The last thing Leo Marcellus understood was the mathematics of failure.
The bridge groaned—a deep, metallic shriek that vibrated through his boots. Calculations flashed behind his eyes, a frantic, useless scroll of numbers and stress diagrams. The load distribution was wrong. The lateral stress on the central pylon— The thought was cut short by the sound of shearing steel. Screaming concrete. The world tilted.
He fell.
Then, nothing.
Awareness returned without fanfare. No gasp of breath. No pounding heartbeat. No weight.
Just… awareness.
Darkness. Then, lines of searing light cutting through the dark. He tried to blink. He had no eyelids. Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through him. He tried to move his head. A grinding, unnatural sound filled the silence—the sound of stone on stone.
What was that?
He looked down.
Bone fingers. Pale, dry, and clasped in the magenta sand. His own hands.
The panic exploded into a silent, internal scream. It had no lungs to fuel it, no throat to release it. It was a perfect, contained loop of horror in the prison of his mind. Nononononono—
Assess.
The word cut through the panic. An engineer's reflex. A system's analyst's first step. Assess the situation.
He was in a tight space. A tomb of fallen, ancient-looking stone blocks. Light sliced in from gaps above. He was on his back. He focused on moving an arm. The bone fingers twitched, then curled. The grinding sound came from his elbow joint. It was his sound.
He was a skeleton.
The silent scream tried to rise again. He forced it down. Assess.
He commanded the arm to push. He rose, a marionette of bone, into a sitting position. Sand trickled from his ribcage. In the dim light, he saw it: a faint, blue-white glow deep within his chest, where his heart should have been. It flickered like a dying ember.
A window of light, cracked and glitching, painted itself across his vision.
[COCYTUS SYSTEM: STAGE 0 - CRITICAL FAILURE]
A voice, flat and fragmented, spoke in his mind. *"Insertion… successful? Anomaly detected. Host consciousness… stable? Error. Soul-Fire signature… alien. Compatibility: 0%. Reality sync… failing."*
Leo tried to speak. To demand answers. He had no tongue, no vocal cords. He thought the words, shouting them into the void of his own skull. What am I? Where is this? What is happening?
A pause. Static hissed in his mind. "Query… received. Processing. Data corrupted. Primary function: Reality constant monitoring. Secondary function: Host guidance. Both… compromised. Running diagnostic."
More glitching text appeared, transparent over his view of the stone tomb.
HOST STATUS
Designation: LEO (Designation retained from soul-memory fragment)
Form: Base Skeletal Undead (Fragile)
Soul Spark (SS) Capacity: 10/10
Bone Integrity: 100% (Structural Grade: Fragile)
Corruption: 0 CP
Emotional Anchor: 10/10
SYSTEM STATUS
Cocytus Network Link: SEVERED
Reality Monitoring: OFFLINE
Guidance Protocol: MINIMAL
Leo focused on the numbers. SS: 10/10. A resource. Energy. It was already draining. SS: 9.9/10. A tiny tick down. Just from thinking. From being.
The voice—Cocytus—spoke again, clearer now but still cold, broken. *"Location: Material World, designated Fourth Bassin. Geographic sector: Sun-Scorched Dunes. Temporal landmark: Approximately 2000 years post-Collapse Event. Local magical ecosystem: Triune Foundation detected. Warning: Host biological template is classified as 'Undead.' Local dominant faction: Luminescent Church. Doctrinal assessment: Absolute eradication of undead entities. Threat assessment: MAXIMUM. Recommended immediate action: Concealment."*
Undead. Church. Eradication. The words landed with clinical finality. The panic was still there, a background hum, but it was being smothered by a flood of analytical coldness. He was a structural problem in a hostile environment. His body was the structure. It was flawed. It was a target.
How do I move? he thought.
"Basic locomotion possible," Cocytus responded. "SS expenditure required for neural impulse transmission and joint stabilization. Estimated cost: 0.1 SS per second of standard movement. Caution: SS depletion below 1.0 incurs high risk of system stasis—total immobility."
A cost for moving. A tax for existence. He looked at the slash of bright light ahead—an exit from this stone tomb.
He had to see. He had to know.
He pushed against the sand with his bone hands and forced himself to stand. The world tilted as he rose. SS: 9.7/10. His joints protested with dry scrapes. He was a wobbling stack of bones. He took a step. Then another. Each one cost him. SS: 9.5/10… 9.3/10.
He reached the light and stumbled out of the ruins.
The world opened up in a brutal, beautiful panorama. A vast desert of magenta and violet sand stretched to a shimmering horizon. Two suns—one large and amber, one smaller and pale blue—hung in a lavender sky. The air wavered with heat. Crystalline rock formations jutted from the dunes like shattered teeth. It was alien. It was majestic. It was utterly terrifying.
"Your existence is an error code in reality," Cocytus stated, its monotone somehow conveying a grim fact. "The local systems will attempt to delete you."
Before Leo could process that, movement caught his eye. A shadow detached from the base of a crystal spire. A creature, low to the ground, with six chitinous legs and a segmented body the size of a large dog. It scuttled forward, antennae twitching. Its faceted eyes locked onto him. It froze. Then, with a click of sharp mandibles, it scurried toward him.
Fast. Too fast.
Adrenaline was a ghost memory. His system responded with cold data. Threat identified. No defensive capabilities logged. The creature closed the distance in seconds.
Leo raised his arms, a pitiful shield. The creature didn't hesitate. It leapt, mandibles wide, aiming for his leg bone. He stumbled back. SS: 8.8/10. The creature landed, skidded in the sand, and whirled around.
No weapons. No strength. Just… bones.
He looked at his hands. At the faint glow in his chest. The Soul-Fire. A signature, Cocytus had said. Alien. He had nothing else. He focused on the glow, on the feeling of that tiny flame. He willed it forward, down the hollow of his arm, to his fingertip.
A sputtering, weak lash of blue-white flame shot out, hitting the sand at the creature's feet. SS: 8.5/10. The creature flinched, screeching—a high, rasping sound. A patch of its carapace was blackened. It was angered, not hurt.
It charged again, a blur of chitin and rage. Leo tried to sidestep, but his foot caught on a half-buried stone. He fell. The world spun. The creature was on him, its weight pinning his pelvis. Its mandibles snapped shut on his left forearm.
CRACK.
The sound was clean, sharp. Not like breaking a tree branch, but like snapping ceramic.
A shock—not pain, but a brilliant, white-hot system alert—flared in his mind. BONE INTEGRITY: 94%. A jagged fracture line appeared on the radius bone. The creature worried at it, trying to snap the bone free.
Desperation stripped away the last of his analysis. The ghost of panic and the memory of falling merged with the now. He focused everything—the terror, the confusion, the sheer will to not end—into the flame in his chest. He didn't guide it. He shoved it.
A torrent of blue fire erupted from the fracture in his arm, directly into the creature's open maw.
SOUL-FIRE LASH. COST: 10 SS.
The creature didn't scream. It came apart in a silent burst of azure light. Chitin plates vaporized. Globs of ichor sizzled into smoke. Then it was gone.
A small, grey, crystalline core thumped onto the sand beside him, glowing with a soft inner light.
Leo collapsed. The world greyed out. A severe, draining emptiness filled him. The glow in his chest cavity guttered, dim to almost nothing.
SS: 0.5/10.
STASIS RISK: CRITICAL. ACTIVITY NOT RECOMMENDED.
He couldn't move. Couldn't lift a finger. He was a pile of broken doll parts, staring at the twin suns. The core was there, just three feet away. It pulsed gently. It promised energy. It was utterly unreachable.
"Death-energy core detected," Cocytus reported, its voice the only thing moving in the universe. *"Potential SS source upon absorption. Cannot retrieve in current state. Warning: Localized Soul-Fire discharge may have been detected by monitoring wards or patrols. Scanning… Probability of hostile contact within the hour: 18%. And increasing."*
Leo lay there. The mathematician in him calculated the diminishing probability of survival. The engineer surveyed the catastrophic failure of his design. The man remembered the bridge, the shearing steel, the weight of his error.
He had calculated wrong again.
Now, he was a skeleton lying in the magenta sand, waiting to see if death would find him twice.