The System Gave Me A Dead God

Congratulations, Host.]

[You have died.]

Ezra stared at the words floating in front of his face. They hung in the dark like they'd always been there, pale blue letters with no source, no glow spilling onto the rubble around him.

"What?"

His voice didn't echo. That was the first wrong thing. A collapsed subway tunnel should echo.

[Don't worry.]

[You are about to become something much worse.]

The letters blinked out. For a second there was nothing. No pain, no cold, no weight of the ceiling that had come down on him four minutes ago. No corpse under his hand.

Then all of it hit at once, and Ezra sucked in a breath like he'd been underwater.

He was on his back. Concrete dust coated the inside of his throat. His right hand was still wrapped around a wrist that wasn't warm and wasn't cold, just still, in a way nothing alive had ever been under his fingers.

He let go so fast he cracked his elbow on the rail behind him.

"Okay," he said, to nobody. "Okay, okay, okay."

The body he'd been holding onto didn't look like a body anymore. It looked like it had been carved out of the tunnel wall and then abandoned halfway through becoming something else, armor plates fused into skin, skin fused into stone, one arm ending in a stump of black glass where a hand should have been. It had been down here a long time.

Long enough that the collapse three years ago hadn't disturbed it. Long enough that when Ezra's package run had gone sideways and the ceiling had opened up under him, he'd fallen directly onto something the city had apparently forgotten existed.

He hadn't meant to touch it. He'd meant to catch himself.

"Bad landing," he muttered and pushed up onto his knees, and that was when the second notification hit.

[System Initialization: Complete.]

[Host: Ezra Kade]

[Rank: —]

[Class: —]

No numbers. Everyone in Meridian City who'd ever Awakened had numbers by now, stats scrolling down a panel the second the System kicked in, Strength and Agility and Mana Affinity stacked up like a receipt.

Ezra had spent three years staring at his own miserable list of numbers, E-Rank, bottom of the bottom, the kind of awakening people apologized to your face about and laughed about behind your back.

This wasn't that. Where the stat block should have been, there was one line.

[You have inherited the corpse of a God.]

Ezra read it twice. Then he laughed, one short ugly bark of a sound that bounced wrong off the tunnel walls, too flat, swallowed too fast.

"Sure," he said. "Sure I have."

*You do,* something said, and it wasn't the System's blue text. It came from inside his own skull, low and unhurried, like a voice that had been waiting a long time for someone to finally be worth using it on.

Ezra went very still.

"Who said that."

*You know exactly who said that. You're holding what's left of me.*

He looked down at his hand, at the glass-black stump of an arm two feet away, and every instinct he owned told him to run. He didn't. He'd learned a long time ago that running from things in the Underlevels usually just meant dying tired instead of dying rested.

"You're dead," Ezra said. "I watched you not breathe for four minutes."

*Dead is generous. I've been unfinished for three hundred years. There's a difference.*

"Unfinished."

*Nine of them saw to that. I intend to finish it myself. You, it turns out, are the hand I have left to do it with.*

Ezra's ears were ringing. Somewhere above him, a long way up through collapsed concrete and rebar, the city was still running on schedule, couriers on their routes, S-Ranks doing morning patrols, Damon Ashgrove probably already posting his kill count from last night's Guild sweep. Ezra was supposed to have delivered a sealed crate to a pickup point eleven minutes ago. He was going to lose the contract. He was going to lose the day rate that contract paid, which was the only thing standing between him and missing rent again.

None of that mattered right now, and the fact that it didn't scared him more than the voice did.

"What do you want," he said.

*What I've always wanted. Names. Nine of them. You're going to help me collect.*

[Objective Unlocked: The Nine Unfinished]

[Target 1 of 9: Located — Sublevel 4, Undertrack Junction]

[Time Remaining: 30 Days]

Ezra read the countdown three times before the number actually landed.

"Thirty days for what."

*For you to decide whether you're strong enough to keep being the one holding me,* the voice said, and for the first time it sounded almost amused. *Or whether I take it back.*

The tunnel groaned somewhere above him, dust sifting down through a crack in the collapsed ceiling, and Ezra realized he was still kneeling next to a god's corpse in the dark with no idea how to get back to the surface, no Rank, no Class, and a voice in his head that had just told him, without a hint of a lie in it, that his own body had a return date attached.

He wiped the dust off his hands and stood up anyway. Nobody was coming to get him out of this. Nobody ever had.

"Fine," Ezra said, mostly to himself. "Thirty days. Let's see who's first."

Behind him, deeper in the collapsed tunnel, past where his flashlight beam died out, something shifted in the dark that hadn't been moving a minute ago. Not rubble settling. Footsteps.

Slow ones. Getting closer.

[Warning: Target 1 has detected your presence.]

Ezra had wanted a weapon his entire life. He'd never once wanted one to introduce itself.