Author: Tricia best

2025-11-01 08:11:17

Chapter 13: Alone with the Divine

Kael’s pulse hammered against his ribs like a trapped drum. The world had turned itself inside out again. One moment he was a ghost erased from every record, and the next, Elira—the one person who tethered his sanity—was gone too.

Gone. Like smoke leaving a grave.

He sat in the fractured quiet of the slums, the air thick with soot and incense. Questions clawed at him, multiplying like weeds in his chest, and every answer the world owed him was dust. The police would drag everything through bureaucracy and suspicion, so Kael chose the slower pain: he’d stay hidden here a while longer, let the noise die before stepping back into light.

A pulse of energy brushed the edge of his mind, the voice of the System sliding in like static.

I can still sense a fragment of her mana. Stay put. Don’t move until the investigations are done. Then I’ll lead you back.

Kael pressed his palms together and exhaled through h

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83
Healing SystemC83: Sunlight“She seems a bit weird,” Kael thought with the quiet exhaustion of someone who had long since accepted that reality around him had a habit of behaving like a smug cunt with a sense of humor far sharper than his own, as he walked at the front of the path while Astraea followed a few steps behind him, her presence light yet impossible to ignore, like a thought that refused to finish forming.She had watched the entire fight earlier with an expression so casual that it unsettled him far more than panic ever could, because indifference in the face of impossible violence usually belonged to gods, monsters, or systems that pretended they were not enjoying themselves.“Astr,” Kael started, turning back toward her with the intention of asking something harmless, something human, only to stop mid breath when he noticed that her eyes had once again lost their focus, drifting past him and through the world as if she were looking at so
82
Chapter 82: Blood That ScreamsThe frenzied Vampire continued its assault with the kind of obsessive cruelty that suggested either remarkable discipline or a deeply personal hatred for Kael’s continued breathing, as bolts of condensed force tore through the air toward him at speeds that made perception itself feel like a delayed luxury, forcing him to rely on instinct and precognition rather than sight as he twisted, stepped, and slid through the storm like a man dancing inside a guillotine factory that had just discovered rhythm.It took far too long for clarity to claw its way into the chaos, but repetition has a way of educating even the most distracted mind, and Kael finally caught the pattern hidden inside the madness, noticing that each projectile shimmered with a dark red sheen that refracted light like wet glass and pulsed with a viscosity that made his skin crawl, the color unmistakable and obscene in its familiarity.“They are using blood,” he mu
81
Chapter 81: Coffin Beneath the DirtKael moved through the uneven hills with the careful irritation of a man who knew exactly where the problem was and deeply resented that it existed at all, his awareness stretched across the terrain as clusters of hostile red marks burned patiently on his mental map, all of them gathered together like idiots waiting to be scolded, and he made absolutely certain that no curious soul or well meaning hero was tailing him because this was personal, messy, and very much a one man inconvenience that he intended to finish without witnesses.The land itself seemed wrong the closer he drew, the ground rising and falling in shallow waves as if the earth had once tried to escape and failed, and when the first shapes revealed themselves, crawling out of shadow and rot, Kael felt that familiar, tired click of recognition settle into place because these things were not shadows, not truly, but imitations stitched together from death and bad dec
80
Chapter 80: SimilarKael lay beside the crackling fire, his body trembling under the lingering ache of exhaustion. The System had forced him to “train” for four relentless hours, and he now looked like someone who’d wrestled with death and barely crawled back. His hair clung damply to his forehead, and his breaths came shallow, smoky in the cold air.To make matters worse, he could feel the weight of two gazes fixed on him. The longer it went on, the more uncomfortable it became.Bored and sore, Kael finally turned his attention toward Astraea. Talking seemed better than sinking further into the silence. He didn’t know much about this world, about its customs or its strange truths, but she fascinated him—too quiet, too composed, too otherworldly.He wanted to ask her something simple, something that wouldn’t sound foolish. Yet before he could, she moved first.Astraea approached the firelight and sat beside him. Her silver eyes shimm
79
Chapter 79: Cold ---Kael sat in front of the fire, staring into it as if the flames could explain why the silver-haired woman across from him wouldn’t stop staring at him like a particularly interesting ghost.‘She’s still staring at me,’ he thought, trying not to meet her eyes again.The cave was quiet except for the occasional crackle of burning wood. Night had fully claimed the forest outside, leaving only the trembling halo of the campfire. Orin seemed calmer now, the madness in his eyes cooled into something that almost resembled rest.But Astraea... she was something else entirely. A presence that shouldn’t exist. A fragment of his past wearing human shape.Kael could feel the connection between them — not imagined, not metaphorical, but stitched through the soul like a needle through scar tissue. The memory she awakened in him was too vivid to dismiss, yet too incomplete to understand.When he finally looked back, sh
78
Chapter 78: The Odd Woman[Kael’s POV]“How does it taste?”Kael didn’t even have the luxury of answering before his body decided to violently betray him. He bent forward and vomited everything onto the stone floor of the cave, the sound echoing wetly in the cold air. That made it the fourth monster he’d ruined today. Four steaming piles of culinary failure, each more inedible than the last.They looked edible enough—beast-like, muscular things that probably considered him a snack in another life—but once he cooked them, every bite tasted like rotten mana condensed into despair.Orin had already fallen asleep deeper in the cave, curled against the wall like an overgrown cat. The cave itself was safe, wrapped in a natural mana flow that repelled beasts. Kael should’ve been at peace. Should’ve been, if not for the yellow dot blinking on his Halo’s minimap, a few dozen meters away.The dot hadn’t moved. It just watched.“Wh

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