Chapter 43: Sovereign of Death
Darkness....
Not the darkness of closed eyes, or the darkness of a dim room with shapes still half visible at the edges. This was an absolute black so complete it seemed to press against him from every direction at once, thick and suffocating, swallowing sound the instant it left his mouth.
"Eleanor?"
His voice fell dead, no echo, no answer, nothing but the crushing silence everywhere.
Lucas tried to move and found nothing to move against, no ground beneath his feet, no walls to reach for, no sense of up or down.
He might have been floating.... He might have been falling. There was no way to tell, no way to make reference in a place that seemed to exist outside every rule he studied.
Panic came fast, clawing up through his chest just moments later.
This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how it worked.
Every single time before, dying meant seeing a flash of white, a feeling of vertigo, and then waking somewhere back along the path with the clock reset and the notification fading from his vision like it had always done. Routine, familiar, so much so that it was almost comforting, in the twisted way anything could become comforting after enough repetition.
Bot not this...
"No, no, no—" The words spilled out of him in the dark, and he pressed his palms against nothing, searching for anything solid, any proof that he still had a body at all. "Come on. Come on, work. I have to go back..."
Nothing answered him. No status window. No system notification. No familiar sense of vertigo slamming into edge of his consciousness the way it always did in the moment before a checkpoint pulled him backward the last "stable moment" before his death.
Just the dark, patient and endless, and the growing, gut wrenching certainty that whatever had happened to him this time was different. Permanent, maybe. Final in a way none of his other deaths had ever managed to be.
The memory surfaced unwelcomed, sharp enough to hurt, and Lucas shoved it down before it could take root, before the fear underneath it could swallow him whole.
"Work," he said again, quieter this time, more plea than command. "Please."
And then, finally, something.
A flicker. Faint at first, barely more than a spec of light somewhere in the black, and then it steadied, resolved, familiar glitchy blue text bleeding into existence in front of him.
[Player has failed to regress]
The words hit him like a physical blow, confirming the fear that had been clawing at him since the moment the dark swallowed him. He had known, somewhere underneath the panic, but seeing it laid out made it real in a way that gut instinct alone hadn’t managed.
Failed. Not delayed.... Failed.
Before he could spiral any further into the implications of that single word, the notification shifted, text rearranging itself into something new.
[Rebooting System...]
A loading bar appeared beneath the words, agonizingly slow, filling in fractions of a percent at a time, and Lucas stared at it with something close to desperate hope clawing back into his chest.
Rebooting meant broken, not gone. Rebooting meant there was still a system to reboot, still some thread connecting him back to the world he’d been so violently and not so surprisingly ripped away from.
Rebooting meant a chance....
He didn’t know how long he watched that bar creep forward time meant nothing in a place like this, stretched and compressed in ways that made every second feel like an hour and every hour feel like it might have only been a second.
Nonetheless, he watched it with a focus he himself didn’t know her had...
’Come on. Come on, hurry...’
The dark ahead of him changed.
It wasn’t light exactly. If anything, it was a deeper shade of black carving itself out from the surrounding void, a shape solidifying with the slow, deliberate menace of something that had all the time in the world and felt no need to hurry.
A throne took form first, jagged and enormous, built from what Lucas’s mind refused to process for one moment before the details sharpened into horrifying clarity.
Skulls....
Hundreds of them, stacked and fused together into something too deliberate to be accidental, hollow sockets facing outward in every direction like some grotesque audience bearing silent witness to whatever throne room this was.
Some of the skulls looked human. Most of them didn’t, jaws too long or too wide, horns curling from places— some from the eye sockets, others from the forehead and Lucas found himself unable to look away even as every instinct screamed at him to.
And seated atop that impossible throne, a figure took shape.
It wore no clear form. It was shadow given rough approximation of a seated shape, robes of pure absence pooling around it.
Where a face should have been, there was only more of that same absolute black, deep enough that Lucas’s mind kept trying and failing to find features in it, some ancient survival instinct screaming that anything without a face was worse, somehow than anything that had one.
In one hand... if hand was even the right word for the elongated, thing that ended in something closer to a claw, the figure held a scythe.
It wasn’t ornamental though. The blade caught no light, obviously because there was no light to catch, and yet Lucas could see it perfectly, curved and impossibly long, its edge so fine it seemed to cut the air itself into wherever it moved, humming with a low intimidating sound that Lucas felt more in his bones.
The temperature around him plummeted the instant the figure’s attention settled on him.
Cold... the kind that passed through skin and muscle and settled seemed to eat at his soul...
"Lucas Kane."
The voice spoke, every syllable landing directly inside his skull, ancient, vast and edged with something that might have been irritation.
Lucas’s blood ran cold...
"How do you—" His voice came out smaller than he wanted, then his vision blurred
"I know a great many things about you, little Regressor." The figure shifted, the motion unhurried and predatory the scythe’s blade tilting just by a little, catching that impossible darkness before tearing through it.
Lucas’ eyes widened. How did it know about his ability?
From what he knew, time always reset after he died so the gods must have watched him die but not when he returned because time rewound.
So basically, to them, he never did die...
"I have watched you die. Again. And again. And again. Each time, some clever trick of the system’s design has reached down and plucked you back out of my grasp before I could so much as close my hand around you."
The scythe’s tip lowered, drifting toward Lucas with painful slowness, and he found himself unable to retreat, frozen in place by a cold, primal fear.
"Do you understand what you are, boy? What you’ve been doing, every time that pretty little notification saves you from the consequences your foolish choices should have earned?" The voice sharpened, cold fury bleeding into every word now...
"You are a thief. You steal death from me. Every regression, every reset, every second chance that system so generously grants you. It is my domain you plunder. Mine to give. Mine to take. And you have taken it from my hands more times than any mortal soul in the history of this game has dared."
"I didn’t—" Lucas started, though he had no idea what defense he even meant to offer. "I didn’t choose this. The system gave me—"
"The system," the figure cut in, it’s words dipped with something venomous now, "is an aberration. A cheat, glitched system coded into the fabric of this world by means that defile every part of the natural order. Every time you cheat death, you mock the natural order. You mock the gods who built this game and the balance they demanded of it. And worse..." the scythe drifted closer still, close enough now that Lucas swore he could feel its edge parting the air an inch from his throat, "...you mock me."
The cold worsened and Lucas realized with horror that he couldn’t move at all now, some kind of invisible weight pinning him in place as the figure rose from its throne of skulls, unfolding to a height that seemed to stretch impossibly upward, fanning out across whatever passed for a horizon in this endless dark space.
"I am owed. Every soul that draws breath owes me its ending eventually, and you, little thief, have run up a debt no mortal has any business incurring." The scythe rose, drawn back with slow, deliberate menace, and Lucas felt something in the air shift, gathering, the way pressure builds before a storm. "I think it is past the time I collected. Personally...."
"Wait—"
"You have mocked me for far too long, Lucas Kane."
The scythe began its decent in a downward arc.
And in the moment before the scythe would have found him, before that curved blade could collect the debt this thing insisted he owed, blue light exploded across his vision, blinding and sudden and sudden.
[Ding!]
[Reboot Complete]
[Activating Regression...]
The world tore itself apart around him—the throne, the skulls, the impossible reaching darkness of the figure’s blade, all of it fracturing into streaks of light and color, and somewhere beneath the static filling his ears, Lucas thought he heard that same ancient voice, distant now and fading, but no less furious...
"This isn’t finished, thief. I know your name now. I will find you again!"
***
[Regression activated]
Sunlight.
Grass beneath his boots, overgrown and brushing against his legs. The looming, gothic silhouette of a cathedral rising ahead, spires stretching toward a pale, indifferent sky, stained glass catching fractured light across an overgrown courtyard gone quiet and still.
[Player has returned to designated checkpoint.]
Lucas staggered, one hand rising instinctively to his throat, fingers pressing against skin that was whole, unbroken, no trace of the wound that had ended him only moments—or was it hours before.
[Checkpoint has been restored to the last stable moment prior to death.]
"Lucas?"
Eleanor’s voice came, close beside him, edged with concern, and he turned to find her watching him with a furrowed brow, her expression that of someone who’d simply seen him go pale and unsteady.
He was back. Back at the edge of the courtyard, the cathedral looming exactly as it had before the fight, before the Bora, before all of it.
The regression had worked. Eventually....
"I’m fine," he managed, though the words came out rougher than he intended, his hand still pressed against his throat like he half expected to find it torn open despite the evidence otherwise. "Just... just give me a second."
Eleanor studied him a moment longer, clearly unconvinced, but before she could press further, a sound cut through the moment, not the familiar, gentle chime that usually accompanied a system notification, but something harsher. A grinding ping that followed immediately by the bloom of an interface window unlike anything he’d seen before.
Where his usual notifications glowed a calm, steady blue, that glitched, this one burned crimson, the edges of the window flickering like something struggling to stay contained— the glitch however, was still present.
Lucas stared at the words as the text glitched into existence, his blood running cold all over again, the memory of that scythe’s edge and that ancient, furious voice pressing back into his mind as a horrifying memory.
[You have encountered the Sovereign of Death.]
[You have been marked by the Grim Reaper]
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