Alice takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. This is it. Her first battle. The sky overhead is the color of a raw, bleeding bruise, and the violin screeching of the Sin echoes between the buildings. It’s huge. How is it so big? Couldn’t she start with something smaller?
She takes another breath. Ready or not, she’s going to do this. No—she is ready. She’s got to be. There’s no one else.
Her gem glows, and she kicks off the ground faster than she knew she could go, flying through the air and landing on the Sin’s back. All around her are tree-trunk tentacles, steaming maws, doll-joint limbs, burning eyes, and other, stranger anatomy. It ought to be sickening, but her stomach holds steady, even as she gets to work hacking and slashing. Iridescent black ichor pours out onto her as she carves into it with practiced swings of her sword, but she’s not making any headway. She needs to get deeper.
Alice hates this part. Gritting her teeth, she sets her sights on the nearest gaping mouth and leaps straight in. The stench is indescribable, but she’ll be fine. She’s used to it.
The inside of a Sin is a strange place. Or, technically the place where she was fighting earlier was the inside, and this is the outside that it tries to expel things to? Alice doesn’t really remember how the explanation went, and she’s got more practical concerns. Corrosive unreality swirls around her; her gem’s singularity will keep her safe for a while, but she needs to wrap this up quickly.
There, at the center of a field of whatever the opposite of a thorn is—Alice can see the Origin. She swims over to it and pulls out a knife that would swallow up the light if there were any light here to swallow. She stabs it in, and the Sin everts, sharply withdrawing from reality and rushing away into the void.
Out here, unconstrained by causality, tears stream down Alice’s cheeks. She’s so lonely, and so tired, and part of her just wants to stay out here and dissolve and stop. But she can’t—she knows she can’t. Every memory of anything that still exists, every attachment she still has to anything real, is tied through her gem, binding her to the world. The tether pulls taut, and she lets it carry her back.
Alice wakes up in her bed from a dream of nothing at all. The sun shines in through her window; it’s another peaceful day.
She stares at the gem sitting on her bedside table—a reminder of what she’s been chosen for. She’s never had to use it, but someday, she’ll need to fight to defend this world. And when that day comes, she’ll be ready. She’s got to be.