Cameraman Never Dies

The stone groaned as Judge pressed his back to it, muscles trembling. Cracks traced along his arms like lightning across marble, and his breath came in ragged bursts.

He had pushed a boulder into place using pure ether, sealing the crevice behind him. The rock still shimmered faintly with leftover energy, but its cost had been carved into his skin, deep cracks running all the way to his bones.

The cave was silent.

But his thoughts roared.

He couldn't afford to pass out. The moment he did, everything ended.

The flux core pulsed nearby, a dark heart beating in rhythm with the void it created.

The air around him was impossibly still, suffocating, and yet, within that nothingness, he could taste ether again. The pocket of void he had managed to stabilize before was gone, devoured. But this... this was different.

The core had scattered ether like bait, drawing corrupted monsters from the dark to come and have a taste, but only one would become its guardian, the puppet that protected it.

Judge clenched his trembling fist. If he were to take action, it would be now, when the ether was still present and before a new guardian was created.

The idea had taken root. The logic followed, cold and relentless:

A heart made from the principle of nihility — not just a concept, but a living, breathing heart of emptiness — could function as a paradox. A siphon for everything. And maybe, just maybe, survival.

His heart faltered.

Once. Twice.

His hand slammed against his chest. No ether surged to respond.

He was dying.

And still he focused.

Pain flooded in. He could feel every shattered inch of him. The flesh that refused to knit. The nerves screaming beneath cracked skin.

Still, he reached inward.

Not for strength.

For emptiness.

He shaped it slowly. Not a container. Not a void. A core. A beating nucleus of nothing. One that devoured without destroying. One that drew ether in like lungs drew breath.

At first, nothing happened.

Then his chest caved inward. Bone groaned. Flesh bent. His spine arched in agony. He howled, not from pain, but from the horror, the inexplicable feeling worse than any physical suffering he endured. He felt as if he was something half-living.

Memories surged unbidden. A gentle hand running through his hair. Amber's voice reading aloud in a soft, stammering cadence. Liam's daring grin just before tossing a pebble at a soldier's helmet. His mother's back as she walked away one final time.

He reached toward them. And they began to fade.

The last thing he remembered was warmth.

Then, a beat. Not from his heart — from something else. Something deeper.

His heart gave a final beat, then disappeared into absence. The void it left behind pulsed.

Not death, but a new existence.

The heart of nothing, the Core of Nihility, began to feed.

Ether poured into him. Wild and untamed, it was screaming.

He seized it. Shaped it. And for a moment, he thought it would consume him, but it didn't.

He opened his eyes, and he was breathing.

The ether obeyed.

But the cost had been carved into every inch of his flesh.

His face had peeled in places, chunks of flesh fallen away, leaving behind a surface that looked more stone than skin. A statue carved in grief and agony. Veins glowed faintly with dark light beneath the cracks, as though something unspeakable simmered just under the surface.

His lips were gone. Torn or dissolved, he wasn't sure. Teeth bared in a grimace he couldn't change. His eye wept blood. The other had gone dark hours ago.

He couldn't speak. Could barely move. But he felt. The cave trembled.

The flux core stirred, sensing something wrong, confused by a rival presence. Then it shrieked, releasing another wave of ether to lure new prey.

And the prey came.

They slithered. Crawled. Shuffled. Groaned.

Corrupted monsters.

Some moved like beasts. Others walked like men with broken minds. Their bodies were warped and wrong, limbs fused or elongated, faces twisted into parodies of the things they once were.

They had smelled ether.

And now they had smelled him.

He stood.

Cracks spiderwebbed across his legs. Chunks of skin slid away, revealing a body that looked forged from shattered obsidian. But the ether responded. Threads of it laced into his tendons. Held him up. Moved him.

He raised his arm, the one that wasn't there. A limb of ether formed in its place. Coiled like mist. Burned like fire.

The monsters shrieked and surged toward the crevice.

Judge didn't let them in, he knew that weak rock was not enough to cover the entrance for too long.

With a flick of his new ether hand, he shaped ether into a spike and hurled it. The rock exploded into smithereens, and the first creature exploded into a mist of black blood, its gore painting the rocks.

Another one charged. He stepped into the strike, moved like a blur, finally having the mobility, and tore through it with an ether blade forming from the phantom arm.

A dozen more replaced the dead creatures.

He didn't stop, he had survived till now, and he will again.

His body screamed. His skin fell away in strips. But his eyes burned with ether.

He was not dead, hope drove him. Grasping the tiny bit of his mind whispering that there was a way out.

And the monsters were not getting through.

The forest floor soon became rough and slick with gore and shattered bone. Ether twisted through the air, bending to the two voids present.

Judge, a ruin of a boy, stood atop the mound of slain horrors. Every breath wheezed through his cracked chest.

He pointed his hand toward the flux core, creating a small needle in front of him.

It was dark, darker than the back of a raven's wing under a moonless night sky.

He shot the needle straight toward the core.

The flux core couldn't do anything but pulse, waiting for the inevitable end. Just as the needle touched the core, it began to unravel and disappear. It didn't explode, nor did it burst.

A slow, whispering dissolution — like silk being pulled apart by invisible hands. The air around it grew thick with energy, ether bleeding out from the gash in reality. The strands collapsed inward, taking its secrets and sins with it, until all that remained was silence.

From the space left behind by the void, the immense ether that was absorbed by the core erupted.

Not as an explosion, but as a soothing air that raced through the forest.

Judge collapsed.

But not just from exhaustion.

He had won, and the relief hit like a truck.

The monsters were dead. The flux zone was broken. The core started destabilizing.

He gathered ether for another move, which was entering his safe haven, the studio.

And then, with one final pulse, he folded into space, not as the boy who had entered, but as the man who endured.