Chapter 13 ECHOES OF THE DAMNED

I crouched on a rusted overhang just outside the shelter door, knife loose in my grip, eyes scanning the dark vines and broken concrete. Scar’s breathing had evened out inside, but I wasn’t taking chances. “Come on then,” I muttered to the night. “Any beasts, any scouts, any damn thing. I’m right here.”

The wastes stayed quiet for now. Too quiet. I flexed my fingers, feeling the new power humming under my skin like a caged animal. “Alright, System. Let’s see if I can make you behave.”

I focused on a thin spirit vine crawling up the wall nearby. Weak. Safe. “Extract. Slow. Just a thread. My rules.”

The system window flickered.

[Minor Vein Fragment Detected.]

Warm energy trickled into my palm, gentle, controlled. My tired shoulders loosened. “There. See? I’m still driving. Not you.”

I pulled another small one from the cracked ground under my boots. Then another. Each time I stopped early, yanking my hand back before the rush could build. “I decide how much. I decide when it stops.”

For a minute it worked. The power felt clean. Manageable. I even grinned in the dark. “Maybe I can do this. Stabilize the bad veins, help people, keep the blackouts away. Scar might actually believe I’m not…”

The first soul fragment hit like a hammer to the skull.

I gasped, grabbing the edge of the overhang. A clan warrior’s last moments flooded me. His name was Wei. Twenty-seven. He’d promised his little sister a new hairpin after this hunt. My, his, chest burned as my own hands drained the life from him. The terror. The betrayal. “Not like this… please…”

“Get out,” I growled, shaking my head hard. “That was you. Not me.”

Another one crashed in right after. The woman with the crossbow from earlier patrols. She’d been feeding her sick mother with the bounty money. I felt the exact second her veins tore free, the cold emptiness as her vision went dark. Her final thought wasn’t anger. It was worry about who would buy medicine now.

I dropped to one knee, breathing ragged. “Stop it. Those aren’t my memories. I didn’t know you people. I didn’t…”

More came. Faster. A young scout begging for his life. An older sergeant thinking about the debt he’d never pay off. Each death played out in my head like I was the one dying. Their fear clawed up my throat. Their regrets wrapped around my own until I couldn’t breathe right.

I slammed my fist against the concrete. “I said stop!”

The voices only grew louder. Overlapping. Screaming. Whispering. Seventeen different last breaths rattling inside my skull.

“Damn it.” I spotted a slightly stronger vein pulsing under a pile of rubble ten paces away. “Just enough to push them back. Small one. Come on.”

I lunged for it and slapped my palm down. “Extract!”

The energy rushed in harder than I wanted. Not a thread this time. A small river. The voices surged with it, louder, clearer, like pouring oil on a fire. I relived all seventeen deaths in flashing bursts, faces, names, final words, the exact feel of their spiritual roots being ripped out by my own hands.

I fell forward, forehead pressed against the cold ground, choking on screams that weren’t mine. “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean… please just shut up!”

My body started shaking. For a second my hands moved on their own, reaching for another vein like they were hungry. “More,” my mouth whispered in that calm, ancient tone. “They are fuel. Take what is offered.”

“No!” I slammed my head against the rubble once, twice. Pain cleared my vision for a heartbeat. “This is my body. My head. Get the hell out!”

The voices peaked, a chorus of dying men and women begging, cursing, weeping. I curled tighter, knees to chest, trying to hold myself together.

Behind me, the shelter door creaked open.

“Chen?” Scar’s rough voice cut through the noise. He stood in the doorway, one hand pressed to his bandaged side, face pale but eyes sharp. He watched me muttering on the ground, my lips still moving with words that weren’t fully mine.

I blinked hard, forcing the voices down. My own voice came back, raw and cracked. “Scar… you should be sleeping.”

He limped closer, slow and careful, eyes never leaving my face. “You were talking to them again. Different voices. Different tones. Sounded like half the strike team was living in your mouth.”

I pushed myself up, wiping dirt and blood from my face. My hands wouldn’t stop trembling. “It’s getting worse. Every time I pull, even the small ones, they come back stronger. I felt them die, Scar. All of them. Like I was the one bleeding out on that floor.”

Scar leaned against the wall, studying me. His voice dropped low, quiet in the night. “How many people are living in your head now?”

The system chimed softly, cold and clinical in my vision.

[Soul Fragments Assimilated: 17]

I stared at the number, chest tight. Seventeen ghosts. Seventeen sets of memories. Seventeen last moments that now belonged to me whether I wanted them or not.

“I don’t know anymore,” I whispered, looking down at my bloodstained hands. “Sometimes I hear them clearer than my own thoughts. Sometimes I don’t know which voice is the Emperor, which ones are theirs, and which one is still me.”

Scar didn’t say anything for a long moment. He just stood there, wounded, tired, watching the guy who’d saved his life and nearly killed him in the same night.

The Emperor’s voice brushed against my mind again, soft and reasonable. “They weaken you. Let me silence them. Permanently.”

I clenched my jaw and pushed it back. “Seventeen,” I repeated out loud, meeting Scar’s eyes. “And the number’s only going up.”

The night wind carried distant howls and the faint sound of patrol horns. More hunters still searching. More veins waiting to be pulled. More voices waiting to move in.

Scar’s hand rested near his axe, even now. “You keep pulling to help people… but every pull adds more ghosts. How long until there’s no room left for you?”

I had no answer. I just sat there on the cold ground, surrounded by the echoes of the damned, wondering how many more deaths I’d have to carry before the man who woke up wouldn’t be me anymore.