Chapter 4: The Regressor
Cold...
That was the only thing that existed for a moment — cold, and the phantom sensation of muddy water flooding somewhere that wasn’t quite his mouth, wasn’t quite anywhere, because he didn’t have a mouth right now, didn’t have anything at all except the memory of dying.
Suddenly, his lungs slammed full of air like they’d been switched back on, and Lucas gasped, doubling over where he stood, the faint sense of vertigo leaving him.
He was standing.
[Regression has been activated.]
[Player has returned to the designated checkpoint.]
The forest around him was the same forest. Same trees, same slant of dying light through the canopy, same mud caking his boots from hours of walking he apparently hadn’t walked yet. His hand flew to his chest — no wound, no blood, nothing but his own frantic heartbeat slamming against his ribs like it was trying to make up for the beats it had just missed.
"I died," he said out loud, like saying it would make it stop being true. "I actually—" He swallowed, using his hand to cover his mouth. "I actually died."
The memory of it hadn’t faded the way dreams did. It sat in him whole and intact... The growl from the lake, the creature dragging itself out of the water with its three horns and its skin like wet coal, the stupid confidence in his own voice right before something hit him so fast he never even saw the shape of it.
**Ching. Splat. Thud.**
And then nothing, then cold, then this.
He was back here. Before the fight. Before the water bottle, even — no, wait. He checked his hand. The bottle was still there, the [Water Bearer] still cool and full against his palm.
[Regression: Checkpoint restored to last stable moment prior to death.]
Not the whole day. Just this right before the lake.
A shape was already moving in the water.
Lucas’s blood went cold.
It was happening again, exactly the same, the same growl building, the same ripple spreading across the surface, and this time he wasn’t going to stand here like an idiot waiting for a system window to tell him how scared to be.
[Warning: Makara Class entity detected.]
[Objective: Slay the beast.]
[Survival probability: 62%]
The number sat there, smug and useless, and this time Lucas didn’t trust it for a second.
Except some small, stupid, hopeful part of him still did, still wanted to believe the glitch had fixed itself, that maybe this time the system had gotten its act together and the number actually meant something.
It hadn’t.... It didn’t.
The creature erupted from the water in a spray of lakewater, and it was fast — far faster than a 62% survival number had any business describing.
Faster than his brain had time to process before its head snapped forward and one horn caught him across the ribs, and Lucas was airborne before he even registered being hit.
He crashed into the mud, air punched clean out of him, and every instinct in his body screamed the same thing his memory already knew: this is exactly how it started last time.
**Ching. Splat.**
Not yet. Not the thud. Not yet.
"Not again—" He rolled, barely, the creature’s second strike gouging a trench into the earth where his skull had been half a second earlier. Mud sprayed into his eyes, his mouth, and somewhere underneath the panic a colder, steadier part of him started talking.
Left. It favors the left horn. It dips its head before it strikes, just slightly, just enough.
He hadn’t noticed that the first time. He’d been too busy dying to notice it.
But his body remembered what his conscious mind hadn’t — the exact half-second dip of the creature’s skull before it struck, a tell buried somewhere in the wreckage of his own death and dragged back with him.
"Okay," Lucas breathed, scrambling backward through the mud, putting distance between himself and the thing stalking toward him with black ichor dripping from its horns. "Okay. Left. It’s the left."
[You have activated the skill: Ignition.]
Heat roared up his arm before he’d even finished the thought, flame licking around his knuckles, hungrier and less controlled than anything he’d felt back on the rooftop. It didn’t feel like a tool. It felt like something barely leashed, straining to get loose, and for a moment, Lucas almost recoiled from his own hand.
The creature lunged.
Left. It’s head dipped left.
Lucas threw himself right, mud smeering is boots as he twisted past the horn by inches, close enough to feel the wind of it against his cheek, and he didn’t think, he just swung, burning fist connecting with the side of the creature’s skull with a sound like a hammer striking wet stone.
The impact screamed up his arm. The creature reeled, a noise tearing out of its throat, blood hissing where the flame had scorched its hide, and for the first time since it had crawled out of the water it looked less like a predator and more like something that could bleed.
However, It didn’t stop.
The creature twisted, faster than something that size should move, and Lucas barely got his forearm up before the second horn raked across it.
Pain. Hot and immediate, flesh tearing, and he screamed through his teeth and didn’t let it stop his swing. His burning fist crashed into the beast’s flank
This time the flame caught, spreading fast and ugly across matted black hide. The creature shrieked and thrashed slamming a clawed limb into his chest that sent him skidding backward through the mud.
’Get up. Get up. You know how this ends if you don’t.’
He finally got up...
Blood ran hot down his arm, mixing with mud, and his vision blurred at the edges, but the creature was staggering now, half its body wreathed in fire that refused to go out, and Lucas understood with a clarity that felt like it was biting down at him that he was not going to get a cleaner opening than this one.
He ran at it.
The creature’s head dipped. Left. Left, exactly like before, exactly like the memory promised, and Lucas didn’t dodge this time — he dropped low under the strike, close enough to smell burning flesh and rot, and drove his flaming fist straight up into the underside of its throat with everything he had left in his body.
The world went white and orange all at once.
The creature’s shriek cut off mid-sound, its whole body seizing, and then it collapsed sideways into the mud with a wet, final finality that Lucas felt more than heard.
He stood there, chest heaving, fist still smoking, blood running down his forearm in thin lines.
[You have slain a Makara class entity.]
[Survival probability recalibrated: 91%]
"Ninety-one," Lucas said hoarsely, and almost laughed, except it came out more like a sob he didn’t have the energy to finish.
"Ninety-one now. Where the fuck were you five minutes ago?"
He sank down into the mud beside the creature’s smoking corpse, letting himself shake for some time before he forced himself back onto his feet. His ribs ached where the first hit had caught him, phantom-deep, like his body still half-remembered the version of this fight that had killed him.
’I’ve done this before,’ he thought, staring down at his own scorched, trembling hand. ’I died, and I remembered, and it still almost wasn’t enough.’
It was not a comforting thought. It was, if anything, the opposite — because next time, whatever came next, the system’s numbers would still be wrong, and he wouldn’t always get a second chance handed to him with a memory attached.
He cleaned the wound on his arm as best he could with water from the bottle, tore a strip from his sleeve to bind it, and walked
The forest thinned after another hour of walking, trees giving way gradually to open ground scarred with the kind of stillness that came after violence — churned earth, a scorched clearing, the unmistakable shape of a camp someone had built and defended.
Voices reached him before the camp itself did.
Lucas slowed, keeping to the treeline, every muscle in his body still raw from the fight.
He counted five... six shapes gathered around the remains of a fire, weapons within easy reach of every one of them — a girl with a bow slung across her back, a boy nursing a wrapped hand, an older-looking man standing at the camp’s edge like he’d appointed himself guard duty.
The sentry saw him first.
"Hey!" The man’s hand went to the blade at his hip, not quite drawing it, just resting there. "Who’s there? Come out where we can see you."
Lucas raised both hands slowly and stepped into the clearing, mud-caked, blood dried dark along his forearm, and felt every eye at that fire land on him at once.
"My name is Lucas" he said, voice rougher than he meant it to sound. "I got separated from my group during the drop."
He squinted. He didn’t recognize these people at all...
The girl with the bow studied him for a long moment— the burn marks still smoking faintly at his knuckles before she spoke.
"You fought something," she said. Not a question.
"Yeah." Lucas glanced down at his own ruined sleeve.
"Didn’t go great the first time."
That got him a few odd looks, the kind that said they hadn’t quite understood what he meant and weren’t sure they wanted to. The man finally let go of his blade.
"Well," the man said, gesturing
toward the dying fire.
"Get warm. You look like shit."
Lucas allowed himself something close to a smile as he sat. "You have no idea."
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