Cameraman Never Dies

Judge hurled his sword, his skin cracked a little more as he created another pocket. Pain creeping through the bloodless wounds.

The monster's head jerked. Instinctively, it blocked with its blade. But a sudden explosion blinded it, weak but effective.

Judge, with the last of the ether he could scrape, lunged.

His legs barely worked. His arm screamed in agony. But he closed the distance and, with a howl of effort, drove a makeshift bone dagger, forged from scavenged scraps and sharpened against stone, into the core embedded in its chest, another blast of ether exploding on the blade's tip and inside of its chest.

The reaction was instant.

The monster shrieked, an inhuman, echoing sound that made the flux itself vibrate. Its body convulsed. Ether unraveled in spirals, violent and chaotic. It exploded outward, and Judge was caught in the blast.

Agony tore through him. His arm was gone. Shredded from shoulder to elbow. He hit the dirt, tumbling in a spray of blood and moss. His face burned. His vision was red. He could barely hear himself scream.

One eye swelled shut. His breath came in short, choking bursts. His chest was torn open, and every heartbeat sent a fresh wave of torment.

But he was alive.

Somehow, the durability of a dragon felt like a curse, intense pain caused him not to feel his body at all.

He stared at the jagged stump of his arm, at fingers that no longer existed. His body felt like it had been torn from the inside out, nerves raw and hollow. Blood loss blurred his vision more than pain. The world tilted.

The monster was gone, hopefully, but the scars it left would never be.

At least the monster wasn't attacking.

It staggered. Its form rippled like a glitch in reality, limbs twitching with staccato jolts as if resisting a command it could no longer defy. The spiral scar on its chest blazed like a relit furnace, pulsing brighter with every labored breath.

Then the pull began.

The Flux Core flared to life behind it, no longer a steady hum but a ravenous roar. The air bent. Colors twisted. Shadows elongated and spiraled toward the core like strands of ink in water. The moss beneath the creature's feet frayed into dust. Stone cracked. Trees leaned toward the core as if bowing.

The monster clawed at the ground, talons digging trenches in the earth, but they found no purchase. The monster's resistance failed. Ether coiled and funneled through the air in violent, tightening loops, dragging the creature backward.

It thrashed. Shrieked. Its voice was a dozen screams bound together, distorted and ancient. Limbs broke and reformed. One arm disintegrated into smoke. Its face split into a dozen shifting masks, flickering with fragments of old memories — battles fought, lives ended. Its lower half dissolved into a cyclone of fragments, and the core drank in the remains without pause.

And then — silence.

The world inhaled. The Core surged. The monster was pulled in, stretched into a thin silhouette of light, then crushed into a single spark.

Gone.

Not slain — erased. Drawn into the singularity like a debt collected. A soul recalled by the god that forged it.

The Core pulsed once more, satisfied.

Judge didn't wait.

He crawled with one arm and one leg, mostly working. A trail of blood behind him like a second shadow. His breath was thin. Wet.

There was a hole, a cleft in the rocks. Hidden and dark. He dragged himself inside, every inch felt like an eternity.

His heart fluttered.

Then stuttered.

Cold had begun to take his fingers. His vision dimmed, not from pain, but from something deeper. His consciousness slipping away.

He pressed his trembling fingers to his chest, where the blow had landed. The wound pulsed. Slower. Slower.

Ether. He needed ether.

He was surrounded by it, but he couldn't pull any in. Not enough to even create another ether pocket without cracking his body.

Healing his wounds needed ether, but he couldn't heal a wound that was sucked off of ether. Like all the tiny cracks across his body.

Unless!

... He needed a constant supply of ether, it is the only thing that can repair his cracked body.

He looked at himself, he was like a broken sculpture. A small statue of a dragon child, lost and forgotten in a godforsaken land where the blessing of ether was the curse that allured beings into the trap set by the flux core.

The flux had turned the area into an ether farm, it devoured ambient ether constantly, always hungry.

Humans needed ether. Just like lungs needed air. It flowed through the organs, kept tissues regenerating, powered every reflex and breath. Without it, life dwindled.

With enough ether, some scholars believed, you could push back age. Delay death. Become something more than human.

But immortality required more than belief. It needed flow. A constant torrent of ether. A heart that could pump nothing and draw everything.

His breath hitched. His remaining hand curled against his chest.

One beat.

Another.

Then none. Then another.

And still, his thoughts moved.

So he decided.

If life needed ether, and ether couldn't reach him—

Then he would try the impossible.

His body trembled — not just from pain, but from the weight of his decision. He thought of everything he'd lost: the sound of laughter that wasn't his own, the scent of roasted potatoes in that dream that wasn't real, the way his sister once braided his hair when they were children.

He thought of the people who would never know what became of him. Of the part of him that still clung to life, despite everything.

He would make a heart of nothing.

Not just an imitation. Not a temporary pocket. A core, a singularity in his chest. A well that would drink ether from everything, always.

He knew it might unravel him. He knew he was too close to death for the threads of his soul to hold steady.

But what else was left?

A principle that defied survival, built in the image of death.

He would try.

And if he failed—

At least something of him would vanish fighting.

He will find out what part of him would survive.