Chapter 93: The List (13)
Lucien’s breath caught in his throat as the apparition hovered closer, its ruined form staggering yet steady, as if suspended between falling apart and holding on by sheer will.
His back met the cold railing with a clang.
He had run out of room.
The specter’s voice oozed from its slack, torn lips, ragged and broken, but not cruel.
Not angry.
“Why… did you bring me here?”
Lucien’s pulse thundered in his ears.
He forced his lips to move, even as his tongue felt heavy, his throat bone-dry.
“W-What do you mean?”
His voice cracked.
“Why… what?”
The corpse tilted its broken head.
The motion made its dangling eye sway, blood and fluid dripping in slow trails onto the wood below.
It looked at him, no, into him, its gaze unbearable in its frailty.
“Why… haven’t you done anything?”
The words weren’t screamed, nor spat.
They were whispered, almost wept.
A plea wrapped in accusation.
Lucien’s chest heaved, shame gnawing at his ribs, but something inside him flared; desperation, indignation, raw refusal to accept the judgment hanging over him.
“I have,” he rasped, voice thin, trembling.
“I’ve done everything… I could… Everything….”
The words spilled like a dam breaking, faster and louder, as if he could drown out that mournful whisper.
“You think I just wasted this second chance? That I sat around while the world went on? No,I fought. I clawed for every step forward.”
He sucked in a shaking breath, his voice fraying at the edges.
“I studied. I studied until my eyes burned and the words blurred. I forced sparks of magic from my hands when they refused to come, over and over, until I thought I would break. I made myself learn what children in this world knew from birth. I humiliated myself, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t.”
His throat tightened, tears stinging.
“And the sword, my body wasn’t built for it. Every swing tore me apart, every blow left me gasping, bruised, useless. But I picked it back up. Again and again, until my hands bled. Until I could stand against people stronger, faster, better. Even in that duel, I stood. I won.”
His voice rose, caught between defiance and pleading, between anger and despair.
“I’ve endured humiliation, scorn, fear. I’ve carried a secret that could kill me if anyone found out. I have lived every day with the thought that I am not supposed to exist, and still I keep going! So don’t say I’ve done nothing! Don’t… Don't look at me like that.”
Silence.
The specter only gazed at him. Its single eye rolled faintly in its ruined socket, its broken jaw twitching as though it wanted to speak but struggled.
For a long moment, it seemed almost pitiable, like a lost child.
Then it whispered:
“Then why… is Leonardo still alive?”
Lucien’s entire body went still.
The name hit like a knife to the chest.
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
His excuses, his explanations, collapsed under that single truth.
All he managed was a shallow, stuttering breath.
The specter’s voice grew softer, almost breaking.
“You laughed… you smiled… while he stood before you. So close…. So close.”
Its eye rolled down, its gaze slipping past Lucien as if unable to bear looking at him.
The words trembled with sorrow more than anger.
“Why didn’t you… do anything then?”
Lucien’s knees weakened.
He shook his head violently, desperation rising like bile.
“No- you don’t understand. It’s not that simple. I couldn’t-”
The specter’s head jerked, its neck bending further, bones snapping like brittle wood.
It loomed closer, until its ruined face hovered a breath away.
The dangling eye brushed Lucien’s cheek, cold and wet.
Its voice quivered, barely a whisper.
“You carried me here. You promised me… justice. You gave me hope…”
It looked so fragile then, trembling, broken.
Not hateful.
Just aching.
Just betrayed.
“…so why?”
Lucien’s voice cracked.
“I haven’t denied you anything! I just… I just need time. Can’t you see that? Everything I’ve done- it’s all for that! I just need time!”
His words tumbled out, pleading, frantic, as if he could hold onto the specter’s forgiveness through sheer insistence.
But the ghost did not soften.
Its lip quivered. Its voice, weak, fragile, but sharp as glass, slid into his ear.
“Justice delayed… is justice denied.”
The words broke something inside him.
They weren’t screamed, weren’t forced; they were whispered, mournful, final.
And yet they carried the weight of a verdict.
Lucien’s face twisted, fury sparking through the cracks of his despair.
“No… no, don’t you dare say that to me. Don’t you dare stand there like you know better. You think I don’t wake up every night choking on his name? You think I don’t see him, over and over, standing there, smiling like nothing ever happened?”
The specter only stared, its ruined form unmoving, unreadable.
Lucien’s voice broke into a ragged shout.
“I will do it! I’ll end him, I swear it! But if I strike now, if I rush in half-prepared, I’ll lose everything! You’ll lose everything! Don’t you get it? I’m the only one who can finish this, but I need more time!”
The specter said nothing. Its one eye quivered faintly in its socket, fixed on him with that same unbearable emptiness.
Lucien’s breath came in shuddering bursts. His hands clenched into fists, nails biting into flesh.
“Say something! Damn you, say something! Don’t just stand there like I haven’t bled for this!”
Still it remained silent.
The ghost swayed, broken jaw trembling, but no sound left its torn lips.
Lucien slammed his palm against the railing with a crack.
The rails groaned, as the cold metal biting into his skin.
“I’m not a coward! You hear me? I’m not-!”
He struck the railing again, harder this time.
The rails vibrating beneath each blow, his anger hammering into it with every word he couldn’t force into the specter’s silence.
“Stop looking at me like I failed you! Stop-!”
SNAP.
The railing gave way with a splintering snap.
His hand plunged through, his weight lurching forward before he could catch himself.
Lucien’s eyes widened, breath tearing from his throat as the balcony crumbled beneath him.
Lucien’s body lurched backward, balance gone, arms flailing at empty air.
For a split second, he saw the spectre leaning over him, its face twisted not in malice but in sorrow, lips trembling as though it wanted to cry but could not.
Then the void swallowed him whole.
Falling.
Again.
Just like before.
***
Lucien fell.
The black swallowed him whole, the rushing air replaced by a suffocating stillness, as if he were sinking rather than dropping.
His arms flailed, searching for something, anything, to cling to, but the void offered no mercy.
No walls, no ground, no light.
Only the sound of his heartbeat and the echo of that last whisper:
‘Justice delayed… is justice denied.’
And then.
He gasped.
His eyes snapped open.
His chest rose and fell with frantic, ragged breaths, his body shuddering as if he had been drowning and finally broken the surface.
But instead of darkness, he was staring at a ceiling.
A plain, white ceiling with long fluorescent lights humming faintly overhead.
The sterile scent of antiseptic filled his nostrils, sharp and clinical.
He was lying on a bed.
A real bed.
The stiff sheets clung to his sweat-soaked body, the scratchy hospital blanket tucked neatly around him.
A pillow propped him upright, supporting his aching back as though carefully arranged by someone.
For a long moment, Lucien couldn’t move.
His trembling hands clenched at the sheets as his wide eyes darted around.
He was in a hospital.
On each side of him, pale curtains hung from the ceiling rails, partitioning his bed off from the unseen patients beyond.
He could hear faint shuffles, the squeak of rubber soles on linoleum, the muted rhythm of heart monitors and IV drips.
His throat tightened.
Relief.
Warm, fragile and overwhelming, washed through him.
‘I must have… I must have fainted. After the duel…’
“Yes. That had to be it.”
‘I must have collapsed, too strained from the fight, too drained from everything.’
Lucien’s head tipped back against the pillow, a shaky laugh slipping past his lips.
“Gods… thank you,” he whispered to himself.
“It was just… just a dream.”
Footsteps approached.
Slow, measured.
Someone drew the curtain back with a metallic rattle of rings against the rail.
A doctor entered.
He wore a white coat over pale blue scrubs, a stethoscope draped casually around his neck.
His hair was neatly combed, his glasses slipping a little down the bridge of his nose as he glanced at a clipboard.
The way he carried himself was all too familiar.
Lucien blinked, stunned.
‘He looks…’
His breath caught.
‘He looks like he’s from Earth.’
The cut of the coat, the sterile mask tucked beneath his chin, the small ID card clipped at his chest, every detail screamed Earth.
Not some medieval-fantasy imitation of medicine, not the crystal-healing nonsense he half-expected from this world.
This was modern.
The doctor pulled up a stool and sat beside Lucien’s bed.
He flipped a page on the clipboard, muttering something too soft to catch.
Lucien’s lips parted, the urge to speak bubbling to the surface.
‘Should I ask?’
‘Should I call out?’
“Excuse me-”
The word stuck in his throat.
As the doctor twitched.
No, not twitched.
He… glitched.
For a split second, the doctor’s outline jittered, his body misaligning like a broken recording.
His hand jerked from the clipboard, froze, then snapped back into place.
The room’s ambient sounds, the footsteps outside, the distant beeping monitors, stuttered, cutting in and out like a radio losing signal.
Lucien’s breath quickened.
The doctor shifted again, this time more violently.
His torso split into afterimages, fragments of himself overlapping, stuttering with digital static.
His head flickered between two angles, his face distorting, breaking into pixels and reassembling.
And then the noise stopped.
All of it.
No shuffling.
No machines.
Not even the hum of the lights.
A silence heavier than death dropped into the room.
Lucien froze, every muscle rigid, as the partitions surrounding his bed began to peel away.
Not fall.
Not drawn back.
Peeled.
The curtains shuddered, then dissolved into static, their fibers unraveling into gray lines that blinked out of existence.
The floor beneath him shimmered, then collapsed into black.
The walls glitched, stretched, and evaporated like fragile paper burned by invisible fire.
One by one, every trace of the hospital winked out.
Until only the bed remained.
Lucien sat upright on the thin mattress, his fists clutching the sheets, surrounded once again by the endless void.
Darkness stretched in every direction, infinite and absolute.
His breath echoed, shallow and quick, far too loud in the suffocating silence.
“No,” he whispered, voice trembling.
“Not again. No- no, no, no-”
His words bounced into the dark, swallowed instantly.
Then.
A voice.
It came not from above or below, not from left or right, but from everywhere at once.
Deep, resonant, yet familiar enough to chill his blood.
“…There you are.”
Lucien’s breath hitched.
The voice carried weight.
Relief.
Weariness.
Almost a strange tenderness.
“…It took me so long to find you.”
Lucien’s grip tightened on the sheets until his knuckles turned white.
His heart hammered against his ribs as his wide eyes searched the void.
The voice was familiar.
Painfully familiar.
He knew it.
He had heard it before.
But from where?
His chest ached with confusion, dread, hope, and fear all bleeding into one another.
“…Who…?”
His voice cracked.
“Who are you?”
No answer came.
Only silence.
Only the dark.
The void held him, bed adrift in an infinite sea, with nothing but that haunting, familiar voice echoing in his ears.
