. A conscious, thinking corpse, currently rebuilding its primary processing unit and one sensory input device, but a corpse nonetheless.

  [Manual Reconstitution Allocation Confirmed. Target: Minimal Cognitive & Sensory Function (Left Eye). Vital Signs: Suppressed. Current Status: Playing Possum.]

  The world snapped back into focus, albeit viewed through a single, rapidly clearing eye. The image was canted, distorted by the unnatural angle of my head, but it was there.

  I saw the cliff edge high above.

  Krysanthea stood there for a heartbeat, frozen in shock. Then, with a choked cry that echoed across the quarry, she rushed down the steep limestone steps. Her velociraptor body moved with preternatural speed, but her movements were jerky, fueled by panic.

  I saw Nessy rising up from where she was handcuffed, looking over the side of the cliff. She saw me and her face shifted to horror, muzzle pointed down towards where I lay.

  Krysanthea reached the bottom of the stairs and didn't slow, quickly scrambling over the sharp, uneven rocks near the water's edge with dangerous abandon. Her green-scaled legs pumped, feathers fluttering behind her as she closed the distance to my broken form.

  She skidded to a halt beside me, falling to her knees. Her breath came in ragged gasps. For a moment, she just stared, amber eyes wide with a dawning, terrible understanding.

  Then, her training kicked in. Her clawed fingers, trembling violently, fumbled at my neck, searching for a pulse. They pressed against cold, unresponsive skin. She shifted, checking my wrist, finding the same chilling stillness.

  "No," she whispered, the sound raw, broken. "No, no, Alec..."

  Her gaze traveled up to my head, lolling at that impossible angle. She saw the way my neck was clearly, horribly broken. The finality of it seemed to hit her like a physical blow.

  Her composure shattered. A keening wail tore from her throat, echoing off the quarry walls—a sound of pure, heart-wrenching agony. She collapsed forward, her feathered head pressing against my still chest, scaled shoulders shaking with uncontrollable sobs. Tears flowed freely from her amber eyes, tracing glistening paths down her snout to splash onto my shirt.

  "No... please, no..." she wept, her voice muffled against my body. "Alec... why? Why would you...? I just wanted to help... I just... I love you so much… How could you?!"

  Watching her grief through my one functioning eye, from the prison of my deliberately broken body, was a profoundly disturbing experience.

  A cold knot formed in my chest—not empathy, exactly, but a grim acknowledgment of the pain I was causing her.

  She wept above me, clawing at her own face. “No, no… no… I just found you… whyyyyyyyy?! Why would you do this…”

  Something seemed to snap inside her as her eyes went wild.

  "Nessy…" she let out. "That damned dog… she murdered you. She did this. I'm going to kill that bitch!"

  Krysanthea's grief transformed, morphing into something darker and more dangerous. Her shoulders stopped shaking, her sobbing cut off abruptly like a switch had been flipped. When she looked up, her amber eyes had hardened, pupils contracting to thin slits. Her clawed, violet-black hands clenched into fists, talons drawing blood from her own palms.

  I wanted to scream, to tell her that Nessy had nothing to do with my choice, but my body remained a lifeless prison. The [Play Dead] skill had worked too well—I was utterly immobilized, unable to communicate, to warn, to stop what was about to happen.

  With mechanical precision, Krysanthea carried and laid my broken body down on the flat section of the glassy beach. She stood slowly and wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand. Her expression had gone eerily blank.

  She unholstered her service weapon once more, holding it in her left hand. Her feathery tail, which had been hanging limp in grief moments before, now whipped back and forth with barely contained fury.

  I desperately tried to move—a finger, an eyelid, anything—but the Play Dead skill locked my body in rigor mortis. My Reconstitution energy was still busy repairing my brain and eye, leaving nothing for motor function.

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  "I'll be back for you," Kristi whispered to my corpse, her voice flat and hollow. "I'll bring you justice."

  She began to climb back up the limestone steps, her movements purposeful, each footfall landing sharply. The gun remained in her left hand, barrel glinting in the fading daylight of the coming rainstorm. I could see her intention written in every line of her body—she was going to execute Nessy.

  I focused all my mental energy on my Reconstitution counter, willing it to work faster, to repair enough to let me move or speak. The silver text flickered in response:

  [Reconstitution: 34% | Warning: Redirecting energy from cognitive repair to muscle control will result in reduced higher function.]

  I didn't care. I needed to save Nessy.

  Divert, I thought at the System. Fix my voice.

  The response was immediate and excruciating. It felt as if someone had thrust white-hot wire through my throat, threading molten metal through dead tissue, forcing connections that weren't ready. My vision blurred as energy was siphoned away from my brain repair, plunging parts of my consciousness back into darkness.

  [Partial motor control restored to vocal cords. Warning: Suboptimal allocation may result in degenerative neural pathways.]

  I didn't have time to worry about long-term consequences. Krysanthea was already halfway up the steps, her gun raised.

  With tremendous effort, I forced my lips to part. My jaw creaked like rusted hinges as I drew in a rattling breath—the first my lungs had taken since impact. The sound that emerged was barely human, a guttural rasp:

  "Khh-riss-tii…"

  It worked. The raptor-woman froze mid-step, her entire body going rigid. Slowly, she turned, amber eyes wide with disbelief.

  “Kristi…” I repeated. The word sent waves of agony through my shattered jaw.

  "Alec?" Her voice was a hiss, carried to me by the quarry's acoustics. "You're... alive?"

  "Don't... hurt... her..." I managed, each word like swallowing broken glass.

  Krysanthea stood paralyzed on the steps, caught between the evidence of her ears and the impossibility of the talking dead. The gun wavered in her hand.

  Meanwhile, Nessy ran down the stairwell with the orange bucket.

  Krysanthea wasn’t paying attention. She rushed back to me and cradled my broken body.

  “You… you don’t have a pulse,” she stammered out.

  “I’m dead,” I said.

  “What?! How?!”

  "Dead... but conscious." I let out.

  Krysanthea's amber eyes widened, pupils dilating with disbelief as she cradled my broken form. Her scaled hands trembled against my skin, again seeking a pulse that wasn't there.

  "That's not possible," she whispered. "You can't be... this isn't…”

  "The System... changed me," I managed, each syllable a small agony. "Also… Not your Alec. Never was. I’m… from another dimension… one with no… pradavarians."

  Conflict rippled across her features. She brought her head close to my chest, listening. Her raptor instincts, honed by evolution to detect life and death, told her one truth. Her heart, wrapped in scales but no less vulnerable for it, clung desperately to another.

  “No breathing, no heartbeat… nothing…” She let out. “Fucking hell. How are you talking?!”

  I heard the sound of claws scrambling across stone—Nessy approaching with frantic speed, the bucket clutched awkwardly in her teeth.

  Her breath came in ragged pants, her blue eyes wild with fear as she skidded to a halt beside us.

  She dropped to her knees, the bucket tipping precariously.

  Alec! Oh God, Alec!" The panic in her voice tore at something in my chest. "What did you do, you idiot?! What did you DO?!"

  Krysanthea's head snapped toward Nessy, a growl building in her throat. Her hand moved toward her gun, instinct momentarily eclipsing the impossible reality of my speaking corpse.

  "Stay back!" she snarled. "Don't you dare touch him!"

  "He needs the sandwiches!" Nessy barked, struggling with her cuffed wrists to reach into the bucket. "They'll heal him!"

  "Get away from him!" Krysanthea's voice cracked like a whip.

  I gathered what little strength remained in my shattered form. "Kristi... please. Let her... help. Otherwise… I might die for real.”

  The raptor-woman froze, her amber eyes darting between my lifeless body and my somehow speaking mouth. Confusion, fear, and desperate hope warred in her expression.

  "The tree," I insisted. "Not… corruption. Healing… We… made it ourselves… Please."

  Something in my words finally penetrated her grief-stricken shock and rage. Her shoulders slumped slightly, her grip on her weapon loosening.

  Nessy didn't wait for further permission. She gave up on trying to reach a sandwich backwards. Instead, she awkwardly maneuvered the bucket closer with her feet, then bent down to grasp one of the small sandwiches in her teeth. With delicate precision, she placed it against my lips.

  "Eat," she urged, her voice muffled around the morsel. "Please, Alec."

  I parted my lips with monumental effort, accepting the sandwich. The flavor bloomed across my deadened tongue—somehow both ordinary and extraordinary, a hint of honey, eggs and salmon mingling with something else, something that tasted like the silver text that danced across my vision.

  A rush of warmth flooded through my broken body as I spent more Reconstitution, not enough to heal me completely, but enough to ease the strain of consciousness trapped in a corpse. My vision cleared slightly in my one functioning eye, colors becoming sharper, more vivid.

  "More," I rasped.

  Nessy worked quickly with her snout and mouth, feeding me sandwich after tiny sandwich. Each one sent pulses of energy through my system, the numbers ticking upward with every bite. Reconstitution ticked up and then down as I began to heal specific parts of myself one by one.

  I kept my neck broken. Maybe it was a silly thing to do, but I wanted to see how long I could suspend myself between life and death, to pummel into Kristi that I wasn’t hers to keep.

  Krysanthea watched in stunned silence, her scaled features slack with disbelief as my body began to show subtle signs of recovery. The most horrific angles of my broken form slowly, incrementally began to shift, bones realigning with wet, cracking sounds that echoed off the quarry walls.

  “Fuck my life,” Kristi retreated away from the macabre show.

  "Told you," Nessy grunted. "It's medicine, not corruption. Now take these damn cuffs off so I can help him properly!"

  “Uncuff… Nessy,” I added.

  The raptor hesitated. Finally, with a shaking hand, she withdrew a small key from her belt and unlocked Nessy's handcuffs who presented her back and hands to her.

  The moment her hands were free, Nessy grabbed the bucket and began feeding me more methodically.

  "What… the fuck are you?" Kristi uttered, her face horrified as my blood boiled and twisted, returning back into my body as flowing rivers of red roots and mycelium blossoms.

  “He’s Alec,” Nessy said.

  “What?!”

  “Our Alec,” the husky insisted. “Brought back from death in another world… without memories of either of us.”

  The raptor-girl blinked at the husky. She opened and closed her mouth, hyperventilating and watching as my body bloomed and folded itself into life… or perhaps unlife.

  Then, the initial shock in her expression slowly hardened into something darker, more calculating—the bewilderment of the witness giving way to the analytical precision. Her professional training reasserted itself, pushing through the emotional turmoil that had momentarily overwhelmed her.

  I felt my shattered ribs knitting together beneath my skin, the sensation both excruciating and oddly pleasant—like feeling the negative space of pain, the shadow of agony rather than agony itself. Each bite of the small sandwiches Nessy fed me sent pulses of silver energy cascading through my broken form, weaving flesh and bone back into a semblance of wholeness.

  I deliberately kept my neck broken. There was power in this state of in-between, this twilight existence that defied neat categorization. I wasn't alive, wasn't dead—I was something the System had made, something that existed outside the boundaries of natural law.

  Krysanthea took another step back, her clawed hand instinctively moving to hover over her holstered weapon once more.

  "System-bloom," she uttered, the words falling between us like stones. "Full manifestation. Not just contamination—you're a complete System artifact. Human shaped… bloom."

  Nessy's hands froze, a sandwich halfway to my lips. Her blue eyes darted between us, tension radiating from her fur-covered body.

  "I told you," I rasped. "Not your Alec."

  "You're right," Krysanthea replied, her voice hardening. "My Alec was human. Whatever you are..." She squared her shoulders, her professional demeanor settling over her like armor. "I have a duty to this town. To protect Ferguson from System corruption… like you.”

  Her hand closed around her weapon, drawing it to point it at my head.

  "Eradication and controlled burn of Systemfall blooms is protocol," she continued, her voice detached now, clinical. "I have to terminate abominations wherever they are found."

  Way to go Alec. Way to set yourself up for an execution.

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