Aiden remained frozen, arms crossed in front of his face, all his muscles tense awaiting the pain that wasn't coming. The silence stretched for what seemed like an eternity, broken only by his panicked breathing and the frantic beating of his heart.
Then he heard a dull sound, something heavy crashing to the ground with a muffled impact, followed by a metallic clatter.
Before he could open his eyes to understand what was happening, a firm hand grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and half-lifted him off the ground.
- "Come on, move!"
The voice was hoarse, breathless, and definitely human. Aiden didn't have time to react before he felt himself being pulled forward at a speed that took his breath away.
- "Wait! What's... AAAAH!"
His feet barely touched the ground. Whoever was holding him, and he was strong, was literally dragging him through the misty streets of the village like a sack of potatoes. Aiden's legs flailed in the air, desperately trying to find purchase, his shoes occasionally scraping the wet pavement.
- "Let me go! I can walk! I CAN WALK!" he screamed, but his protest was lost in the whistling of the air whipping his face.
He finally opened his eyes and nearly fainted from shock. The man dragging him was elderly, at least sixty, with a bushy gray beard and round glasses that had miraculously stayed on his nose despite their mad dash. In his free hand, he held an enormous wooden club, so massive that Aiden couldn't have lifted it with both hands.
But what troubled him most were the old man's legs. They moved at a completely inhuman speed, as if he were an Olympic athlete in a retiree's body. His feet barely touched the ground, yet they raced through the fog faster than Aiden had ever run, even in his healthy youth.
This isn't normal, he thought, completely panicked. This isn't normal at all! Sixty-year-olds don't run like that! It's impossible!
- "Sir!" he tried to shout over the noise of their run. "Sir, please, who are you? What's happening? Those puppets, they..."
The old man's face tightened with annoyance. Without slowing his pace, he brutally pressed Aiden's face against the damp, earthy ground, forcing him to shut his mouth.
- "If you don't want to die, shut your trap!" he hissed through gritted teeth. "You're going to get us all spotted with your yelping!"
Aiden found himself with a taste of earth and rotten grass in his mouth, but he didn't dare say another word. He had never heard such a threatening voice, charged with an authority that brooked no argument. This old man had something in his gaze that said he wouldn't hesitate to abandon him on the spot if he continued making noise.
They continued their silent run through the ghost village. Aiden could see the abandoned houses flashing by, still drowned in that thick mist that seemed never to want to dissipate. From time to time, he glimpsed puppet silhouettes in the distance, but they didn't seem to have spotted them.
After what seemed like kilometers, but which probably represented only a few hundred meters, the old man finally stopped in front of a house that appeared to be in better condition than the others. Unlike the other buildings, this one still had its shutters closed and its front door seemed solid.
Without releasing Aiden, the man knocked three quick raps on the door, then two slow ones, then three more quick raps. A code, Aiden realized.
The door opened immediately, revealing a middle-aged woman with gray hair tied in a strict bun. Her eyes widened upon seeing Aiden.
- "Thomas, what are you bringing us?" she whispered in a worried tone.
- "I don't know," grumbled Thomas, so that was the old man's name. "I found him yelling in the middle of the market square, surrounded by the puppets. The kid was lucky I had my club handy."
He pushed Aiden inside and quickly closed the door behind them. The interior of the house was dark, lit only by a few candles that cast dancing shadows on the stone walls. It smelled of wax and mustiness, with a hint of humidity indicating the place hadn't been heated for a long time.
- "Come," ordered Thomas, grabbing Aiden by the arm again, more gently this time, but with the same firmness. "And above all, not a sound."
He guided him to a corner of the main room where there was a worn rug. Thomas pushed it aside with a gesture, revealing a rough wooden trapdoor that Aiden never would have noticed if it hadn't been shown to him.
- "Go down," murmured the old man, lifting the trapdoor.
Aiden glanced into the opening. A wooden ladder led down to what seemed to be a cellar, faintly lit by the flickering glow of several candles. He could hear murmurs below, other human voices.
Finally, he thought with intense relief. Other people. Real people who might be able to explain what's happening.
He carefully descended the ladder, his hands still trembling slightly from adrenaline. The cellar was more spacious than he expected, with a ceiling high enough for him to stand without problems. Barrels and crates were stacked along the walls, and in the center of the room, a small group of people sat in a circle around a lantern placed on an overturned crate.
They all looked up at him when he reached the ground. Aiden quickly counted: seven people in total. Three men, three women, and a child—a boy about ten years old who was pressed against a woman who must have been his mother. They all had the same look—tired, suspicious, but above all haunted. The look of people who had seen things they should never have seen.
They observed him in silence, with a curiosity mixed with caution, but no one asked questions. It was as if they were waiting for someone else to speak first.
Suddenly, a voice resonated in Aiden's mind—that same synthetic system voice he had heard earlier. But this time, it wasn't accompanied by any visible screen.
[SCENARIO PROGRESSION: ENCOUNTER WITH NON-TRANSFORMED VILLAGERS]
[GENERAL PROGRESSION: 10%]
[REWARD UNLOCKED: VITAL FLAME - 10% AWAKENING]
[NEW ABILITY: INCREASED FEAR RESISTANCE]
Aiden felt something change in him, a strange sensation, as if a small flame had ignited somewhere in his chest. It wasn't unpleasant, quite the contrary. It gave him the impression of being slightly more... solid. More present.
Thomas descended into the cellar in turn, carefully closing the trapdoor above their heads. He placed his enormous club against a wall and dusted off his clothes before turning to Aiden.
Without warning, he grabbed him by the collar again, apparently, this was his preferred way of manipulating people, and pressed him against the cold stone wall.
- "Good," he said in a low but threatening voice. "Now you're going to tell me who you are, where you come from, and what the hell you were doing in the middle of those damn puppets."
His eyes, behind his round glasses, were hard as steel. Aiden realized this man wouldn't hesitate for a second to hurt him if he thought he represented a threat to the group.
- "I... my name is Aiden," he stammered, still in shock from everything that had just happened to him. "Aiden Norask. I swear I don't know how I got here. One moment I was... elsewhere, and the next minute I found myself in your village, in the fog, and those things..."
He fell silent, realizing how implausible his story must sound. How could he explain that he came from another world? That he had died in a hospital and woken up in a teenager's body? That all this was part of a "story" into which he had been sucked by a magic book?
Thomas studied him for a long time, his narrowed eyes scrutinizing every detail of his face. Finally, he sighed and released him.
- "Shit," he mumbled, running a hand through his beard. "Another one who ended up here by accident."
He turned to the other survivors, who had followed the entire scene in silence.
- "Martha," he said to the woman who had welcomed them at the door, "get him something to eat. He looks like he's had a rough time."
Then he turned his attention back to Aiden, and his expression softened slightly. Fatigue replaced suspicion in his eyes.
- "My name is Thomas Greymont," he said, sitting heavily on a crate. "I was the mayor of this village before everything went to hell. And them," he gestured wearily at the group, "that's all that's left of the inhabitants of Greyhollow."
Aiden sat down as well, his legs still shaky. "What happened here? Those puppets, they..."
- "They were like us before," Thomas interrupted. "Normal people. Neighbors, friends, family." His voice broke slightly on the last words. "My own wife... she's part of those things now."
A heavy silence settled in the cellar. Aiden could see the faces of the other survivors, all marked by the same pain, the same traumatic memories.
- "It all started three weeks ago," Thomas continued in a dull voice. "A stranger arrived in the village. A weird guy, entirely dressed in a large black coat, with a mask shaped like a crow's beak. Like those worn by doctors during the plague, you know?"
Aiden nodded, a clear image forming in his mind.
- "At first, we thought maybe he was a traveling doctor, or an eccentric merchant. He settled in at the inn, paid his meals in gold, didn't bother anyone. Rather polite, even. But there was something... something wrong."
Martha, the gray-haired woman, returned with a bowl of something that looked like cold stew and a piece of hard bread. Aiden thanked her with a nod and began to eat, suddenly realizing he was starving.
- "The first night after his arrival," Thomas continued, "Jeanne the baker disappeared. We found her house empty the next morning, the door wide open, but no trace of a struggle. As if she had just... left."
He paused, his hands trembling slightly.
- "The second night, it was the blacksmith who disappeared. Then the third, it was the Henrot family, the parents and their two children. Each time, the same. No traces, no apparent violence. Just... nothingness."
One of the men in the group, a thin guy with dirty brown hair, spoke up.
- "We tried to leave the village, but impossible. Every time we took the road, we found ourselves on the other side of the village, as if we had gone in circles. That bastard had trapped us."
- "And then," Thomas resumed, "after a week, we saw them. The missing ones. But they... they were no longer themselves. They had become these... these things. These wooden and fabric puppets, with those horrible masks. And they obeyed the stranger."
He suddenly stood up, beginning to pace in the confined space of the cellar.
- "He called himself the Puppet Scourge. He gathered us in the village square, all those who remained, and told us we were all going to become his 'perfect actors'. That our village was going to become his 'eternal theater'."
Thomas's voice became harder, charged with cold anger.
- "We tried to fight, of course. But how do you combat someone who can transform people into puppets with a simple gesture? How do you struggle against that?"
He stopped in front of Aiden, looking him straight in the eyes.
- "So we hid. Like rats. And every night, we hear the footsteps of our transformed loved ones patrolling the streets, looking for the last survivors to bring them back to their master."
Aiden swallowed his mouthful of stew with difficulty. The story was even more horrible than he had imagined.
- "And... and this Puppet Scourge, where is he now?" he asked.
- "In the old manor of the local lords, at the top of the hill," Martha replied in a trembling voice. "He's set up his... his workshop up there. Sometimes, at night, we can see red light coming from the windows, and we hear sounds... sounds that no normal human being should be able to produce."
Thomas sat back down, suddenly looking even older and more tired.
- "And that's our situation, kid. We're trapped here, waiting for this monster to come finish what he started. So now, tell me..." He stared at Aiden with disturbing intensity. "You wouldn't have a brilliant idea to get us out of this mess?"
Aiden looked around at the faces full of mixed hope and despair. These people were expecting something from him, a solution, a plan, anything. But he was just a former sick person who read books. What could he possibly do against a being capable of transforming humans into puppets?
And yet, somewhere deep inside him, that little flame he had felt ignite pulsed softly, as if whispering to him that he might be capable of more than he thought.
- "I... I don't know," he finally admitted. "But we can't stay hidden here forever. We have to find a way to stop him."
Thomas let out a bitter laugh.
- "Stop him? Kid, you saw what he did to the whole village. How do you want us to stop him?"
Aiden didn't answer immediately. He was thinking about everything that had just happened to him his death, his rebirth, the system, this story into which he had been thrown. There had to be logic, a purpose, a way to "win" this story.
- "I don't know yet," he finally said. "But I think... I think I didn't arrive here by chance."