Chapter 2: The Hundredth Goodbye
The lizard-man's laughter was a wet, grating sound that echoed off the damp cavern walls, sounding like rusted chains dragging over a tombstone. It straightened its spine, bones popping with the rhythmic violence of rapid gunfire. The creature loomed, its shadow stretching across the uneven floor until it swallowed Crimson's small, frail frame entirely.
" I am Drakon! The lizard King" and a mere huakn enter my domain, do you seek death.
"For a human, you have a spectacular death wish. I haven't smelled your kind in years I thought the Clan had finally scrubbed the last of your filth from the soil," the Drakon hissed, a string of black saliva trailing from its maw. "You smell of dust and stagnant water. Hardly worth the effort of a hunt, yet here you are, walking into my larder."
Crimson, as he was known in the lifetimes that actually mattered, back when the sky was blue and the word 'hope' wasn't a cruel joke offered a thin, ghostly smile. He looked at his trembling, pale fingers, the skin so translucent he could see the slow, sluggish pulse of his veins, and then back at the monster.
"Sorry to disappoint you. I know I'm not exactly a five-course meal," Crimson replied, his voice eerily steady. "And for what it's worth? It's my first time seeing a talking lizard. You're uglier than the ones in the picture books. They usually have more... I don't know, majesty? You just look like a swamp that learned how to stand upright."
The creature's eyes flared with a predatory amber light, the pupils dilating until the gold was nearly gone. "Cockroaches," it hissed, crouching low, its claws digging furrows into the stone floor with a screech of mineral on mineral. "You are nothing but insects that refuse to stay crushed. I think I'll start with your legs. I want to hear if a 'last human' screams any differently than the rest. I want to see if your blood still runs red, or if you've turned to grey ash inside like the world you lost."
"Let's see what you've got then," Crimson whispered. He didn't take a combat stance. He didn't draw a hidden blade or reach for a magical focus. He just stood there, looking profoundly bored, a sheep waiting for the wolf with the patience of a cliff face.
Drakon roared a sound that shook the dust from the ceiling and sent a shower of grit into the stagnant air and launched itself. It was a blur of scales, muscle, and ancient hunger, a ton of lethal force aimed directly at Crimson's throat. But as the creature entered the air, the world seemed to stutter, like a film reel skipping a frame.
Crimson didn't move his feet. He simply exhaled a breath he had been holding for centuries and raised a single, skeletal hand.
In that heartbeat, the air in the cave didn't just grow heavy; it turned into a physical weight, thick enough to crush lungs and liquefy bone. The lizard-man's momentum didn't just stop; it inverted. An invisible force, sharp as a monomolecular wire and heavy as a falling mountain, slammed into the creature mid-air.
CRACK.
There was no struggle, no heroic back-and-forth. There was only the sickening sound of meat meeting a metaphysical wall. Drakon's head was whipped backward with such violent velocity that the spine snapped like a dry twig in a storm. The skull detached entirely, spinning through the air in a spray of dark ichor before slamming into the far wall with a wet THUD that echoed through the tunnel.
The headless torso crumpled at Crimson's feet, its legs still kicking rhythmically in a pool of rapidly spreading black blood. The bone-knife it had been sharpening clattered uselessly against the stone, its edge finally dull.
"Weak," Crimson muttered, his voice echoing in the sudden, terrified silence of the cave. "Pathetically weak. I was hoping for a spark. A reason to stay another hour. But you're just another mindless mouth."
In the deep shadows behind the stalactites, dozens of yellow eyes blinked and then vanished. The lesser Kaiju the scavengers, the scouts, and the parasites who had been waiting for the Drakon to finish his meal so they could pick the bones began to scuttle backward. Their claws clicked frantically against the stone as they retreated into the dark, tripping over one another in their haste to escape. They had realized too late that the "frail" human wasn't prey; he was a walking natural disaster wrapped in a dying man's skin.
They lived by one rule: kill or be killed. And Crimson had just erased their apex predator without breaking a sweat or even shifting his weight.
"I need to grow stronger," Crimson sighed, stepping over the twitching carcass. The blood began to soak into his boots, but he didn't care. "This isn't enough. It's never enough. The numbers don't add up."
He walked out of the cave and back into the suffocating, familiar embrace of the Dark Fog. As the grey mist swirled around him, his mind drifted back to the beginning to the tragedy that had become his only companion, his only recurring dream.
The Illumination had first appeared decades ago, not as a monster, but as a miracle. A blinding, celestial light that promised a new era for a planet dying from resource wars and environmental decay. Humanity had looked up, shielded their eyes, and cheered. They thought they were being saved. Then, the fatigue set in. Then, the madness. Millions wandered the streets like hollowed-out shells until their bodies simply gave out, dying unnatural deaths that defied every law of medicine.
Then came the Kaiju.
They weren't just animals; they were malice given form, biological weapons from a dimension that hated the light. National militaries, with their prideful tanks and screaming jets, were nothing more than toys to them fragile things to be crushed and forgotten. The world plummeted into a dark age in a matter of weeks. Only the Awakened the rare humans who had survived the Illumination and gained god-like abilities stood a chance. For a moment, they had won. They had built soaring walls and created a new order.
But then came the Kaiju Clan.
They were the royalty of the monsters, beings of such overwhelming power that even the strongest Awakened were turned to ash by their mere presence. One by one, the cities fell. One by one, the heroes were eaten or broken. Until there was only one man left standing in a world of fog and ghosts, clutching the fragments of a broken timeline.
Crimson stopped walking. He had reached the center of the ruins, a place where the fog was so thick it felt like walking through grey wool. He felt the weight of his soul heavy, scarred, and exhausted from ninety-nine lifetimes of watching everyone he ever loved turn into dust. He had been a king, a beggar, a soldier, and a coward. He had died in fire, in ice, and in the quiet dark.
"Looks like my turn is up," he whispered to the empty world. He wasn't sad. He was just ready for the reset. He was a gambler who had lost ninety-nine hands and was moving his last chip to the center of the table.
[Commencing the 100th regression.]
The words appeared in his mind, written in burning, holographic gold that hurt to look at. A familiar, searing heat began to radiate from his chest, right where his heart shouldn't have been able to beat anymore. The fog didn't just part; it disintegrated. A pillar of white light erupted from his body, a spear of pure energy piercing the dark sky, reaching for a sun that hadn't been seen in a century.
"This time," Crimson said, his voice overlapping with the voices of ninety-nine previous versions of himself. "This time, I'm not just going to survive. I'm going to burn the whole board down."
With a final, tired thought, Crimson closed his eyes and let the light take him. The sensation was always the same a violent pulling at his atoms, a sense of being stretched across time until his memories became a blur of faces and names he would soon have to meet for the "first" time again. Everything he knew, everything he had suffered, dissolved into the blinding, agonizing glare of a new beginning.
The ruins of the city vanished. The smell of soot and death was replaced by something sharp and clean the smell of ozone and rain.
Everything went white.
And then, the sound of a school bell rang out, sharp and jarring, cutting through the silence of the void. He look up and look down his eyes filled with tears, getting up from where he stood he walked towards a building as he took a quiet Step inside the room of the building looking at the mirror he has regressed for the 100th time and he was going to make sure he succeed this time around.