[You have left the territory of the System. You were warned.]

Brock’s eyes widened in horror, and they only served to widen even further when he frantically spun around and was met with only darkness, his previous entrance removed as though it had never even existed in the first place. Slowly, the excerpt hanging before him began to bleed away into disfigured chunks and particles before finally just fading from existence.

The System was gone, that much was clear.

Luckily, he felt no weaker than he had been when he was under the System’s ‘territory’, and he at least confirmed that his physical changes would be permanent no matter what, from what he gathered from his limited understanding. Brock shuddered as he noticed a familiar bone-deep chill invade his flesh and burrow deep into him.

…The Beyond…

This place, despite the fact his memories of it had been left fragmented and in tatters, was easily recognisable as the strange realm he had been banished to by the System initially, if only for a brief moment in time. Those very same figures in the black swam about idly, their colossal forms hungrily approaching him yet never appearing to get any closer.

The System... uses the Beyond somehow?

All around him, echoes flowed through the air as though they were schools of fish, whispering temptingly of the great power they held. It came as a surprise, but Brock found himself capable, albeit by the barest amount, of understanding their hidden potential. Unlike before, he too possessed an Augment, a hidden truth, although compared to that which he saw currently, it was a hollow imitation, akin to garbage on the strewn across a footpath.

With great effort, Brock managed to resist their enticements and he took a step forward, tapping down on the invisible surface beneath him. No longer was he the person he had once been before the System, and it gave him the strength through both Stats and experiences to ignore his pervasive surroundings and press onward, no matter how reluctant he felt about such an action.

Despite the warnings and words of the System, he was all but certain it wanted him to be here. Needed him to be here. It had tirelessly worked to lead him to this place, even from the moment he was first inducted into the System’s villainous fold. It was all a part of its cruel machinations for him to be trapped in this place, and while the machine had been nothing but a dick to him, he at least trusted that it knew what it was doing.

A calculating robot should know better than anyone that a corpse held no value.

So, he walked through the pitch-black aimlessly, his feet making no noise on the solid surface he found purchase upon. In the distance, among the deafening silence, Brock watched the shadowy beasts as they radiated their immense gluttony. It was such a strong sense of impulse that they even began to attack the dark monsters floating beside them, brutally tearing each other apart and tainting the black with lifeblood that seemed yet darker.

What was more horrifying, however, was that they grew larger and slowly inched ever closer with each bite.

Around him, akin to the delicate throb of the roots at the base of the Source, the darkness seemed to ebb and flare to that very same heartbeat, wherever it happened to originate from. It was an extremely faint feeling within his chest, but his Ascendancy began to weakly beat in tune along with it, straining desperately against the ethereal shackles that bound the faded heart.

As Brock trekked further and further through the black, the heart of dimmed energy within him continued to fight against its bonds harder and harder, rallying the small amount of power it maintained in an attempt to attack the chains directly and finally free itself. It filled Brock with an odd sense of sorrow as he saw that which he held within try so desperately and continue to fail.

His chest felt hot, akin to a smouldering core of remnant energies as a war raged on inside him. Brock winced and forced himself into a light jog as he noticed the shadow monsters were steadily getting nearer with every few seconds of infighting. He felt a sickening dread begin to pool in his stomach.

Idly, Brock attempted to open his status menu, but he was met with no response, only serving to reinforce the warnings of the System. It truly held no sway in this realm. Why’d it send me here then?!

All his thoughts - and even the fight between his second heart and its shackles – stopped as the gentle throb of the surrounding darkness was pinned to a small sensation of force and sound. Brock could barely pick it out from the gluttony of the silence, but it was the powerful beating of a heart. The heart.

The Source.

Brock jogged, then sprinted, then bolted further and further, the frosty aspect of the air slowly whittling down his damaged body and weakening him with each passing second, crawling deeper and deeper into his flesh and eating away at him from the inside. But all that mattered no longer when he finally arrived, the beat of the core of this place akin to a physical push and shove with each contraction.

Steadying himself as the heavy throb of the object before him tore away the icy weakness and threatened to bowl him over, Brock gazed up silently at the heart of glowing green and blues. They swirled about and ebbed and flared with every beat, radiating the intense energies of life and the divine. It was something so out of place in the realm Brock found himself in, yet it felt like it truly belonged.

Like it had belonged since the very beginning.

Fractures of those same colours populated the dark surroundings, shining radiantly but failing to illuminate both the black and the beasts that dwelled within. It was a weak sensation, but he clearly felt the ambient energies released by the heart seep out of the dimension through the cracks in space.

Focusing back upon the throbbing organ before him, Brock studied the literal heart of energy. It was eerily similar to the Ascendancy trapped dormant within his chest, albeit with a different colour scheme and a strength astronomically far from what he held inside. From the glowing organ, tendrils of black clung to its surface, only partially brightened to a deep grey by energies at play beneath. They held the heart aloft, swaying idly in the darkness.

Breathing slowly, Brock began to walk forward with caution, feeling his Ascendancy fight against its bonds with the enthusiasm of a psychopath, tearing into the ethereal fetters with its final dregs of energy. Being in the presence of such a divine organ, Brock knew what he had to do. What the System had wanted him to do this entire time.

He stepped before the heart, and he reached out.

His hand seemed microscopic compared to the size of the organ, undoubted even more colossal than the tree he had entered to arrive here, yet when he finally contacted upon its surface, Brock felt bigger. An energy tsunami of impossible proportions instantly tore through his pathways, forcing his body to bulge to frightening degrees just to contain the energy that travelled along them.

Brock immediately tried to tear his hand away, but he found himself unable. Groaning in agony, he observed his morphing body as the ethereal pathways were forcefully anchored into his body and bulged like veins on his tearing skin, some thicker than even his pinkie finger. Every inch of his body was glowing with blue and green as his pathways proceeded to be utterly ravaged.

Then finally, the first of the heart’s energy reached his Ascendancy.

It was like he was blind and now he could see. The raw power surging inside of him converged onto the core of energy and melted through the chains akin to that of acid, It flooded the weakened heart and occupied it with a seemingly boundless degree of divine power. If not for the fact that his Ascendancy was already empty beforehand, Brock was all but certain the tide of power would have long torn it and him wide open for the world to see.

Brock felt his body flood with a different kind of power, one similar yet entirely estranged than that of his Augment. The unfortunate office worker’s body shuddered and convulsed under the strain of both this newfound power and that of the raw Life flowing through him. The flesh of his body and the blood vessels underneath finally began to burst off in chunks and showering the darkness in floating spatters of luminous red.

The ceaseless wave of energy seemed to replace the crimson in his bloodstream and empower it to levels that forced it to boil and bubble within his veins. His muscles contracted painfully under the pressure they were subjected to and his organs were simultaneously liquified and rapidly healed, the cycle repeating itself endlessly and agonisingly.

It all stopped as Brock finally found himself able to move his hand, and he ripped it off the surface of the pounding heart. The remaining energies ran rampant through his body, but they eventually left the bounds of him, though not through his pores, but through bursting out of his already desecrated flesh in its raw and radiant form, quickly getting lost to the darkness.

Overcome with both pain and weakness, Brock collapsed to his knees. He was entirely slick with his own blood, but otherwise in a stable condition thanks to the passive healing the energy afforded him despite the destruction it caused simultaneously. He smiled lightly as he felt a second heartbeat added beside his own, pumping his body with waves of dim red energy and slowly increasing the effectiveness of his own ambient regeneration.

Looking inward, Brock witnessed the priorly pathetic heart of crimson energy pound with power, swirling with various shades of luminous reds within as it pumped those very same energies through his network of pathways, flooding every inch and crevasse of his wounded ‘energy veins’. It was a slow process, but the energy was making an effort to repair the damage, while also filling him with a newfound sense of liveliness at the same time.

Weakly, Brock looked upward as a gap slid open in the darkness, revealing a rectangle of blinding light and obscured sights. Immediately, as a warm earthy breeze swept through, swiftly being corroded by the unforgiving realm they entered, Brock knew that it was gateway back to the outside. Back to Earth.

The man fought to return to his feet shakily and he stumbled over toward the egress that he had been presented with, eager to leave the freezing darkness long behind and bath himself in the familiarity of the Earth. Out of the corners of his eyes, Brock noticed that the shadow beasts previously being kept at bay by the heart began to rapidly swim toward him, their collected might from consuming their brethren propelling them forward.

Hurriedly, Brock picked up the pace and soon found himself diving through the mystical doorway and into the land beyond. He hit the ground hard and grunted while looking back the way he had come, just in time to see the incomprehensible maw of a shadow beast chomp down on the gateway, the mere force behind it enough to blow Brock several meters backward until he finally collided with a boulder.

Coughing up a gob of blood, he stared fearfully at the door before it slowly began to slide closed, leaving the Beyond and the monsters that dwelled within trapped forever. Or at least for the time being. But Brock decided to ignore that for now and proceeded to shut his eyes as he looked to his Inner Self.

His pathways were a mess, looking shabby and full of savage cuts and stretches, leaving them to appear partially disproportional. Sort of like his limbs that, with the strange sense of disharmony between each of his extremities gone, seemed to have returned to a relative state of normalcy thanks to the energies, or Original Life, he was flooded with.

Fortunately, it seemed that like his currently torn flesh, his pathways would heal too, given tim-

Brock flinched as a screen flashed before him, signalling that the System had once again regained its douchebaggy influence over him. He sighed in relief, and tension he didn’t even know he had eased from his shoulders.

[Main quest completed.]

Second Dose: Collect the Original Life from the Source to stabilise your fluctuating state of being. Reward: The ability to remain alive. (1/1)

You have 00:59:29 until permanent destabilisation.

[You are now stable.]

Brock sighed in relief once again as he read over the completed quest prompt, acknowledging dearly that he had only avoided death by roughly an hour. Sure, it seemed like a decent chunk of time, but when you were given an entire month to dodge lady death herself, a single hour was cutting it scarily close.

Dismissing the prompt and not even daring to grumble about rewards, as his life was the greatest reward of all, Brock glanced up and over the place the System had placed him.

Slowly, he began to frown. As far as the eye could see, the land was barren, a vast expanse of red sand and sparse shrubbery. Crows cawed and he watched with a gaping mouth as an Inland Taipan the size of his torso slithered lazily over a nearby rock, bathing in the hot sun.

He wasn’t in the city anymore, it seemed. No, he was somewhere far worse. Somewhere far more deadly. He was in the outback.

"Oh fuck off..."