Chapter 63: A Full Day Remaining
The hours bled away, marked only by the slow, painful crawl of the sun across the sky and the relentless subtraction in the corner of my vision. From my perch on the broken ballista platform, I had a ringside seat to the end of the world, or at least, this particular chapter of it.
The mood on the wall shifted from grim endurance to weary triumph, then to something resembling a grim, professional cleanup operation. The beasts weren't pushing anymore. They were just… there. Isolated pockets of feral resistance that were being systematically surrounded and put down. The coordinated, intelligent threat was gone, and what remained was a mop-up job, albeit a bloody and dangerous one.
I watched Freya the entire time. She was a machine. She didn't celebrate. She didn't rest. She moved from one hotspot to another, her voice growing hoarser with each command, her silver sword now more of a dull grey from all the gore. But she was steady. A fixed point in the chaos. Every time I saw her deflect a clumsy attack or shout an order that saved a soldier from a flanking beast, a little of the tension in my own chest unwound.
My body still screamed at me. The potion had done its job, but it was a patch, not a fix. Every deep breath was a negotiation with my ribs. My leg throbbed with a deep, persistent ache. But it was a manageable pain. It was the price of admission for this particular shitshow, and I was willing to pay it.
I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew, the sun was significantly higher, beating down with a midday intensity. I jerked awake, a spike of panic lancing through me as my eyes snapped to the timer.
32:00:04... 03... 02... 01...
My heart hammered against my sore ribs. This was it. The thirty-hour mark. The end of the invasion.
32:00:00
A familiar, translucent box snapped into place, its appearance as cold and impersonal as ever.
***---***
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
Invasion Event: Survived.
Mission Status: Updated.
Primary Objective: PENDING
(Freya Mikaelson - Status: ALIVE)
Time to Mission Completion:32:00:00
***---***
A smile spread across my face, so wide it made the cut on my lip sting. It wasn't a happy smile. It was the grim, exhausted grin of a man who had just crawled through a mile of broken glass and found he was only halfway through the field. But it was a smile nonetheless.
We'd done it. More accurately, they'd done it, and I'd managed to not get Freya killed in the process. Mission Two was essentially in the bag. All she had to do was stay alive for one more standard, thirty-two-hour day. How hard could that be?
The thought was immediately followed by a cold splash of reality. The first two missions. Let's review. Mission One: Get dropped naked into a cave, fight my way through a small army of goblins and a chief that turned into a mini-Hulk, all while rescuing a bunch of prisoners. Mission Two: Survive a city-siege led by a mysterious Beast Tamer and his house-sized lion, which involved getting launched over a wall, crash-landing, and taking a blast of soul-chilling dark magic to the chest.
And the System Administrator had the gall to call these the standard missions. The ones that drew from my "memories, fears, ambitions." What the hell did that say about me? And the "special missions" he'd mentioned, the ones every ten levels? The "mid-season finales designed to make you question your life choices"? If these were the warm-ups, I was genuinely terrified of what a main event looked like. Not to mention there were ninety-eight of these nightmares left. The math was… sobering.
My morbid train of thought was derailed by a sound I hadn't heard in what felt like years: a cheer.
It started small, from a group of adventurers who had just cornered and slain the last large beast in their sector. Then it spread, rippling along the wall like a wave. It wasn't a roar of victory, not yet. It was a collective, bone-deep sigh of relief given voice. Soldiers leaned on their spears, their shoulders slumping not in defeat, but in finality. People started clasping arms, clapping each other on the back. A few even laughed, the sound strange and wonderful after a day and a half of screams and snarls.
Below me, Freya was finally still. She had sheathed her sword and was just… looking out over the scarred battlefield, at the smoldering trenches and the piles of dead beasts. One of the guardsmen said something to her, and she actually nodded, a faint, tired smile touching her own lips.
I didn't join them. I didn't go down there. This was their moment, the city's moment. I was just the guy in the background who'd helped by being a surprisingly effective meat shield.
But as I sat there, watching the celebration begin, the smile didn't leave my face. The pain was still there. The fear of the future was a cold stone in my gut. But for the first time since I'd woken up in that cave, I felt a flicker of something that wasn't pure desperation or survival instinct.
It was the faint, fragile, and utterly terrifying feeling of hope.
The celebration was a luxury I couldn't afford. Their war was over. Mine had just entered its final, critical phase.
The smile faded from my face as I watched the timer, the numbers a cold anchor in the warm sea of relief washing over the wall.
31:58:33… 32… 31… 30…
Thirty-two hours. That's all she had to do. Live. For one more day. In a city that was half-destroyed, filled with exhausted soldiers, and who knew what other surprises this world had tucked away. A loose roof tile, a panicked guard, a sickness from the miasma of death hanging over the city… the ways to die were endless when the System was your narrator.
And what happened when the clock hit zero? A nice, clean reset like after the tutorial? The System Administrator had been clear: full restoration was a reward for completing primary objectives. But was that a guarantee for every mission, or just a one-time tutorial hand-hold? I couldn't bet my life, and Freya's, on that assumption. The way my luck was running, I'd complete the mission only to drop dead from my accumulated injuries the second the clock ticked down.
No. There was no time to waste.
With a grunt, I pushed myself up, the familiar chorus of pain flaring back to life. I ignored it, my focus turning inward. Reaching into another hidden pocket in my leather armor, my fingers closed around the last of my real treasures: a final vial of healing potion. This one was a pale, milky blue, less potent than the yellow one, but designed for stamina and knitting deep muscle tears. It was my emergency reserve.
I popped the cork and downed it in one go. This one didn't taste like fire and broken bones. It was cool, like mint and river stones, flooding my system with a chilling energy. The effect was less violent but just as profound. The deep, throbbing ache in my leg receded, the muscle fibers finally relaxing and properly binding. The sharp, stabbing sensation in my ribs faded to a dull, bearable soreness. The pervasive feeling of being a collection of loosely-assembled parts held together by pain and stubbornness finally vanished.
I took a deep, experimental breath. It was the first full, unhindered breath I'd taken since the crash landing. The relief was so intense it was almost dizzying. I rolled my shoulders, shifted my weight from foot to foot. I was still tired down to my soul, but my body was now a functional tool again, not my enemy.
Then, I reached for the real power. My Ki.
I closed my eyes, shutting out the sounds of celebration. In the quiet darkness behind my eyelids, I focused on the core of energy within me. It was like stirring embers back to life. At first, there was just a faint warmth, a flicker. I pushed, concentrating, remembering the feeling of it flooding my legs for the Acceleration Loop, surging into my arms for strength. The embers caught. A familiar, burning warmth began to spread through my limbs, not the painful fire of the potion, but a clean, powerful energy that was uniquely mine.
My Ki was surging, flowing through pathways that were becoming more familiar with each near-death experience. It didn't heal like the potions, but it reinforced. It turned my flesh and bone into something harder, faster, more resilient. It was the difference between a rusty sword and a honed blade.
I opened my eyes. The world seemed sharper, the colors more vivid. The fatigue was still there, a heavy blanket over my mind, but my body was ready. Alert. Waiting.
The final stretch had begun. Thirty-one hours and fifty-eight minutes to keep one person alive in a world that seemed hell-bent on killing us both. I looked down at Freya, now accepting a waterskin from a soldier, her posture finally showing a sliver of the exhaustion she must be feeling.
My job wasn't over. It was just getting started. I settled back into my spot, no longer a broken spectator, but a sentinel. The countdown continued its inexorable march.
31:57:12… 11… 10…
I was ready.
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