Judge reached for the Flux Core, and it dissolved.

Not exploded. Not evaporated. Just... blinked out of existence. Like a flame snuffed by an unseen hand.

He stood frozen. Then blinked.

Still gone.

He reached out, flailing at the space it had occupied, as if maybe, just maybe, it would be hiding behind a trick of the light. It wasn't.

"...You have got to be fluxing kidding me."

His legs buckled, and he sat, hard, laughing hollowly into the empty clearing.

The core had been an illusion. A cruel trick played by the zone, the forest, or his own starving brain. He didn't know which was worse.

The growl from his stomach reminded him which problem was currently worse.

It had been days. Or hours. Or centuries. Time did somersaults in this place. He had no rations at all, and everything that should have been edible had either fused with metal, sported spikes, or tried to eat him first. He had killed things, yes. He had fought and bled and survived.

So he made a decision.

He crouched beside the twitching, still-warm corpse of the last mutated creature he had slain, something vaguely resembling a boar-human hybrid, if a boar had a mouth with teeth around its neck, two legs, and black ink for blood. He grimaced. Then began skinning it with his blade.

"You know, " he muttered, "they never tell you in training that one day you'll be seasoning meat with existential dread."

He couldn't risk eating it raw. Not unless he wanted to add vomiting his guts out to his growing list of flux-zone achievements. So he worked.

Flint. Wood. Sparks.

Fire.

Blessed, flickering, smoke-spitting fire.

He roasted the mutant flesh until it stopped twitching. The smell was...not good. Somewhere between a tire fire and old cheese. But he ate. Slowly. Carefully.

"Gourmet, " he mumbled between chews, face twisted in disgust. "Delicately corrupted with notes of despair."

Water was easier. A stream ran not far from the cave he had found, his sanctuary of moss and crumbling stone. He filtered it through cloth and boiled it when he could. It tasted like iron and regret. But it was wet, and it was not poison.

His wounds had festered. At first, he used scraps of his cloak as bandages. Then bark. Then leaves that didn't scream when touched. Some oozed blue sap. He found the ones that didn't.

As days passed slowly, he learned.

To move without sound.

To breathe without drawing notice.

To watch the wind for unnatural stillness.

To never, ever trust a shadow shaped like a person.

Every time he let his guard down, the flux gave him a new horror. One creature was made entirely of chattering jaws and skittering limbs. Another floated, moaning like a choir out of tune, eyes stitched across its back. Yet another dragged itself along the ground whispering lullabies. He didn't sleep that night.

They didn't all want to eat him. Some just followed. Others whispered. One mimicked his voice. That one he cut down without hesitation.

He learned never to answer.

He rested in his cave when he could. Hunched in shadows, blade across his knees. And every moment he didn't move, he thought.

About death. About survival. About what it meant to be human in a place that stripped all meaning away.

Was he still Judge without ether, without his weapons, his strength?

Was he still Judge when the only thing that made him special was broken?

He didn't know.

Sometimes he thought about screaming. But the silence in the flux was so perfect, so absolute, it felt like screaming might wake something up.

Instead, he whispered into the dark.

"I'm not dead. That's something, right?"

Sometimes he saw people. Friends. Enemies. A dancing goat in a tophat. He ignored them all.

They weren't real.

He had learned to wait before trusting his eyes.

When the whispers got too loud, when the cave walls looked too much like faces, he scribbled lines into the dirt with his sword. Words. Names. Nonsense poems.

Anything to keep a thread tethered to sanity.

He drew a line for every day he survived.

The floor was covered in them.

One night, he carved a question into the stone: Is this still me?

He stared at it for hours. The answer didn't come.

Then, a growl echoed from outside.

He didn't flinch.

He stood, gritted his teeth, and walked toward the sound with blade in hand.

No illusions. No hope. Just survival.

And something in him snapped. What was he doing in this cave? Hiding? Wasting away?

He left. Into the woods again.

He moved fast now, honed by the horror. Learned to predict the ambushes. To spot the false ground. To slice through illusions before they could reach his mind.

He found another one, another Flux Core.

This one pulsed, humming with energy. He approached. It shimmered. His blade passed right through it.

Illusion.

He didn't sit this time. He didn't scream. He kept walking.

He began to see a pattern. The illusions grew more intense the hungrier he became. The colder the night, the stronger the voices.

It wasn't just surviving anymore. It was adapting.

He crafted crude traps. Dug spikes into the soil. Hunted the corrupted ones in silence. Roasted their flesh and stored it in wrapped bundles.

He found a lake, stagnant but untainted. Built a stone basin. Made tools.

He caught fish with his bare hands, grinding their bones into blades. Learned to cook using stone-ovens he built into the earth. His meals still tasted like sadness, but he no longer gagged.

The flux didn't break him. It refined him.

Judge, no longer just the child with a gun, with ether, with lineage.

Now? He was a survivor. No magic. No power. Just grit, hunger, steel.

He learned to listen to the trees. Not trust them. But understand their rhythm.

He could almost predict when an illusion would strike.

And then, at long last, on a night when the stars above flickered like dying lanterns...

He saw it.

A cave deeper than any other, shrouded in black mist. Inside, floating motionless, was the real Flux Core.

No shimmer. No illusion.

Its presence didn't scream. It whispered. Like a void with a voice.