Chapter 226: Dead End

Words : 1678 Updated : Sep 25th, 2025

*** {Inside The Projection} Malik blinked. And the world... unraveled backwards. His breath caught, and his chest rose once—but no air came. His lungs weren't his anymore. His body wasn't his anymore. Something else had taken the wheel. Time had flipped on its head. He wasn't walking—he was being dragged in reverse. Malik was unkilling them. One by one. Hands that crushed throats now loosened, unwrapped, and let go. A dagger that sank in now lifted cleaner. Blade sliding in to heal. Every scream, every tear, every snap played in reverse as blood flowed up. Heads stitched back to spines. Bones unsnapped, breath returned, and eyes opened. The fallen had coughed back life. And Malik, the one responsible for it all, showed a blank face. His broken smile was long gone; now, only that dead stare remained. Soon, he returned to Faqir. A man, whose eyes were still asking that damn question. And instead of breaking this time— Time snapped back further. WHOOSH. Safira stood before him. Her neck rewound, bone unsnapping, breath rushing back in. Her chest rose. She lived again. Then, she vanished too. Time kept moving. The cocoon—the grave of Nasir—rose up again. The dust un-crushed itself and spun into shape. Malik's hand left it. Stepped away. Nasir's voice returned. Echoed faintly. "NEVER!" But the boom never came. Because Malik was no longer there. Because he rewound further. He watched as he unshielded Safira. Saw the assassin unstep forward. Watched the whine of the core disappear into silence. Saw the grin fade from the assassin's face. Saw himself look up in slow, reverse horror. His hand uncurled from the dagger. It floated backward, relatively clean, stained only by one man's blood. And then he himself was gone too. The hall, the ruin, the blood— All of it peeled away. Gone. The celebration unraveled, banners rolled back up, laughter unsaid, dances undanced. Back. Back. Back. Days. Not hours. Weeks. Whole weeks came apart. Woven backward by invisible fingers. The Shams rose in reverse, only to set the wrong way. A caliph's head was reattached. A massive gate jumped back into place. A short speech was unsaid. A major victory was undone. Back. Back. Back. And finally... It stopped. Malik stood in a quiet village. The Shams was warm. The sky was calm. Soldiers laughed somewhere off in the distance. He looked back. Duban was alive. Safira was alive. Malik touched his face. His broken smile was gone. Not replaced by a real one. Just nothing. Blank. He turned without a word and started walking. Same path. Same steps. Back to the same war. The man wasn't confused. He wasn't lost. He wasn't screaming. He was... he was ready. The curse had no idea what it had just undone. ... The first time, he tried to fix it the normal way. He ran faster, he shouted louder, reaching the mosque many days earlier. He killed the assassins before they even neared the wedding hall. But it didn't matter. The celebration had turned into another tragedy. They Fell, broke, and the same blackened eyes stared back at him. The second time, he tried the second normal thing anyone would attempt. He cut them down before it started. Before their bodies twisted, before their minds were lost and blinked. It didn't change anything. The fourth time, he ran. He left the mosque and kept running. Maybe if he wasn't there, maybe if he abandoned them, it wouldn't happen. But when he returned a week later, he found the battlefield already drowned in madness. Drowned in ruins. Blood. Ash. And the echoes of voices that would never speak again. He hadn't saved them. He had only let them suffer without him. He died. And then he woke up. Again. Again. Again. The pattern stretched on, a noose tightening around his existence. Every iteration was a little different, but the result was always the same. It never worked. Every time, he found himself standing before the Corrupted remains of men he had fought alongside, men he had bled with. Men who had once called him brother. And every time, he had to kill them. But... as unfortunate as it was, he had expected this. He knew those blinks wouldn't fix it. Corruption would snap back. Knew that even with all his running, his slashes in the dark—this fate was sticky. Resilient. IT clung to the soul like tar. So he stopped hoping for luck. Instead, with his bases covered, Malik went on the hunt. His first real attempt. This time, he didn't wait for the assassins to make their move. He tracked them. Their hideout wasn't in the city—it was beneath it. Buried deep beneath the layers of stone, sand, and forgotten time. He followed bloodstains through tunnels choked with incense and rot. And when he found them? He didn't speak. He didn't threaten. He didn't hesitate. They died the way they had killed: quickly, cruelly, without ceremony. When their screams faded, Malik started rummaging through their little hideout—turning over chests, slicing open satchels, and yanking old scrolls from charred boxes. Eventually, he found it—them. The Holy Relics. They sat on a velvet cloth, untouched by dust, gleaming faintly under the low torchlight. Miniature curved sickles made entirely of pale blue metal. In the center of each blade was a gemstone—oval, jet black, but pulsing with thin veins of golden light. Around the handle, runes were engraved in looping script... twisted, reversed, inverted. These Holy Relics were no fancy trinkets. Malik remembered what these things had done. Back then, during his first meeting with that cursed wedding, the assassins had used these relics to momentarily stun his fellow Jinn. Just a few heartbeats—barely enough—but it created an opening. They used that sliver of stillness to go for the kill. Strike fast. Cut deep. Get out. Malik had survived that day only because he had felt and seen the attack coming. Perhaps because he was so familiar with death, he could easily perceive it. He had caught his would-be killer before the blade could even be unsheathed—his fingers snapping around the man's wrist like a viper. The assassin didn't even scream before Malik tore his throat apart. But the others? They had succeeded. Faqir fell. Duban fell. Safira was nearly torn to shreds. And Nasir... even then, that stubborn old beast refused to die. He had taken a deep slash to the shoulder, blood gushing, bones cracking—but he stayed standing, rage pouring from his eyes. A man who refused to fall. Malik gave a grim nod at the memory. But these relics? These cursed little toys? They didn't interest him. He picked one up, felt the buzzing hum of residual Aether still trapped inside... and threw it against the wall. It shattered with a flash of light and a shriek that echoed like a dying bird. Malik wasn't here for that. He was here for something worse. The wedding didn't fall apart because of assassins. It wasn't their blades or these little fucking things. There was only one thing that mattered. One thing that had turned their celebration into Hell on Fam Iblis. A bad thing, a cursed thing, some sort of seed of Corruption. A taint that poisoned everything, every smile, every song, every soul in that building. So he kept digging. And eventually, behind a false wall lined with bones—some still fresh—he found it. It wasn't large. Maybe the size of a clenched fist. But the power radiating from it was suffocating. The... thing was a sphere—obsidian black, but not smooth. The surface was jagged; runes spiraled across it in impossible directions, carved too deep to be mere decoration. They glowed with a sickly light—dark purple and black, pulsing. Each symbol was wrong. Not just cursed, but impossible. Looking at them too long made Malik's eyes blur, like his mind refused to interpret them. He reached out real slow, like he was about to touch a sleeping Roc. Letting Aether trickle down his fingers, a current of thought made real. And as it reached the surface of the thing—whatever the Hell this cursed little object was—he felt it. Click. Something in his brain just snapped into place. This thing—this weird, buzzing, ominous little object—it wasn't... whole. It wasn't complete. It could spread Corruption, yes. It was like a beacon. A flare. A match waiting to light a forest on fire. But it wasn't the fire itself. Corruption wasn't inside it. Not anymore. This thing had been used. A spent weapon. A hollow shell. ...How does something that hadn't been used yet, already show up as used... now? Time travel was one thing. He could handle that. He'd lived it. But this? This was bullshit. This wasn't a paradox. Paradoxes at least had the courtesy of being confusing in a consistent way. This thing hadn't reset; it remembered what it did. And it was still... spent. Burnt out. Why didn't it reset like everything else? Was it too powerful? Was it tied to some higher anchor outside of time's flow? Or was it just a bug in the system—a glitch God or the universe or whatever powers were out there hadn't accounted for? How many other pieces besides IT, God, and the Rukh were skipping the rewind? Malik didn't care to answer that. He didn't care for the technicalities. He didn't have time to map out the mechanics or draw neat little diagrams with lines pointing to when and where. He wasn't a scholar. He wasn't a theorist. But he knew one thing with bone-deep certainty: This was a dead end. He needed to walk another path. "..." Malik stood there for a long moment, the dim light flickering across his expressionless face. Then, without a word, he turned and walked away. Faqir was his destination.

Chapter 226: Dead End

Comments (0)