regenesis // kenji, day three

[lance]

You're alive.

Against all odds, against every instinct in your body protesting otherwise, you live. You breathe. Over the fallen bodies of the two unlucky souls sent to experience purgatory before you, you fought and bled and bared your soul for the world and for two to see.

And when you step out above the surface, feel the cool breeze against your face, you find that it is all worth it again.

Though perhaps step is a bit of an exaggeration - more like half-stumble, half-crawl into the sunlight. For like it or not, the fight between you and Emmett Le Roux was all but guaranteed to go in the other boy's favor. Greater size, greater strength, greater skill with a weapon, all lay within his fingertips.

But he didn't have your desperation. And honestly, you weren't even sure that was going to be enough, until you stuck your knife through his eye socket and pierced through his brain with your last hail mary of an attack.

He'd laid there one, two, three, all the way up to five minutes before the gravity of the situation sunk in. You'd won. You'd killed a boy to survive. But you'd won, and you weren't going to return to the doors of death on this day. And as if on cue, something within the cave shifted - something opened, and your path to freedom was revealed.

Over the blood of an innocent girl, over the extinguished flame of a warrior boy, you'd earned your freedom. Drenched in crimson glory, your own fire nearly burning through your very skin, you'd removed your weapon from Emmett's face and faced your destiny.

And such is the relief, such is the pure emotion that riddles your battered and bruised form, that it takes every ounce of willpower left within you to not burst into tears a second time. One show of weakness in a given day is enough - the last thing you need is another shot of your tear-ridden face, only this time accentuated by the natural light for all of the world to see.

But as you look down to your bandaged hand, feel the familiar weight of a bag on your back, you take a moment to look towards the sky. Where Emmett and the girl from Nine will no doubt shine brightly against the backdrop of the night, only to forever fade away into the dark.

"I won't let this second chance be in vain," you whisper, to nobody and everyone in particular in the same breath.

And without a second look back at the tomb, at the place where you put the burdens of two souls on your own shoulders, you set off into the sunset.

There's someone to find, and several other someones to kill.