Chapter 199: 200 | The Thing That Should Not Exist
I appreciated the system’s honesty. Really. First time the SYSTEM INTERFACE had spoken to me in three days and it opened with you will absolutely die if you fight this thing. Very helpful. Very encouraging. Exactly the kind of motivational speech a man liked to hear when standing fifty meters from something that shouldn’t exist.
Mera appeared beside me, breathing hard, her stepping discs flickering in and out of existence with the kind of instability that said she’d burned through reserves she didn’t have to burn. She’d portaled from wherever the hell she’d been to campus in what had to be less than three minutes. The transit had cost her more than she was showing. One of her horns was dull. Not glowing. Not even faintly luminous. Just dark.
That was a bad sign.
Dull horns meant Mera was running on fumes. Meant she’d pushed herself past the threshold where her Essentia could sustain the physical modifications that came with being a Root-Type. Meant the next disc she opened might not close cleanly. Might not open at all.
"I got twenty students out through the west side," she said. Her voice was steady but her hands weren’t. "Building’s mostly clear. Campus security is setting a perimeter at a hundred meters."
She paused. Looked at Building F. Looked back at me.
"The thing is on the second floor now. It hasn’t attacked anyone directly. It just walks and everything around it breaks. Like its existence is too heavy for the building to support."
Around us, the courtyard had become a staging ground whether anyone had planned for it or not. Students in pajamas and borrowed jackets clustered behind benches and trees, their faces lit by phone screens and the distant emergency lights. A campus security vehicle pulled up with lights flashing but no siren—someone had made the decision not to escalate the noise profile—and I could see three uniformed officers climbing out with expressions that said they had trained for many scenarios and this was not one of them.
One of them had a gun. Standard issue. Nine millimeter.
I stared at it.
Then at Building F.
Then back at the gun.
The officer noticed me looking. Adjusted his stance slightly. The body language read as if you have a better idea I’m listening.
I didn’t.
"Rome." Cheon’s hand was still on my arm. Her grip had not loosened. "If this is a Compound entity, an artificially created Essentia organism, then someone made it. Someone put thirteen abilities into one body and sent it here. To this building. Tonight."
She was right. The timing was too perfect. I had been in Building F visiting Noel. My father’s surveillance team knew my location. And now a thing made of thirteen smashed-together abilities was tearing through the dormitory I’d been sitting in ten minutes ago.
The front doors of Building F buckled outward. The metal frames bent like someone had grabbed them from inside and pulled. The hum was louder now, audible across the fifty meters of courtyard grass, a sound that sat behind my eyes and made my vision swim at the edges.
The thing stepped out of Building F.
Under the courtyard lights it looked worse than in the dark. The translucent skin caught the sodium-yellow glow and I could see what pulsed underneath. Not blood vessels. Not muscle. Essentia channels. Dozens of them, running in patterns that contradicted each other, looping and intersecting in configurations that looked physically painful, like someone had taken a map of the human Essentia system and fed it through a blender. The blank face tilted upward and for one terrible second I felt certain it was looking at me.
Not with eyes. It didn’t have eyes.
It found me with something else entirely.
The drain inside my chest, which had been locked down since the proximity alert first fired, jolted. Not opened. PULLED. Like something on the other side of the wall was trying to get in.
My entire body went cold.
This thing could feel my drain. Not just detect it. Not just register its presence. It was reaching for it. Across fifty meters of open courtyard, through the shut-down channels and the sealed connections and every defense my ability had built for itself in the last sixty seconds, this thing was reaching through the wall my drain had erected and trying to establish a connection.
No. Not trying.
Succeeding.
I felt the first thread of its Essentia touch the edge of mine and the taste that filled my mouth was the worst thing I had ever experienced. Not cinnamon or vanilla or honey or summer mornings. Not any flavor I had catalogued or savored or learned to recognize in the dark.
It tasted like nothing. Like the absolute absence of everything that made Essentia human. It was cold and sterile and empty the way a surgery room is empty, the way a grave is empty, the way the space between stars is empty. There was no personality inside this Essentia. No history. No emotion. No person at the other end of the connection sending their fear or desire or trust through the channel.
Just hunger.
Pure and bottomless and pointed directly at me.
I slammed the drain shut so hard my vision whited out for a full second. Mera caught my arm before I fell. Cheon caught the other one.
"Rome. ROME."
"I’m fine." I was lying. My hands were shaking. My jaw hurt from how hard I’d clenched it. "I’m fine. That thing. It tried to drain me."
Noel had not run. She stood ten feet behind us with one shoe and no glasses, her bare foot on the cold grass and her grey eyes locked on the entity standing in the wreckage of Building F’s entrance.
"It’s a weapon." Noel’s voice carried across the space between us. "Not a person. Not a villain. A weapon. Someone built that thing to test something. Or to hunt something." She looked at me. "Or to hunt someone specific."
The entity took its first step off the building’s front steps and onto the courtyard grass.
The grass died in a circle around its foot. Not burned. Not frozen. Dead. Brown and flat and drained of whatever trace Essentia existed in living vegetation, because apparently this thing was hungry enough to eat a lawn.
It took another step.
Another circle of dead grass.
The campus security officers reached for their sidearms and I wanted to tell them that bullets were going to accomplish exactly nothing against something that could drain the life out of a patch of dirt by standing on it.
My system updated.
[NEW QUEST AVAILABLE]
[TITLE: THE THING THAT SHOULD NOT EXIST]
[OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE]
[REWARD: ???]
[TIME LIMIT: UNTIL IT KILLS YOU OR YOU FIGURE SOMETHING OUT]
[GOOD LUCK]
