SSS-Rank Extra: I Got a Chaos System-Chapter 43: Aftermath

"Ugh!..."

Kazuki groaned, his throat felt raw like a sandpaper.

"Water..." he rasped.

His fingers dragged weakly across the wooden planks, blindly searching.

Then, something pressed against his lips—a nozzle. He tilted his head back and drank in greedy gulps, water spilling down his chin, soaking into the ground beneath him.

A weak voice echoed nearby.

"...Kazuki..."

His eyelids fluttered, barely managing to open. He caught the faint outline of a black-haired woman. Shadows swirled around her face, distorting her features.

"Lillan?...where are we?"

Lillan shook her head—a blur of motion—and murmured something under her breath. He couldn’t make out the words.

Suddenly, she jerked upright, rising to her feet. With deliberate steps, she moved away, just out of sight—almost too quickly to catch.

He tried to call out to her, but the words died in his throat. A sudden pain shot through him, as if his tongue had been bitten by a sharp object, accompanied by a metallic taste. But instead, the pain came from his throat

His hands stretched toward it, holding both sides of his neck, as if trying to fix something ruptured.

But the feeling wouldn’t go away..

Then, like a film reel torn mid-frame, the room flickered—once, twice—and collapsed into darkness.

Kazuki drifted beneath a jet-black sky.

No... more like a room.

A paradoxical space—there was a strange sense of depth and direction to it.

He swore something was writhing just beyond the edge of his sight.

But there was nothing.

Then suddenly, the space began to clench and expand. One corner shot outward, distorting the other three sides around it.

Still, Kazuki had no reaction. He felt oddly at peace; all chaos around couldn’t disturb his mind.

This played on for minutes or was it hours? No... it had to be days...

Either way, he had no idea how much time had passed.

But the cycle of expansion and contraction zipped by like lightning. Before he knew it, all he could see were blurring motions.

A sudden sharp pain shot through his brain, the left half... or was it the right?

His hand shot to his head, as if trying to massage away the aching pain—but his fingers didn’t find anything substantial. No scalp, no skin. Just... emptiness. As though his head was hollow, or worse, not there at all.

Dread washed over him as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water.

His arms flailed wildly, panic finally crashing through the haze. His hands wandered downward, searching—pleading—for something solid.

But they found nothing.

Where his legs should have been, there was only void. Gone—vanished below the knee. His arms, too, began to fade. The skin from his fingertips up to his wrists melted like ink dissolving in water, crawling up toward his elbows, then his biceps.

He tried to scream, but no sound came.

Only silence.

A beep echoed slicing through the stillness.

All around him, hands erupted from the void—long, shadowy limbs. They burst outward clawing toward him with impossible speed.

Kazuki’s eyes widened, or would have, if he still had eyes.

The hands reached for him, stretching across the collapsing space, fingers curling into claws.

But just before they could crush him—

Light.

It tore through the fabric of the black room like a divine blade, rending the shadows apart.

Suddenly, he was wide awake.

His eyes flew open, pooling with tears, breath ragged as if he’d surfaced from drowning. The rough, damp soil scraped against his skin, grounding him in a reality.

The buzzing in his ears—slowly began to fade.

And in its place came a voice.

"Kazuki! Kazuki—hey, look at me! Please—please—"

Lillan’s voice.

He blinked through the blur, and her face came into view. Dirt smeared her cheeks, her black hair clung to her skin with sweat, her eyes—were wide with something between relief and terror.

Her hands gripped his face, trembling. "You’re here. You came back."

He tried to respond, but his throat was still raw, the words a ghost behind clenched teeth.

Lillan didn’t wait. She pulled him into a tight embrace, one hand fisting the back of his tattered shirt, the other resting gently against the base of his neck.

"You were gone," she whispered. "Gone, Kazuki. I—I thought I lost you."

His arms hesitated... then, slowly, moved to wrap around her.

A hollow, dry voice rasped out of him—foreign even to his own ears.

"Wh-What... happened...?"

A sudden ache bloomed in his right hand—a hot, crawling sensation, as if the muscles beneath his skin were twisting, knotting into shapes.

Kazuki winced, pulling back from Lillan. He stared down at his hand.

His whole right hand was wrapped tightly in bandages—stained with dark patches

Kazuki instinctively reached to unravel them, but Lillan’s hands shot out, clutching his wrist with a desperate force.

"D-Don’t," she said, voice cracking.

He froze. Her hands trembled against his skin.

"Why?" he asked, voice still brittle, as if formed from broken glass. "What’s under there?"

She didn’t answer. Her gaze dropped to his bandaged hand—haunted, like the memory of it burned behind her eyes.

"I-It’s a horror," Lillan murmured. Her hand stretched back, hovering in the air, fingers trembling—as if giving a silent permission.

Kazuki paused, eyes flicking between her and his own hand. The bandages throbbed in sync with the ache beneath them, as though something inside pulsed with a rhythm.

With hesitant fingers, he began to peel the cloth away.

One loop unraveled. Then another. The fabric clung to his skin, damp and stained with something thicker than blood—inky, almost tar-like. It left sticky strands between his fingers as he pulled.

Lillan turned her head, unable to look. "I didn’t know what else to do," she whispered.

Kazuki didn’t respond. The final layer of bandage came loose.

His breath caught.

His whole arm was charred black.

Not the burned kind.

It looked more like something unnatural had seeped into him, like a thick layer of permanent ink or raw oil had been draped over his skin. The surface glistened faintly under the dim light, slick and rippling

Veins pulsed beneath the corrupted surface, bulging in unnatural patterns. One in particular spiraled outward from his tendon, wrapping around his wrist like a brand, then crawling its way toward each finger.

Kazuki felt bile rise in his throat. His breath came quicker, harsher.

"What... is this...?" he whispered.

"I found you outside the temple," Lillan said. "You were in pretty rough shape. At that time... your right hand wasn’t like this. There were just a few bulging veins, like something trying to push out from beneath your skin."

She swallowed hard, eyes still locked on the ground.

"But since then... it’s changed. Day by day. It got worse. More twisted. The veins started glowing last night."

He looked around.

They were in a forest.

Moonlight spilled through the canopy above in thin, silver strands, casting ghostly patterns across the forest floor. The wind whispered softly through the leaves, carrying a dry, earthy smell that clung to the air like old parchment and damp moss.

Kazuki’s voice broke through the stillness, raspy and uncertain.

"Where are we? And... how much time has passed?"

"It’s been three days since then," Lillan said, her voice hushed. "The first time you woke up was yesterday...We’re a short distance from the village."

She continued. "I didn’t want to bring you here but things were looking much worse there. Even after the whole thing... there were still zombies. And I still haven’t recovered my magic"

Kazuki frowned, trying to follow. His mind still felt like it was wading through fog.

"So, I took shelter there," Lillan went on, her eyes flicked toward the trees, her voice dipping lower, "something changed. Yesterday, they began dying on their own."

Kazuki blinked slowly. "Dying?"

She nodded. "Collapsing. Some even exploded...When I figured that it was too dangerous to hide, I left from the west side through the forest... but I got a glimpse of the front. There were bodies—maybe hundreds of zombies—all lying around the front side."

A silence stretched between them, filled only by the rustle of leaves and the occasional chirp of night insects.

Lillan said, "We need to move. As soon as possible. I don’t know what happened there, but I don’t have a good feeling about this."

Kazuki exhaled, the air still scraping his throat like embers.

"Yeah... give me twenty minutes," he muttered, his voice rough but steadier now.

Lillan nodded without a word. She stood up and stepped away, giving him space. Her shoulders sagged with exhaustion, but her eyes remained alert, scanning the forest like she expected something.

Kazuki rested his head against the rough floor, his head spinning—one nightmare bleeding into the next. Couldn’t he get a moment’s peace?

His mind was a blur, each thought slipping like sand through his fingers. He needed answers.

He clenched his fist—immediately regretting it from the pulse of pain—and muttered the one command that still lingered in his memory.

Open. System. Status.