The knife stopped in mid-air. There was no magic being expended, no pull of energy from his now absent core. Albert simply willed the knife to stop, and it did. A faint outline of a faraway headache began to appear in his mind, but it was too distant to tell for sure.

He blinked, opening the last of the notifications that had flashed in his vision when he had come to his senses.

Power surge.

Three seconds left.

Albert gasped as air suddenly filled his lungs, throwing himself to the side and launching himself to his feet in a surge of power. His now healed body shot into the air and the ground disappeared from view. Managing to gather just enough wits to understand what was happening, Albert saw the timer count down to one second and scanned the horizon.

He saw a faraway mountain and willed himself there. But the pull was perhaps too strong, and instead of the mountain he was looking at, he felt himself be transported to a mountain… elsewhere.

Suddenly, Albert’s body was pelted by snow and the cold bit into his flesh like a constrictor snake. At the same time, the system message blinked away, replaced by another.

Power surge ended. System offline.

WARNING: Alignment Energy buildup.

And then nothing. Albert did not know where he was, but he knew that it was too cold to stand still and speculate. While he was still unsure about what he did in the years he spent – seemingly – in his inner world or something, he knew that he didn’t have all his body enhancements anymore and that unless he did something, he was about to die of hypothermia.

He had gone from a dire situation where he was about to die to another dire situation where he was about to die but a bit slower, buying himself a few minutes in the process.

Albert’s eyes scanned the surrounding area. The snow was blinding, the light of the sun reflected by the tiny crystals and painful to his now unenhanced eyes. But in the distance, a stone outcropping stood out in the monotone landscape, revealing darkness. A cave entrance, sheltered from the wind and the snow.

He waded through the snow, struggling to reach it. Albert’s naked legs were buried in the snow to the hips, and it the cold burned, no longer painful but searing hot against the bare skin. The snow was hard, half frozen, and where it clung to his skin it melted and the water sapped him of his body heat. Still, Albert focused on planting a foot in front of the other and thought of nothing else.

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Five minutes later, Albert reached the cave and threw himself inside. He fell to the ground, shivering, convulsing and crawling as far as he could from the cave entrance. Immediately the feeling of the frigid wind disappeared, the howling of the wind left behind and outside. Inside the cave it was cold, but without the wind and the snow, it was much more bearable.

He stumbled to a wall, made of blue ice that shone with an eerie inner light, and slumped against it. The ground was cold, smooth and slowly melting due to his own body heat. Finally, Albert was out of immediate danger and could take the time to think about what was going on.

The betrayal stung, even though he had had a few days to process it. The near death experience hung over his mind like Damocles’ sword, however, and he couldn’t tell if his body was shaking due to the cold or due to the realization he had almost died. Again. It was not the first time, but it seemed that he was not building any tolerance to death whatsoever.

He forced himself to focus on the present, pushing all thoughts away. He knew this experience was going to change him, change the way he interacted with people, change his trust in others, and perhaps more than that. He still had to analyze all that happened in the black space, wherever that was. All that would come later.

Even though he was not going to die in the next five minutes, Albert knew he had barely bought himself a few hours. His teeth were chattering in his mouth, his jaw spasming uncontrollably, and the rest of his body was also suffering extreme cold damage.

His thoughts, at least, were regaining some semblance of clarity and the pain was receding slowly.

With cold determination, Albert decided to go through the notifications he had received. Unless he managed to get the System back online, he would die in this cave.

Albert pulled with his mind, willing the System to manifest.

Nothing.

His whole body trembled, and it was not the cold. He tried again. Nothing.

The words system offline rung in his mind like the loudest bell, fanning the flames of a migraine. The realization that he had no more magic was dangerously close, but Albert refused to believe that this was the end. He had done something, when in that black space. Something that took a long time to do and while he had trouble remembering what it was, he refused to believe that he did all that just to escape Kainen and die alone in a mountain cave with no exit.

He focused on himself. He had spent who knows how long meticulously studying his own magic, before and after he reached the black space, trying to figure out how the System worked and how to break free of its limitations. Then, he was struck by an unworldly amount of Alignment Energy from the shield.

There had to be some trace of either of those things in him. Closing his eyes, Albert tried to focus inward and see what was left there. But, to his utter horror, he found nothing.

A memory surfaced. Of him, in the black space, folding lines upon themselves in a cube. What was he trying to do?

A name accompanied those memories. Jeff.

Albert frowned. “Jeff?”

What the hell did it mean?

A small, pulsing cube of small blue lines spun out of Albert’s body. Surprised, Albert tried to touch the thing but his fingers went through it, passing the many lines of color and energy, going straight through the cube’s core. The cube, no larger than a fist, slowly spun in the air. It was made of the same lines Albert remembered from the black space, and energy radiated throughout its many pathways like electrons in a circuit.

“Are you Jeff?” Albert said, wondering if he had gone insane. “What’s going on?”

Power: 1

Defense: 1

Albert’s eyes lit up. He jumped to his feet, the pain and the cold and the terrible situation suddenly forgotten.

“Holy shit! I did it!”

He winced in pain, and sat back down before he fell face first on the cold, hard ice of the floor.