Chapter 74 — The Bait
The forest of the Underworld had the specific silence of a place that was not made for silence.
Dagon stood motionless between the stone trunks, his fist still pressed against the tree he had punched minutes earlier. The rough bark pressed into his knuckles with a texture that was solid and present and completely irrelevant to what was happening inside his head.
Simon.
Not the image of Simon dying — he had learned to store that one in a place where it only came when called. It was the other image. Simon sitting by the campfire in Azumi's cave with a blanket over his shoulders, eyes closed, breathing steady like someone who had found a place safe enough to truly sleep.
*Don't worry, brother. Everything's fine.*
Dagon closed his eyes.
Four years.
Four years carrying those words and he still hadn't found a way to put them in the right place.
"Dagon."
The voice came from behind. Low. Without the mask muffling it for the first time.
He turned.
Jelim stood three meters away, purple hair loose, purple eyes that didn't need borrowed light to shine in the underground gloom. The asymmetry in her face — where Dregor had struck her — was still visible even after Keara's healing. It would stay that way long enough to be remembered.
"Steve just woke up," she said simply.
Dagon remained silent for a moment.
Then he straightened. His fist left the tree. His shoulders settled into the posture he used when there was work to be done.
"Let's go," he said. "It's time to clear things up."
He started walking.
Jelim stayed where she was for a second — just one second, the time it took to make a decision — and then followed.
---
The tent was warm with Keara's healing magic still active at a low and constant level.
Steve was sitting on the straw, shoulders hunched, hands open on his knees. Orzun was beside him with that specific closeness of someone who didn't exactly know what to do but had decided that presence was better than absence.
When Dagon entered, Steve lifted his head.
His face opened — not exactly a smile, but that specific relaxation of someone seeing the person he wanted to see. The eyes that had been absolute purple-pink were brown again. Completely brown. With all the marks of the seventeen years that lived in them.
"Dagon." His voice was hoarse but present. "Are you okay?"
Dagon didn't answer immediately.
Because behind him, Jelim entered.
And Steve's face changed.
Not all at once — in layers. The relaxation went first. Then the openness. What remained was anger, doubt, and beneath both of them that specific expression of someone who still didn't know the name of what he was feeling but knew it hurt.
"Nesin."
The word came out heavy as an accusation and confused as a question at the same time.
Dagon looked at Orzun.
"Orzun. I need a moment alone with my group."
The orc assessed the atmosphere in the tent in a second — read correctly what was there — and stood up without question.
"Alright," he said, placing a brief hand on Steve's shoulder before leaving. A small gesture. But present.
Keara began to stand as well.
"Keara," Dagon said, without taking his eyes off Steve. "Stay. What we're about to say concerns you too."
Keara stopped. Sat back down. Her hands rested on her knees and the healing magic faded — the first time since Steve had woken up that it stopped completely.
The four of them remained silent for a moment.
Steve opened his mouth.
"Tell me Nesin tell me why—"
"Listen first," Dagon cut in, his voice firm but not harsh. "Then you can say whatever you want and demand whatever explanations you need. But listen first."
Steve closed his mouth.
He looked at Dagon with the genuine confusion of someone who had expected one kind of conversation and was realizing it would be another.
"What do you want to tell me?"
Dagon sat down. Not in the position of someone preparing for a speech — in the position of someone about to say something heavy and preferring to be at the same level as the one listening.
"Our meeting in the Great Forest wasn't random," he said, his voice completely flat. Factual. Without decoration. "We already knew you would fall there. Or rather — that your bugged system would fall there."
The silence that followed was different from normal silences.
Steve didn't answer right away. He processed with that specific slowness of a mind trying to fit information that didn't fit into any of its existing categories.
"What do you mean—" he finally said, his voice trembling slightly. "What exactly does that mean?"
"It means we were already waiting for you," Dagon said. "Not you specifically. But someone with your type of system."
He paused. His fists closed slightly — an unconscious movement that Keara recognized as the sign that the hard part was beginning.
"Four years ago, someone very close to me — my brother — came to this world with the same problem. Bugged system. No level. No class. No way to evolve at all."
Steve's eyes moved to Dagon with the total attention of someone realizing they were hearing something important.
"Seeing that left me completely desperate," Dagon continued. "How to help him. How to save him. I did everything. I trusted people I shouldn't have trusted. I tried every path I could find."
His fist tightened further.
"But I never found a solution in time."
Silence.
Steve wasn't breathing regularly.
"What happened to your brother, Dagon?"
The question came out small. He already knew the answer somehow. But he needed to hear it.
"Someone came for him," Dagon said. His voice didn't break. It stayed flat as it had been from the beginning. That made it worse — the flatness of something that had been processed until it lost its sharp edge but not its weight. "Someone who wears a white mask with a question mark on the face. The name he uses is Fantom."
Steve felt his heart beating at a rhythm he couldn't control.
"He… is he coming for me too?"
"Yes," Dagon said. "But you are our bait."
The words settled into the air of the tent and stayed there.
Steve looked at Dagon.
Then at Jelim.
Then at Keara.
"Bait," he repeated.
Not as a question. As an attempt to make the word real, to test it with his own voice to see if reality would reject it.
"Let me explain what that means," Dagon said. "I have sworn an oath to avenge my brother. Jelim is looking for Fantom because her twin sister was possibly used to manipulate you and bring you into this world."
Jelim's eyes didn't leave Steve when Dagon said that. There was no apology in that gaze. Only fact presented.
"And Keara," Dagon continued, "wants answers about the daughter who was kidnapped by Fantom."
Steve turned to Keara.
The healer who smelled of herbs and had that specific gentleness of someone who healed because she wanted to, not because she was forced. Who had hugged him when the possession left. Who had stayed awake beside him for hours.
"Keara."
Steve's voice came out broken.
"Is that true? Everything I just heard — is it true?"
Keara didn't answer immediately.
Her eyes lowered to her own hands — the hands that had healed Steve so many times, that had produced golden light in moments when there was nothing else. The remorse was visible in a way that didn't need to be spoken.
"Yes, Steve," she said finally. "It's all true."
The blanket tightened in Steve's fists.
The memory came unbidden — in quick, disordered flashes. The Great Forest where they had found him. Thornvale and Any and the guards chasing them. The Frozen Mountains with the cold that seeped into the bones. The Underworld and the slave wagons and Dregor and the possession.
And before all of that — the real world. The classmates at school who used him to copy tests and then pretended not to know him in the hallways. The principal who stepped on his face. The father who hit him and called him useless.
*All this time. All this time I was just bait.*
"Shut up," Steve said, and the anger in his voice was real, unfiltered.
Jelim had started to say something.
"Shut up," he repeated, louder. "I don't want to hear you."
Jelim closed her mouth.
Steve looked at Dagon. His voice came out shaky but direct.
"Tell me. During those other years, after your brother, what did you do?"
Dagon didn't look away.
"I searched for other bugged players," he said. "To use them to find Fantom."
"And did you manage to protect them?"
A half-second pause.
"One was absorbed by Fantom before I could reach him." Factual. Without hesitation. "The other I killed because he refused to cooperate and I couldn't risk Fantom finding him first and learning that I was looking."
The blood drained from Steve's face.
"Jelim and Keara have only been with me for a short time," Dagon continued. "They haven't faced Fantom directly yet. But this year will be different."
Steve remained silent for a time measured in irregular breaths and fists gripping the blanket so tightly his knuckles turned white.
The tears came without him deciding they would.
"I didn't do anything," he said, his voice breaking in multiple places. "I didn't kill your brother. I don't even know who this Fantom is. I'm just someone who wanted to make money to pay for my mother's treatment."
Pause. His throat was tight.
"Let me go. Let me try to survive and go back to my family. I'm innocent in the middle of your revenge and I have nothing to do with it."
Dagon remained silent for a moment.
"Out of the question."
"Dagon," Keara began.
"Keara," Dagon's voice came with that specific hardness of a line that should not be crossed. "Stop."
Keara stopped.
Dagon turned back to Steve.
"I'm not asking you to be my bait," he said. "I'm telling you what you already are. The difference matters. You were already the bait before you knew it. Now you simply know."
Steve's eyes shone with tears that didn't all fall — some slid down, others stayed trapped.
"And besides," Dagon continued, his voice losing a degree of hardness, "you weren't completely useless during this time. That power that comes from Yelra — that chaos you carry — is the only reason you're still alive. The others I found didn't have that. They didn't last long enough to discover what they were."
Pause.
"Fantom comes for the bugged ones because he wants something from them. What it is — I still don't fully know. But I know they don't last long. The system destroys them from the inside before Fantom arrives, or Fantom finds them first."
He looked directly at Steve.
"So instead of your death being in vain," he said, "don't you think it would be better if it served some purpose?"
He stood up.
Without another word, he left the tent.
Keara followed — she looked at Steve before leaving, a look that carried remorse that had no voice, then looked away and left.
Jelim was the last. She stopped at the entrance of the tent for a moment — back to Steve, purple hair falling down her back, her face invisible from that angle.
She said nothing.
She left.
---
The silence that remained was different from all the silences the tent had contained until then.
Steve stayed where he was.
Straw underneath. Fabric ceiling above. The smell of medicinal herbs that Keara left everywhere she worked.
He punched the ground.
Once. Hard. Pain shot up his arm but it was irrelevant.
"Why me," he said to the nothing. "Why is it always me who has to be used by others. Why?"
The tears that had been trapped came all at once — not with dignity, not with restraint, with that specific brutality of crying that wasn't planned and had no audience to perform for.
The Steve who had run through fire laughing during the possession. The Steve who had said *it's not over yet* on his knees without a system and without a scythe. The Steve who had thrown a small stone at Jelim because he couldn't accept being ignored.
He cried like the seventeen-year-old Steve from Mozambique who had accepted the form in the hospital beside his unconscious mother because there was nothing else left to try.
---
Outside the tent, Yelra stood motionless.
She had heard everything.
It wasn't difficult — the tent wasn't solid construction and the voices carried clearly enough, especially when they carried that much weight.
Her emerald eyes were fixed on the fabric of the entrance as if she could see through it.
"Looks like we're quite similar in that aspect," she said, so low it was almost only a movement of her lips.
The memory came involuntarily and immediately — the way painful memories always do.
Hands gripping wrists that were too thin. Black iron chains. The specific smell of a cage that wasn't the smell of metal but of time spent inside metal. Eyes of people who looked at her and saw value but not a person.
Yelra closed her eyes for a moment.
Then opened them.
And walked away from the tent — not to escape, but to give Steve the space she herself would have wanted in the times she cried alone inside the cage of the fifth wagon.
---
Inside the tent, Steve stopped crying.
Not because it was over — because his body simply ran out of what it needed to continue. The exhaustion the possession had left and that Keara's healing hadn't fully removed now weighed differently, deeper, as if the conversation had added weight that wasn't physical.
He lay on his back, staring at the fabric ceiling.
Then the HUD flashed.
Not the purple-black of the Percentage System.
Not the pale blue of the Leveling System with its usual error messages.
Two separate notifications. In sequence.
The first:
**[PERCENTAGE SYSTEM: PERMANENTLY INACTIVE]**
**[USER LIMIT REACHED]**
Steve read it. Read it again. Remained silent.
The second came right after, in blue — the color of the normal system that had never worked correctly for him:
**[LEVELING SYSTEM]**
**[COMPATIBILITY TIME WITH USER EXCEEDED]**
**[COMPLETE INCOMPATIBILITY]**
**[TIME REMAINING UNTIL SELF-DESTRUCTION: 7 DAYS]**
**[WARNING: ANY USE OF SYSTEM OR ABILITIES WILL REDUCE THE REMAINING DAYS]**
Steve stared at the two notifications for a long time.
Then he smiled.
Small. Crooked. With that specific quality of a smile that doesn't come from joy but from something that is almost the opposite of joy and reaches the same muscle.
"Nice," he said to the emptiness of the tent. "At least this system is being honest with me."
The tears returned.
But this time they fell in silence — not with the violence of before, just sliding down his face without hurry, like something that no longer had energy to be dramatic but continued to exist anyway.
Seven days.
His mother was waiting in the hospital with machines beeping in a rhythm he knew by heart.
Carla — Dagon's daughter he had never met — was somewhere in the real world growing up without her father.
Simon had been dead for four years.
And he, Steve Matsinhe, seventeen years old, system destroyed, seven days remaining, lay in a tent in the Underworld crying alone after discovering he had been bait from the first day.
He closed his eyes.
*Why always me.*
The answer didn't come.
It never did.