Cameraman Never Dies

The creature lunged. Its mouth split open far too wide, ringed with teeth that shimmered wetly like polished bone. No eyes. No face. Just the constant sound of skin slapping against bark as it moved, too fast, too hungry, too wrong.

Judge didn't scream.

His blade met the monster, and surprisingly, it bled from its bones. Its eyes spat acid out from beneath, burning into the soil. The fight wasn't fast. It wasn't clean. Judge took a gash to his leg, the pain flaring like a hammer blow. He fought without rhythm, without grace. It was survival. One blow, two, a stumble, then a roar that wasn't his voice.

When it finally died, its body folded in on itself. Not in collapse — in retreat. Like the flux was swallowing it whole, or reclaiming it. Judge fell back, one hand gripping the edge of a moss-covered root. He didn't speak. Hadn't in days. But his chest heaved like he wanted to scream, like the sound was stuck somewhere between his ribs and throat.

The hallucinations had worsened.

The core remained in place, unmoving. Watching. It had no eyes, no presence, but its pull was undeniable. He felt it in the back of his teeth. Like a hum through his bones. It pulsed with a rhythm not unlike a heartbeat, not his, not human.

And again, the cycle continued. Days passed in slow, dragging hours. Survival hadn't just failed to improve, it had turned on him. The forest pressed in tighter with every hour, the trees closer, the sky dimmer.

He hadn't eaten in two days. His traps had yielded nothing but shattered branches. The birds had stopped flying. The forest had gone quiet in a way that made silence feel loud, oppressive, full of something hidden.

His skin peeled in places where old wounds never healed. His tongue swelled from thirst, and his hands trembled even when resting. Everything hurt, even rest. The cave walls offered no comfort, just cold echoes of his breath.

But then, on the fourth dusk, it came.

Not another horror. A deer.

Its antlers were intact. Eyes clear. Hooves steady. A real deer, not like the ones with mouths beneath their ribs or tongues for tails or legs that bent the wrong way.

It looked at him.

He froze. Every part of him wanted to believe it wasn't real. But it didn't shimmer. Didn't shift. It breathed steam into the cold air. It was real. It had to be.

He launched himself at an inhuman speed and killed it cleanly. It didn't scream. It bled red. Its meat smelled like meat. Like life. Like hope.

He cooked it with what fire he could coax from stones and dry moss and a bit of torn clothe. He didn't cry, but his hands trembled as he ate. One bite. Then another. Slow. Reverent. Like each chew might break the illusion.

He slept afterward. Deeply. No dreams. Not even nightmares.

The next morning, he found another core. It hovered, same black and silver. But the pull had changed. More aggressive. The trees leaned toward it now. Wind didn't blow — it was drawn, like breath into lungs. The leaves bent toward the thing, as if seeking warmth. Or warning.

He moved toward it. Not out of desire. Not even out of survival.

Curiosity.

He could feel it, the invigorating feeling he had lost... ether!

Ether flowed invisibly, drawn here in slow, relentless strands.. A vacuum. No birds. No rustling. Even his own ether-starved body ached more the closer he got. The pressure on his skull built with every step, as though the air itself resisted his presence.

It all aligned.

Melina's lesson echoed, fragments surfacing like bones in the dirt. A Flux Core created a pull on ether. Not just an object that absorbed it, but one that created a pressure gap. Ether from outside rushed in to fill the absence. A flux zone wasn't a place of wild storms. It was a wound where ether had been drained, sucked out from the fabric of the world.

That ether getting drawn in from outside kept people alive. Barely. Not by protecting them, but by constantly invigorating their body, but it would be sucked out by the core through their bodies. Any living being was a river that the core couldn't stop drinking from. And slowly, inevitably, they drowned.

Survival was possible, but corruption was inevitable.

Principle of Nihility. Judge finally understood how it worked, the theories that felt detached pieced themselves in his mind. The truth too large to comprehend all at once, yet sharp enough to cut through the fog in his head.

He remembered those words in the diary of that researcher who went mad, but this was created by nature.

Nihility, a principle never practiced. The theory of nothing, the absence of power, the null of existence.

The core was that. A failed principle made real. Not by humans, but nature.

No one believed a principle that mimicked it was possible. Like birds that flew before humans learned to create cloudstriders. People before had thought that flight was impossible without a principle.

But it still existed, a marvel of engineering. The same went for this. A marvel not engineered, but a principle that had been created.

The core wasn't sentient, but the process of invigorating and ether getting sucked out was making Judge corrupted, thus he was seeing hallucinations. They were getting worse as time passed, and so was the corruption. The thin line between nightmare and reality had frayed entirely.

He stepped forward.

And the hallucinations screamed.

Voices he hadn't heard in weeks. Mother. Saphiel. Liam. His own voice. Pleading, warning, whispering madness. Shapes moved in the corner of his eyes. Trees bent backward. A shadow walked upside-down. The sky flickered like a dying flame.

The core pulsed. The ether around it shivered.

He didn't blink. Didn't flinch. He finally understood.

He reached out.

The world twisted like water around stone. The air tore sideways. The pressure inverted.

Judge didn't know if he screamed.

He only knew the core was closer now.

And it was waiting.

And somehow, for the first time in weeks, he wasn't entirely afraid.