The road stretched out and out, a gossamer brown thread traveling across an infinite ocean of susurating green grass. Kai's flight's peak of adrenaline, his terror, eventually yielded to a stumbling, nervous gait. His ears caught every sound—the incessant crunch of his own footfalls on the ground, the incessant hiss of wind in grass, and the distant, spine-tingling reverberations of that hoarse shriek. He kept glancing back over his shoulder at the line of black trees, but they slowly receded from him, eventually thinning out to a blur on the horizon.
He was alone. Totally, totally alone.
The desolation that took the place of fear was somehow more suffocating. It wrapped around him, with nothing to fill his mind but the storm vortex of his thoughts. He remembered his friends, their laughter on the school patio yesterday—or a thousand years ago? He remembered Iris—the real Iris—and the way her eyes crinkled at the corners when she smiled. A hard, throbbing lump stuck in his throat. He would never see her again. He would never see any of them again. They were gone, vanished from a world he wasn't part of. He wondered if they thought that he was dead, whether they even existed. Doubt weighed heavily, leadenly, in his belly.
The sun still moved across the sky with the passage of time, its gradual decline painting the gigantic sky in breathtaking arcs of blinding orange, dense violet, and pale pink. He would have pulled over to drink it in, take a picture in his previous world. Here, it was only a reminder that time for him was running out. The air was chillier, and this novel type of fear—the brutal fear of the dark in a foreign land—infiltrated his heart.
His body was shaken by a profound lethargy he had never known before. His legs felt leaden, and a dull pain throbbed in his lower back. His belly growled, a tight, hollow spasm that threatened to remind him he'd not eaten since. since he died. The recollection still shocked, a shard of a puzzle he could not place. He knew the bullet. He remembered the pain, the blood, the world whirling away. And here he was, tired and famished, yet inimitably alive.
He reached at last to a row of leaning, moss-covered stones along the edge of the path. Here the grass was shorter, the ground harder. It seemed as good a spot as any to fall on. He glanced across to the horizon, nothing but hills and the distant black forms of mountains. He was out in the open, exposed, but he could not take another step.
"Iris…?" he breathed into the antiseptic air, his voice rough from not having been used. He didn't know whether she'd appear, or if he had to be in danger of death to make her appear.
There was a flash at the periphery of his vision, the glassy screen he knew illuminating into being.
[Status: Stable]
[Energy: Low]
[Tip: Rest to regain strength.]
He gasped unevenly, relief sweeping over him in a wave. "Least you're still here," he grunted, leaning his aching back against the largest stone. He closed his eyes for an instant, sitting being a luxury. The low power warning was no surprise; he could sleep for seven days, he was so tired.
But when he sat down on rocks, the rustling came back—this time from the tall grass behind him. Not wind. Snapping. Intentional.
Kai's eyes burst open, his heart shooting from zero to a hundred in a second. He leapt around, every muscle in his body tensed. From between the swaying blades emerged a little beast, no bigger than a medium-sized dog. Its body was ruffled in dark fur, its eyes the bad red glow of light in the softening twilight. It padded low, stalking creep, its claws rasping softly against stone. Its jaws yawned open on a soft hiss, revealing rows of needle-teeth jaws that seemed too large for its skull.
His mouth went dry. You've got to be kidding me…
The creature growled, low and gruff. The same gruff growl he had heard in the forest—but nearer now, more substantial and much more dangerous.
Kai pulled back, his hands reaching against the unyielding rock. His mind was yelling Run! but his legs were weights of lead, frozen where they stood. The animal crouched forward, its muscles wound like springs, ready to unleash themselves. The memory of the terrorist, of the gun, of the thought of his life being snuffed out, flashed through his mind. He was not going to die again. Not again like that.
And so, instinctively, without thought or ratiocination, Kai jerked both hands up in a motion of deflecting a blow.
A burst of pale light flashed from his hands. It was a solid, a pulsating wave of energy that condensed out of the air and formed a thin, glowing, dome-shaped barrier around him. The animal, already begun on a spring, hit the wall of nothing and gave a wet thud and a snarl of shock. It was over its hindquarters into the grass, confused and furious.
Kai froze for an instant, gasping, his eyes wide open in awe at the glimmering, opaque wall that encircled him. A thrill of strange energy ran through the air, a shudder that appeared to radiate from the very center of his own heart.
The system burst before him, its text neatly printed:
[Skill Unlocked: Barrier – Level 1]
[Energy Reduced: -10%]
The creature screamed, a scream of fury and fury, and into the tall grass and disappeared as quickly as it appeared. The bright wall stayed for another moment before shattering into threads of light that dissipated into the air.
Once again, there was silence, heavy and thick.
Kai leaned back against the stones, panting, watching his trembling hands. They still glowed with a soft sheen, their power still charged from the lingering power. He could feel the cost of the shield; his already strained power now felt almost used up, and he stumbled, drained.
"I. I did that," he breathed, his voice a mixture of wonder and astonishment. He had created light. He had made a shield from nothing.
Iris's voice returned at last, soft and quiet in the quiet of his mind. "You defended yourself, Kai. That's where it begins."
He held a shaking hand to his chest, forcing himself to take a deep, wheezing breath. His body hurt, his head spinning with a twisted combination of leftover fear and adrenaline. Veridia was a world more than one he'd been banished to; it was a world actively trying to kill him, and it'd granted him an ability he'd never imagined he'd ever have.
He looked up at the first stars to sparkle in the darkening horizon. They did not know the constellations he did. All was new. He was new.
Finally, for the first time since coming to Veridia, Kai understood something with crystal clarity—he was no longer a victim. He was no longer just surviving. He was changing.
And tomorrow, when the sun would rise again, his true test would begin.
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