Errorborne (Timeloop, Grimdark, Fantasy)

[Ultimatedaywriter]

Oxygen hissed, then vanished, as the pod door groaned open. It caught on thick, luminescent vines – fattened obscenely on the amniotic fluids that had sustained me. The door's motors whined in protest, forcing a narrow gap as the resilient vine slowly peeled back. Outside, a nightmare vista unfolded: moss choked other pods, long, spindly roots burrowing into their occupants – skeletal shapes glowing faintly within. How am I the only one alive?

A memory slammed into my skull like a mule kick. Vivid, raw... foreign. They surged, trying to overwrite, to consume. But they failed. Divine ichor, even diluted in a clone, wasn't so pitiful as to bow to some pathetic interloper. This was the life of a miserable wretch – a chronic daydreamer who squandered potential on fantasies of childish worlds. Pathetic. Still, I seized the useful scraps – knowledge, context, warnings – and ruthlessly discarded the useless emotional baggage. Fool. You could have lived, instead of just dreaming.

Gritting my teeth, I squeezed through the gap. Cold metal scraped raw flesh. My hand brushed the vine.

Agony. A thousand tiny hypodermic needles – hairs on the vine – plunged beneath my skin. Paralysis screamed up my arm, a wave of pure, incinerating pain. Somehow, I convulsed forward, tumbling out of the pod and crashing into a brittle sea of bones tangled with glowing vines. Rolling, gasping, I froze. A corpse lay beside me, limbs twitching in a final spasm. My face. Staring back with dead, vacant eyes. The poison clawed from my fingers to my shoulder. My hand went numb, useless.

New Skills
Poison RST lvl1
Physical Fitness lvl1

The words flashed into my awareness, cold and clinical. Where? No shimmering blue screens, no cheerful chimes like in the isekai drivel the dead dreamer had wasted his life on. Just... knowledge. Instinct. Did this mean survival was possible? Sweat stung my eyes as I stumbled to my knees, the poison a molten tide creeping towards my chest. My breaths grew shallow, ragged. Why no Pain Resistance? Where's the skill to stop this? The unfairness choked me as fiercely as the toxin.

I looked up, defiance warring with desperation... and screamed.

Above me, perched unnaturally on a cluster of vines, loomed a figure. A woman's head, unnervingly beautiful and serene, sat atop a body woven from spindly, metallic wires. Its eyes – cold, passionless voids – fixed on me as I writhed. How dare it watch?

"Do something!" I rasped, the demand tearing from a tightening throat.

It merely observed. No help came. No new skill flared to life. No miracle. The poison reached my lungs. Each gasp was a knife. The unfairness burned hotter than the venom. How dare this world? How dare it do this to me? Darkness surged, swallowing the cold light, the wire-thing, the pain. Back to the void.

…

My eyes snapped open. Fluid drained with a gurgle. The same damned vine constricted the opening as the hydraulics whined, forcing the lid open just wide enough to scrape through. Déjà vu twisted my gut. Again. The vine waited, a silent executioner.

What happened? The memory-flood hit, harder this time. I braced, sifting ruthlessly. Skills. Attributes. Stats. Worlds like this needed foundations. I focused inward, past the lingering terror, past the echo of suffocation. Not screens, but… motes. Two cold points of light in an inner darkness, radiating their names – Poison RST lvl2, Physical Fitness lvl1 – concepts, not words. My mind, honed by good cloning and divine scraps, parsed them into functional understanding: resistance growing, baseline strength unchanged. Still infuriatingly cryptic. No explanations. Just survive.

The vine offered its lethal proximity. No. Not this time. Planting my bare feet against the pod wall, I braced my back against the rear panel. Metal dug into flesh. I pushed. Muscles screamed, unused. The motors groaned louder. I roared, a raw sound of fury and will, pushing with every fiber of my stolen life. The gap widened. Centimeter by agonizing centimeter, the vine peeled back, yielding to sheer, stubborn force.

Just wide enough. I slithered through like an eel, landing hard on the calcified graveyard below, ribs jarring against bone but unbroken. Naked. Alive. A looper.

The memory-dreamer's final, desperate act crystallized: a wish to a djinn, a gambit to overwrite my consciousness in a new world built to his fantasies. His cleverness was his undoing. The overwrite failed on the first loop, shattered against the divine echo in my blood. His soul-fragment was incompatible, weak. Now… I was free. And immortal. No terminal point. Infinite loops. His meticulous failsafes, even against soul-death, were meaningless against what I carried. He'd been played, and I was the ultimate beneficiary.

That was it. The sum of my inherited knowledge: a world shaped by a djinn's caprice, a playground for a dead man's dreams. Grim satisfaction warred with the vast, terrifying unknown.

I moved cautiously through the ossuary corridor, stepping over femurs and skulls tangled in roots. Focus. Escape. A muffled thwack. White-hot pain blossomed in my side. I looked down. Three vicious thorns protruded between my ribs. A tripwire vine, camouflaged among bones, recoiled, bearing strange, blood-flecked flowers. Wrenching the thorns free sent fresh agony spiking. Poison, familiar yet different, slithered into my veins – slower, heavier than the vine's toxin. Blood pulsed from the wounds, warm and alarming, defying my frantic pressure. It streamed down my stomach, pooling on the bone-littered floor. Rage, cold and absolute, surged. Burn them. Burn it all to ash.

New Skill
Bleed RST lvl1

A third mote flared in the inner dark. Instantly, it resonated, linking with the pulsing light of Poison RST. A synergy, a grim defense coalescing. But my body betrayed me. Weakness spread, a creeping chill. I slumped against a pod door, the cold metal a brief relief before fresh, familiar agony lanced through my back and legs. More hidden vines. More needles. The poison, the blood loss, the old venom – a toxic cocktail flooding my system.

Not again. Not like this…

She coalesced from the gloom, the wire-woman. Her beautiful face tilted, those impassive eyes fixed on me. She settled beside my trembling form, the wires of her body shifting with eerie silence.

"Again already?" Her voice was melodious, devoid of warmth. "You almost made it past the first chamber this time. And here you are, dying before the five-minute mark."

The condescension stung worse than the thorns. "Does my dying... inconvenience your plans?" I managed, each word a labor.

"Obviously," she stated flatly. "Perhaps you should reconsider exiting the pod if you lack the resilience to survive the nursery."

A spark of that divine defiance, that stolen arrogance, flared through the encroaching cold. My vision blurred, but my voice held. "Denied."

…

The wire-woman's impassive gaze lingered for a moment longer before she dissolved back into the gloom, leaving me alone with the encroaching cold and the mocking silence of the bone forest. Denied. The word echoed, a fragile shield against despair. This ends now.

Fueled by a fury colder than the void, I planted my bare feet against the pod's cold interior wall. Ignoring the lingering phantom pains, I braced my back against the rear panel and kicked. Muscles, strengthened by loops and the meager Physical Fitness lvl2, screamed in protest. The hydraulic motors groaned, a metallic shriek fighting my will. Again. And again. My thighs burned, fire lancing through them with each desperate thrust. Wider! The luminescent vine, thick and obscene, resisted, binding the gap. With a final, guttural roar that scraped my throat raw, I kicked with everything the divine ichor and stolen resilience could muster.

SNAP.

The vine severed, its glowing ends recoiling like wounded serpents. The pod door slammed fully open with a final hydraulic sigh. I tumbled out, gasping ragged breaths that tasted of metal and decay, landing hard on the unforgiving bone-littered floor. Alive. Unscathed. The first victory. The memories surged – the foreigner's pathetic life, his wasted dreams – but I slammed a mental door shut. Irrelevant. Survival required focus, not distraction.

A plan, born of necessity and the grim resources at hand, crystallized. The dead offered their final tribute: hair, long and coarse. My hands, clumsy instruments compared to the phantom memories of master artisans, fumbled at first. Twisting, pulling, knotting – it was agonizingly slow work, the stiff strands resisting my untrained fingers. But persistence, honed by repeated deaths, was its own skill.

New Skills
Crafting lvl1
Weaving lvl1
Leather Working lvl1 (Dried flesh, not hide, but the principle held)
Bone Carving lvl1

The awareness flared. Crafting settled like a central sun within the dark expanse of my mind. Weaving orbited it immediately, a loyal moon, its processes suddenly clearer, my fingers finding a slightly better rhythm. Orbit? The concept struck me. Did the specific resistances – Poison RST, Bleed RST – circle a core Resistance skill I hadn't yet unlocked? The possibilities hummed, tiny sparks against the infinite inner dark.

Hours bled away, marked only by the scrape of bone on metal and the strain in my shoulders. The result was crude, functional: strips of dried, leathery flesh stitched with hair-cord into rough soles. My first sandal. I tied them tightly, the coarse rope biting into my ankles. A tentative step. Grounded. Protected. Footwear first. If you can't walk, armor is a coffin. The logic was brutal, undeniable.

Next, a weapon. A jagged shard of the pod door became my tool. I selected a thick femur, grinding its end against the metal edge, shaping a crude handle. The friction sent bone dust into the air. An image bloomed: magnificent bone armor, plates interlocking like a skeletal knight. Reality mocked the fantasy. My "stupid fingers," as the foreigner might have whined, struggled. Patience. Learn. I focused on the femur, carving, smoothing, widening one end into a brutal, asymmetric blade. Bone Carving pulsed, drinking in the effort. Finally, I hefted the heavy bone axe. A swing at a dangling vine. THWACK. It severed cleanly, falling lifeless to the bone pile. A savage satisfaction, hotter than any skill-glow, surged through me. Vengeance. A down payment.

Armor was the true test. Ribcages became my quarry. I stacked them, interlocking curves, searching for natural fits. Nails were a fantasy; hair-cord had to suffice, but only where it wouldn't take direct impact. Tie it from behind. Using the metal shard again, I painstakingly carved divots into overlapping ribs – notches where bone could clasp bone. Bone Carving flared brilliantly, jumping not one, but two levels as the first pieces clicked solidly into place. Lvl4. Strength flowed into the carving, a tangible feedback loop. I scavenged arms, cartilage still binding finger bones into rigid claws. These became my fasteners. Tied at the top and bottom ribs, then lashed tightly together behind my back with thick cords of hair, the claw-hands gripped the bone plates fiercely. After an eternity of labor, the crude breastplate hung heavy and uncomfortable on my chest. Ready.

Skills
Physical Fitness lvl2 (The labor counted)
Poison RST lvl3 (Passive hardening?)
Bleed RST lvl2
Crafting lvl2 (Integrating multiple disciplines)
Weaving lvl2
Leather Working lvl2
Bone Carving lvl4 (Mastery through necessity)

I set off, not walking, but in a determined jog. Confidence, brittle but fierce, propelled me. The bone claws dug into my skin with every step, the plates rocking and chafing, but I was armored. The ossuary corridor seemed less menacing. Nothing can touch me now.

THUNK. A thorn slammed into the rib-plate over my heart, embedding deep in the bone, the impact jarring me. Another step. Prick. Something sharp jabbed through the woven sole of my sandal, grazing my foot. I whirled. Thorn-launchers – bulbous flowers perched atop pods – swiveled towards me. A volley hissed through the air. THUD-THUD-CRACK! Thorns hammered the breastplate, splintering bone, one punching clean through a weaker section near my shoulder, drawing a hot line of blood. Bleed RST flared weakly.

I sprinted. The armor bounced wildly, grinding raw patches on my skin. New skills flickered at the edge of awareness – Pain Tolerance? Endurance? – but didn't solidify. Ahead, vibrant flowers released clouds of iridescent pollen. I couldn't stop, couldn't dodge. I plunged through the shimmering haze, sucking in a breath before I could clamp my mouth shut.

Fire. Thick, cloying, burning agony erupted in my lungs. I choked, vision blurring, stumbling blindly. My shoulder slammed into a massive, vine-choked gate blocking the corridor's end. Red, angry lines of infection spiderwebbed instantly up my arm where it brushed the vines. Gasping was torture. A blur of purple. THWIP-THWIP. Two needle-thin thorns buried themselves in the side of my neck. Reflex ripped them out. How DARE they pierce me?! Burn it all! My eyes swelled shut, sealing me in suffocating darkness.

Rage, pure and blinding, took over. I swung my good fist at the immovable gate with all my divine fury and stolen strength.
CRUNCH.
The sound was sickening, final. Mind-obliterating pain detonated in my hand – bones pulverized. I screamed soundlessly, tripping over my own failing legs, crashing down onto a mound of skeletal figures piled against the gate – predecessors who hadn't even breached their pods. With my shattered hand cradled uselessly, I flailed with the bone axe in my other hand, hacking desperately at the vines binding the gate. Clang! Clang! Mostly, I hit unforgiving steel, the ringing impact jolting up my arm. A lucky swing severed a vine. Then another. Hope flickered. I forced one swollen eyelid open a slit – just as the overstressed bone axe, carved too thin in my inexperience, snapped near the haft.

My legs gave out completely. Warmth – my blood – seeped from the thorn wounds, the shoulder puncture, the infected arm. Breathing was a nightmare: one lung frozen, the other drawing air through a pinhole strangled by pollen and swelling. The cold crept back, deeper this time. Dying. Again.

"Can you hear me?" The voice was melody carved from ice. Close.

Through the agony, the swelling, the suffocation, I forced my lips to move, shaping the words like shards of glass: "What... do you... want... from me?"

A pause. Then, utterly devoid of warmth or praise: "You did better."

Better? The absurdity almost cut through the pain. Warm and fuzzy? She was turning me into a pincushion, not a teddy bear.

Her next words, however, sliced through the haze, colder and sharper than any thorn: "I'll tell you something interesting. Skills are determined by the user. Only you can decide if something is impossible or not. The higher a skill level... the more that skill can do." Another pause, letting the implication hang in the poisoned air. "Think about it."

…

Death reclaimed him. Again.

This time, the rebirth felt different. Not just the familiar gurgle of draining fluid, but a seething fury beneath the surface. Skills are determined by the user. Skuld's words echoed in the void before consciousness fully returned. Only you can decide if something is impossible. The implications burned hotter than the phantom pollen in his lungs.

He braced. Kicked. Struggled. Not just against the hydraulics, but against the expectation of failure. Muscles screamed, the pod groaned, and with a final, wrenching lurch, the door slammed fully open. The cursed vine, peeled violently from the frame, dangled like a severed nerve, limp and harmless beside the pod. A small, savage victory.

August stepped out, landing squarely on the brittle carpet of corpses. Most were desiccated husks, shrouded in networks of dead, fibrous vines. Above, the ceiling of the cloning facility was a living nightmare – a dense tapestry of glowing moss and thick, pulsating vines that snaked over every surface, choking the inactive pods. His previous workstation – a bent pod lid propped against a ribcage – waited nearby, a stark reminder of the crude tools this ossuary provided. This wasn't a sanctuary; it was a slaughterhouse designed by flora.

He turned, instinct pricking his neck. The vine he'd just defeated... moved. Slowly, deliberately, it slithered back up the pod's exterior, coiled around the door's edge, and with a chillingly precise snap, pulled it shut. A series of soft, electronic beeps chimed from within. Through the small viewport, he saw a viscous stream of fresh, amber amniotic fluid begin to fill the pod once more.

A cold dread, deeper than any poison, washed over him. Am I the fool? The thought was reflexive, instantly crushed. Impossible. But the cold calculus of it... He hadn't conceived of such pervasive, calculating intelligence in plants. Skills? Yes. But an Intelligence skill? Plotting? Farming... taken to a perverse, nightmarish extreme? The facility wasn't abandoned; it was managed. Harvested.
The inner darkness flickered. Poison RST lvl4, Bleed RST lvl3, Physical Fitness lvl3, Crafting lvl3, Bone Carving lvl5... More motes, brighter sparks against the infinite void than ever before. But they were irrelevant noise now. The only skill that mattered was Escape. And for that, he needed to understand his prison warden.
…
Skuld phased through the dense bio-mass, a ghost in the green gloom. She navigated twisting tunnels choked with grappling vines, past alcoves where desiccated corpses – animated by fungal threads pulsing within their hollow bones – performed eerie, silent maintenance. Her destination: the facility's main blast door. It loomed ahead, colossal and final, utterly sealed. Thick vines bound it like restraints, their roots burrowing into the control panel beside it. Wires hung, severed and sparking fitfully – a deliberate severance. The lack of power wasn't neglect; it was a cage door welded shut.

He should have reset by now. The minutes stretched, an anomaly. Her candidate had survived longer this loop. Not well – starvation and dehydration would claim him in days without supplies – but he was learning. Grudgingly, she acknowledged it. Clones, blank slates devoid of innate skills, were forced into a brutal game of catch-up. This crucible of death accelerated growth, but would it be enough against the predatory ecosystem of the Undercity? Could anyone be ready?

She paused near a crumbling statue, its features worn but still imposing. Wodin, the city's mythic founder, stared out with his single eye. One hand gripped a hammer, symbol of artifice; the other, a spear, symbol of conquest. Skuld herself was an artifact of that ambition – the Technocracy's failed attempt to bridge the gap between their cold logic and the Cultivators' organic power. Named after a companion of Wodin, she was meant to be a tool. Instead... she was an echo bound to a dying clone.

How? The question haunted her circuits. How had she imprinted on him? And this looping... Staying away hadn't broken the cycle. Each time he neared death, a deep-rooted protocol forced her back, a digital ghost compelled to witness the inevitable. She couldn't intervene, only observe. Frustration, a cold static in her core, drove her to scout. To find some advantage.

Her findings were bleak. A fungal mycelial network connected the plants, a decentralized hive mind operating with chilling patience. The "zombies" were its maintenance drones, preserving the facility as a perfect trap. Power to escape routes? Disabled. The hive was passive, content to let intruders blunder into its lethal flora. Only active attempts to breach the perimeter would trigger a coordinated response. The exits? Sealed behind six meters of reinforced steel or hundreds of meters of solid rock. Escape was a statistical zero.

Phasing back towards the pod chamber, she found August bent over a large pelvic bone. Sweat slicked his back, muscles straining where a fresh line of self-inflicted vine stings blistered angrily. He was deliberately poisoning himself.

"What have you done?" Her voice crackled with disapproval.

He glanced up, his eyes fever-bright but focused. Beside him lay a strange pole – a femur deliberately twisted under heat and pressure into a spiral, its surface thinned and hardened. "August," he stated, as if it were the most important fact. "That's my name. Part of the introduction."

"Skuld," she replied automatically, the protocol ingrained.

He nodded, seemingly satisfied, then returned to his work. He was shaping a section of ilium into a wicked, curved axe blade. Nearby lay another bone – an ulna – meticulously filed into a rasp with deep, precise grooves. "You know bone can't cut bone easily," she observed, a statement of fact.

August smirked, a flash of dark amusement. "Finished products are stronger than materials." He picked up the ulna-rasp. "Doesn't make sense, does it? But this little file?" He tapped the rasp against the twisted femur-pole. "It's much harder now. Stronger. Until I perceive the creation as complete... it stays as brittle as any other bone." He blew bone dust off the rasp, a grim chuckle escaping him. Crafting lvl4 pulsed faintly in her awareness of him.

She watched, silent now, as he fitted the axe blade onto the pole. Clever indentations locked together. He slid thin bone needles through pre-drilled holes on the side of the blade, locking it perpendicular to the handle. A final pin, driven through the top, prevented rotation. He hefted the weapon – a brutal, functional bone axe – and gave it an experimental swing. Solid. Unyielding. He stepped towards a thick, pulsing vine near a cluster of innocuous-looking flowers.

THWACK!

The blade bit deep. August leaped back instantly, just as the disturbed flowers erupted in a cloud of shimmering, clinging pollen. "See?" he rasped, watching the particles settle like toxic glitter. "Not just poison. It adheres. Suffocates from the inside. A gas mask... that's next."

"Why not a spear? Or a sword?" Skuld asked, genuinely curious about his methodology now.

August spun, eyes sharp. "Better than an axe? I could make a scythe. But the vines are thick. I need impact. Weight. Axe Mastery..." He paused, the concept forming. "...pairs with Gardening. Probably Forestry too, if it exists. Stacking skills. Synergy. That's the key." He moved to a corner, picking up two large rib fragments. He held them end-to-end, his gaze intense, almost furious.

"What are you doing?" Skuld drifted closer.

"Fusing them," he grunted, his knuckles white with the pressure of his grip and concentration.

"You acquired Bone Fusion?" Hope, faint and unwelcome, flickered.

"I didn't," August stated flatly, his eyes never leaving the join. He wasn't carving, notching, or tying. He was glaring at the bones, demanding they become one. It looked like madness. "Your Bone Carving and Crafting are sufficient for now. Why this?"

"Limits," August hissed, the word dripping with frustration. "Always limits unless I can fuse. Unless I can make." He ignored her, pouring all his will, all his stolen divine defiance, into the two inert pieces of calcium. Bone Carving lvl6 hummed around him, pushing against an unseen barrier. Hours bled into days. He barely slept, fueled by grim determination and scavenged moisture from condensation. Skuld watched, a silent witness to his obsessive, possibly futile, endeavor.

Then, on the third day, the facility shuddered. Not a tremor, but a deep, visceral thrum that vibrated through the bones underfoot. A sound like tearing flesh and splintering rock boomed from the direction of the sealed gate. The vines throughout the chamber thrashed wildly, a sudden, panicked frenzy.

Before August could react, before Skuld could even process the seismic alarm, the far wall exploded.

Not steel giving way, but the rock around it bulging, cracking, and vomiting forth a tidal wave of glistening, pulsating flesh. It wasn't a creature; it was a wall. A living, advancing barrier of muscle, sinew, and writhing tendrils, studded with half-digested pods and screaming plant matter it absorbed as it surged forward. It flooded the corridor, an avalanche of hungry biomass, moving with terrifying speed.

August roared, a sound of pure, incandescent rage. He threw the unfused bones down with a clatter. "I ALMOST HAD IT!"

Skuld could only watch, a silent scream trapped in her code, as thick, whip-like tendrils, moving faster than thought, speared through the air. They struck August with brutal force, punching through his crude bone armor like parchment, impaling him. There was no struggle. The flesh-wall engulfed him. She saw a final flash of defiance in his eyes, swallowed by the glistening mass, before the tendrils pulsed. A sickening, wet dissolution began from within, visible even as the biomass absorbed him whole. Liquefied. Consumed.

Silence descended, broken only by the wet, squelching sounds of the flesh-wall settling, filling the corridor it had breached. The pod chamber, once a graveyard, was now part of something infinitely more horrifying.

Skuld remained, a ghost hovering over the spot where August had stood seconds before. The loop hadn't reset. Not yet. Enough of August was still alive.

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