The town's Dungeon guard was having a bad day. First, rats ate all of his food - which while unnecessarily, did give him enjoyable flavors - the night before, then some impudent little slave came barging in on his conversation with his friend, and finally the bottom half of a man suddenly appeared out of nowhere and slumped to the ground while spraying blood all over his friend's business. And the impudent little halfling he tried to kill ran away in the confusion.

Padina watched Degritone's death in confusion. As the moment approached, the feeling of existential dread coming from his location kept growing and growing. As soon as he heard the maid's voice, Padina almost broke down for the first time since the first 3 years with this Skill.

So, when he died, she was confused. That feeling of dread did not lessen. She'd expected it to immediately disappear, but it stuck around. In fact, looking at the Dungeon guard whose food she'd caused to be eaten, she saw that the feeling of dread did not accurately follow him. It was also frozen in place as if the Skill had broken when Degritone had died. While not the intended outcome, and despite the now-permanent spot of high intensity dread in the world, she'd been excited to finally be rid of the Skill.

Then, without warning, the spot of dread Degritone used to occupy got worse, and worse, and worse, then started spreading, slowly at first, but soon covering the whole town, then the entirety of the area around the town all the way to the Liberator's hideout, then the entirety of the nearby woods, then the continent, and soon, the whole world.

Padina was at the limit of what she could stand. No matter where she looked, she felt a sense of pure, unadulterated dread that originated from Degritone's death. Nowhere was spared from its touch, and finally, after what felt like an eternity of terror, Padina passed out.

When Degritone awoke, he was in his mental space, staring at the ceiling. He looked around and saw a clone of himself. It held one hand on the wall of the mental space while looking at him with a somewhat strained face. "You're up," it said.

"Apparently. Why am I here and who are you?"

"We technically died and I'm technically you, just the System doesn't recognize that yet. I only have very slightly more information than you do and you'll probably figure it out soon, anyway, so don't ask. I don't think you could use me as a way to make Omen of Death, but blah. Irrelevant. I'm your Class Ideal. I only have like 12 minutes before I need to devote the entirety of my mind to keeping us from being devoured by the System.

"I looked through the structures for Cloakium and soul material, and they definitely have the same base flow. I can give you at minimum 29 days and 10 hours, at most 29 days and 12 hours, to figure out how to make it and make a new body out of it. I think that will stop the System from eating our soul, but I have no proof of that.

"Doing that is the only course of action I can think of that will even potentially allow us to get out of this situation before I run out of energy keeping us alive, as our daughter of our life dream told us. And yes, even if it hurts us like that, we were given the order to not die first, so you know what to do."

Degritone nodded and searched around for the materialized memories of the two substances' flows. They weren't around. Looking to his Class Ideal, Degritone started to say something before the two memory packets were created in front of him, granting him perfect memory of the flows in general, then a third memory packet appeared that granted him perfect memory of the commonalities of the flows.

"What are you doing, by the way?" Degritone asked as he started working on finding the structure for pure, solidified Stavch. Honestly, he didn't know what he was doing, effectively making arbitrary shapes in the hopes it would do something.

There were some commonalities between the various structures he knew, but they were few and of potentially little relevance. It was like trying to reconstruct a valid English sentence exclusively from the knowledge of the letters and that E typically makes vowel sounds long. Without knowing the grammar or what words typically looked like, he was just stumbling around.

"The System's doing something with our soul and I don't know what it is. I'm keeping it from doing it, as it definitely triggers an order reaction."

"That thing where we hear the loli that told us our order right as we're about to fail? Also, we're skipping a ton of steps here. We're supposed to be multiverse hoppers before we replace our bodies with pure pocket energy."

The Class Ideal nodded and said, "Nothing we can do about that, as far as I can think."

Nodding himself, Degritone silently focused on work.

Padina woke up to shouting and immediately jolted up, looking for the source of this unbearable dread, only to remember what happened. Someone noticed her move and said, "Lady Padina! I'm so glad you're awake. I was so sure som-"

And then the terror ended her consciousness once more.

After five days of non-stop Stavch structure testing, during which time his Class Ideal left the mental space, Degritone found a structure that created a temporary Stavch flow, rather than one that actually stuck around. Interestingly, it didn't create any noticeable physical phenomena, unlike all but the mental-oriented Stavch flows.

Additionally, this one was much more precise than the other structures he knew of. Other Stavch structures could have a deviation of as much as 5% from its base form. The fact that Degritone found this one at all felt to him like either the meddling of this pocket of creation's Gatiel or quantum immortality. Testing showed the structure had to be less than 0.075% different from what was assumed to be the exact structure.

So, using this suspicious stroke of luck as a starting point, Degritone experimented with chaining multiple of them together to form a circuits of Stavch flows in various shapes. The last thing he tried before moving on was to make a known Stavch structure using this Stavch flow, as any known material could be used to make them, just with differing efficiencies.

When the hybrid structure failed to produce any result, Degritone knew that this Stavch flow was not considered a material in any way. After creating a permanent copy of the structure out of iron, he moved on to creating differing structures using it as the starting point.

"-oo something's wrong. She won't wake and the only other time she did was for a short while," the same servant from before said.

Melena bolted up at the feeling of dread around her, and immediately remembered it cause. She tried slowing her breathing to limited, but not no, success.

The originator of the Skill that is the bane of her existence pushed past the servant after seeing Padina move. Once he reached her, he moved her face to look at his. "It seems like something so undeniably threatening has appeared." He slightly threw her head to the side and stood back, then elaborated, "This is the same reaction as the others who survived for more than a second after the Skill being implanted.

"She's never had this reaction. The theory was that they were so weak willed that the terror instilled by the Skill killed them on the spot. The fact something can cause her to be so terrified as to pass out from it means that this is even worse than Kaldra. Significantly worse, look at her. She was able to hide her fear surprisingly well for a halfling back then. She can't even do anything but focus on staying conscious right now.

"I must go warn the king," he finished up, disappearing out the still not completely fixed castle.

The dread increased further and all the progress she had in dealing with the dread was undone.

Another breakthrough came on day 18 when Degritone actually looked at himself and his surroundings, rather than just having wandering eyes. He noticed that the Stavch flows were not those of atoms. Despite what he expected when he'd had the idea, he was not made of soul material. Despite this, the flows were oddly familiar. He looked back at the permanent Stavch construct made of iron in his mental space.

It was properly made of iron, but that was not why he initially looked over. The Stavch flow created by the iron structure was almost identical to the material of his body and surroundings. The only difference was that it was internally turbulent in a very specific pattern, while its surface remained perfectly smooth.

So, he created a chain of permanent Stavch structures to create a continuous ring of this Stavch flow and went about testing what structure he needed to manipulate it to have this internal turbulence, even if just temporarily. His initial idea to layer the structure in such a way as to induce turbulence in the flow did not work, simply redirecting the flow, or having no effect whatsoever in the case of two opposite structures.

It seemed it was back to trying out arbitrary structures again, but this time in an attempt to modify this smooth Stavch flow into the internally turbulent Stavch flow that made up his mental space.

Once again, Padina found herself waking up; this time, however, the only other person in the room was her servant, sleeping in a chair next to her. Outside, she could see the stars and a partially obscured moon. It took an hour to fully calm down. The dread would never weaken, but she could push its effects to the back of her mind. Unlike normal fear where constant exposure to it numbed you to what made you afraid, this was caused by a Skill.

She gently woke the servant and tried to speak, but coughed instead, dehydration taking its toll. After a bit of charades, she was able to get him to get her some water. After drinking half a gallon of water, she said, "Thank you. Please get me something to write on and with. I have a feeling I won't live much longer, and want to make sure my predecessor, if I ever have one, knows why they must suffer like this."

"Right away, Lady Padina," he said before running off to do so.

When he returned, she wrote down what had transpired from Degritone entering the world to his death, and told whoever may come after her about her potential fates. Death by heart attack from this dread, death should this note be found early, or simply dying due to the time she'd given up to her image's Skill Set. One way or another, she believed she would die before seeing the end.

To mitigate that second way of death, she placed the note in a safe given to her by the king that only he and she could open.

Her people would only be free once the country had fallen, and it seemed her wish was finally an inevitability after the sacrifice of that stranger from another world. Uncertain as to what final cause would be and unable to detect any differences in the dread across the entire planet, she silently thanked that stranger. While she was unhappy she wouldn't be able to thank him directly, she was thankful the end was near, even if she may not live to see it.

Finally, with only 10 hours remaining before the window of guaranteed safety closed, Degritone found success. He was able to create permanent Stavch flows that had the same properties as the Stavch flows of his mental space, which created translucent matter. He briefly pondered why it was not opaque like the rest of his mental space, but pushed that aside for now and went about making certain the flow was Stavch-recognized matter.

It was. Now he just had to craft a body before his Class Ideal ran out of energy.

Only 36 seconds after the minimum safe time, Degritone put what he hoped would be the finishing touches on his new, pure Stavch body.

Major Achievement Unlocked!

Past Expiration

For the monumental task of coming back from the dead you gain

1 Automatic, Forced, Predetermined Class Upgrade Token

You are being hunted.