Riley knelt before a mound of packed snow, staring at the makeshift grave he had built for his mother with his bare hands.
There was no way he was making it out of this blizzard. The journey downhill had already made that clear. He had only avoided capture by the skin of his teeth, spotting the armored men marching uphill at the last possible second and pressing himself flat against the rock face until they passed. He wasn't sure what they were doing back here, but if he had to guess, they were combing the mountain to make sure no one had survived.
"Fucking assholes." He slammed his fist into the snow. "ARGH!"
He hit it again.
And again.
Then stopped.
He looked down at his knuckles. Blood. Even the snow had managed to cut him.
"How did I even survive in the first place?"
That question had been sitting at the back of his mind since he woke up, and he still didn't have an answer. But there was something else beneath it, something that bothered him even more than the mystery of his own survival.
For the first time in ten years, the interface had changed.
[------ SYSTEM] [Objective: ???]
Riley stared at it.
"Does that mean she's dead?" he muttered.
A second later he caught himself and shook his head. That was an absurd thing to even consider. The probability of that happening this early in the plot was essentially zero. And yet the objective had wiped itself clean, which meant something had shifted. Something the system hadn't anticipated.
"The plot changed," he said quietly.
He let himself fall back into the snow and lay there, staring up at the grey sky pressing down over the mountain.
He was at the wrong edge. Not the pathway that led downhill but the opposite side entirely, a face of Ember Mountain that no one willingly approached. The standing belief, backed by enough dead warriors to make it credible, was that no one had ever gone over this drop and come back to describe what was at the bottom. That said something, given the caliber of people who had tried.
"This wasn't supposed to happen," he said. "I sidestepped Riley Snow's entire canon. None of this was in the plot."
A strange sensation crept up from his chest then, sudden and sharp. His heart was hammering too hard, too fast, like it was fighting against something. The cold, maybe. Or something worse.
"I can't die here," he gritted out, pressing a fist to his chest. "If I die, who's going to make them pay? Who's going to avenge any of this?"
He hit his chest once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then stopped, because the pain that came back at him was genuinely awful.
"God, that actually hurts."
He tried to push himself up and couldn't. His body simply refused. The next moment he was face-down in the snow, coughing blood into the white, his vision narrowing at the edges like a door swinging shut.
"What's happening?" he managed.
Then nothing. He went out the way a light does when you cut the power.
[DING] [SYSTEM ACTIVATED] [HIDDEN REQUIREMENT MET]
[DING] [SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMMENCING] [PROGRESS: 100%] [SUCCESS]
[DING]
[SECOND ENTITY DETECTED WITHIN USER]
[ATTEMPTING TO FUSE SOULS]
[ERROR]
[ERROR]
[ERROR]
[TROUBLESHOOTING]
[INCOMPATIBLE]
[ERROR]
[ERROR]
[GENERATING NEW ALGORITHM TO ACCOMMODATE USER CHANGES]
[COMMENCING PERSONALITY STABILIZATION]
[PROGRESS: 10%]