From Moving Crates to Killing Gods-Chapter 32: Heavy Eye

"Finn." I grabbed his arm. He didn’t react, just kept staring at the wet stain spreading at his knees. His fingers were submerged in it, black water soaking into his skin, his clothes, and out of his palms. "Finn, we have to move." Nothing. Not even a blink.

I stood him up. His body came loose jointed, uncooperative, a puppet with cut strings. His feet dragged through the dust as I pulled him toward the barrier, my shoulder screaming, my legs burning. The wet footprints he left behind were dark and glistening.

"Walk!" I hissed. "Just put one foot in front of the other. You can do that. You can do this."

His feet found the ground eventually. Not running. Not walking with any real awareness. Just shuffling, automatic, the way sleepwalkers follow dreams they can’t remember. The black water clung to him, heavy and metallic.

That’s good, I told myself. It’s on him now. He’s hidden. He’s safe. The barrier shimmered as close as I’d ever seen it. Kira’s silhouette stood at its edge, small and still, waiting. Coco beside her, Rolen scanning the field behind us.

We were going to make it.

Behind us, the pressure changed.

I felt it before I heard it, that deep wrongness, that shift in the air that meant the Corruptor had finished digesting. I didn’t turn around. I didn’t need to. I knew what I would see, that single, depthless eye pivoting away from the space where Mira had been.

"Faster." I breathed. "Finn, faster!"

He didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed on the barrier, on the light, on the promise of safety that grew closer with every shuffling step. But his pace didn’t change. He was moving through syrup, through concrete, through the thick, drowning certainty that he was already dead.

The Corruptor was moving. I heard it in the way the dust shifted behind us, in the sudden absence of ambient sound, as if the wasteland itself held its breath.

It’s not coming for us, I thought desperately. He’s covered in black water. It can’t sense him.

But the eye was already fixed on Finn, and I understood now.

The Corruptor had an eye.

It didn’t know Mira was there until I switched her canteen. Until the dark water scent vanished and her fear bloomed raw and unprotected. That’s when it saw her. He can sense emotions, but this Corruptor also has an eye to look for prey.

The Corruptor turned toward us. It began to flow, a fracture in space focused on its newfound prey. I felt the pressure of its attention settle on us.

It was about to lunge.

The knowledge crystallized in the space between heartbeats. I had one canteen left.

One chance. The black water in my hand wouldn’t save us. Wouldn’t mask us. Wouldn’t do anything except maybe, distract the creature long enough for us to reach the barrier.

"Finn." My voice came out wrong, scraped thin by adrenaline and fear. "Keep moving. I’ll slow it down."

Finn didn’t respond. His eyes were fixed on the barrier, on the shimmering light that grew closer with every shuffling step. But something flickered across his face. Not hope, not gratitude. Just a brief, dim awareness that someone had spoken to him, and the words had registered somewhere beneath the weight of all that emptiness.

He kept walking.

Three steps. Two. His knees buckled and he went down hard, palms catching his fall in the dust. He didn’t try to get up. Didn’t cry out. Just knelt there, staring at his hands, at the black water dripping from his fingers, at the dust swallowing it.

He was a couple of steps away from the barrier. He could have crawled. He could have reached out. He did neither.

I didn’t watch. I was already aiming.

The canteen left my hand in a high, desperate arc. It spun, dark water trailing from its mouth like blood from a wound. I watched it fly, watched the Corruptor’s single eye track its progress, and I thought, ’Please work’.

It struck the creature’s chest and dissolved, drawn into that shifting void like ink into water. The black water spilled free, a sudden bloom of darkness against deeper darkness.

Nothing happened.

The Corruptor absorbed it. Digested it. Made it part of itself.

My simple plan, swallowed like everything else. It probably felt offended. Here I was, thinking water would be enough to stop a moving mountain.

The Corruptor lunged.

Fifteen feet of void and absence. A single, depthless eye, coming at me like a collapsing star.

My hand moved before my brain caught up.

I still had pebbles in my pocket. Two of them. Small, worthless, meant for switching Mira’s canteen. My fingers found one, pulled it free, held it up like a talisman against the apocalypse.

Switch.

The word was a prayer. A plea. A desperate scratch against an ability I didn’t fully understand.

Switch its eye. Switch it now. Blind him.

I reached out with everything I had left, every scrap of focus, every last ember of the ability I’d honed moving crates, swapping pebbles for sand, a boot for a paddle, and a canteen for a pebble.

I didn’t know if I had anything left to give.

But it was already upon me. Its eye was a perfect circle of nothing, and I was staring into that abyss.

My ability sparked.

The object in my hand grew warm. Then hot. Then impossibly heavy... what kind of eye weighed this much?

And the darkness lunged.

I felt it before I saw it, the pressure of its approach, the absence of warmth. The shadow of that massive form fell over me, blocking out the sickly green sky.

This is it, I thought. This is where I die.

Even if the switch worked. Even if I held its eye in my hand. It wouldn’t matter.

A blind monster was still a monster. And I was just someone whose greatest power was moving crates from a loader to a shelf.

The darkness reached for me. The Corruptor’s long limbs stretched toward me, almost touching my skin.

Then the air shifted.

Its hands stopped. Curled. They began moving slow, fingers flexing against empty air. Its massive torso turned, unsteady, disoriented. The body took a clumsy step. Then another.

It was looking for something.

It was missing his head.