The phantom friction of rough hemp still burned Elowen’s throat.

  He gagged, expelling empty air, and scrambled backward until his spine hit freezing stone. His hands flew to his neck. There was no rope. Just a rusted iron collar. Runes etched into the metal hummed against his pulse like a parasite.

  Elowen squeezed his eyes shut, trying to breathe, trying to process the sheer, suffocating weight of what had just happened.

  He remembered the rain on Earth. The sound of his little brother laughing as they ran for the bus. That single, pristine memory was the only thing that had kept him sane through ten years of bleeding for the Weeping Court. Ten years of crawling from pit-thrall to Knight-Captain

  Only to be framed, dragged to the gallows, and slaughtered like a diseased dog. The roar of the nobles still rang in his ears, overlapping with the sharp crack of his own vertebrae snapping.

  He had died. He had lost his life, and he had lost his ticket home.

  But the damp stone under his bleeding fingernails was real.

  A jagged, crimson interface ripped into his vision. The System in Valtoria had never been kind, but this felt openly malicious.

  [Judgment: Unworthy.]

  [Trait Activated: Remorse Loop. Flesh fails. Rewinding temporal anchor.]

  [Loyalty Integrity: 100/100]

  Level 1.

  Elowen stared at the bleeding text. He had climbed this mountain ten years ago. Now, looking at his emaciated hands, the truth settled in. His muscles were gone. His mana core was an empty cavern. He was back on his very first day in the Pit.

  Uneven footsteps echoed outside.

  The iron door shrieked inward. Two 'Hollowed' stepped into the torchlight—gaunt husks in rusted chainmail, their faces fused behind featureless, weeping-porcelain masks.

  "Up, meat," the lead Hollowed rasped.

  He drove the butt of his halberd hard into Elowen’s sternum.

  Elowen collapsed, coughing up bile. Instinct took over. He twisted his hips, aiming a sweeping kick at the guard's legs to break his stance. But his starved, atrophied leg just slapped uselessly against the Hollowed's iron greave. The guard didn't even flinch.

  "The Graft-Brute is hungry," the second Hollowed sneered, hauling Elowen up by the collar. The runes flared, sending a wave of nausea through his gut.

  They dragged him through narrow, calcified tunnels. They shoved him through an iron grate. Sunlight stabbed his eyes.

  The Pit wasn't dirt. It was a sunken arena of blinding white chalk, ringed by jagged glass walls. High above, nobles in veiled silks looked down like vultures.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  A notched falchion was kicked into the chalk at his feet. Elowen picked it up. The iron felt dead in his frail grip.

  Across the expanse, the rusted gates opened.

  A Graft-Brute lumbered into the light. A former prisoner heavily modified by the flesh-smiths. The man’s left arm had been amputated and replaced with a siege-hammer, bolted directly into his shoulder bone. Black veins spiderwebbed across his grey skin.

  Level 5.

  The crowd’s roar peaked. The Brute charged, kicking up clouds of chalk.

  Elowen knew this monster's rhythm. It led with the hammer and overbalanced on the downswing.

  The Brute closed the distance. The siege-hammer arced high, blotting out the sun. Elowen pivoted left to slip the blow.

  But his bare feet slid on the loose chalk. His calves seized.

  The hammer didn't miss.

  It caught his shoulder with the sound of a snapping tree trunk. Agony exploded through his left side. His collarbone shattered into bone shrapnel. The sheer kinetic force lifted his feet off the ground and spun him into the dust.

  [Critical Trauma. Health: 18/120]

  [Status: Left Torso Shattered.]

  Elowen tried to inhale, but his punctured lung refused. He tasted copper and ash.

  Through the haze of pain, the massive silhouette of the Brute loomed over him. The creature just raised the hammer one more time.

  Elowen’s brain screamed at his limbs to move. His broken body lay paralyzed.

  The hammer came down.

  Nothing.

  ***

  [Fatal Damage Sustained.]

  [Atonement Failed. Initiating Remorse Loop...]

  [Loyalty Integrity: 100/100 → 95/100]

  [Warning: Soul Tax Applied. Synaptic pruning initiated.]

  Sparks. Blue fire. Freezing stone.

  Elowen gasped, his lungs inflating violently. He flailed, clapping a hand over his mouth. His shoulder was whole. His chest was unbroken.

  But his mind was burning.

  A cold scalpel scraped the inside of his skull. A memory was dissolving. He frantically tried to grab it—the rain on Earth. The bus stop. His younger brother's laugh. That single, pristine memory that had kept him sane for ten years.

  Then, the boy's face smeared like wet oil paint. The sound of his laugh warped into digital static, then silence. Elowen clawed at his own head, weeping. He knew he had a brother. He knew he loved him. But the face was gone. The warmth was gone. Replaced by an agonizing, hollow void.

  [Integrity: 95/100]

  Elowen stared at the damp stone wall. The loop wasn't just a reset. It was a meat grinder for his soul. If he died twenty times, there would be nothing left of the man he was. He would be an empty, sociopathic shell.

  Footsteps echoed in the corridor. The cycle was repeating.

  Elowen wiped the cold sweat from his face and forced himself to his feet. He couldn't rely on his old reflexes. His body was too weak, and his soul was too fragile to die again.

  He stared at the iron door, the phantom pain of the hammer still throbbing in his shoulder.

  He wasn't going to the arena.

  The door shrieked inward. The same two Hollowed guards stood in the torchlight.

  "Up, meat," the lead Hollowed rasped.

  He lunged, driving the butt of the halberd toward Elowen’s chest.

  Elowen threw himself sideways, dropping to the floor. He scooped up a handful of stagnant water and grit from the corner of the cell. In one fluid motion, he flung the filth directly into the eye-slits of the guard's mask.

  The Hollowed flinched with a wet, gagging sound.

  Elowen went for the ankles. He threw his frail weight against the guard’s shins. The Hollowed, blinded and top-heavy, couldn't adjust his balance. His boots slipped on the wet stone, and he toppled backward with a deafening crash, his head cracking against the corridor wall.

  [Sneak Attack Successful.]

  The second guard shouted, raising his halberd. But the tunnel was too narrow for a sweeping strike.

  Elowen scrambled over the fallen guard. He grabbed the iron chain attached to his own collar, wrapped it around his fist, and slammed his knuckles into the first guard's mask. The ceramic cracked. Bone crunched beneath it.

  The blinded guard dropped his weapon. Elowen snatched the halberd from the floor.

  It was too heavy for his Level 1 arms to swing. So he didn't swing it.

  He braced the wooden shaft against a divot in the floor, pointing the heavy iron blade upward at a forty-five-degree angle.

  The second Hollowed realized the trap a fraction of a second too late. His momentum carried him forward. The iron blade tore through the rusted chainmail, sinking deep into the guard's stomach.

  [Critical Hit. Hollowed Guard Eliminated.]

  [Essence Siphoned: 50]

  The guard choked on his own black blood, collapsing over the shaft.

  Elowen ripped the short falchion from the dead guard's belt. He spun back to the first guard, who was just trying to stand. Elowen drove the falchion straight through the crack in the porcelain, burying the blade to the hilt in the Hollowed's throat.

  [Hollowed Guard Eliminated.]

  [Essence Siphoned: 50]

  [The Void Feeds. Level Up Imminent: 100/300 Essence to Level 2.]

  Silence fell over the corridor. Black blood dripped from Elowen's hands, pooling on the cold stone.

  He looked down at the bodies, then toward the end of the tunnel. One way led to the arena. The other led down, into the pitch-black labyrinth of the prison’s under-tunnels.

  Elowen looked at the flashing red System text. He was alive. But his brother's face was still a terrifying blank spot in his mind.

  They had taken the rain. They had taken the laugh.

  He stepped over the corpses and vanished into the dark.

  But as the shadows swallowed him, a sound echoed from the deep under-tunnels. Not a footstep. Not a roar. It was a voice, wet and synthesized, perfectly mimicking the dying gargle of the guard Elowen had just killed.

  And then, another voice answered it in the dark.