I had never died before.

Well, wait… that wasn’t true. I guess I could say that I "physically" died when I was initially uploaded into the Tela’s system and placed in a Personal Live Matrix. So, I had physically died but not mentally.

At this point though, stuff like that just seemed novel, like getting into a car and driving somewhere. My mind had been transported so many times to different places and into different bodies, both in the Haoolla Defender game and this drone body, that as long as my mind stayed the same, I still felt alive and could press on like normal.

So… I don’t know if what I was experiencing now would be called death.

The moment that the beam reached my physical body, I was instantly severed from my personal space and taken to a sensory heaven and hell.

Yup, both places at once, and as far as I could tell…

I was still alive.

At least, some version of me was.

But here, in this place… everything felt disjointed. My vision was warped, an endless cascade of colors that shouldn’t exist, folding in on themselves in a slow spiral. The horizon was everywhere and nowhere, a constant curve that never bent the same way twice. I saw a place that looked like a world of melting pointing fingers, but then it twisted into a view of me flying through caverns of heart-like organs, then shattered into shards of bubbling glass, each with a different image and angle shown, all without making a sound.

Sometimes, like a child had found the volume dial—everything made sound. Deafening bursts or low vibrations of what could only be described as patterns of noise. No melody, no rhythm—just the scream or hum of something impossibly old vibrating in the air, followed by sudden crashes, like waves hitting a beach that wasn’t really there. It was… oppressive, but fascinating.

Light pulsed at the edges of my vision, forcing my eyes shut as though the brilliance of a new star had been born directly in front of me. Yet, sometimes when I opened them again, it was total darkness, like everything had ended. It was the kind of black that makes you think you’ve gone blind or been swallowed alive. But just as I thought my vision had been broken, fragments of light exploded, as if galaxies were being born and dying in the span of seconds, right in front of me.

I floated, unable to feel my feet—or was I sinking? Gravity seemed to change every second, pulling me in different directions like some unseen force was toying with me. At one moment, I felt impossibly heavy, the weight of worlds crushing my bones. In the next, I was weightless, like I was suspended in an oily soup… only there was no liquid around me and the effect of weight was in my mind and spirit.

Smell was another thing entirely. I knew I wasn't breathing, yet somehow my mind thought I could. One breath would be thick with sweetness, a sickeningly sweet scent that made me think of overripe fruit about to rot. The next? Something metallic, like iron, or blood with worms wiggling in it. It stung my nose, but then drifted away like smoke turning sweet like a grandmother’s pie. There was a rhythm to it, almost like a breeze, except… there was no wind here.

And I was cold. Not a physical cold, but a deep, unsettling kind of chill. A dread that seeped into my mind and twisted there, like the memory of a nightmare I couldn’t quite forget. Like running down a hallway in the near dark to get away from someone chasing me.

It was too much.

I tried—really tried—to escape to VR or my personal space. I tried to feel out my swarm, to send my mind away to visit the Six even. But every attempt to access what I once had was met with a dead silence, like a door slammed shut. The more I tried, the more distant it felt, until the hope of returning to it vanished entirely.

I was alone. No connection to the outside. No Nurse, no swarm, no... anything. Just me, floating in this place that was as much a lovely prison as it was an expanse of eldritch horror.

There was something hidden here, so powerful and strange, yet my mind couldn’t begin to conceive of it.

An odd thought hit me. What if this was what it was like to be a plant? To grow in a sightless world, feeding off of the light that nourished, the soil enfolding beneath, yet never having a concept of the world around. No concept of seasons, of drought or disease that made their presence known in the plants suffering. Of the worms wriggling in the dirt around and through its roots, the birds landing on branches and fluttering their wings, nor the of the axe or fire that ended its life and made it into something else.

All I could make sense of was what happened to me, what something felt like in the moment. I figured everything that I saw and sensed was only a fragment of what was really happening.

My body was missing the ability to understand. Even with all my senses I was still deaf dumb and blind.

And then the whispers began. Not voices - more like echoes of conversations that were never spoken. They made no sense, just fragments of sound that slipped through my mind like water through fingers. But I felt them. I felt their meaning, as if they were trying to tell me something, to take something from me, to give and take some truth I wasn't ready to know.

I wasn’t dead. At least, I didn’t think so.

But if this wasn’t death… what was this?

I tried to look around, feel around, but all I got was the trippiest image of my body somehow returning to its human form. Sure enough, it was impossible—but there they were: two hands, five fingers each, just like before.

What the heck?

I raised my hands, expecting them to flicker away or dissolve like everything else in this twisted dimension. But no, they stayed. Somehow, they were real. Or at least, as real as anything could be in a place like this. My hands—my actual hands—remained in my vision, solid and steady, while the chaos around me spun out of control.

“Oh snap!” I shouted, the absurdity of it all hitting me at once. “I return to being human when I die?!”

I laughed, the sound echoing oddly in the vast emptiness, tilting my head down to inspect the rest of me. Naked, unscarred, everything back in its place, just like when I was still human. “Hey! Long time no see!” I chuckled again, amused by my own joke.

That’s when I heard it.

Or rather, them.

Whispers, soft but persistent, almost drowned out by my own laughter. But they were there—cutting through the noise, faint slivers of sound that didn’t belong to the madness surrounding me.

“Who's there?” I called out, but only a ripple of sound answered. My voice, bouncing back at me from unseen places, warped and twisted, as though this place erased words as quickly as they were spoken. I could even hear my voice playing in reverse, like time itself was confused here.

The whispers grew louder.

I froze, the grin fading from my face. One of those voices… I recognized it. It had screamed into my skull just before I was infected by the Void Seedling. Sacrifice, over and over again.

The whisper pulsed, louder, then quieter, as if trying to sense me through the layers of chaos, like it was reaching for me through the twisted fabric of this reality.

Realization struck me like a hammer, and I instinctively clapped my hand over my mouth. I knew where I was. Somehow, I hadn’t died. This place—this chaotic, twisted reality—was the inside of the field created by the Skism weapon.

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I was in the prison meant for Void creatures.

And I had just let them know that I was here, locked inside with them.

If they found me, they would reinfest the shell that was wrapped around me—the same shell, I now realized, that was keeping me alive. The Void creatures were the only ones capable of surviving in this hellish dimension, and if they recaptured me, I’d be trapped again as their paralyzed host.

So I was their prey again? Not if I could help it.

I stared down at my hand, now human again. I wasn't going to give up this second chance to anyone. Slowly, I clenched my fist and felt the muscles tighten, more powerful than ever, the power to crush mountains. It was a reminder that I was more than human now. I could destroy things in ways mere mortals couldn't even comprehend.

Not only that...

Black smoke, little more than escaping dust or vapor, began to swirl around my hand as I summoned Depletion. It flickered faintly at first, struggling against the oppressive forces of the Skism Realm, as if this place was fighting to extinguish it. But I pushed harder, forcing my indomitable will into it.

A sharp crackling sound shot through the air as something shattered. My fist exploded into a raging inferno of darkness - no longer the familiar, controlled power I'd wielded before. Here it raged, unpredictable and wild in all directions, surging from my hand as if the very laws of this dimension were rebelling against it. As if they didn't belong together, but I was forcing them to coexist. Two forms of chaos that hated each other.

I stared at my dark blazing fist in contemplation, remembering back to what I had learned from the Seven. These concepts that I possessed did not originate in the branch that belonged to the creatures that I had dubbed the Void. They seemed to exist in a different state and so far, only the silver and black relics seemed to be able to affect them in any way, coming from their home dimension.

"So I doubt it will keep me from getting infected again. Still, at least it is something." I said as the world around me seemed to expand. Several alien ships popped into view, near and far at the same time as though just to mess with my mind. Five ships, each of a different origin. Three of them seemed to be part of the battle, all decked out in shields and weaponry, while the other two looked like civilian product transporters, as defenseless as babies.

“The first three I recognize but where did the last two come from?” I asked, unaware of the range that each Skism beam was capable of reaching and just how much damage it had done to the outside universe.

I watched the five ships in fascination, everything seemed normal for a moment before the effect of the field became apparent. Within seconds, the impossible began.

The first ship, a massive heavy cruiser from the Yelvos race, seemed to ripple. I could see it—its metallic surface rusting, corroding right before my eyes as if centuries were passing in mere heartbeats. Panels buckled, wires sparked and snapped, lights flickered out. The ship’s systems were being drained of all power, as if their entire life expectancy had been compressed into an instant.

I could see the crew inside, scrambling in desperation. The panic was palpable, even from here. They were trying to escape, launching their pods, but the field wasn’t about to let them go. The moment those pods ejected, the crew aboard them aged rapidly. Their bodies twisted, withering as if they had lived out their entire lives in a blink. I could see the light leaving their eyes, their skin shriveling up, their bodies turning into lifeless husks. One breath, and then nothing.

And then, as if mocking them, the rules of this twisted place snapped everything back. The ships and crew rubber-banded to the exact moment before they entered the field. The rust vanished, the decay reversed. Their bodies—whole again, pristine, as if they’d never gone through that horrifying passage of time. But they were dead. Irrevocably dead. Their hearts wouldn’t beat again, their lungs, if they had them, couldn’t draw breath. Everything looked untouched, but life had been torn away, never to return.

The next ship wasn’t so lucky. It experienced the same fate, but more violently. Its systems crumbled under the pressure of time, the crew dying instantly as they aged. Then the ship itself went critical—something inside it exploding outward, expending all its energy in a violent blast. And then, just like that, it reversed, pulling itself back together in the same eerie rewind, the explosion undone, but the crew still lost.

Cold understanding settled into my bones as I watched. The Skism field wasn’t just a prison—it was a torturous loop, a temporal death trap that aged and killed you, then rewound the scene, only to do it all over again if you somehow survived the first round. Those ships, once powerful and majestic, were now nothing more than floating graves. Their technology drained of power, their life force pushed through infinity, leaving nothing but empty shells.

It reminded me of the Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail. A loop without end. Time moving forward, only to devour everything from you so you never moved again.

"Kevin..." a whisper came from the infinity around me, soft but insistent. "Kevin, where are you? I need you."

I froze. It wasn't Nurse. It wasn't my mother. It wasn't the chorus of voices I'd grown accustomed to - the thousand threads that tugged at the mental and heartstrings of my soul. No, this was different. This was the Void spread, searching for me, using the voices of my loved ones as bait, distorting them, turning them into hollow echoes.

I could almost taste the undercurrent of corruption, the taint of hunger in every word. It was trying to play on my emotions, weaving my memories of them into a lure, hoping I'd make a sound, any sound, to betray my presence. It knew what I cared about, what I loved, and it was using that against me to lure me out of hiding.

I clenched my jaw and fought back a wave of nostalgia as the voice spoke again, bringing back memories of my distant childhood - friends I hadn't spoken to in ages, echoes of a life long gone. The insistent, vocal presence felt like the phantom of an old fear, like when I was a child, afraid of sharks lurking beneath the surface of the ocean I swam in, unseen but always threatening. I couldn't see the Void spread, but I could hear it, creeping through the space around me, its presence slipping between the cracks of reality. There was no way to tell how close it was, if it was moving in my direction, or if it was waiting, silent, patient, for me to make a mistake.

The crackling of my fist cut through my thoughts, the noise like glass grinding against itself as the black flames raged and pulsed. But the sound hadn't attracted the Void spread's attention - it continued to sing, calling to me in stolen voices, unchanging, relentless. I considered extinguishing the fire to remove the effect, but something in me refused. The intensity of the black flame held my focus, burning like an anchor in the midst of the chaos. It grounded me, pushed out the distractions, and let me think.

I stared into the fire and felt a sudden impulse rise within me. Without hesitation, I clenched my left hand into a fist and pressed my will into it. Depletion crackled and sparked, and with a sharp, tearing sound, a second fist of black fire ignited, burning as fiercely as the first. I watched as the Skism realm seemed to recoil slightly, as if I had touched a nerve. The air itself shivered, and I could swear I heard a faint gasp, an off-frequency sound that cut through the hum of the dimension, as if something had felt pain for the first time.

Was it just me or did the Void spread pause for a second as well?

Hmm… whatever. I needed to focus. This wasn't enough. I needed more. This place wouldn't let me go unless I made it hurt.

I extinguished the flames in my fists, feeling the sudden stillness of the space around me before everything returned just as it had been, my actions being undone in a moment. Right, so I had to do something drastic, something to force this realm to acknowledge me, to suffer enough to let me go. A slow, dark grin spread across my face as the answer hit me. If my fists weren’t enough, then I’d burn something stronger.

I set my heart on fire.

The realm resisted, fighting against me as I pushed my will into my chest. It felt like trying to set a mountain on fire. The effort was immense, but I continued, feeding the flames with Expansion, Manifest, and the weight of my Indomitable will to live. My chest strained, the black flames building within me, spreading outward like cracks in the foundation of this twisted dimension. The realm of the Skism itself was shuddering under the weight of my willpower, the control it had over me shuddering by the second as mote by mote escaped my chest, spreading to my shoulders and hips and beyond, flames igniting powerfully from my core and kindling my whole body.

I would burn it all with the power inside me.

I could feel it now - this realm would see me. It would feel me. And it would fear me, it was a given. One of the abilities within me stirred, like a hand reaching through the flames. A power I barely understood, something I had never fully controlled. Time itself spoke to me here, bending and warping in the twisted currents of this place. Delay, a power I'd never once wielded, was now unraveling in reverse, responding to the distortion of the Skism field. The strangeness of this dimension was turning everything upside down, bending the rules I'd known, allowing time to fold in on itself like a living thing.

I clenched my fists, feeling this strange power pulsing within me, feeding on Depletion, fanning and accelerating the flames. I would burn this place to ashes if I had to. I'd burn it until there was nothing left - until it had no choice but to let me go.

As the fire in my body surged outward, the voice shifted, growing darker, colder, until it was a chilling rasp. The Void spread’s final words slithered into my mind, every syllable laced with venomous intent.

“If you won’t let me find you, little Kevin…” it whispered, the words twisting like the coils of a serpent, “…then I am forced to share your existence with the rest of us trapped here. If I can’t have you for myself, then all of us will feast on you together.”

The malice in its voice echoed, lingering in the air like a promise, a threat woven into the very fabric of this cursed dimension.

Then it started to scream, a guttural, alien sound that pierced through the chaos of the realm. The words—if they could even be called that—were in a language I didn't know, harsh and jagged, like needles tearing through my mind. I could feel it broadcasting my presence, spilling every detail it had about me, sharing my memories, my thoughts, my fears with its countless Void brethren.

The realm around me seemed to pulse with their collective consciousness, like wolves sniffing the scent of their prey.