Beast Gacha System: All Mine

Ruby couldn’t breathe. But did she ever need to breathe?

The place she was drowning in wouldn’t allow her to breathe air, letting her lungs fill with water instead. But it didn’t hurt.

Just... suffocating. Extremely.

She was suspended in it and somewhere in the distance, through the murk, the muffle, and the crushing weight of the deep, she saw it again.

On the surface of the upside-down lake, a little girl with black hair—

***

Ruby opened her eyes with a violent, choking gasp. Her chest heaved and her throat burned.

She tried to grab her neck immediately. The instinct was overwhelming, the phantom sensation of her head threatening to violently separate from her body still screaming through every nerve.

But she couldn’t move her hands. Something was restraining her wrists. Soft bindings... Linen strips, tied to the bedframe. She thrashed against them, panic surging fresh through her veins, and then—

"Ruby..."

She turned. Her whole body flinched so hard the bed rattled. A figure was sitting in the chair beside her bed.

He was leaning forward with an expression of barely-contained worry. His face was pale, and his dark eyes were shadowed with exhaustion. His dark hair was uncharacteristically disheveled, as though he had dressed in haste and ridden through the night to reach her.

While being unstable himself.

"A-Arzhen...?" Her voice came out as a croak, raw and scraped from the screaming she didn’t remember.

But the moment his name left her lips, her body betrayed her. A violent tremor seized her muscles, starting in her shoulders and rippling down her spine.

Her wrists pulled instinctively against the restraints, her legs, hidden beneath the blankets, curled up toward her chest as though trying to make herself smaller. To hide. To escape.

"A-aa—aaahh—"

Why? Why was her entire body trembling like this?

This was Arzhen. Her Arzhen.

The man who had loved her, supported her, chosen her over his own wife!

He was... her greatest triumph! He was her perfect man, her safety net! So why did every cell in her body scream at her to get away?

"Ruby, are you okay?" Arzhen’s worried face was pale, and he was clearly trying very hard to look steady, to be the strong, protective presence she had always relied on.

His hands were clasped in his lap, knuckles white, as though he were restraining himself from reaching for her. "Ruby, what happened? We suddenly got sick at the same time..."

What?

"At the same time...?"

Ruby turned to the vanity mirror across the room. The reflection that stared back made her breath catch in her raw, aching throat.

She saw herself, hair matted, face pale as bleached bone, eyes bulging slightly from their sockets with the residue of primal terror.

Her lips were cracked. Her skin had the waxy, translucent quality of a corpse that hadn’t yet realized it was dead—oh God.

And beside her, reflected in the same glass, was Arzhen.

He looked exactly the same.

The same bulging eyes, rimmed with red. The same bloodless countenance. The same deep, bruised hollows beneath his gaze that spoke of nightmares that had followed him into waking.

They... looked like two survivors of the same catastrophe.

She tried to remember everything. She had been preparing for sleep, the lantern turned low, the priestesses dismissed for the night.

And then, suddenly, she had felt something.

No.

Not felt.

That was the wrong word.

It had been vivid, yes, but there had been no physical pain. Only the terror. Only the absolute, soul-consuming certainty that...

As a Saintess, Ruby possessed a subtle but crucial ability to differentiate her senses. She had experienced visions since she was a mere child, and she knew how to distinguish a vision from a dream or a hallucination.

It didn’t feel like a vision. Nor was it a dream or a hallucination. This felt... like a memory.

Like something that had already happened. Like her body was remembering a death she had already died.

The sensation of her head being pulled off. Her neck ripped apart, muscle torn and wet sensation of blood spraying everywhere, hot and dark and endless, ended with the last thump of her head as it landed somewhere nearby.

A memory. It had felt like a memory.

That was when she remembered how Arzhen had returned after failing to claim the Dragon Lord’s corpse.

He had looked just like she did now. Hysterical, pale, his eyes wide with a terror he couldn’t explain. He had babbled about the dragon being alive.

She had thought he was simply shaken. Traumatized by a failed mission and meeting the supposedly dead Dragon Lord himself. But now, looking at their similar reflections in the mirror, she wondered.

Was this the same predicament? Two people struck down by the same thing at the same moment? But what could have caused it? A dragon’s smite, if such a thing even existed?

Some divine punishment for—for what? What had either of them done to deserve this?

No. No, no, no.

Just now, she had also received another vision.

This one was different from the memory of her death. This was a true vision. But... she hadn’t received this in her previous life. Especially not twice, because this was the second time.

She saw her again. That little black-haired girl.

When was she supposed to appear again?

Ruby’s eyes widened as the vision’s warning crystallized in her mind.

Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Didn’t she—that girl, she was supposed to appear after Damon Iondora became Emperor!

Ruby’s already pale face went paler still, the blood draining from her cheeks until she looked less like a living woman and more like a marble statue of one.

She had failed to accuse Damon of the Emperor’s murder. The killer was still unknown, whoever they were.

Ruby had never thought about this before. She had never connected the threads. But now she felt that the little girl’s appearance was somehow tied to Damon’s rise to power.

Then, if this kept going, if Damon continued his ascent unchecked, wouldn’t that girl appear soon? Wouldn’t everything she had tried to prevent come crashing down around her?!

Right then, Lady Sees’s advice surfaced in her mind.

She needed to prove herself. She needed to predict more disasters, more calamities, more deaths. She needed to be so undeniably, unassailably accurate that no one would ever dare brand her a fake.

She needed to establish herself before that little girl appeared.

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