Canta exhales, lifting his torso body upwards, his hands are locked behind his head. His breath leaves him, visible in the cold air present outside now here in the empty night of the far, north-western region of the world. He lowers himself back down, getting ready for another repetition of sit-ups.

It has been a week since their escape from the fake-city. A week since the smell of smoke and burning flesh had come to his nose, a week since that deafening silence that followed, in which not a single dying scream was to be heard. He’s been eating everything he can find on the way in order to grow his body, in order to grow the muscles that he has been feverishly trying to train during the brief moments that they stop for. Rabbits. Frogs. Bugs. Frogs. There are a lot of frogs. Everything except for the birds that he sees Alleluia secretly cherish with her sidewards glances towards them. He doesn’t touch the birds.

He doesn’t know if he can get stronger like this. In his old life, he used to get stat-ups for training this hard. But maybe his class doesn’t allow that now. Or maybe the system that governs the universe has simply changed in this way as well, not allowing this functionality anymore. He doesn’t know. But until he finds another sin worth eating, he has no other way to really get stronger and he knows that he needs to be so.

Canta exhales again. It’s getting cold, the further north they go. But he just lets it bite his skin. Alleluia doesn’t really notice the temperature and he doesn’t tell her about it.

“Are you ready?” she asks, having given up on trying to stop him from his training weeks ago.

Canta lifts himself up one more time, before getting up to his feet. He’s not even anywhere close to being ready. He can’t even kill some disgusting, human-eating lizard by himself. How is he supposed to kill the literal embodiment of evil?

He nods to her and the two of them keep going, wandering for days and weeks through this odd part of the world. The further they delve into it, the more it seems to become entirely cobbled and jumbled together out of fragmented features of varying landscapes, as if someone had hastily put it all together the moment they wandered far enough towards the horizon to need more land to trod over.

Jungle trees hang off sideways from sandstone outcrops. Water with an unidentifiable source runs down a ruin that looks like it was from the city with the broken dungeon-gate. Rocks lay scattered here and there, covered in chunks of snow and next to them, sits a pond of bubbling magma that he has to furiously keep Alleluia from, as she apparently doesn’t recognize it as dangerous.

The world is just wrong here and the further they go, the more wrong it becomes. The distortions of the landscape become more apparent and obvious. Autumn-leaf adorned trees start hanging upside-down from what appears to be nothing at all. Occasionally, there is a large, prismatic-crystal which radiates with magical energies floating in the sky, clumped by these trees as if to give a reason for their floating. But not every clump of trees has a crystal to explain their levitation, as if the creator of such sceneries, in their hurry, had simply forgotten to add them. Clockwork mechanisms spin out of ponds and pipes jut out in every direction in the middle of small forests, as if meant to hastily replace the missing trees here.

Everything is clearly wrong.

“What is this place?” asks Alleluia.

“Hell if I know,” says Canta, spinning a small gear that is stuck onto a twig with his finger as they pass. “It’s probably just as fucked as the rest of the world is,” he sighs. “I guess there’s nobody here to hide it from.”

A particularly odd, cracked, glassy crystal, covered in crude, hand-made engravings that he can’t make heads or tails of, juts sideways out of the ground, like a small pole. For some reason, someone had carved a childish depiction of a ghost onto its surface, in between the rune-work. He flicks it as they walk past, listening to the single chime of the bell-like sound that it makes, reverberating around the odd-forest.

“Weird,” says Canta, looking around.

“Mm,” agrees Alleluia, stopping for a moment to let him wind her back up.

Despite the oddness of the landscape, there still seem to be a lot of animals here in clear abundance. The odd-forest is full of life. Canta stares up at the gap between two low branches of a tree. “SPIDER!” he cries, lunging at the little morsel.

Forest spider 100 g Calories: 109 *Protein: 19.1 g Fat: 3 g Carbs: 1.4 g Fiber: 2.5 g Sugars: 0.6 g Rich in COPPER

“Uh…” Alleluia thinks for a second, rubbing her head. “I lost count.”

“Twenty, I think,” mumbles Canta, a few wiry legs still sticking out of his mouth. His stomach growls as he swallows. He’s desperately hungry for a sin. But this isn’t one to be smelt anywhere even near here. What a world for a sin-eater to live in. There simply aren’t any wild sins left outside of the predesignated ‘grazing fields.’

Canta can’t help but wonder as he walks back to Alleluia and turns her crank, wouldn’t this imply that there were more sin-eaters before himself? Aside from the one? For a dedicated ‘sin-eater preparation process’ to exist, there had to have been several already, right? So that means, for whatever reason, sin-eaters kept naturally ‘spawning’ and the demon-king had simply created a system to industrially process them.

Grim.

Everything that remains in this world is just… grim.

The wind blows, tousling his long, greasy hair towards the sides of his face as he stares off into the odd forest, searching with wide eyes for a sign of anything. What are they doing? Where are they going? How are they supposed to find a way to make him stronger out here?

He doesn’t know.

If the demon-king has corrupted and taken the entire world, is there even enough sin left for him to eat? To get strong enough to do what needs to be done?

He doesn’t know.

The further they walk, the odder the world becomes. The ground almost seems like it’s twisting sideways and Canta is sure that he feels like he’s upside-down now and then, but every time he looks, the sky is still where it should be and so are his feet. But for some reason, his hair is dangling down towards the sky. A minute later, as they keep going, he finds himself right-side up again, despite having noticed no difference in his perception.

Occasionally, the ground shakes just the tiniest bit, as if there were a tremor running beneath their feet. The animals around them however, remain entirely undisturbed. The birds stay on their branches, the frogs in their ponds. Many of them don’t even run when they approach, as if there were simply no natural predators here at all and they didn’t even know that something such as a threat to themselves could exist.

Canta eats a lot of frogs.

Pond frog 500 g Calories: 73 Protein: 16 g Fat: 0.3 g *Carbs: 0 g Fiber: 0 g Sugars: 0 g Rich in POTASSIUM

The water beneath him ripples, the disturbance breaking apart the reflection of his own face down in it. Canta swallows, looking around and running after Alleluia as the ground shakes again. The terrain becomes sloped, slanted. They start walking up a steadily steeper and steeper growing hill. Bookshelves, devoid of books, jut out of the ground together with odd constructs that remind him of the dry fountains that he had seen down in Alleluia’s dungeon.

The world shakes again, stronger now.

The two of them keep going, higher, further. The terrain becomes steeper yet, the shakes intensify, the wind picks up and begins pressing against them, as if trying to force them down back from whence they came, as if trying to tell them that they have arrived at a place not meant for people to see.

There is also a pressure in the air, a crushing, heavy weight that is present separate from the wind. He doesn’t think Alleluia notices it, but he does. It pushes down on him, as if the sky itself has become heavier. The northern air here is bitterly cold and frigid and the powerful wind spins around them, leaving no refuge for warmth on his skin.

The world shakes. No… No, it’s not a shake. It’s a pulse, a ripple. Canta feels it through his boots, he feels it run up his legs and into his knees. The pulse, like a heartbeat. First one, then two.

“What is that?” whispers Alleluia, her gears rattling audibly as they approach the source of the oddity, as they approach the source of the odd heartbeat that doesn’t belong here, up on this high perch that the wind circles, that the world has forgotten. This is a secret place, where no living thing belongs.

The pulse shoots through the ground again.

The two of them look past a broken stone-wall, staring at the only thing that there is to see on the other side of it. A janky, broad-shouldered silhouette sits there, facing the western setting sun without moving an inch. Its back is turned to them. The dark-cobalt, if not even purple, armor is visible beneath the fraying tatter of an equally-colored cape, which blows furiously in the north-wind.

“Looks like a heap of old armor,” sighs Canta, disappointed. For a second he thought there would be something to eat.

“Oh,” says Alleluia, walking out from behind the wall after him. “But why is it doing that?” she asks, the two of them stepping into the field. “The ‘thook-thook’ thing?”

“It’s probably just fucked like everything else here is,” says Canta. “Come on, let’s see if there’s anything good.”

“What if it’s a trap?”

“It probably is,” sighs Canta, walking towards it anyways. “But you know, at this point, what fucking isn’t?” he says, shrugging. “Everything in the world is fucked. It’s always been fucked. It’s always going to be fucked,” relents Canta, looking back towards her. “Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if there’s even a point to it all,” he explains, shrugging. Any resolution or determination that might have been instilled in him shortly after his rebirth is gone now. Extinguished.

Alleluia looks at him for a while, but then turns her gaze away, not having a clear answer either for his feelings. The wind surrounds them both. Canta rubs his head. Maybe it’s for the best to just keep going this direction forever, to get as far as they can. Though, he’s probably going to starve to death soon, if he doesn’t get some real nourishment.

Whatever.

The world that he was so excited to show Alleluia doesn’t exist anymore. The world that he was so excited to experience himself anew, doesn’t exist anymore. It’s been taken, stolen, laid out of reach by a power that he is too small, insignificant, weak, dumb, thoughtless, selfish, ignorant to fight against. What is he? In the grand scheme of things, what is he?

Nothing.

“What’s the point?” he sighs, turning around to loot the ancient corpse. The fabric of its cape billowing loudly in his ears from a meter away. “Why even bother?” Alleluia doesn’t have an answer for him and lowers her gaze.

“You’ve got to believe in something,” whispers a strange voice from next to him.

Canta jumps. It was a trap after all. “Look out!” calls Alleluia, running his way as the armor rattles. Shaking, twisting, its limbs and ligaments snap left and right, as if some cosmic-puppeteer were pulling it upright and shaking it out, like an old marionette, retrieved from the bottom of a toy-chest.

Metal strikes the rocks beneath the awakened suit of armor, as the tip of a long lance strikes against the ground. A skull pieces itself together, out of the crumbled dust, nested inside of the chestplate. A single, purple-glowing eye looks his way from the self-reconstructing skull, as the sun sets down behind the horizon, the red-light vanishing nigh-entirely from the world, leaving only the glow of the thing that observes him.