Nhilly's heart climbed up into his throat as the cloaked figure finally moved.
The motion was slow, almost lazy—no theatrics, no fanfare. It simply extended one gloved hand into the dark between them.
Something came with it.
At first, it was just a deeper vein of shadow, a line of black cutting across the already-black world. Then the details surfaced, like a shape rising from deep water.
A sword.
It was shaped like a katana in the way a star is shaped like a pinprick of light—technically true, and also not nearly enough.
The blade was darker than the void around it. Not just black, but a kind of absence that drank the light from the nearby motes and refused to give any back. Along that impossible edge, thin lines of gold script ran from base to tip, curling and intersecting with ridiculously fine precision.
It didn't look engraved so much as grown there—constellations written along steel instead of sky.
The hilt was its own kind of arrogance. Lacquered ebony, the surface slick and mirror-smooth, wrapped in a careful pattern that formed crisp diamond apertures. Inside each, the samegawa glowed a deep, ember-red, like someone had skinned a dying star and used it for grip.
The whole thing screamed: this is not for you.
The figure closed the distance between them without crossing any space at all. One breath, Nhilly was just looking. The next, the hilt hovered in front of his hand, perfectly angled for him to take it.
He did.
His fingers curled around lacquer and scaled red.
Cold ran up his arm—clean, violent, not like the dead chill of the void but like touching metal left out in winter. At the same time, something heavy and old settled into his grip, as if the weight of the sword wasn't measured in kilograms but in stories.
A phrase rose in his mind before the system ever spoke.
Draco's Shroud.
He didn't know how he knew the name; it just arrived, fully formed, like a memory he was certain he'd never had.
Nihilus Major has received the sword Draco's Shroud.
Class: Relic.
The words burned themselves into place behind his eyes. The sword seemed to tighten in his hand at the same time, as if pleased about being recognised.
Relic.
His brain immediately supplied the comparison.
Most Dissapants got Common swords: decent, functional, as replaceable in the statistics as the people who held them. Some were lucky enough to draw Tempered—stronger metal, stranger quirks, names that occasionally made it into blogs and late-night trivia shows.
Relics were something else.
Relic-class swords had started life as ordinary weapons. Blades carried by men and women who fought so hard, lived so loud, or died so spectacularly that the audience upstairs had reached down and yanked them into the sky. Those people became Constellations. Their swords remained below, soaked in everything they had been.
There were only three known Returnees on Earth who'd come back with Relics.
They had endorsement deals. Documentaries. Religions.
Holy Swords were rarer still—twelve, world-wide, artefacts handed out like structural supports for the plot. But everyone knew the rule: rarer didn't always mean stronger. A Relic could stand beside a Holy Sword in the right hands. It simply came with different baggage.
Nhilly looked down at Draco's Shroud.
The blade's golden script glowed faintly, like a constellation squinting at him.
"Of course," he muttered. "Give the pathetic office worker the sword of someone who refused to stay dead."
Information unfolded in his head, not as a neat panel but as a series of impressions.
Draco's Shroud had a power. All Relics did.
Oblivion Veil.
He saw it, for a moment, the way the Constellations saw it: a command spoken like a secret. A blade that bled darkness instead of light. Mist pouring out in a dense, ink-black flood, swallowing a room whole. Vision gone. Sound swallowed. The world reduced to weight and breath and the shape of your own fear.
Inside the Veil, the wielder disappeared.
Scent, sound, sight—all of it muffled or stripped away. To others, you became a ghost. Their blows fell wild. Their formation broke. They died confused.
But Relics were never generous without small print.
Oblivion Veil didn't just suffocate the outside world. In that perfect black, even the wielder's own lungs felt like they belonged to someone else. No air stolen, no literal choke… yet every breath fought for room against the pressure in their own head. Panic came easy. Overuse meant gasping, dizziness, the edges of consciousness creeping in with the dark.
A beautiful trick, wrapped around a simple truth: the sword would hide you, and in hiding you, it would ask how much you really wanted to live through the scene you'd just written.
Nhilly's grip tightened.
Relic-class sword. Nebula-class Star. For the first time since he'd dialled 444 on that broken phone, the numbers weren't stacked entirely against him.
And he still felt like someone had made a clerical error.
He couldn't help it—a small, disbelieving huff of laughter escaped him. "You're overestimating me," he told the blade.
The cloak-figure didn't react.
His gaze dragged upward.
It wasn't curiosity so much as gravity. The hood had been an absence since he first arrived—a black within black, the kind of dark your mind refused to draw lines in. Now, with Draco's Shroud in his hand and Poor Man's Gravity coiled inside his bones, it felt closer.
He let himself look at it.
Properly, this time.
The emptiness inside the hood wasn't passive. It wasn't simply there; it did something. The darkness moved in slow, patient currents—as if he were staring at the surface of an ocean at midnight and realising the ocean was staring back.
Light from the drifting motes bent as it approached, arcing away, fading. Sound felt quieter near it. Even his thoughts seemed to slow, words dragging as if they had to wade through something thick and unseen.
It was not just a void. It was that, and more.
Under the fear, there was… recognition.
The pull he felt wasn't some mystical compulsion, no siren song from an eldritch god. It was something nastier and far more familiar: the sensation of looking into a mirror you'd tried very hard to live without.
That's me, he thought, throat working. Or something wearing what I'd be if you scraped out the last of the jokes.
The emptiness under the hood felt like his own hollowness, distilled and perfected. Every day he'd dragged himself to his cheap office job. Every night he'd stared at the ceiling and rehearsed disappearing. Every time he'd told himself none of it mattered because soon nothing would.
All of that, compressed into a single, staring absence.
Nhilly took a shaky breath.
"I… can't look away," he whispered.
His words didn't echo. The abyss swallowed them without ceremony.
The dark pulsed.
Not visually—not in any way his eyes could track—but in the rhythm of his heart. For one beat, they matched perfectly. On the next, they staggered. Then matched again. Like it was syncing to him. Or he was syncing to it.
It's me, he thought. It's always been me.
But under that realisation, something else curled, unsettling.
It feels like more than me.
As if the void under that hood wasn't just his own emptiness, but a road leading past it. Toward something larger, crueller, patient enough to wait for him to step off the edge willingly.
A question surfaced, uninvited.
What's beyond it?
What happens if I keep staring long enough?
His grip on Draco's Shroud tightened until his knuckles ached. The blade didn't cut him. It just sat there, humming faintly, as if entertained by whatever decision he might make.