03:17 p.m. - At Market Square, Dawnspire.
The market smelled of frying bread and damp wool. Men pushed carts. A little sister ran, a little brother chased after her. The bell from the cathedral had already rung twice—too many bells for a market day.
A bruise of red rolled over the sky. People's faces first tightened, then went empty. Flesh shifted, skin pulling tight over teeth that sharpened. One man lunged at a fruit seller, where his fingers touched, the seller convulsed and then burst into black ash and steam. Screams tore the air.
Ryan stood on a low bench and, because his head made dark jokes when the world broke, he said with a dry, stupid grin: "Everyone tells me to look on the bright side… I looked, but the lights went out." The line came out wrong—half laugh, half sob. A hawker backed away like the sky had just insulted him.
(Play the part. Protagonist moves. Elric, be useful.)
He remembered Pope Thaddeus' voice from earlier—smooth, honeyed, and dangerous.
Pope Thaddeus (steps forward): "Trust the Temple. Give us your names, your gates, your fear—let the Church hold you safe!"
!(People of Dawnspire—hear me. The gods demand we stand together.)
The temple steps were bait. The square moved like water toward the tall doors, but a tide of panic blocked many routes. Stalls filled with the changed—undead hands clawing at any who tried to run. A mother shoved her way forward with her boy, a big brother held back to buy time and shout directions. A big sister yanked a child behind a stall. Some people could not reach the steps. They were trapped.
(Ryan thinking): (I can't open the Space House here. The Authority sits like a heavy stone behind my thoughts and says nothing. No menu. No glowing choices. I only have instinct and whatever weird rules are on my skin.)
He had no status screen. No skill bar. Only a distant weight: the Authority, mute and heavy. It gave no prompt. It showed nothing. But something in him pulsed—an odd, raw pressure that felt like a blank command waiting for a hand.
He wanted to be the hero. He knew the feeling as a story—main person moves first. He also wanted to survive. The protection he carried, Safe from the Red Moon, sat at his skin like hot iron. When the changed touched him they did not drain or bite—contact made them detonate, explode into ash, bone and steaming meat. It was ugly, sudden, final—like a gunshot at point-blank range that shredded the body into pieces that rained down.
A woman near the fountain grabbed her little sister and pushed toward the steps, but a snarling changed blocked her path. It lunged. Her sleeve brushed its rotten hand as she passed Ryan, the monster hit the air and blew apart in a spray of dark gore. The woman's mouth opened around a scream that choked into a sob. People staggered. The little brother clung to his mother's skirts, eyes wide.
(Ryan thinking): (This is wrong. The Temple promised safety but the bait is the Temple. I have an odd weight—the Authority—but it gives no instruction. I have to do something here.)
He shoved a cart into a narrow lane and found his palms sweating. He did not go into the Domain. He did not see the Choice Mandate. He did something else: a thin shove of force left his hands like a leaking command, a rough paracausal shove with no ritual and no form. It felt wrong, like pushing on a locked door. But the shove opened a path. People could slip through the stalls toward the temple steps without being grabbed. It was small and shaky, but it worked. Mothers dragged their children. A big brother pushed a screaming man to the side to stop a changed from getting a hold.
They were not enough.
The changed pressed. More bodies shifted to red-lit hunger. A hulking demon pushed through the crowd—bigger than the others, eyes like burning coal. It moved with heavy grace.
High Demon (growls): "Who the fuck is that man?"
Demon Lieutenant (snarls): "I don't know, but he's hindering our plans."
Another demon snapped its shoulder bone and the limb reformed into a jagged blade that dripped with dark ichor. It sprinted forward with a terrible speed. The crowd scattered.
Ryan stepped into the sudden opening, thinking he could redirect the monster away from a mother who held her boy like a small talisman. The demon's blade flashed. Metal cut him across the stomach with a sound like leather tearing on a factory press. Pain lanced hot and bright, the world narrowed to one unbearable line.
He was cut clean in half. The square froze as if someone had dropped the world.
For a long, terrible beat there was a white, humming silence in his head. He should have died. He should have known fear. Instead something in him slipped sideways: dissociation locked on, and the panic went distant. A laugh came out of him—high, jagged, wrong—like a broken thing forced from a throat. The sound did not belong to the Ryan who once fixed servers and balanced ledgers. It belonged to someone hollowed for survival.
His breath came fast and clinical. The wound did not become an end. Safe from Wounds—whatever violent rule hid in his flesh—seized the tear and began the ugly repair. Flesh crawled like threads, dark filaments knotted and drew skin closed. Muscle flattened and reformed, black, oily strands stitched his ribs back together. The healing was not soft or clean. It was savage, a hungry reweaving that felt like a machine patching corrupted code. He rose whole as if a crash had been patched.
The demons stumbled back, their faces breaking into something like fear.
High Demon (hisses): "What are you?"
Ryan stepped through a ring of ash and shattered stalls. His voice was flat and exact—the tone of someone who speaks to systems and expects obedience.
Ryan (breathes): "I'm a software engineer—the one who wrote the code that makes the whole world run."
Silence answered. Mothers pulled their children in close. The little sister sobbed into a shawl, the little brother clutched his mother's hand so tight his knuckles went white. A big brother propped a fallen stall and looked at Ryan as if he might be a god or a demon.
Around him, any changed that tried to touch him detonated. Heads burst in fountains of black blood and bone. Limbs snapped and scattered like pottery. The effect was brutal and absolute—contact became disintegration. The crowd watched, a raw hope and raw terror mixed.
Ryan's mind was a fractured instrument. He had Acute Stress Reaction with Dissociative Features and a trauma-triggered shift in how he held himself. He could be painfully tender and coldly precise at once. He felt both hollow and furious, like a machine with a bleeding heart, and the calm that steadied him was not peace but survival. He could fix systems in a calm voice, he could also step into violence without blinking. That contradiction made people lean closer and hold back at the same time.
(Ryan thinking): (I do not know what the Authority will let me do next. It is heavy and silent. I can only push and watch. I keep thinking the world is a program. Bugs must be fixed. Do the thing.)
Demons gathered, unsure. The big one reached out with a claw and the hand smoked against Ryan's sleeve. It disintegrated into a rain of ash and slag. The demon recoiled, baffled.
Demon Lieutenant (roars): "Take him down! Kill the little ones! Make them scream!"
They surged. Ryan found himself a line between the monsters and a mother with her boy. The fight became a blur—blood, ash, shove, and the sound of metal on metal. He did not feel heroic. He felt a brittle, wired need to act like the protagonist in a story, because that made the noise in his head quieter. He kept moving because he had to, because not moving felt worse than getting cut in half.
A demon twisted and lunged for the children clustered by the fountain. Its claw stretched toward a small form. The crowd shrieked and a big brother threw himself into the path, taking a blow that would have cut him in two. The man fell.
Ryan saw the child—small, with hair tangled and eyes full of terror—and a sudden animal thing in him snapped. He grabbed the demon as it reached the child. The creature touched his shoulder and exploded outward in a spray of bone and dusk. The force threw him back and knocked him against a stall. He saw the child safe, mouth open and weeping, clutched to a mother's breast.
Then the square went quiet for a moment. The demons gathered in a ragged circle and stared.
High Demon (hisses): "He should be dead. What is he?"
Demon Lieutenant (snarls): "I don't know, but this is bad. He ruins everything."
Ryan stood with ash on his coat and his chest heaving. He felt the dissociation like a shield and a wound at once—he could be clear and cold while his hands trembled. He was ordinary flesh and bone, he had no skill menu, no powers list, only the Domain he could not open and an Authority that offered pressure and silence. Yet everything that touched him fell apart.
He forced his voice, oddly flat and a little amused.
Ryan (to the demons, small smile): "You all came a long way for the wrong patch."
(Ryan thinking): (I will say my true name. I want to see if the world remembers me differently. Test the spotlight. Test the rules.)
He stepped off the bench and let the name fall from his mouth like a small, dangerous stone.
Ryan (muttering): "My name is Ryan."
It was half a test, half a promise. He had used Elric when people first met him—an alias that kept the past from sticking. Now he wanted to try the other rule: Safe from Spotlight. If he used his real name, maybe something would change in how people saw him. Maybe they would forget easier. The Authority sat behind his thoughts like a locked gate. It said nothing. No menu came up. The Domain did not open. He felt the cold weight of rules and silence, and then he moved.
A line of demons tried to block him as he ran. Their red eyes flared and their teeth clicked like gears. When the closest one reached out, its hand touched Ryan's sleeve. Flesh smoked and shattered. The limb fell apart as if some hidden charge detonated inside bone. Blood flung like rain; ash and dark meat spattered a nearby stall. A baker cursed and grabbed his apron to hide from the spray. The crowd screamed and ran.
Demons fell like rotten trees. Every contact made them blow apart in jagged, horrible bursts—heads cracked, spines snapped, blood and steam and black bits flying. For the people watching it looked like a nightmare show. For Ryan it was a tool and a horror. He had this rule on him—Safe from the Red Moon—and it acted like a living gun at close range. Touch meant annihilation.
High Demon (growls): "Who the fuck is that man?"
Demon Lieutenant (snarls): "I don't know, you ask me two time."
They shouted in cruel voices, but the words meant little to Ryan. He kept running. He wanted to test another rule. He wanted to feel what the Authority would do when he used his true name, when he stood under the imagined eyes of the city. He also wanted to see if the fiction in his head—him as protagonist—would hold him steady.
He was only a human. He had no magic well, no mana pool, no spell book. The world here had things he did not own. He remembered how he had tried in the first panic—urging a fireball, whispering words he had seen in a child's story. Nothing happened. The words burned his mouth but no flame leapt out. He had Safe from Fire on his list, but that meant protection, not power. He could not cast. He was not a mage. He was a man with a strange set of rules stuck to his skin.
(Ryan thinking): (I can't make magic. I can't call the form. I can only move and touch and try to be the one the story asks for.)
The Demon Lieutenant moved closer, fast and mean. Around them the square filled with smoke, ash, and the slick shine of spilled gore. A no-name little girl—hair in a braid, eyes wide—was shoved forward and held like proof. The Lieutenant grabbed her by the shoulder and lifted her up so the city could see. Her feet dangled; her face was white.
Demon Lieutenant (taunting): "This one's mine. Anyone who wants to play hero, come take her."
He flexed the arm that had become a living blade. It shone like wet bone. The demons around him snickered, hungry.
Ryan did not slow. He should have felt fear—real, loud fear. But the world inside him had changed. The trauma had carved a hollow space where panic usually lives. An acute stress hit him first, then the hollowing: his mind folded around the pain and made a cold shape out of it. He felt like someone who had learned to watch a broken machine and not flinch when it ground. He moved as if in a dream and everything felt two steps away.
He ran full into the Lieutenant. The demon's blade screamed through his middle like a press. The sound was a terrible, final note. Pain exploded; then, blankness. For a long white beat he hung between seconds. The people stopped breathing.
Then something in his chest crawled and sewed. Flesh reknit with a terrible, animal greed. The healing was rough and ugly—muscle folding, black threads pulling like stitches, skin closing like a wound being patched by cold hands. He did not heal like a saint. He healed like a thing that rebuilt itself from the inside out. When the work finished, he stood whole and wet with steam.
The Lieutenant had the little girl dangling. He screamed, a thin, insane cry, when Ryan's hand closed on his arm. For a moment the demon still looked like the victor, proud and cruel. Then the contact turned him inside-out. His mouth opened and then burst. He became a fountain of blood and hot meat. Limbs tore off in a rush of steam. The head split like rotten wood. The little girl fell free and tumbled into the street; a big sister scrambled to scoop her up, and the little brother—small and white-faced—hid behind their mother, hands over his mouth.
Ryan stepped back with ash on his coat. He let out a laugh that rattled like a loose tin. It was not joy. It was raw, dark humor scraped by shock.
Ryan (breathes, small smile): "I haven't leveled up at all... Maybe because the experience was just 'pain.'"
The joke was thin, bitter, and the market did not know what to do with it. Some people flinched because they thought humor was wrong. Others, who had blood on their hands and fear in their eyes, let out a small, broken laugh because the sound made them human again. It was a sound like a match struck in the dark.
Those demons who could walk and fly drew back. Their leader was a smear of red and ash on the cobbles. The plan had failed with a single touch. Fear spread through them like ice. The ones who could fly took to the air, wings beating wetly. The ones who could run did so with slavering speed. Those who could not move crawled away, dragging broken limbs.
Only the mindless undead kept coming—stiff, slow, their mouths empty. They did not plan. They walked forward because that is what they do. Touching Ryan still killed them in the same savage way, but they kept moving. They were persistent and stupid and, in their numbers, dangerous.
Ryan's mind was not steady for reasons he liked. The trauma had shaped him into two halves: one part clean and clinical, the other raw and animal. When he moved, the clean part did calculations in the back of his head—how many could he touch before exhaustion, whether the protection had a limit, what the Authority might cost him later. The animal part did the work, the grab, the push, the touch that ended things.
(Ryan thinking): (I am tired. Safe from fatigue keeps my body moving, even when my head wants to fall apart. I still feel every cut and bruise—my mind just borrows calm to keep working.)
He did not feel like a hero in a movie. He felt like a person who had been pressed until his edges were sharp enough to cut others. The children he saved stared up at him with trust that made his throat tight. He wanted to tell them something clean—that they were safe, that the temple would help—but the temple was a bait and the priest's voice still called people in.
Some people ran toward the steps, moving past steam and ash. A mother with a little sister in her arms ran, clutching her child like a treasure. A big brother carried a fallen man on his back and kept going. A big sister wrapped a frightened little girl in a shawl and ran. Ryan watched them go. He had used his body to clear a lane. He had used the Authority only in small, instinctive ways—not the formal Choice Mandate—because the form would not appear.
Demons still tried to surround him, but each touch made them fall apart. The undead kept shuffling and dying where they broke contact. The square smelled of iron and wet earth and something like burnt hair. People began to pull from their fear a first, fragile look of hope.
(Ryan thinking): (If the Authority stays quiet, I will keep doing this. I will be the moving thing. I will touch them and stop them. I will test the boundaries until the world answers.)
He stepped over a fallen stall and ran toward the next cluster of undead. Their hands clawed at his coat. He smiled with something like pity and pressed forward. The touch made them shatter again, and again, and the square began to fill with the sound of breaking things.
One by one the living people found the temple steps. Mothers with their little brothers and little sisters climbed two at a time. A big brother helped carry an old man up the stones. A big sister pulled a boy who had tripped back to his feet and shoved him toward the doors. Voices rose in sobs and prayer. The Temple doors slammed behind the last frightened group like a lid on a pot.
Ryan stood alone in the square as the final wave of people moved inside. He could see them through the doorway — small faces pressed to shoulders, hands clenched around shawls, eyes wide and raw. The priests on the steps bowed and chanted; the crowd inside fell into a hush that felt both safe and wrong.
He felt the Safe from Fatigue humming under his skin—an odd, steady buzz that kept his legs from folding. His body did not want to quit. His mind wanted rest and sleep, but the automatic protection kept him standing, moving, touching, fixing what he could.
People were inside the temple now. The bait had done its work.
Ryan (breathes, small smile): "Now I need to go that fucking temple again."
He said it quietly, not because he wanted to enter but because some part of him needed answers—wanted to see what the priests would do with those names and those scared faces. The Authority still offered no menu. The Domain did not open. All he had was the silent weight behind his thoughts and the terrible, human need to know if the Church would protect them—or use them.
He pushed off the cobbles and walked toward the steps once more. The square smelled of steam and ash and the iron tang of fear. His hands were steady. His laugh, when it came later, would taste like rust.