Kar'thessa did not slow.
Wounded flesh meant nothing to something that large. Blood poured from the torn seam beneath her jaw, dark and heavy as oil, soaking into the sand until the ground turned slick. But her movements did not weaken. If anything, they grew more violent, less controlled, driven by pain and fury rather than instinct.
The ground buckled again.
I tried to stand.
My legs gave out.
I barely registered the shadow before it swallowed me.
Kar'thessa's body slammed down sideways, not biting this time, but crushing. The impact threw me hard into the sand. Something snapped in my spine. The pain didn't bloom. It detonated.
My vision shattered into white fragments.
I felt my body fold the wrong way.
Then nothing.
—
I came back coughing sand.
For half a second, I didn't know where I was. My mind was still stuck on the last thing I remembered, the heavy pressure in my chest, the dark at the edges of my vision, the awful certainty that my body had reached its limit.
Then the heat hit.
Wind. Grit. The smell of mineral blood.
Kar'thessa.
She was still there, towering above the dunes like a living cliff. Dark fluid streamed from the seam under her jaw where Edrin and Lyra had opened her up. It should have slowed her more. It didn't. Not enough. She moved with the anger of something too large to understand injury the way smaller creatures did.
Tomas's support circle flickered weakly, the markings in the sand half-erased by tremors. Tomas himself was on one knee, breathing hard, face gray with strain. Lyra's left arm was slick with blood from the bowstring cutting into her fingers, and her quiver looked dangerously light.
Edrin stood between them and the worm, shield bent, sword wet, posture steady but tight in the shoulders. Even his calm had limits.
I had limits too.
Failure Converter pulsed faintly, exhausted. It had helped, but it wasn't a miracle. It was leverage, not salvation.
"Finley!" Tomas shouted when he saw me breathe. "Stay inside the boundary!"
I tried to answer, but my throat scraped raw. I nodded instead and forced myself to crawl back toward the fading ring. Every movement sent pain up my ribs, phantom memory from the last death. My body was reset, but my mind didn't forget the feeling.
Kar'thessa's head swung.
The motion alone sent a tremor across the sand, like a wave. Her mouth opened, and heat rolled out. Her teeth spiraled inward, those jagged ridges grinding against each other with a sound that made my stomach twist.
"She's trying to collapse the ground," Lyra shouted, voice hoarse.
Edrin didn't look away. "She's trying to bury us."
I saw it then. The sand in front of her mouth was changing. Not just shifting. Compressing. The grain pattern tightened, drawing inward as if the dune itself was being pulled into the throat. Kar'thessa wasn't only biting. She was swallowing the land.
Tomas swore. "If she pulls the circle under, I can't reinforce it!"
Failure Converter sparked behind my eyes. Red blink. Brief. Weak.
It didn't give me a solution. It gave me a map of failures about to happen.
The circle collapsing.
Edrin losing footing.
Lyra trapped.
My body giving out again.
I forced myself upright. My legs shook. It felt like trying to stand while carrying a boulder in my chest.
"Edrin," I rasped.
He didn't glance back. "Talk."
"The ground," I said. "She's overloading it. She's forcing instability."
"I can see that," he replied.
"No," I insisted, voice cracking. "Not just sand. Something else. Something under it."
A split second later, Kar'thessa screamed.
The sound was not rage.
It was strain.
The scream stuttered, uneven, as if her body had hit a limit and didn't like it. The plates around her throat flexed, swelling outward. A dark, pulsing pattern moved beneath the hardened armor like veins lighting up.
She was using an ability.
Not just muscle.
Something innate to her as a Queen.
And it looked unstable.
The idea hit me so hard I almost laughed.
An overloaded ability. Corrupted flow. Broken coordination.
Those were the exact conditions Error Exploitation fed on.
But I hadn't used it yet. Not once.
Because it wasn't safe.
Because it was destructive and chaotic and not something you practiced casually around allies.
But we were already in a disaster. Kar'thessa was tearing the land open. Tomas was failing. Lyra was bleeding. Edrin was one bad angle away from being swallowed.
So what was "safe" now?
Kar'thessa slammed down.
Sand erupted.
The shockwave hit Tomas's circle and the markings finally cracked. The boundary faltered, and in that falter, the ground under my feet dipped.
I fell forward.
The sand opened like a mouth.
Not Kar'thessa's. The land's.
A sinkhole formed beneath the circle, dragging everything downward.
Tomas screamed, trying to anchor it. His runes flashed and sputtered, then failed.
That was another death coming.
I knew it.
I tried to roll away, but the pull caught my legs. The sand swallowed my knees, then my waist. Grit filled my mouth. I reached for a root of stone, anything, but the ground was fluid.
Edrin grabbed my wrist.
For a breath, I thought he might pull me free.
Then Kar'thessa's shadow fell over both of us.
Her mouth opened.
Edrin shoved me.
Not toward safety.
Toward the bite.
He sacrificed the angle so Lyra and Tomas could escape the collapsing circle.
And I died.
The world snapped shut in heat and crushing pressure.
Then reset.
I woke up gasping, five seconds earlier, lungs full, body whole, mind screaming.
I rolled instantly, throwing myself away from the forming sinkhole before it could fully open. Tomas's circle still existed in this moment, barely. Tomas was still standing.
I shouted, voice raw and loud. "MOVE! THE GROUND'S ABOUT TO DROP!"
Lyra reacted first, pulling back, dragging Tomas by the arm. Tomas stumbled, eyes wide, but moved. Edrin shifted too, stepping out of the circle's center.
The sand collapsed exactly where we had been.
A dark pit opened, swallowing the runes whole. Tomas's circle died with a final flicker.
We lost the only thing keeping us stable.
Kar'thessa surged, sensing the shift.
Lyra fired at her eye ridge. The arrow bounced again. Edrin lunged, blade driving into the old wound under her jaw. Blood sprayed. The Queen shrieked, but the shriek was still uneven, still strained.
Her throat plates pulsed again.
The same unstable pattern.
I could feel it now, even without sight. A wrongness in the way the air tightened around her head. A pressure building with no clean release.
That was an error.
A crack in the system of her body.
Error Exploitation didn't create instability.
It forced existing instability to collapse faster.
I raised my shaking hands.
My status window flickered in my vision, faint and red, like it was struggling to stay visible.
[ERROR EXPLOITATION: AVAILABLE]
I swallowed hard.
"Edrin," I called, forcing my voice to stay steady. "I need her to use that throat ability again."
Edrin glanced back for the first time, eyes sharp. "Can you handle it?"
"No," I said honestly. "But I'm going to do it anyway."
Lyra looked at me like I'd lost my mind.
Tomas opened his mouth, then closed it. He didn't have breath to argue.
Edrin nodded once. "Then we force it."
He stepped closer to Kar'thessa's front, raising his shield, blade angled low.
"Come on," he muttered, voice like steel. "Show me that Queen's pride."
He struck the seam again, deep this time, twisting the blade to widen the wound. Kar'thessa screamed, and the throat plates pulsed hard, lighting up beneath her armor.
The unstable pattern flared.
That was my opening.
I activated Error Exploitation.
The world didn't glow. It fractured.
For a brief moment, my vision split into overlapping outlines, as if I was seeing several versions of Kar'thessa at once. Not timelines. Not futures. Just structural possibilities. The way her ability could resolve.
And I grabbed the wrong one on purpose.
I reached toward the pulsing pattern and forced the instability to accelerate.
It was like yanking a knot tighter until it snapped.
The air around Kar'thessa's throat turned bright, not with fire, but with harsh, jagged light, white-blue and violent. The sand beneath her mouth began to lift, then shudder, then implode inward. The ability she was using to swallow the ground overloaded.
Instead of pulling sand into her throat, it pulled her throat into itself.
A crackling blast erupted from inside her mouth, a detonation of compressed heat and broken force. The inside ridges split. Blood sprayed in a wide arc. Several throat plates shattered outward like shrapnel, embedding into the sand.
Kar'thessa screamed again, this time in real pain.
The sound shook the dunes.
Lyra shouted something I couldn't hear. Tomas staggered backward, shielding his face from flying debris.
Edrin didn't retreat.
He charged into the opening I had created and drove his sword upward, deeper than before, aiming for whatever counted as vital in a creature like that.
For a heartbeat, I felt triumph.
Then my Failure Converter pulsed red again.
Because the error I exploited wasn't isolated.
It was connected.
Kar'thessa's body convulsed, and the instability I had forced didn't stop at her throat. It rippled through her entire system, cracking sand, shifting pressure, destabilizing the ground around her in a widening ring.
The land began to collapse again, not in one pit, but in multiple fractures.
The dunes broke.
The world under us gave way.
I tried to hold it back with Failure Converter, forcing the failure to redirect away from Edrin, away from Lyra, away from Tomas.
For a second, it worked.
The ground dropped to my left instead of under Edrin. A fissure opened behind Lyra instead of beneath her feet. A sinkhole formed where no one stood.
I was doing it.
I was turning chaos into a weapon.
But every use ripped something out of me.
My heartbeat became uneven. My lungs seized. My vision blurred again, red and white blending together. The system window flickered violently.
[HOST CONDITION: CRITICAL]
[ACTIVE AUTHORITY OVERLOAD]
I tried to take one more breath.
My chest refused.
Pain lanced through my ribs as if something inside me had shattered. My mouth filled with blood, hot and metallic. I dropped to my knees, hands clawing at sand, trying to stay conscious long enough to warn them.
"Move," I croaked, but it came out wet and weak.
Kar'thessa thrashed, wounded and furious.
Still alive.
Still far from finished.
And I died again, the world going dark with the taste of blood still on my tongue.
When I returned, I knew two things with perfect clarity.
Error Exploitation and Failure Converter together could crack a Queen.
But if I kept using them like this, I would burn through my own body faster than Kar'thessa bled.
And she was still moving.
~~~
We were losing.
There was no cleaner way to frame it, no clever wording that softened the truth. Kar'thessa was wounded, bleeding heavily from her throat and side, but she was still moving with terrifying power. Each time she struck the ground, the dunes shifted violently, swallowing distance and balance alike.
Captain Edrin fought like a wall that refused to fall.
His breathing was heavier now, shoulders rising and falling with controlled effort. Blood soaked into the sand beneath his boots, some of it Kar'thessa's, some of it his. His sword arm trembled on recovery, a fraction too slow, a fraction too strained.
Even at his Standing, even with his experience and control, he could not win alone.
I could see it clearly.
If the full expedition team had been here, if there were more blades, more angles, more pressure points, they might have crushed Kar'thessa through sheer attrition. But there were only four of us now, and one carrier hiding far away with the crate, doing exactly what he was supposed to do.
Lyra was running out of arrows.
Tomas had long since burned through anything resembling reserves. His hands shook uncontrollably, blood drying at the corner of his mouth. He was keeping himself upright through stubborn will alone.
And me.
I was already past my limit.
Failure Converter flickered weakly, unable to keep up with the scale of collapse unfolding around us. Error Exploitation had done real damage, but Kar'thessa's size and resilience were too vast. She adapted faster than I could break her.
This was not a fight meant for initiates.
This was not even a fight meant for a small elite team.
Kar'thessa reared again, higher than before, her massive body casting a shadow that swallowed all of us. Her wounded throat glowed faintly from within, unstable but furious, preparing to release another catastrophic surge.
Edrin set his feet and raised his shield.
"Behind me!" he shouted.
Lyra stumbled backward, nearly tripping as another tremor rolled through the sand. Tomas fell to one knee, unable to reinforce anything anymore.
I stood there, shaking, lungs burning, vision swimming.
And I understood something with terrifying clarity.
There would be no more chances after this.
Failure Converter could not push further.
Error Exploitation would kill me before it killed her.
If Kar'thessa unleashed that surge, at least one of them would die. Maybe all of them.
I didn't think.
I acted.
The system window slammed into my vision, sharp and undeniable.
[ACTIVE ABILITY AVAILABLE]
[DEATH-LINKED BURST]
Once per life.
I had never used it before.
I hadn't wanted to.
Because I knew what it meant.
Death-Linked Burst didn't pull power from mana or stamina or stats. It pulled from something far more dangerous.
It pulled from experience gained through dying.
Every mistake.
Every miscalculation.
Every angle that failed.
Every second I had spent being crushed, bitten, torn apart, suffocated, or broken.
All of it.
I triggered it.
The world went silent. Not quiet.
Silent.
Kar'thessa froze mid-motion. Sand hung suspended in the air. Blood droplets hovered, unmoving. The wind stopped. Sound ceased to exist.
I could still breathe.
I could still think.
And for the first time, everything made sense at once.
I saw Kar'thessa perfectly.
Not just her body, but her intent. The timing of her next surge. The precise millisecond her throat plates would contract. The exact angle her jaw would tilt. The fraction of instability that would open her core completely.
I saw Edrin's position, the tension in his muscles, the exact point where his next step needed to land.
I saw Lyra's remaining arrows and which one could reach the opening.
I saw Tomas's failing body and knew exactly how long he could stay conscious.
Perfect prediction.
Perfect timing.
Perfect execution.
My body moved before thought.
I ran.
Not fast.
Not strong.
But perfectly placed.
I slid across the sand, stopping exactly where Kar'thessa's shadow thinned. I grabbed a broken shard of her own armor from the ground, still hot with her blood. I hurled it upward at the precise moment her throat opened fully.
At the same instant, I shouted.
"NOW!"
Time resumed.
The shard struck.
Lyra released her last arrow.
Edrin lunged.
Everything happened together.
The shard punched into the unstable glow at Kar'thessa's throat. Lyra's arrow followed it in, driving deeper. Edrin's blade came down like judgment, splitting the already fractured plates wide open.
Kar'thessa screamed.
But this time, the sound cut off abruptly.
The instability I had forced earlier finally collapsed in on itself. The energy she had been gathering had nowhere to go. It imploded.
Her head detonated inward in a violent, wet shockwave.
Blood, armor fragments, and sand blasted outward. The Queen of the Giant Sand Worms convulsed once, then went limp, her massive body crashing into the dunes with enough force to shake the horizon.
The ground settled.
The wind returned.
Silence followed.
Kar'thessa was dead.
I didn't feel relief.
I felt everything leave me at once.
The backlash hit like a collapsing building.
My muscles tore themselves apart in protest. My heart skipped, then stuttered wildly. My vision fractured into white and red. I dropped to my knees, unable to even scream.
Death-Linked Burst always took payment. Sometimes, that payment was everything.
I collapsed forward, face hitting the sand.
Darkness swallowed me.
I died.
—
I came back a second later.
Literally a second.
Kar'thessa's corpse was still settling, sand sliding off her massive form. The echoes of her fall still trembled faintly through the ground.
To everyone else, nothing strange had happened.
They saw me stagger. They saw me fall unconscious.
They did not see me die.
They did not see me return.
Edrin was already moving, checking Lyra, then Tomas, barking orders with hoarse urgency. "Status! Injuries!"
Tomas laughed weakly, slumping onto his back. "We're… alive."
Lyra dropped to one knee, staring at the massive corpse in disbelief. "We killed it."
I was lying in the sand, barely breathing, body trembling violently.
[Death Count: 129]
The Queen of Sand was dead.
And I had paid for it with my life.