When Veeryan's vision cleared, the glowing system window floated steadily in front of him. Its cold, alien text now displayed something new — his stats. Most numbers looked… normal. Health, stamina, strength — nothing that stood out. But then his gaze drifted to the Ability Panel.
Only one ability was listed.Its rank glimmered in gold letters: Mythical.Name: Eldricth Regeneration.
This ability allows the user to regenerate even from a single atom of his body, or from an atom-sized particle infused with his Eldricth Force.
Veeryan stared blankly at the description. The words might as well have been in another language. His mind felt slow, heavy. Exhaustion pressed down on him — not just from his injuries, but from the entire surreal nightmare he'd been thrown into.
It felt like a dream laced with trauma, too strange to be real, too vivid to be false. He said nothing. There was nothing to say.
Then, a distant roar shattered the silence.
His head turned sharply toward the sound. Far off, across the shimmering red-and-blue sands, something massive was moving — a reptilian ghost, towering, its outline jagged and shifting. It threw its head back and roared again, a sound so deep it seemed to shake the air itself.
Veeryan barely had time to react before something sliced clean through his neck.
"Wh—" The word was cut short — literally. His head tumbled, rolling across the strange sand… until it simply wasn't.
In an instant, he was whole again. Skin, bone, and flesh knitting themselves back into place in a shimmer of unnatural energy.
"What… the—" But there was no time to finish.
Instinct screamed at him to run. He bolted in a random direction, sand kicking up behind him. But shadows closed in from all sides.
Dozens of ghosts emerged from the haze — twisted shapes with skeletal frames, claws like hooked blades, and eyes that burned with cold hunger. They moved fast. Too fast.
Claws tore into him. Teeth ripped at his flesh. His limbs were severed in an instant. One ghost held his head aloft, its jaw widening in a cruel grin.
"Please… leave me," Veeryan choked out.
The ghost crushed his skull in its grip.
Light — then darkness — then light again. His body was whole once more, pain replaced by the cold clarity of regeneration. But the cycle did not stop.
Over and over again, they killed him. Piercing, biting, tearing him apart in every way possible. And over and over again, he returned, each resurrection dragging him back into the nightmare.
Five hours later, the battlefield was silent.
Veeryan sat hunched among heaps of mangled ghostly corpses, their strange forms dissolving slowly into drifting motes. His hands shook. His breath came in ragged pulls. The world around him felt distant, unreal.
In his mind, his own voice narrated the horror.
They kept killing me. Again and again. Every time I came back, they tore me apart all over. At first, I just ran — but running did nothing. Eventually, I started fighting back. I ripped the teeth from one of them and used it as a blade, stabbing into their strange skin, over and over. Even when they killed me mid-swing, I came back. Little by little, I hurt them. Little by little, they fell. When the last one dropped, I realized there were only twenty-three of them.
Veeryan's eyes lifted to the horizon. Somewhere out there, the giant reptile still roamed — the one he'd seen, but not dared to fight.
And he knew… there were more. Many more.