Chapter 6 - 5 — Six Years Earlier [I]
POV: Jace
"HAAAK!"
My own gasp woke me, and my body came up off the bed before my eyes opened, with my hand slamming flat over my stomach where the fist had gone through.
"Haaak... haaak... haaa..."
The air kept sawing in and out of me, too fast and too shallow, and I could not slow it down no matter how hard I tried.
My eyes went to the ceiling first, because it should have been split open and pouring smoke, but it was flat and white and whole.
Then I turned my head to find my father lying in front of the throne, since that was where he had fallen, and instead I found a window with grey morning light coming through it.
No fire, and no bells anywhere in the house, so the only sound left was the one my lungs were making.
I pulled my shirt up.
The skin underneath was smooth and rising with my breath, without any blood or burn or torn flesh anywhere on it.
I pressed my palm into it and pushed until it hurt, because pain would have meant the wound was still there, but all I got was the dull ache of pushing on my own gut.
My hands went up to the side of my face next, where Aurelian’s palm had cooked my cheek until the skin split. I could still hear that wet hiss whenever I thought about it.
My fingers found nothing but cool, dry skin.
I swung my legs out of bed and stood too fast, so my knees folded and dropped me onto the floor.
I caught the bed frame, hauled myself up, and stumbled across the room to the mirror.
Then I stopped moving.
The face in the glass was mine, except that it was younger, with narrower shoulders and a thinner frame holding them up.
The nick above my eyebrow was gone, and so was the pale line running up my left forearm.
I turned my hands over and found smooth palms without a single callus on them, none of the ridges that a weighted sword builds into you after ten thousand swings in the rain.
Six years of work had come off my body as though I had never done any of it.
My fingers tightened on the edge of the mirror until the wood bit into them, and I stared at an eighteen-year-old boy while my mind refused to hand me one answer that made sense.
Then something opened in the air beside my reflection.
[Ouroboros — EX]
[First Activation: The user will return to the beginning of his original Awakening Window.]
[Subsequent Activations: Upon death, the user will regress twelve hours.]
[Memories and acquired Abilities will be preserved.]
I read it twice, the second time with my lips moving.
Upon death.
Those two words dragged the whole night back up through me, so that I saw my sword sagging in Aurelian’s hand, and my father’s lightning thinning out, and the burning fist going into his chest.
And I heard the last thing that reached me before the dark closed over everything.
Now regressing.
A second panel slid up underneath the first one.
[Mimesis — SSS]
[When the user is killed by another being, three Abilities belonging to the killer will be presented as concealed Skill Cards.]
[The user may permanently copy one selected Ability.]
[The original owner will retain the Ability.]
My breath went out of rhythm again, and I had to put a hand on the wall to keep myself upright.
For six years I had believed the System looked at me once and decided I was worth nothing, and the entire clan had believed it right along with me.
Now there were two Abilities hanging in front of my face, and they were not small ones, because EX and SSS were ranks I had only ever heard spoken about the strongest people alive.
I swept my hand through both panels and knocked them out of the air, the way you wave off something that cannot possibly be there.
Then I stood in the quiet with my heart hammering, and I called them back, because I had to know.
They returned exactly as they had been, with the same words and the same ranks, and by the third time I read them my hands were shaking so badly that I pressed them flat against my thighs.
Another notice stacked itself over the top of them.
[Killer identified: Aurelian Nolan.]
[Mimesis has generated three Skill Cards.]
[Choose one.]
Three cards formed in the air with their faces turned away from me, and one was brown, one was silver, and the last one was gold.
They showed me nothing but their backs and their colors, without a name or a description or a rank anywhere on them.
And I had no idea what the colors meant, since in twenty-four years of living among Players I had never heard of an Ability that turned powers into cards.
The gold one felt different, though, because its light sat stronger and steadier than the other two.
Something in it pulled at a memory I did not want, which was the white-gold heat crawling up Aurelian’s arms while he took my father’s clan apart around him.
Choose one.
Not choose, then, but choose and lose the other two for good.
Brown looked like the least of the three, and silver looked like the middle of them, while gold looked like the thing that had killed my father.
All of that was guesswork, and I knew it was guesswork even while I was doing it, but if the colors meant anything then gold was the one I could not afford to lose.
My hand went out before I could think myself out of it.
The moment my fingers touched the gold, the other two winked out of the air.
[Selection confirmed.]
[Ability copied.]
The card turned its face up.
[Aten — SSS]
[The power of the solar disk has been acquired.]