fen died screaming.
Fen woke up coughing.
He rolled onto his side, gasping, hands clawing at grass that was very much not the ash-strewn battlefield he'd died on. His throat burned. His head rang like a bell that had been struck too hard. His body ached in a way that felt residual, like the echo of pain rather than pain itself.
Phantom agony.
He lay there for several seconds, breathing hard, waiting for either the construct to finish the job or his brain to catch up with what was happening.
Neither happened.
Instead, he heard birds.
Fen froze.
Slowly, carefully, he lifted his head.
Blue sky. A few drifting clouds, white and innocent. Rolling moorland stretched before him—the familiar brown-green expanse of Pendle Hill's lower slopes. He knew this place intimately. The weathered stone wall running along the footpath. The distant silhouette of the hill's distinctive summit against the eastern sky. Beyond it, barely visible through the haze, the sprawl of Manchester proper—towers and rooftops bleeding into the industrial belt that connected the city to Lancashire's mill towns.
"No," Fen whispered. "No, no, no."
He scrambled to his feet, legs shaking, and spun in a slow circle.
The village of Barley sat in the valley below—intact, unburned, blissfully unaware. Smoke rose from chimneys. He could see tiny figures moving between the stone cottages. Normal. Mundane. Alive. The Pendle Heritage Centre's car park had a few vehicles scattered across it. A dog walker moved along the lower trail.
No spires of Chrysalis. No arena. No contestants from alien realms.
No system overlays.
In his defence, the scream came after the fatal mistake, not before. He'd already misjudged the construct's reach, already committed to a dodge that assumed a humanoid enemy with joints that respected anatomy, and already realized—about half a second too late—that the stone-and-bronze knight did not, in fact, care about such limitations.
The blade didn't just clip him.
It carved through him.
There was a moment—crystalline and eternal—where Fen felt the separation. Not pain, not yet. Just the wrongness of his body existing in two states simultaneously. Whole and not-whole. Connected and severed.
Then the pain arrived.
It didn't flood in. It detonated.
Every nerve ending lit up at once, a symphony of agony that his brain couldn't process fast enough. His legs gave out—or maybe they were already gone, he couldn't tell anymore. The ground rushed up to meet him, and he hit hard enough that new pain joined the chorus.
The sky above was still gray. Still unmoving. Indifferent.
Fen tried to breathe and choked on something hot and copper-tasting. His vision was darkening at the edges, tunneling down to a pinpoint of gray sky and the construct's burning golden eyes.
Move, his mind screamed. Get up. Do something.
His body didn't respond.
He tried to reach for the stone in his pocket—the one that had hummed with agreement, that had aligned his thoughts and given him probabilities. Maybe it could fix this. Maybe it could—
His fingers found it.
Cold. Inert. Dead.
Or worse—bored.
The stone had felt him die and decided he wasn't worth the effort anymore.
Fen's breath came in wet, rattling gasps. The construct loomed over him, blade raised for a second strike. Unnecessary. Thorough.
I should have listened to Ayger.
The thought came with perfect clarity, cutting through the pain and panic. Ayger had warned him. Had told him to wait, to observe, to think before acting. But Fen had seen an opening and taken it, because that's what he did. That's what he'd always done.
And now he was dying for it.
The blade came down.
Fen screamed.
It wasn't dignified. It wasn't brave. It was raw and animal and terrified—the sound of someone who'd just realized that death wasn't an abstract concept anymore. It was here. It was happening.
The blade hit.
There was a sensation—brief, oddly distant—like being pulled backward through himself. The pain didn't stop so much as invert, turning inside-out, and then—
Nothing.
Darkness folded in, thick and absolute.
Fen floated in it, weightless and formless. No body. No pain. No anything.
Just void.
And then, cutting through the silence like a knife:
SAVE FILE CREATED
ANCHOR: SYSTEM INVASION—INITIAL DEPLOYMENT
CAUSE OF DEATH: INSUFFICIENT PREPARATION
NOTES: LOL
The words hung in the darkness, glowing faint blue. Fen stared at them—or would have, if he'd had eyes. The "LOL" pulsed slightly, as if emphasizing the joke.
Something about that felt worse than dying.
The system had watched him get carved apart and thought it was funny.
Before Fen could process that—before he could feel the appropriate horror or rage or anything—the darkness yanked.
Fen woke up coughing.
He rolled onto his side, gasping, hands clawing at grass that was very much not the ash-strewn battlefield he'd died on. His throat burned. His head rang like a bell that had been struck too hard. His body ached in a way that felt residual, like the echo of pain rather than pain itself.
Phantom agony.
He lay there for several seconds, breathing hard, waiting for either the construct to finish the job or his brain to catch up with what was happening.
Neither happened.
Instead, he heard birds.
Fen froze.
Slowly, carefully, he lifted his head.
Blue sky. A few drifting clouds, white and innocent. A familiar hill slope, dotted with wildflowers and half-ruined stone markers that predated modern mapping. He knew this place. He'd grown up near it. He and Ayger used to come here as kids, back when the world made sense and death was something that happened to other people.
"No," Fen whispered. "No, no, no."
He scrambled to his feet, legs shaking, and spun in a slow circle.
The village was still there in the distance—intact, unburned, blissfully unaware. Smoke rose from chimneys. He could see tiny figures moving between buildings. Normal. Mundane. Alive.
No spires of Chrysalis. No arena. No contestants from alien realms.
No system overlays.
Except—
A translucent blue window flickered into existence in front of him.
Fen flinched hard enough that he nearly fell over.
SYSTEM STATUS: ACTIVE
INVASION PHASE: INITIALIZATION
SAVE FILE: 1
LAST CHECKPOINT: TEMPORAL ANCHOR CONFIRMED
Fen stared at the words until his eyes hurt.
"You've got to be kidding me," he said hoarsely.
The window helpfully added:
TIP: TRY NOT DYING IMMEDIATELY NEXT TIME
Fen laughed.
It started as a bark—sharp and disbelieving—then broke into something hysterical and half-relieved. He laughed until his sides hurt, until tears blurred his vision and he had to bend over with his hands on his knees just to keep breathing.
He was alive.
He was back.
The system had killed him, mocked him, and then rewound time like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"This is insane," Fen gasped between laughs. "This is completely—"
He stopped.
Because the laughter felt wrong. It felt like something breaking inside him, like a dam cracking under pressure it was never meant to hold. He'd died. He'd felt it. The blade cutting through him, the pain, the darkness.
And now he was standing on a hillside, alive and whole, while the system made jokes.
Fen's hands were shaking again.
He looked down at them, detached. They didn't feel like his hands anymore. They felt like props. Temporary things that could be taken away at any moment.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Okay. Think."
The system had reset him. That meant—what? Time travel? Resurrection? Some kind of save-state mechanic like a video game?
Fen pulled the stone from his pocket.
It hummed.
He nearly dropped it.
The stone was alive again. Warm and present and aware, as if it had never gone cold. As if Fen hadn't felt it abandon him in his final moments.
"You left me," Fen said to it.
The stone pulsed, neither confirming nor denying.
Fen closed his fist around it. "If you do that again, I'm throwing you in a river."
The stone's hum shifted slightly. Amused, maybe. Or indifferent.
Fen wasn't sure which was worse.
He looked back toward the village, then toward the hill's crest where the system invasion would begin. Where it had begun. Where it would begin again, because apparently time was a circle now and Fen was trapped in it.
"Ayger," he said suddenly.
If Fen had reset, had Ayger? Was his brother still in the arena, thinking Fen was dead? Or had he reset too?
Fen started walking before he'd fully decided to. His legs carried him up the hill on autopilot, toward the spot where he and Ayger always met when they needed to talk without being overheard.
If Ayger was there—if he'd reset too—
Fen walked faster.
Ayger was standing in the kitchen when the notification arrived.
He'd been staring at the knife for the past three minutes, turning it slowly in his hand. It wasn't a special knife. Just a normal one—well-balanced, sharp, used daily for mundane tasks like chopping vegetables and cutting bread.
He watched the light glint along the blade and tried to calculate probabilities.
Fen should have been back by now.
The Contest's separation had been immediate, but not total. Ayger had expected something—a signal, a system update, a win-state notification. Some indication that his brother had survived the first trial.
Instead, he'd received this:
CONTESTANT STATUS: TERMINATED
The words appeared in his peripheral vision, cold and clinical. No fanfare. No explanation. No option to dismiss them.
Just: Terminated.
Ayger stared at the notification for a long time.
His hands didn't shake. His breathing didn't quicken. His face remained perfectly neutral.
Inside, something cracked.
Terminated.
Not "defeated." Not "eliminated." Terminated.
Fen was dead.
The thought arrived with perfect clarity, settling into Ayger's mind like a stone dropping into still water. Fen had gone into his trial—probably charged ahead without thinking, probably ignored every warning Ayger had given him—and died.
Ayger closed his eyes.
He didn't panic. Panic was inefficient. Instead, he ran through possibilities with the same methodical precision he applied to everything else.
Death was the most likely outcome. The system had proven itself capable of physical manifestation. The trials were real. Therefore, the danger was real.
Which meant Fen was gone.
Ayger opened his eyes again.
The kitchen was still the same. Same wooden table. Same cracked window. Same faint hum in the air that hadn't been there yesterday.
Ah.
There it was.
Ayger focused on the hum, letting it resolve into pressure behind his eyes. A prompt waiting to be acknowledged.
He let it surface.
SYSTEM STATUS: ACTIVE
INVASION PHASE: INITIALIZATION
Ayger's heart skipped.
"Invasion," he repeated softly.
That was earlier than expected. Earlier than possible. The Contest was supposed to be separate from the invasion—a preliminary event, a selection process.
Unless it wasn't.
Unless the Contest was the invasion.
Or—
Ayger's mind raced.
Or time had rewound.
The thought should have been absurd. Impossible. But Ayger had learned long ago that "impossible" was just another word for "not yet understood."
If time had rewound, that meant Fen's death had been undone. Reset to a checkpoint. Which meant—
Which meant Fen might still be alive.
Ayger looked back down at the knife.
If this was a loop, he needed to confirm it. Needed to test the hypothesis before he allowed himself to hope.
And there was only one way to test it.
"Empirical evidence," Ayger said aloud. His voice was steady. That was good.
He didn't hesitate.
That was the important part. Hesitation introduced variables. Doubt. Fear.
Ayger brought the knife up, aimed carefully at his own throat, and—
Slipped.
The blade bounced off the edge of the table with a dull clang, spun through the air, and clattered to the floor.
Ayger stared at it.
"…Wow," he said. "That was undignified."
He bent down, picked up the knife, and checked the edge. Still sharp. Good.
He adjusted his grip, braced himself against the counter for stability, and tried again.
This time, he didn't slip.
The pain was sharp but brief—a bright line of sensation that his mind cataloged and filed away even as his body began to fail. Ayger's last coherent thought was that this was a terrible way to go and that Fen would never let him live it down.
Then darkness folded in.
SAVE FILE UPDATED
ANCHOR: SYSTEM INVASION—INITIAL DEPLOYMENT
CAUSE OF DEATH: SELF-INFLICTED (INELEGANT)
NOTES: STYLE POINTS DEDUCTED
The words floated in the void, mocking him.
Ayger would have laughed if he'd had a body.
Ayger woke up on a hillside.
He sat up immediately, scanning his surroundings with practiced efficiency. Same hill. Same sky. Same village in the distance, smoke rising from chimneys.
He was alive.
More importantly: he was back.
Ayger laughed.
It was a short, incredulous sound that turned into something almost giddy. He pressed a hand to his throat—whole, unmarked, as if the knife had never touched it—and laughed harder.
"It works," he said.
A blue window appeared.
SAVE FILE: 1 (SHARED)
SYNC STATUS: CONFIRMED
Ayger's laughter cut off.
Shared.
That meant—
He was on his feet and moving before he'd fully processed the thought. If the save file was shared, Fen had reset too. Which meant his brother was alive. Somewhere on this hill, probably panicking, probably—
Ayger crested the rise and saw him.
Fen was pacing in tight circles, hands gesturing wildly as he muttered to himself. Alive. Whole. Here.
"You died," Fen blurted the moment he saw him. "I died too. There's a save system. It called my death 'insufficient preparation' and—"
Ayger hugged him.
It was brief, awkward, and immediately released, but it happened. His arms wrapped around his brother's shoulders and held on for three seconds that felt like the only real thing in the world.
Fen went rigid with surprise, then slowly relaxed.
"…You okay?" Fen asked quietly.
Ayger stepped back and cleared his throat. "Knife accident."
Fen stared.
Ayger sighed. "On purpose."
Fen burst out laughing.
It was the same hysterical sound from before, but this time Ayger joined him. They stood on the hillside, laughing like madmen, while the system watched and the world continued on, oblivious.
When the laughter finally died down, they sat in the grass and compared notes.
"So," Fen said, "I got carved in half by a construct. You?"
"Stabbed myself in the throat. Missed the first time."
"You missed?"
"The table was uneven."
Fen snorted. "That's the most you thing I've ever heard."
"At least I didn't charge a giant murder-knight."
"It was a tactical advance."
"It was suicide."
"It was initiative."
They fell silent for a moment, the humor draining away as the reality settled in.
"We died," Fen said quietly.
"Yes."
"And we came back."
"Yes."
"The system reset us. Like a video game checkpoint."
Ayger nodded slowly. "A shared save file. Every death rewinds us both to the moment the invasion begins."
Fen looked at him. "That means—"
"Infinite attempts," Ayger finished. "We can't lose permanently."
The words hung in the air between them.
Fen's expression shifted—something dark and hungry flickering behind his eyes. "We can experiment. Test things. Die as many times as we need to."
"Learn the system inside and out," Ayger agreed. His mind was already racing, cataloging possibilities. "Every mechanic. Every exploit. Every weakness."
"We could become unstoppable."
"We will become unstoppable."
They looked at each other, and something passed between them. An understanding. A shared recognition of what they'd just been given.
Not a second chance.
A weapon.
"So," Fen said slowly. "We know the future. We know the system. And we can't lose permanently."
Ayger leaned back and looked at the sky. It was still blue. Still innocent. The system invasion hadn't started yet—wouldn't start for hours. They had time.
"Let's break it," Fen said.
Ayger smiled. It wasn't a kind smile. It was the smile of someone who'd just realized the game was rigged in their favor.
"Carefully," he said. "Methodically. We document everything. Every death. Every reset. Every piece of information we can extract."
"And then?"
"And then we become the thing the system should have been afraid of."
They sat in silence for a moment longer, two brothers on a hillside, planning how to exploit their own mortality.
Somewhere deep in the architecture of reality, something vast and patient continued to smile.
It had given them infinite lives.
It was curious to see what they'd do with them.Fen died screaming.
In his defense, the scream came after the fatal mistake, not before. He'd already misjudged the construct's reach, already committed to a dodge that assumed a humanoid enemy with joints that respected anatomy, and already realized—about half a second too late—that the stone-and-bronze knight did not, in fact, care about such limitations.
The blade didn't just clip him.
It carved through him.
There was a moment—crystalline and eternal—where Fen felt the separation. Not pain, not yet. Just the wrongness of his body existing in two states simultaneously. Whole and not-whole. Connected and severed.
Then the pain arrived.
It didn't flood in. It detonated.
Every nerve ending lit up at once, a symphony of agony that his brain couldn't process fast enough. His legs gave out—or maybe they were already gone, he couldn't tell anymore. The ground rushed up to meet him, and he hit hard enough that new pain joined the chorus.
The sky above was still gray. Still unmoving. Indifferent.
Fen tried to breathe and choked on something hot and copper-tasting. His vision was darkening at the edges, tunneling down to a pinpoint of gray sky and the construct's burning golden eyes.
Move, his mind screamed. Get up. Do something.
His body didn't respond.
He tried to reach for the stone in his pocket—the one that had hummed with agreement, that had aligned his thoughts and given him probabilities. Maybe it could fix this. Maybe it could—
His fingers found it.
Cold. Inert. Dead.
Or worse—bored.
The stone had felt him die and decided he wasn't worth the effort anymore.
Fen's breath came in wet, rattling gasps. The construct loomed over him, blade raised for a second strike. Unnecessary. Thorough.
I should have listened to Ayger.
The thought came with perfect clarity, cutting through the pain and panic. Ayger had warned him. Had told him to wait, to observe, to think before acting. But Fen had seen an opening and taken it, because that's what he did. That's what he'd always done.
And now he was dying for it.
The blade came down.
Fen screamed.
It wasn't dignified. It wasn't brave. It was raw and animal and terrified—the sound of someone who'd just realized that death wasn't an abstract concept anymore. It was here. It was happening.
The blade hit.
There was a sensation—brief, oddly distant—like being pulled backward through himself. The pain didn't stop so much as invert, turning inside-out, and then—
Nothing.
Darkness folded in, thick and absolute.
Fen floated in it, weightless and formless. No body. No pain. No anything.
Just void.
And then, cutting through the silence like a knife:
SAVE FILE CREATED
ANCHOR: SYSTEM INVASION—INITIAL DEPLOYMENT
CAUSE OF DEATH: INSUFFICIENT PREPARATION
NOTES: LOL
The words hung in the darkness, glowing faint blue. Fen stared at them—or would have, if he'd had eyes. The "LOL" pulsed slightly, as if emphasizing the joke.
Something about that felt worse than dying.
The system had watched him get carved apart and thought it was funny.
Before Fen could process that—before he could feel the appropriate horror or rage or anything—the darkness yanked.
Ayger was standing in the kitchen when the notification arrived.
He'd been staring at the knife for the past three minutes, turning it slowly in his hand. It wasn't a special knife. Just a normal one—well-balanced, sharp, used daily for mundane tasks like chopping vegetables and cutting bread.
He watched the light glint along the blade and tried to calculate probabilities.
Fen should have been back by now.
The Contest's separation had been immediate, but not total. Ayger had expected something—a signal, a system update, a win-state notification. Some indication that his brother had survived the first trial.
Instead, he'd received this:
CONTESTANT STATUS: TERMINATED
The words appeared in his peripheral vision, cold and clinical. No fanfare. No explanation. No option to dismiss them.
Just: Terminated.
Ayger stared at the notification for a long time.
His hands didn't shake. His breathing didn't quicken. His face remained perfectly neutral.
Inside, something cracked.
Terminated.
Not "defeated." Not "eliminated." Terminated.
Fen was dead.
The thought arrived with perfect clarity, settling into Ayger's mind like a stone dropping into still water. Fen had gone into his trial—probably charged ahead without thinking, probably ignored every warning Ayger had given him—and died.
Ayger closed his eyes.
He didn't panic. Panic was inefficient. Instead, he ran through possibilities with the same methodical precision he applied to everything else.
Death was the most likely outcome. The system had proven itself capable of physical manifestation. The trials were real. Therefore, the danger was real.
Which meant Fen was gone.
Ayger opened his eyes again.
The kitchen was still the same. Same wooden table. Same cracked window. Same faint hum in the air that hadn't been there yesterday.
Ah.
There it was.
Ayger focused on the hum, letting it resolve into pressure behind his eyes. A prompt waiting to be acknowledged.
He let it surface.
SYSTEM STATUS: ACTIVE
INVASION PHASE: INITIALIZATION
Ayger's heart skipped.
"Invasion," he repeated softly.
That was earlier than expected. Earlier than possible. The Contest was supposed to be separate from the invasion—a preliminary event, a selection process.
Unless it wasn't.
Unless the Contest was the invasion.
Or
Ayger's mind raced.
Or time had rewound.
The thought should have been absurd. Impossible. But Ayger had learned long ago that "impossible" was just another word for "not yet understood."
If time had rewound, that meant Fen's death had been undone. Reset to a checkpoint. Which meant—
Which meant Fen might still be alive.
Ayger looked back down at the knife.
If this was a loop, he needed to confirm it. Needed to test the hypothesis before he allowed himself to hope.
And there was only one way to test it.
"Empirical evidence," Ayger said aloud. His voice was steady. That was good.
He didn't hesitate.
That was the important part. Hesitation introduced variables. Doubt. Fear.
Ayger brought the knife up, aimed carefully at his own throat, and—
Slipped.
The blade bounced off the edge of the table with a dull clang, spun through the air, and clattered to the floor.
Ayger stared at it.
"…Wow," he said. "That was undignified."
He bent down, picked up the knife, and checked the edge. Still sharp. Good.
He adjusted his grip, braced himself against the counter for stability, and tried again.
This time, he didn't slip.
The pain was sharp but brief—a bright line of sensation that his mind cataloged and filed away even as his body began to fail. Ayger's last coherent thought was that this was a terrible way to go and that Fen would never let him live it down.
Then darkness folded in.
SAVE FILE UPDATED
ANCHOR: SYSTEM INVASION—INITIAL DEPLOYMENT
CAUSE OF DEATH: SELF-INFLICTED (INELEGANT)
NOTES: STYLE POINTS DEDUCTED
The words floated in the void, mocking him.
Ayger would have laughed if he'd had a body.
Ayger woke up on a hillside.
He sat up immediately, scanning his surroundings with practiced efficiency. Same hill. Same sky. Same village in the distance, smoke rising from chimneys.
He was alive.
More importantly: he was back.
Ayger laughed.
It was a short, incredulous sound that turned into something almost giddy. He pressed a hand to his throat—whole, unmarked, as if the knife had never touched it—and laughed harder.
"It works," he said.
A blue window appeared.
SAVE FILE: 1 (SHARED)
SYNC STATUS: CONFIRMED
Ayger's laughter cut off.
Shared.
That meant—
He was on his feet and moving before he'd fully processed the thought. If the save file was shared, Fen had reset too. Which meant his brother was alive. Somewhere on this hill, probably panicking, probably—
Ayger crested the rise and saw him.
Fen was pacing in tight circles, hands gesturing wildly as he muttered to himself. Alive. Whole. Here.
"You died," Fen blurted the moment he saw him. "I died too. There's a save system. It called my death 'insufficient preparation' and—"
Ayger hugged him.
It was brief, awkward, and immediately released, but it happened. His arms wrapped around his brother's shoulders and held on for three seconds that felt like the only real thing in the world.
Fen went rigid with surprise, then slowly relaxed.
"…You okay?" Fen asked quietly.
Ayger stepped back and cleared his throat. "Knife accident."
Fen stared.
Ayger sighed. "On purpose."
Fen burst out laughing.
It was the same hysterical sound from before, but this time Ayger joined him. They stood on the hillside, laughing like madmen, while the system watched and the world continued on, oblivious.
When the laughter finally died down, they sat in the grass and compared notes.
"So," Fen said, "I got carved in half by a construct. You?"
"Stabbed myself in the throat. Missed the first time."
"You missed?"
"The table was uneven."
Fen snorted. "That's the most you thing I've ever heard."
"At least I didn't charge a giant murder-knight."
"It was a tactical advance."
"It was suicide."
"It was initiative."
They fell silent for a moment, the humor draining away as the reality settled in.
"We died," Fen said quietly.
"Yes."
"And we came back."
"Yes."
"The system reset us. Like a video game checkpoint."
Ayger nodded slowly. "A shared save file. Every death rewinds us both to the moment the invasion begins."
Fen looked at him. "That means—"
"Infinite attempts," Ayger finished. "We can't lose permanently."
The words hung in the air between them.
Fen's expression shifted—something dark and hungry flickering behind his eyes. "We can experiment. Test things. Die as many times as we need to."
"Learn the system inside and out," Ayger agreed. His mind was already racing, cataloging possibilities. "Every mechanic. Every exploit. Every weakness."
"We could become unstoppable."
"We will become unstoppable."
They looked at each other, and something passed between them. An understanding. A shared recognition of what they'd just been given.
Not a second chance.
A weapon.
"So," Fen said slowly. "We know the future. We know the system. And we can't lose permanently."
Ayger leaned back and looked at the sky. It was still blue. Still innocent. The system invasion hadn't started yet—wouldn't start for hours. They had time.
"Let's break it," Fen said.
Ayger smiled. It wasn't a kind smile. It was the smile of someone who'd just realized the game was rigged in their favor.
"Carefully," he said. "Methodically. We document everything. Every death. Every reset. Every piece of information we can extract."
"And then?"
"And then we become the thing the system should have been afraid of."
They sat in silence for a moment longer, two brothers on a hillside, planning how to exploit their own mortality.
Somewhere deep in the architecture of reality, something vast and patient continued to smile.
It had given them infinite lives.
It was curious to see what they'd do with them