“Well,” A voice resounded. Confident. Snarling. “Took me long enough.”

A chill shot straight down Brock’s spine. Each word possessed such power - such arrogance - that it seemed to violently collide against his brain, bashing it against the walls of his skull. A throbbing headache took root as his stress mounted, and the sound of footsteps behind him seemed mind-numbingly loud in his ears.

Brock strained his body against his bindings to no avail and glanced at the remains of the Elemental. It was whole for the most part, albeit with several large pieces discarded and its glow ever dimming. To the naked eye, and even to Brock’s aura senses, it appeared that the creature was in the process of dying. But to his eyes, aura still rose up in thick strands, healthy and powerful.

He was confused for only a second before it struck him. The Elemental was playing dead. You fucking serious?

While he wasn’t exactly well-versed in the power levels of higher grades, Brock assumed that if the monster stood its ground and fought, it’d at least score a few wounds on the terrifying being approaching. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking. It… the aura emitted… it couldn’t even compare to the Elemental’s.

“Months of searching, and where do I find you?” he continued to speak, although it seemed he was more talking to himself than Brock, “in the middle of fucking nowhere. For a galactic infestation, you sure know how to run.”

FuckfuckfuckFUCK! MOVE!

The sound of footfalls grew ever closer, from several dozen meters, to only a few dozen, and Brock’s body still refused to budge. His muscles were locked frozen, but not by the ambient power pressing down on him. His fear and stress and dread all seemed to coalesce into the bindings that held him. As those emotions grew, so did the strength of his shackles.

He tried to calm himself, suspecting that a Technique was at play, but no matter what he tried, he couldn’t do so. This being… would be able to kill him with a single blow, tear him limb from limb, Brock knew. He could feel it. Every cell in his body was telling him so. He gritted his teeth so hard he thought they might break.

Just… MOVE!

Images of his past fights and acts of miraculous survival flashed in his mind. As long as he did something, as long as he moved, he could find a way out of this, just like every tribulation that had come before it. Brock Carter was a true survivor, and he was going to do what he did best.

Avoid death like a mother fucking cockroach. Come on… come on…

His ears estimated only ten meters between him and the footfalls now, and while the increasing sound was barely noticeable as it came closer, it seemed to be almost deafening in Brock’s ears. Memories of the times he’d cancelled Jonathan’s Technique in Adelaide and the Shadow Scout’s in Meiyo rose to the forefront of his mind.

The muscles of his legs flexed, and his veins bulged on his forehead. His body squealed in protest as he directed the entirety of his being into forcing his apparent power to activate. Please… if that really was me… if that was my passive ability… just fucking activate.

“You wouldn’t even be able to begin to understand the boredom,” his voice adopted a sinister edge, “at least those disgusting locals were fun to fuck around with.”

Brock heard none of it, his hearing consumed by his pounding heart. But then, as though he’d broken the floodgates to a dam, a gushing connection formed between him and his Ascendancy, and knowledge followed. His eyes widened.

And he took a step forward.

Aura exploded in wisps around him, signifying the destruction of whatever Technique had held him captive. His body shed its fetters and his full motion of movement was returned to him. The idle power of the aura still restricted him heavily, but he could move. He could fight.

Despite himself, a chuckle escaped Brock’s lips. Fight? Yeah right.

As he sucked in a breath, Brock noticed something worrying. The footsteps had ceased. A veritable blur, frantic and fearful, he turned to face the opponent behind him and leapt back, putting a few more meters between them.

““…What…?”” Brock found his voice matching the being’s own perfectly.

A dozen or so meters away from him stood… well, what he could best describe as an alien. Not a monster, nor a human, or even an artificial being, but a true alien. He – the face portrayed as such – was tall, easily reaching seven feet. Wiry muscle dotted his frame, and his pale red skin didn’t glisten with sweat like the desert should have forced it to.

Two, large ivory fangs protruded up from his lower jaw past his lips, and a pair of curved horned stabbed out from his forehead, reaching up toward the sky. Hair that was black like oil and thick like a horse’s mane hung down to the base of his spine, billowing softly in the wind. Two slitted pupils bore into him, wide with shock.

Great. I’m about to be killed by a fucking alien.

“You… broke free from my Technique? Interesting…” Brock didn’t at all like the fact that his shock readily morphed into extreme intrigue, not outrage or disgust like he’d expected. It was the sort of intrigue one had when looking at a fascinating animal, the kind you wanted to dissect and study and put in a jar.

Brock trotted back a few more steps, and the other man didn’t move. Or even react, for that matter. Instead, his yellow eyes bore into his own, unmoving and unyielding, seeming to tear into him and scrutinise every aspect of his being. Brock felt himself unable to look away, held there by the power those eyes spoke of.

Finally, he broke eye contact, and the demon narrowed his eyes, almost suspicious. Clenching his jaw, he glanced down at the device within his hand. It pulsed with a blue light, “You aren’t… you can’t be the Error. You should be a mindless beast without form; the archives said as much. You shouldn’t be… this.”

He absentmindedly gestured to all of Brock with a disdainful snarl. But he didn’t care, what he was focused on was one simple word from his past. Error… there’s no way right…?

“I’m…” Brock’s stress mounted once more as memories flashed back, and his throat felt so dry he could cry, “sorry?”

“…You speak?” his red skinned face scrunched up in confusion.

“…umm…no?”

Brock’s tongue flicked out and wetted his drying lips. He felt his breathing began to accelerate and his eyes darted around in every direction he could possibly look. His brain worked overtime, thinking so fast that he could feel his head becoming feverish. With razor focus, he considered every single asset and item around him.

And no matter what he did, he found no escape.

He didn’t have Salvation to bail him out this time, and he knew this man wasn’t a being he could win against otherwise. The occasional beeping abruptly increased in frequency, and Brock jolted in horror as a clawed hand clasped around his jaw before he even saw the demon move. Each pointed end dug into the flesh of his check, drawing thin pricks of blood.

The beeping continued, rapid and droning. With shaking eyes, Brock glanced over at the small, rectangular device that had been brought to his face. It was wrought of a metal so white that it seemed to be of the divine. Accents of blue light pulsed in tune with each screeching sound it emitted.

A small, spherical hologram of flickering blacks and reds floated above it, and Brock felt at the signature it was releasing. It was so familiar. It…

It was his own. I was being… tracked?

As though he was nothing more than a toy to be played with, Brock was turned this way and that, the being glancing over him with a scholar’s curiosity, “hmmm. The machine says you’re the Error.”

No… I thought… I thought getting to the Source fixed it? Brock’s eyes shook and dread budded within his gut. His headache throbbed with newfound intensity. The man holding him spared a glance for the small machine before his eyes fell back onto him.

“But the signature is… suppressed… interesting. Interesting.” His grip tightened. A grin was slowly spreading across his face. Brock remembered having a similar one that time he’d went fishing and caught a massive fish, “perhaps you’re a new breed? Or you’ve somehow contained what you should have been?”

He furrowed his brows, “There’ve been intelligent ones, but… maybe this time the base lifeform became the dominant personality…?”

Base lifeform? Dominant personality? I’m so confused. I…

His memories of the jungle slammed into him in full force. The flickering of red and black lightning that saw him phasing through solid matter, the System notifications of quarantines and his status as an Error. He had thought to have gotten past all of that, freed himself of that sickness and restored himself to normal when he reached the Source. But…

The feeling of dread within his gut blossomed, and he felt sick. Oh so sick.

But what if an Error wasn’t a sickness, but a race? The mural depicted on the tablet, and the horde of creatures carved upon it came to mind. They had appeared to be savage. To be somewhat ‘without form’, as the demon had said.

Against his better judgement, Brock jaw begin to move, and words passed by his lips, “What… do you mean… by all that?”

He had to know.

Those slitted eyes once more met his own, though this time, they held no disdain or disgust. Only curiosity and undisguised greed, “I’m curious about something, Error. Care to answer it?”

The Error in question felt rather miffed at how casually his question was dismissed, but attempted to shrug, “…Sure. It’s not like I’m… going anywhere.”

His jaw was getting sore moving against the tight grip, and he was fully conscious that if the man wanted to, he could tear it off with a single movement.

“You’re dying, correct?”

Brock stilled, and his eyes narrowed, “How do… you know?”

“The machine,” he tapped the hologram box atop Brock’s forehead. The sharp edges cut at his flesh and blood dribbled down into his eyes, “That suppressed signature you’re emitting currently is weaker than what was captured by it weeks ago. You’re stronger, I can tell, but your lifeforce is waning.”

A disdainful smile played upon his lips.

As if on queue, Brock felt a warm fluid drip from his nose and down his lip. As it dribbled onto the man’s reddened hand, he could see that it was blackened blood, almost as dark as oil, with small clots of red. The owner of the hand paid it no notice, and the blood was immediately frozen and discarded to mist in the wind.

“You are.” His words were punctuated by a harsh cackle. It carried derision and a snarling arrogance. Clearly, he was enjoying this, “The Great Machine naturally despises Errors. It goes out of its way to limit your kind’s power without breaking its core coding. Who’d have thought you’d be capable of foolishly break the leveling limiter it placed upon you?”

His face leaned in close, until Brock could feel his protruding fangs brushing up against his unkempt stubble, “There are consequences for disregarding the rule of the Great Machine. Burning lifeforce to fuel your unsupported growth is one of the lighter punishments.”

The demons snarled. A crackle resounded.

Brock’s next breath caught in his throat as the grasp on his jaw tightened further, and the bone began to splinter. Pain surged up through his skull, and desperation took root in his mind. This was it, he was about to be slain, killed for something he had no control ov-

He felt aura move within the man holding him captive, and he felt that it was in an oddly reminiscent manner of the way that Fon’s old friend Jonathan had activated his teleportation. Although, unlike him, the aura wasn’t siphoned into a Technique node, but directly projected out into the atmosphere.

It was different from simple aura projection. It possessed purpose and meaning, like the result of a Technique but without the node that created the construct. A freestyle Technique. And that was what made the horror settle in. The predatory way the being had been looking at him suddenly made sense as he watched a tentacle of solid aura form and grip upon the fabric of space.

He wasn’t being killed. He was being captured and studied. So, Brock focused.

The tentacle flickered and sputtered out. Brock watched on, half-stunned, half-proud, as wisps of the energy that made up the ethereal limb floated away and dispersed. The grip on his jaw lessened for a moment as his captor’s face fell in shock. Brock sensed another activation and projection, but this time, it sputtered out only a second after it left his body.

My Ascendancy! Its passive ability is aura suppression! He resisted the urge to grin despite his situation. His aura plummeted. I really did fucking find it!

His joy was cut short as two glowing yellow eyes locked onto him, and the slitted pupils within dilated, “You’re interfering with my aura.”

It wasn’t a question, but a statement. And Brock supposed it was the truth.

For an Ascendancy that had based many of its Techniques on some form of oppression or binding, it just… made sense. And that was why he’d never discovered it. It was so… obvious. All he needed to do was be in contact with someone using aura and want their aura to fail. Everything just suddenly clicked into place for him.

The small surge of joy he felt was abruptly ripped away.

Searing pain erupted as a fist drove into his face, crunching his nose and caving his skull inward slightly. Time and space seemed to freeze as the immense force of the blow caught up with the action, and the world twisted.

An explosion of sand followed.

Blackness reigned for a short time, before Brock blinked once more, and he felt himself bloody and broken as he came to. The entirety of his skull and back were consumed by agony. He felt splinters of his jaw and face poking through torn skin, and he could taste the smell of iron in his brain, which was currently being tickled by a few sharp pieces of bone.

While his sight was already somewhat blurred in one eye from his experience with the Sky Bandit, now both were blurred entirely, reduced to sighting rough shapes and blotches of dull colours. A blackened fluid coated the bottom of his vision, probably being the blood he could feel oozing from his eyes.

Brock tried to move but his body refused to listen to his commands. His fingers twitched, and his toes flexed, but nothing happened otherwise. His organs sputtered ominously, pulped against his spine by the collision with what he assumed was a sandstone behind him. A large gouge had been carved into it by his crash landing, and Brock was fairly certain, through his sluggish thoughts, that the Elemental was not going to be happy.

In his vision, a figure approached. Tall. Domineering. Accompanied by the horns, only one name came to mind.

Demon.

The sound of feet stomping on sand sounded distant and disfigured. A voice echoed, although Brock could only make out a few words among many, “I don’t know… interfere with my aur… disrupts… plans of teleportation. But… wonder if… you can do it while unconscious?”

A cackle reverberated through the deserts as the man’s feet stopped before him. Sputtering for breath, Brock watched a fist rise high above him, rearing up to smash him into the oblivion.

Then, as it streaked downward, the shadows twitched.