From Moving Crates to Killing Gods-Chapter 28: The Cost of Panic

I came back to consciousness in fragments. First pain, sharp and insistent along my left side. Then sound, Kira’s voice calling my name with rising panic. Finally sight, the sickly green sky swimming into focus above me. My body felt wrong, as if the crash had scrambled the map of nerves and muscles I’d lived in for twenty one years.

I tried to move and immediately regretted it, a white hot spike of agony shooting from my shoulder to my fingertips. The glider. The fall. We’d survived, but into what nightmare had we landed?

"Allaran! Please wake up!" Kira’s voice cracked with fear, her face hovering above mine, streaked with dirt and blood. A cut above her eyebrow leaked a thin line of red down her temple. "We need to move. Now."

I blinked, trying to force my thoughts into order. My fingers twitched, the yo-yo still somehow in my pocket. The familiar shape grounded me, a small anchor to reality in a world gone suddenly sideways.

"I’m here." I managed, the words scraping my throat like sandpaper. "Give me a second."

I struggled to sit up, each movement triggering new explosions of pain across my body. Our glider lay shattered around us, wooden struts splintered beyond recognition, the fabric torn to useless ribbons. The harness that had kept us tied to the frame now hung from my shoulders.

"The others?" I asked, scanning our surroundings as my vision cleared.

"Scattered." Kira said, her voice tight with controlled panic. She pointed across the wasteland. "Look."

I followed her gesture and felt my stomach drop. The crash had flung our fifteen bodies across a vast expanse of broken ground. Our glider, mine and Kira’s, had landed farthest from the Citadel, a cruel twist of fate that left us with the longest distance to cover. I could see Argent’s barrier shimmering in the distance, green and close, yet impossibly far given what lay between.

And what lay between was hell made manifest.

From the edges of the field, Corruptors were emerging. Not one or two, but a loose, gathering horde. They flowed like spilled oil toward the wreckage. Our crash had sounded a dinner bell across the entire sector.

Gliders littered the wasteland, some relatively intact, others not so much. Figures moved among the wreckage, survivors struggling to their feet, some crawling. But it was the unmoving forms that drew my eye, still and silent amid the chaos.

Gale lay closest to the barrier, his body splayed at an unnatural angle beside his shattered glider. He wasn’t moving. Whether unconscious or dead, I couldn’t tell from this distance, but the stillness of his form carried a terrible finality. His last act, the wind cushion that had possibly saved some of us, had cost him dearly.

"We’re the farthest out." I said, the obvious statement somehow making our predicament more real. "Bad luck."

"Or maybe not." Kira muttered, helping me to my feet. When I shot her a questioning look, she elaborated. "Did you notice how the Zeros gliders landed further from the barrier too?."

I hadn’t, but now that she mentioned it, the pattern was clear. Darien and Finn, Mira and Yami, all had landed in a rough cluster, they were further from Argent than the rest. Coincidence? After everything we’d seen, I doubted it.

A movement caught my eye, a figure breaking away from the crash site, running with unnatural speed toward the barrier. Cobb. His ability was fully activated, his legs blurring beneath him as he abandoned his partner Ember without a backward glance. Pure panic had overridden any sense of loyalty or strategy. He’d decided to save himself, consequences be damned.

"No..." I breathed, having a bad premonition rise inside me. "Stop, you idiot!"

But he couldn’t hear me, and wouldn’t have listened if he could. He was far away from us and closer to the barrier, moving faster than I’d ever seen anyone move. For one heartbeat, I thought he might make it.

Then the ground erupted.

There was no other word for it. A massive fissure split the earth directly in Cobb’s path, and from it rose a Corruptor unlike any we’d encountered. Where the others had been distortions, this was an absence, not just a warping of light and matter, but a vertical tear in reality itself.

It towered over the landscape, easily fifteen feet tall, its proportions disturbingly normal, broad shoulders, long limbs, and a large head set firmly upon its frame. But at the center of that head sat only a single eye, round and depthless, staring without mercy. Its form shifted between something almost humanoid and something more horrific.

Cobb didn’t even have time to alter his course. His momentum carried him straight into the creature’s waiting grasp. One moment he was a blur of desperate motion, the next, he was suspended in the air, caught in what might generously be called the Corruptor’s hand.

The scream that followed would haunt me for whatever remained of my life. It wasn’t just the sound of pain, it was the sound of a human being unmade. The Corruptor didn’t consume Cobb so much as it absorbed him, drawing him into the void of its form until nothing remained but a lingering echo.

The entire encounter lasted perhaps five seconds. When it was done, the massive Corruptor remained motionless, as if savoring its meal, before turning slowly to survey the scattered survivors.

I noticed then that the other, smaller Corruptors emerging from the fissures and shadows kept their distance from this one. They flowed around its position in a broad arc, as if reluctant to approach its claimed territory or compete for its prey. This monster had its own hunting ground, and the lesser ones knew better than to trespass.

"We need to move." I said, pulling Kira behind the remnants of our glider. "Now."

But as I watched the other survivors react to Cobb’s demise, something struck me as wrong. The orphans like us were panicking, scrambling blindly away from the Corruptor, stumbling over debris in their haste to escape and reach the barrier. But the Zeros, Darien and Mira, moved with a deliberate slowness that made no sense given the immediate danger.

They weren’t running. They were walking, calmly and methodically, toward the barrier. Their expressions weren’t twisted with terror but set with grim determination. They moved like people executing a long planned strategy.

And suddenly, with the clarity that sometimes comes in moments of extreme danger, I understood.

"They’re using us." I said, the words tasting like ash in my mouth. "They’re using us as bait."

Kira’s eyes widened. "What?"

"Look at them." I hissed, pulling her down as I pointed toward Darien’s receding back. "They’re not running. They’re not even trying to help the others. They’re just... circling around the Corruptor while it’s distracted."