The silence in the room was worse than the ringing in my ears. I tried to close my fist, but my fingers stopped halfway, twitching with a phantom electric hum that felt less like power and more like a short circuit inside my bones. On the nightstand, the Power Coin sat dull and cold—no longer a golden ticket, just metal that had almost burned a hole through my life.
I looked past the white silk curtains at Ishabana's skyline, jagged and smoke-stained, where the sunset was bleeding into the ruins. I was alive, lying in the finest bed in the world, while distant hammers and collapsing stone reminded me I had slept through the end of a city.
It didn't feel like recovery. It felt like I was being stored.
The door hissed open, but there was no rush of boots or urgency of a kingdom at war. Just the faint, clinical scent of expensive lilies. Sebastian stepped in. His posture was so sharp it felt like a personal insult to my aching spine. He set a tray of porcelain and silver onto the bedside table with a deafening, precise click.
"The doctors insisted you weren't ready for solid food," Sebastian said, lifting the silver lid. The thick steam of the soup hit my face. It smelled far too rich for a recovery ward. "But Her Majesty finds a pale complexion... distasteful. She expects her guests to look the part, even if they can barely sit upright. Ishabana has no use for a ghost."
I looked at the shimmering liquid, then back at the smoke-stained skyline.
"The city is in ruins," I said, my voice sounding thin. "And I'm being polished for a photo shoot?"
Sebastian didn't react. He adjusted the spoon by a fraction of an inch. "Ishabana maintains standards," he said. "Even in recovery."
A pause. Then, quieter—like it wasn't meant to land: "You are currently the Queen's most expensive project. It would be inefficient to allow deterioration."
That line didn't need weight. It already had it. I wasn't a guest. I wasn't even a patient. I was maintenance. Something that needed to be kept functional while the world broke elsewhere.
My skin felt too tight. Being useful would've been easier. So would disappearing. Being "stored" was starting to feel a lot like being buried alive in velvet.
Then, the steam didn't just smell rich anymore. It turned thick and metallic, coating the back of my throat with the unmistakable tang of blood. I blinked, and the white silk curtains were gone. The fine Ishabana bed was a pile of rubble and bone
I wasn't lying down; I was standing in a sea of red, my boots heavy with the gore of a kingdom that had tried to save me.
Then I saw her.
Hymeno was slumped against the base of her own throne, her dress shredded, the vibrant yellow fabric soaked to a deep, bruised orange. My hand was buried in her chest, my fingers locked around her heart, the electric hum in my bones screaming in sync with her fading pulse.
She didn't scream. She didn't even look angry. She reached up, her hand trembling as she brushed a smear of blood off my cheek. Her eyes were wide, filled with a terrifying mixture of agonizing pain and a love that refused to die.
"BJ," she choked out, a red bubble bursting on her lips. "I told them... I told them you were still... in there."
She died believing in a version of me that didn't exist.
The silence didn't stay silent. It fractured.
Not Yanma. Not Gira. Not anyone with a name I could hold onto.
Just something that sounded like memory scraping against bone.
"Look at what your 'help' does."
"She was just the last one still lying to herself."
I looked at my other hand. I was holding the Power Coin, but it wasn't metal. It was a black hole, sucking the light out of the room, growing heavier with every person I let down.
"Why struggle?" the voice whispered, crawling into my ear like a parasite. "The pain only stops when you're the one holding the knife. Control the world, or the world will keep bleeding on your hands."
"...but I could still feel the warmth of Hymeno's blood on my skin.
I felt a sudden, violent jolt.
I was back in the bed...'
gasping for air that still tasted like copper. My hand was a white-knuckled claw, the fine silk sheets torn to ribbons under my fingernails.
Sebastian flinched. The mask of the perfect butler cracked completely. His face went pale in a way that didn't belong in this room.
"Master BJ?"
His voice broke on my name.
He rushed forward and grabbed my shoulders—just for a second, like he was trying to confirm I was still real.
His hands were steady in the way panic sometimes pretends to be control.
Then I jerked.
He let go immediately, like contact itself had become a mistake.
What hurt the most wasn't the death. It was the mercy. They kept forgiving me while I kept destroying them.
His eyes scanned me—shaking breath, torn silk—and something in him shifted from concern to alarm.
He stepped back fast, almost stumbling, already reaching for the comms device in his pocket.
"Medical team to the recovery ward!" he barked into the device, his eyes never leaving mine. "Master BJ is having a seizure or some kind of neurological episode. I need medical support immediately."
A pause. Static.
Then his voice cracked again.
"Master BJ is destabilizing. I repeat, urgent."
He lowered his hand slowly, but didn't look away from me. Like if he did, I might come apart.
The door hissed open almost immediately.
Footsteps followed—quick, trained, too calm for what was happening. A nurse entered first, then another behind her, already reading the room before saying a word.
Their eyes landed on me. On the bed. On the state of everything.
And they moved in. Not toward me like I was a person—
toward me like I was a problem to solve.failure that needed containing.
One checked my pulse, another reached for my wrist, another started speaking softly into a monitor I couldn't see.
They didn't see a weapon. They didn't see a danger. They saw something breaking and tried to hold it together with bare hands.
I didn't want to be stored like a fragile relic, and I couldn't stay here as a ticking bomb.