Silence in the Dead Marshes was never empty. It was thick, greasy, oppressive—like the space itself had been filled with invisible jelly. After the explosion, it didn’t simply fall into place—it slammed into my ears, scorching away every other sound. I lay face-down in black sludge, and the only thing proving I still existed was the wheezing, strained rhythm in my chest. Every breath felt like trying to swallow a strip of red-hot sandpaper. Methane fumes mixed with superheated steam burned my throat, forcing my lungs to cough the air back out along with dark, salty clots.

  I opened my eyes.

  The world was crimson.

  At first, I thought the fog had caught fire. But my mind—the cold, thirty-year-old analyst locked inside a child’s skull—immediately delivered a dry diagnosis: hyphema. Internal bleeding. The vessels had ruptured from the pressure spike when the blast wave crushed my chest like a tin can. Now I was looking at reality through a filter of my own blood. The red veil swayed before my eyes, turning the outlines of tree stumps into blurred silhouettes of monsters.

  The skill [The Will to Live] didn’t respond with its usual cascade of numbers. A low, vibrating hum filled my head, making my teeth ache like I was biting frozen iron. The System no longer offered attack vectors or probability calculations. It simply latched onto my neurons with a dead grip, broadcasting a single command into my consciousness:

  Live.

  It wasn’t a voice—it was instinct converted into code. Mechanical willpower that refused to acknowledge biological failure.

  I tried to move my right hand and nearly blacked out. The world flashed white—not red, not black, but blinding white from pain that shot from my fingertips straight into the back of my skull. I had forgotten. In the heat of combat, I had turned my own hand into a detonator, inverting the magical channels inside it. Now, where my hand should have been, there was something resembling a charred pine branch. The skin had split and curled away, exposing pink tendons and soot-darkened finger bones. Sensation was gone, replaced by a horrifying, rhythmic throbbing that echoed in my temple.

  Alright… I thought, spitting mud from my mouth. Let’s see what human will is worth against the laws of entropy.

  I needed to get out of the open. A methane explosion like that would leave a thermal signature visible for miles. The Order’s rangers weren’t idiots. If the one I targeted survived, he’d already sent a signal. And if not—others would come. In this world, “defects” are always collected.

  I started crawling.

  There was no dignity in it. An eleven-year-old boy—a lump of meat and filth—dragging his broken body through the mire. I pulled myself forward on my left elbow, clawing into the slick peat with my fingers. My legs were useless: the left, pierced by Kyle’s bolt, was completely numb; the right refused to obey at all, nothing more than a dead log.

  Every meter was a battle. Mud packed under my nails, into the open wounds on my back, into my mouth. It was cold—and that saved me. The icy sludge drew excess heat from the burns, keeping my organs from cooking in their own warmth. My mind, stripping pain away layer by layer, isolated useful markers from the surrounding stench. Hydrogen sulfide—deeper ground, don’t go there. Iodine—shieldleaf roots, firmer soil.

  After what felt like an eternity—and in the Marshes, time doesn’t flow, it rots—the fog ahead turned gray, almost opaque. This was the edge of the Marsh Heart, a place even mounted patrols avoided. Here, beneath thick layers of moss, centuries of magical waste and toxic gases had accumulated. The air was so dense it felt like it could be cut with a knife.

  I stopped beside an uprooted stump that, through the crimson haze of my vision, looked like the ribs of a dead titan. Something had to be done about my hand. If I left it like this, gangrene would kill me before sunrise. I groped nearby and found a slab of thick gray clay. It smelled like rotten eggs—sulfur. In my past life, I would’ve recoiled. Now, it was my only antiseptic.

  “Chemistry…” I muttered through clenched teeth, fighting the rising nausea. “The only magic that doesn’t need mana.”

  I began smearing the clay onto my right hand. It felt like sculpting with my own flesh as the material. The clay stuck to the burned meat, triggering violent spasms, but I didn’t stop. I literally sealed the hand inside a heavy, cold cocoon. The sulfur would slow infection; the cold would constrict the vessels, keeping blood from leaking into the swamp. When I finished, I was something shapeless. A bog demon—mud and ash given form.

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  I crawled a little farther until my forehead struck something solid, reeking of tar.

  A boot.

  Heavy. Reinforced with nails. Caked with brown algae.

  Slowly—feeling the world begin to spin like a centrifuge—I lifted my head. A figure towered over me. Huge, shapeless beneath a heavy cloak of oiled hides. In his hands, the man held a long bone probe—a staff used to test the depth of the mire.

  He wasn’t here by chance. The methane blast had shaken the Marshes hard enough to rattle dishes in his shack. For a scavenger, a junk collector, it was a dinner bell: after eruptions like that, valuable “catch” often washed ashore—magical debris, or ranger corpses with expensive gear. He came to collect. He found me.

  “Well now…” His voice was low, dry, crackling like old bark. “Look what the swamp spat out. Still alive. Barely.”

  I tried to reach for the knife at my belt, but my left hand failed—my fingers simply refused to bend. I was completely, utterly defenseless. A crippled twelve-year-old facing a marsh vagrant.

  The old man—he was old, judging by the wheezing breath—leaned closer. From beneath the deep hood, eyes stared down at me. Not kind. Not cruel. Cloudy, yellowish, but sharp and hooked. He smelled of tobacco, sour sweat, and burned herbs.

  “Order brat?” He poked my shoulder with the tip of the probe.

  I screamed—and the sound drained the last of my strength.

  “No…” I rasped, swallowing blood. “I’m… an error… in the system.”

  The old man snorted, eyeing the clay “gauntlet” on my hand.

  “Figure out the sulfur trick yourself? Or did that… demon in your head whisper it?”

  “Myself…” I looked up at him, feeling my consciousness start to fracture. “Your… stove… in the shack. No draft. You’ll poison yourself… in a week. The damper… clogged with soot.”

  He froze. His thick eyebrows slowly crept upward.

  “What nonsense are you spouting, runt? How would you know about my stove?”

  “I see…” I closed my eyes. “And don’t drink… from the creek. You’ve got… kidney stones. I hear… how you breathe… through pain. Help me… and I won’t let you… die… in that hole.”

  I didn’t see his face, but I heard him exhale—heavy, old, tired.

  “Cheeky little bastard. One foot in the grave and still handing out advice. Fine. Come on. Name’s Efrem. And don’t you dare die on the way—I don’t need extra stench.”

  Rough, calloused arms lifted me. I weighed no more than a sack of oats, but every movement sent symphonies of pain through my bones. I remembered the path to his shack only in fragments—swaying gray grass and Efrem’s steady muttering under his breath.

  When I opened my eyes again, the crimson fog was gone. Darkness, softened by warm orange light. I lay on something hard, smelling of dry straw and dust. Nearby came the gentle bubbling of a pot and the dry crackle of firewood.

  I tried to move my right hand. Pain answered instantly—sharp, alive.

  So the nerves aren’t completely burned out, I thought. Bad for comfort. Good for survival.

  I was inside the shack. The blackened log walls were hung with bundles of herbs, small creature skulls, and strange mechanisms. In the corner, on a heavy stool, sat the old man. He wasn’t looking at me. His attention was fixed on a peculiar object on the table: a hollow bird skull wrapped in copper wire. Inside it pulsed a cloudy crystal, its light uneven, jittery.

  “Awake?” Efrem didn’t turn around. “There’s a jug on the table. Drink—if you can reach it.”

  The jug stood a couple of meters away, right at the edge of the table.

  A test.

  He wasn’t about to hand me water. He wanted to know whether there was still will left in this broken body—or if he’d dragged home useless junk better tossed back into the swamp.

  I bit my lip until fresh blood filled my mouth. Rolled onto my stomach, feeling the bark splint on my left forearm dig into my skin. Every movement cost me a wave of cold sweat. I reached with my left hand, centimeter by centimeter, until my fingers touched the cool clay of the jug. The water was clean, with a faint hint of mint. My throat eased slightly.

  “Efrem…” I called once my breathing steadied. “That crystal… in the skull.”

  The old man slowly turned. The open threat in his eyes was gone, replaced by heavy, leaden curiosity.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s got… reverse resonance. You looped the coil wrong. In three hours, it’ll overheat and burn your eyes out. Shift the third turn to the right.”

  Efrem looked at the skull, then at me. He took a thin wooden splinter and carefully—barely breathing—nudged the copper wire. The crystal’s pulse immediately stabilized. The light became steady, amber.

  He set the tool down and crouched beside my pallet.

  “You’re not just an Order defect,” he said quietly. “You’re a very expensive malfunction. Who are you, boy?”

  I looked at my ruined hands—the gray crust of clay, the blood-soaked rags. Inside me, my thirty-year-old mind began slowly assembling a new plan. There was no point hiding my name.

  “Iron,” I rasped. “Iron Everfall. And I’m your only insurance against this shack blowing sky-high—with you inside.”

  Efrem gave a crooked grin and tossed me a chunk of stale bread.

  “Eat, Iron. High tide’s coming tonight. If you can’t sit up by morning—I’ll toss you back.”

  I tore into the crust with my teeth. My previous life had burned with that wagon on the bridge. Now a new chapter was beginning. And in this one, I wasn’t going to be a tool anymore.

  [The Will to Live] flickered deep in my subconscious:

  System integrity: 22%.

  Recovery mode active.

  Current objective: Survive at any cost.

  I closed my eyes. A long night in the Marshes lay ahead—but for the first time in a long while, I felt that I was still me.