So here I was, dangling from a sheer wall above a bottomless chasm, with nothing but my knife plugged firmly into the crumbling earth to keep me from falling. My inventory had glitched out so the brass head of Everwant was protruding into the air. Meanwhile, Berlin was preparing another shot from Wrongtonk. If the impact from that didn’t knock me down, the estray’s retaliation might have just cut clean through me where I dangled.

Sure, I was still lucky from my connection with Volce, but I wasn’t going to test fate. The minimum time between Wrongtonk’s shots was thirty-two seconds and, knowing Berlin, she’d probably find some way to do it in thirty-one. I wanted to use my knife as a platform to leap up from then drag the knife up via a rope made from of my tie, but since I had no intention of fucking with my inventory, that wasn’t going to happen. No choice: I had to leapfrog up. It was going to be slower, unfortunately.

It wasn’t easy with the cliff face shorn clean but I did manage to find a firm hold for my fingers. I applied pressure to it to make sure it wouldn’t slip out. Then I pulled myself up with one hand, the other keeping hold on the knife as a safety. I tried not to look down—it wouldn’t have mattered, of course, since there was literally nothing to see down there that would let me fantasise about my death, but it was the principle that mattered.

As I got my chin level with my hand, I was about to yank the knife out when a chunk of rock slipped out from under me. The air raced around me as I plummeted towards oblivion. Heart racing, I reaffirmed my grip on the knife and managed to catch myself after a short stop. My shoulder screamed with pain this time from the pull. I ignored it—the ash helped with that. I watched a dislodged rock tumble into the darkness, occasionally colliding with the walls on its way down and making no sound due to the estray’s silence effect. If there were a bottom to this pit, I never would have known.

Growling noiselessly, I decided to abandon caution. If I took too long to climb it would be no different than death. In one smooth motion, I leaped up, yanked the knife out, was airborne for the slowest split second of my life, then thrust the knife back into the cliff face with a crunch. I’d put all the effort into my one good arm, and thankfully that was all I needed. My breath was coming in ragged—either the ash couldn’t erase this fear or it was wearing off. I repeated the leap.

When the knife went back in, it dislodged part of the wall and more rocks tumbled out beneath it.

For a heart stopping second, I was convinced the knife was going to slip out. It was holding on by barely a few centimetres. I practically begged the thing to stay still. It must have answered my prayers because it held so firmly in place that it may as well have been a part of the cliff face. Taking a deep breath to steady myself, I pulled myself up with one arm then reached for the top of the chasm with both hands, abandoning the knife for now. I dragged myself up the rest of the way into absolute chaos.

The estray had spawned heads all along its tail, the end of which had been blasted off in the last explosion. That wasn’t stopping it, however, as each of those heads was firing torso-wide reality-eating beams at random. They were carving up everything. As soon as Markus patched a hole in the fire wall, another spot was snuffed out next to it. A number of those beams were aiming for the cliff that Berlin was hiding upon, however they weren’t able to reach it. As strange as it was, the estray’s beams thinned out and stopped long before they reached the cliff.

The demons weren’t any more injured than before the last shot from Wrongtonk, having stayed close to the edge of the makeshift arena to avoid the brunt of the blast. However, between dodging beams and fighting digressers, they were struggling. Which would have been an ideal opportunity for me, given the estray was so distracted as well, if I hadn’t left my knife stuck in a pit to Hell itself. Oh, and the one rabdos I needed had glitched itself into who-knows-where.

Cursing Volce’s crappy luck powers, I lay flat along the edge of the chasm and reached for the knife. As I did so, a wrist-wide beam came charging at my flank. I rolled out of the way just in time and the earth simply vanished where the void-like darkness touched. Unfortunately, where I had just been was also where my knife currently was.

By the time I rolled back over, the knife was already falling. I leaned back over the edge and lunged for it. Desperate, thinking I’d lose the only thing that was keeping me alive, I shouted, Stop! I used my bad arm to grip the edge of the chasm then dropped in after it. I reached out and snatched at where I though gravity would take it and missed entirely.

I snapped to a stop. Pain shot all the way through my arm, shoulder, and chest. I blocked it out and gripped on for dear life, desperately seeking out the knife. It took a full second for me to realise the knife was falling far too slowly, practically hovering right in front of my eyes, before snatching it by the grip. When it was in my hand, I breathed a sigh of relief.

My shoulder was absolutely aching this time. When I tried to pull myself up, my arm was barely responsive. I couldn’t get any strength into it. Fantastic. Just fucking fantastic. That tendon was well and truly blown. Oh, the joys of being a human.

I slammed the knife into the top of the chasm. As I went to pull myself up, another beam burst out of the wall right beside me. I barely managed to react in time to pull my leg out of the way, but that move caused my busted arm to fall off, leaving me dangling with one hand.

I was running out of time. There were probably fifteen seconds left to hit the estray with Everwant—less if I wanted to get out of there alive. Gritting my teeth, I dragged myself up, snatched the knife out of the ground, and charged recklessly at the estray.

Several of the heads bulging out of its body faced me. From within their snapped-open maws, darkness swallowed the light and beams shot out at me. However, the attacks were easy to predict and few between. I dodged and weaved with little issue. Its attention was still focused on the cliff and it likely thought me a minor disturbance given I hadn’t struck it yet.

As I ran, I used my busted arm to tug at Everwant. At first, I was cautious about how to handle it, on account of the space that had turned to static around it, but I figured if I just grabbed the head of the cane and avoided the glitched space, nothing would happen to me. Whether it was my own weakness or a product of the glitch, the cane emerged into the world ever so slowly. I had little choice but to keep tugging.

Digressers were melting off the estrays body. Chunks of its form came off of the gaping wound where the tip of its tail had been as it rebuilt itself, and these too became digressers. I knocked them down one at a time with the knife.

As I landed a clean blow the tenth digresser, I caught another in the corner of my eye. The thing was glitching more madly than any digresser I’d seen so far and was well within leaping distance. However, it hesitated. I watched it intently, somewhat curious as to why it wasn’t charging me like its identical brethren. As I strained my attention onto it, a sound echoed through the silence.

Deep pulses radiated around me, darting back and forth at a rapid pace between the digressers and the estray. I hadn’t noticed it before because there were so many of them; the pulses danced between them so rapidly that it melded into a hum, which I’d mistaken for the sound of silence. Now that it was just me, this thing, and the estray, I could hear that pulse bouncing back and forth as clearly as glass.

Hidden within was another sound, like the scraping of gravel. Each time that pulse bounced back onto the digresser, the gravelly sound seemed to intercept it and the digresser broke into a spasm of glitches.

I wasn’t staring for long. The whole sensation would have lasted the span of a tenth of a second, but it stuck with me. I was so engrossed in the details of that moment that the minutiae I’d absorbed could have swallowed up a whole minute under normal circumstances. My senses were on overload and everything was pouring into my mind so rapidly. In that tiny span, I’d made a startling realisation and my mouth stretched into a grin. The next moment, my knife was through the stunned digresser’s head and I was back to a sprint.

Between digressers and the beams, it was slow going. Volce’s luck could only help so much when I was practically getting swarmed by these things. I opted for caution initially, but with only ten seconds left and after my discovery, I decided to be more reckless. Without this thing’s points, I’d be useless to the party and, therefore, dead.

I leapt over another chasm, barely avoiding digressers as they charged at me in greater hordes. In front of me shot jets of fire and slashes of wind as the other demons tried to head me off, to warn me not to go. It was their only means of communication now that silence reigned over the known universe. I pointedly ignored them, knowing they wouldn’t risk losing one of their allies in the middle of a fight against a reality-eating abomination.

When I was in arm’s length, however, the estray shifted. Grey flesh writhed along its body as arms shot out at wrong angles. Gangly clawed hands swept and swiped at me. I dodged and weaved almost on instinct, hopping over arms and ducking beneath the ongoing barrage of beams. In that mad rush, I noticed something strange: this time the arms weren’t destroying the earth it brushed through. That only made me more reckless.

I just needed to get Everwant out. Now that it was swiping at me, I didn’t need to get any closer—I could move in for the finishing strike when I knew where the Hell to land it. However, the cane was stuck three quarters of the way out and I was struggling to move it a centimetre past that.

As I was leaping over a beam, another arm thrust out and struck me square in the gut. Its claws latched onto me and slammed me into the earth a distance away from it. I let out a gasp of pain but the silence swallowed it. I was winded, dizzy, I was struggling to breathe, struggling to make sense of what had just happened. Worse, that hand was squeezing so hard that I could only breathe in short bursts. In that messed up state, though, I saw something that snapped me back to reality and pushed me beyond human limits: one of the estray’s heads turned to me, snapped open, and darkness grew inside of its maw.

My hands were free but I couldn’t escape. No amount of clawing would have helped me. I realised my knife was missing and patted around frantically for it. I found it lodged into the back of the estray’s hand. I grabbed it and started hacking. Nothing. The thing didn’t even budge. There were still another five seconds before Wrongtonk fired, and I wasn’t even sure I was outside of the blast zone.

That was it. I was about to get erased from existence just like a demon, or at the least decapitated. Everwant didn’t matter at this point—if I was going to die, knowing the location of the estray’s sigil was pointless. But as I gave the estray one last stab for good measure, deciding to at least let it feel some of my suffering, something occurred to me.

There were many knives in the Culling. Over a thousand actually, and most weren’t worth anyone’s time. However, this one was strange. It stopped forces it ought not to, had remained lodged in the side of a cliff on just a couple of centimetres of blade despite my whole weight threatening to angle it out, it carved through things as though they weren’t even there, and, just a moment ago, didn’t seem to fall very far when I’d let go of it down a chasm. Time and again, it just… stopped.

My eyes lit up in realisation. In the nineteenth Culling, a haures had got their hands on a knife that they used to, miraculously, stop dead a charging bunè in the fifth Ring. The demon waited perfectly steadfast as the bunè barrelled towards them and, at the moment they were meant to be run down, the haures thrust a knife in front them. The force of the impact caused the knife to punch straight through the bunè’s shield, destroying it in the process, and penetrate straight through to the sigil on its neck. The haures themselves had sustained no injuries—the way they’d recoiled from the impact would have been no different than if they’d popped a charging balloon.

That knife has a name. Möbius, Class 3-S. Nothing can move it. At least, that was the description that viewers had speculated on in online forums. I had even taken part in that speculation at one point when I was thirteen, obsessed as I was with the Culling back then. I felt like an idiot for forgetting about it but, hey, the description the administrators had given for the knife was so damned vague!

Well, there was never a better time to put that speculation to the test. I thrust the knife forward. However, with how small the hand guard was, I realised there was still a good chance my arm would get shorn away by the oncoming beam.

It wasn’t the first time I heard something strange within that silence. This time, it was like a faint whisper.

Let go, it said.

So I did. And the knife remained exactly where I’d left it, suspended as though time and space no longer flowed around it. I leaned back as much as the hand that gripped me allowed, trying to create some distance between the knife and myself.

The beam was let loose. It struck in an instant, time being no obstacle for it. Darkness swallowed everything. I thought for sure that I was finally dead, that this was it. Then I wanted to kick myself for thinking that. The fact that I could think meant I was very much alive. My gamble had paid off.

Darkness only reigned directly in front of me. Elsewhere, I could see clearly, even if everything was tinted in reds as though it was twilight. The beam was splitting around the blade of the knife and each half continued unabated at mirrored angles. The twin beams carved holes into a distant forest. Trees toppled silently as they lacked full trunks to support them. That could have been me, I realised, just toppling over without hardly enough muscle to carry my weight.

As close as I’d come to death, I knew this wasn’t the time to celebrate. I tugged at Everwant with my good hand. With any luck there was some other hidden function to the thing that would save me from this mess.

The estray’s beam stopped. Once the darkness cleared, I noticed that a number of its heads were staring at me, tilting side to side at angles that ought to have snapped a supporting spine. It was trying to figure out how I stopped its beam. Well, the answer was suspended right in front of it; the estray was just too stupid to realise it, regardless of how many heads it had. I had no intention of explaining it, assuming it could understand me—its hesitation was my opportunity.

As though to acknowledge my discovery, a popup appeared in the corner of my vision:

Affinity with Möbius has increased!

Gained use of the [Suspension] feat.

Then finally, Everwant popped from the inventory. The space which it had just been lodged within glitched away in a multitude of colours. I couldn’t help but grin. Damn I was lucky.

With a grin, I smacked the hand that gripped me.

Then the world went dark.