Cheat In Apocalypse

Four

"I'm sorry."

The woman breathed the words so quietly they nearly vanished in the roar of the fight. Guilt darkened her face, yet she forced her attention back to the creature towering before her. Spell after spell burst from her hands as she fought to keep the monster from advancing.

Ray could not move. He could not even blink. But he heard her clearly, as if her voice traveled straight into the hollow space where his consciousness floated.

"She is sorry, huh? What a joke," he muttered inside his own mind, a weak grin tugging at lips coated in blood. His teeth were stained red, and his face, stiff with drying crimson, was the only part of him that still felt real.

Everything below his head was gone to numbness.

That was when it finally clicked.

This was the end. The real one.

"I do not blame her or that man. I expected this. Saving someone like me was pointless," Ray told himself, his throat tightening as though it, too, was preparing to stop working.

His thoughts blurred. Sensation slipped away in pieces. Only a shrill, unending buzz filled his ears, drowning out the battle around him.

Zzzzzzz...

The sound swallowed everything. He could barely follow his own thoughts anymore. There was only the certainty that his heart had almost reached its final beat.

"At least I managed to alert the officials when the red Abyss Gate showed up. At least I did that much before dying..."

One by one, his pains faded. The agony in his shattered bones faded. The suffocating ache in his sick lungs faded. The throbbing in his cracked skull faded. Even the raw burn traveling through his nerves dissolved into nothing.

And in that nothing, he found a strange quiet.

"Peace?"

Tears gathered in his ruined eyes. They slid across the dried blood on his cheeks and left dark streaks like thin, red rivers.

"No. This is not peace. Death is not peace."

His weakened mind grabbed onto the thought and repeated it again and again, the repetition giving it shape, almost giving him something solid to hold.

Ray had grown up alone. Abandoned at five years old and delivered to an orphanage by parents who never returned. The years before that were blank to him, swallowed by memory he could never recover, which frustrated him even now as life slipped away.

He had lived as a poor, fragile young man, one who never found a moment that felt like real joy. He had never tasted a truly satisfying meal. He never made a friend who stayed. People mocked him, stepped over him, and treated him like an inconvenience until the very last days of his life.

Even when the world changed and the system descended, giving humanity miraculous power, none of it mattered for Ray. He awakened nothing. No gifts. No talent. No ability. If he could have leveled up, he could have cured his sickness, but he had been too weak to fight the monsters that crowded the new era.

He never blamed the people who ignored him. Why would they help someone who could give them nothing? He was sick, frail, useless. A liability. A burden. His mind echoed these words so often they had become the truth he lived in.

Even now, he blamed no one. Not truly. Someone should have taken the blame, but he could not give that weight to anyone else.

So he blamed himself.

For the sickness.

For the weakness.

For failing to awaken any kind of ability.

For failing to try harder.

For every misstep that led him here.

Deep down, though, he knew the real culprit was something untouchable.

Fate had dealt the cards.

He simply held them.

And his greatest regret gathered in his fading mind like a final confession.

He had never really lived.

Only a few seconds remained. His heart worked without him, making a last, clumsy effort to keep him in the world. The rest of his body had already left. He had lost consciousness, his chest rising in faint, uneven motions that barely counted as breathing.

Around him, the battle roared on. Dozens of high-level Gifteds clashed with monstrous, writhing creatures. Their blows shook the earth. Their power flashed across the fields in bursts of fire, light, and smoke.

Above them, a helicopter shredded the air. A cameraman leaned out, filming the chaos for the world to watch. Ray’s body lay nearby, but the man behind the camera did not spare it even a passing glance.

Then everything went silent.

Everything stopped.

The Gifteds froze with their weapons mid-swing.

The monsters halted, their tentacles suspended in place.

The helicopter hung in the sky with its blades frozen in perfect stillness.

The wind quit moving.

The clouds stopped drifting.

Even the turning of the earth seemed to fall into pause.

Time held its breath.

A thin crack streaked across the sky. It spread with a sound like breaking glass, splitting the heavens into sharp fragments that crumbled into nothing.

From that void, a woman stepped into existence.

She looked like strength given form. Her eyes glowed with a deep, bright blue that illuminated her pale face. Her long hair floated around her as if caught in a gentle lunar tide, shining with a soft white radiance. A flowing white dress covered her completely, the fabric pure and almost sacred, yet her expression held an unmistakable sadness.

Her gaze swept the battlefield once, and in an instant she found the boy on the ground.

The distance meant nothing. She appeared at his side with no movement at all.

Ignoring the frozen world, she lowered herself beside him and slipped an arm beneath his head, resting him gently on her lap. His blood spread across her immaculate dress, staining the white fabric, but she did not react to it. Her hand pressed over his chest as she closed her eyes and listened to the faint, failing rhythm of his heart.

"Forgive me, my beloved."

Her voice trembled with fury that she worked hard to suppress.

"I should have known they would dare to do something like this to your soul while I was away."

Her calm cracked, revealing simmering anger.

"How dare they seal your talents, your bloodlines, your potential, your abilities. How dare they take what is yours. I will show them what true suffering is when I return."

She inhaled slowly. Her rage softened into grief. Tears gathered in her glowing eyes and fell onto his cheeks as she brushed her fingers along his face.

"I can only imagine what you must have gone through," she whispered. "You deserve rest, but this cannot end here. What must come requires this moment."

She leaned closer. A faint light gathered at her fingertip as she traced it over the curve of his cheek.

"I am removing the seals that were forced onto your soul. Every ability. Every talent. Every part of you they locked away."

Light flowed from her hand and traveled straight into his chest. His heart responded with a small but steady thump, the only moving thing in the frozen world around them.

With her other hand, she called something into existence. A translucent blue prism appeared over her palm as though it had always been waiting there.

"The Time Lords would lose their minds if they knew I brought this to you. It is not like they could stop me. Or you."

She held it over his body. The prism hovered in the air and began to rotate, humming softly.

"I should have found you sooner," she whispered, regret tightening her voice.

"The seal hiding your soul blinded even me. Yet that same seal shielded you from them. They never found you. They never destroyed you before you could rise again. Fate tried to bury your path, but destiny bends toward you no matter how they twist it."

The prism spun faster. Sparks danced around it, bright enough to illuminate the frozen battlefield. Energy rippled outward in small waves.

"I will send your divine soul back to the day the system descended into this world."

Tears streamed freely down her face.

The prism reached a blinding speed and shattered into raw energy. The surge shot into Ray’s body, engulfing him in a brilliant glow that washed over everything around them.

"Strength without hardship will crumble. It will never be enough."

Her voice grew firm, filled with iron that contradicted the tremble of her hands.

"Grow stronger," she commanded.

"Grow stronger and destroy anything and anyone who blocks your path. Become unmatched. Become unstoppable. Make every being across every race and every plane bow before you."

"Grow strong enough to surpass even the system itself."

A gentle smile touched her lips as she watched his soul lift from his body, glowing like a fragile spark rising into the air.

"I will always be with you," she whispered as his soul drifted out of her arms and into the light.