The compass pulled me forward with an insistent tug, its needle unwavering.

The eye-glass bracelet hummed against my skin, occasionally sending pulses of acceleration through my limbs that made the world blur around me. The spider-watch ticked steadily at my wrist, its mechanical legs flexing against my flesh as if impatient to rewind me.

I moved through aisles I'd never seen before—sections selling clouds in bottles, memories in jars, and dreams woven into tapestries. The further I walked, the more the products changed, becoming stranger, more conceptual, less bound by the rules of physical reality.

Eventually, the compass led me to a blank concrete wall at the end of an aisle labeled "Permanent Solutions to Temporary Problems." The needle pointed directly at the featureless surface, spinning in small circles as if confused by the obstruction.

I placed my hand against the wall, feeling nothing but smooth, hard concrete. "This can't be right," I muttered, tapping the compass. The needle continued its insistent pointing.

Frustrated, I took a step back, my hand instinctively moving to the 2D Fractalizer knife at my belt. The blade had never failed me in all my time hunting in these endless aisles. Perhaps...

I drew the weapon, its impossibly thin two dimensional surface catching the light on its flat side as I raised it. With a swift, practiced motion, I slashed at the wall. The knife cut through it like it wasn't there, leaving a perfect line in the surface. I continued cutting, carving a door-sized rectangle. When I pushed against the section I'd cut, it fell away, revealing a dark passage beyond.

The compass needle steadied, pointing into the darkness.

"Here goes nothing," I murmured, stepping through the opening I'd created.

The passage beyond was narrow, the walls close enough to brush my shoulders as I moved forward. Unlike the brightly lit aisles of the Supercenter, this corridor was dim, the only illumination coming from faint phosphorescent moss growing along the ceiling. The air felt different too—stale, as if it hadn't been disturbed in centuries.

I walked for what felt like hours, the passage occasionally turning or branching, but the compass always guiding me true, pointing the way forward. Eventually, I began to notice a change—a freshness to the air, a subtle breeze carrying scents I hadn't encountered in what felt like years. The smell of earth, of plants, of... outside.

The passage widened, and ahead, I could see a rectangle of gray light. An exit. A way out of the Supercenter's endless expanse.

My pace quickened, hope surging through me for the first time in longer than I could remember. As I approached the exit, I could make out what looked like a set of loading dock doors, hanging crookedly on rusted hinges. A few dying plants and moss hung from the ceiling.

I pushed through the rusted doors, the metal groaning in protest, and stepped out into...

A nightmare.

The parking lot that greeted me wasn't the mundane expanse of asphalt and white lines I might have expected. It was a wasteland—cracked pavement split by jagged fissures that glowed with an eerie violet light, abandoned vehicles overgrown with moss and half-sunk into the ground as if it had partially liquefied beneath them, their metal frames twisted into freaky, half-melted shapes.

The air felt wrong against my skin—heavy, charged with something that made my hair stand on end. The sky overhead was a sickly greenish-gray, thick gray clouds roiling with internal lightning that cast sporadic, disturbing violet flashes across the devastated landscape.

Behind me, the Supercenter itself looked nothing like the pristine big-box store I remembered. Its walls were cracked and pitted, large sections missing entirely to reveal a gaping darkness within made from a fractal, mad arrangement of bricks and metal bulkheads. The sign hung crooked, most of its letters missing, reading only "S- ER-E" in flickering neon.

"What the shit hell happened here?" I asked. "Is this really Nessy's Ferguson? Is this the right path forward?"

No answer came.

The compass needle wavered momentarily, then steadied, pointing toward the distant mountains—or what remained of them. Where there should have been forested slopes, there were only barren, jagged rocks, their surfaces gleaming with that same unsettling violet light that emanated from the cracks in the ground.

I took a tentative step forward, and immediately felt a burning sensation across my exposed skin. Looking down, I watched in horror as my forearms began to flake, tiny pieces of skin peeling away like ash and drifting into the air.

"Shit," I hissed, the pain intensifying with each second of exposure. I looked around desperately for shelter, but there was nowhere to hide from whatever corrosive force permeated the air.

The fog around me began to thin, revealing more of the hellscape this world had become. In every direction, as far as I could see, was desolation—a blasted, ravaged land stripped of life.

The compass tugged me forward, insistent despite the danger. Ferguson. I needed to get to Ferguson. To find a way back to the beginning, as Nessy had instructed in her final message to me.

Gritting my teeth against the pain, I set out across the shattered parking lot, each step taking me further from the Supercenter and deeper into the apocalyptic wasteland that had once been the world I knew.

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The road to Ferguson, once a winding mountain path through pine forests, was now a broken ribbon of asphalt cutting through a dead landscape. Massive fissures split the pavement, some wide enough to swallow a car. Strange crystalline growths erupted from these cracks, their surfaces reflecting the sickly light from above in nauseating patterns.

My skin continued to peel away in dry flakes, when I came too close to the violet fissures, the pain a constant burning that Reconstitution struggled to keep pace with. Whatever entropic force saturated this world, it worked against my ability to heal, slowing the regeneration to a crawl.

I walked for hours, the compass guiding me through the desolation. Occasionally, I passed the remains of vehicles—cars melted into grotesque sculptures, their metal frames warped and twisted as if they'd been caught in some impossible heat. Inside some, I could make out the silhouettes of what might have once been people, now just ashen outlines against blackened interiors.

As I approached the mountain tunnel that led into Ferguson, a new horror awaited me. The reinforced steel gates that had once protected the town's entrance had been torn away, the metal peeled back like the lid of a tin can by something possessing unimaginable strength. The tunnel itself yawned open, a dark wound in the mountainside, its interior lost in shadow.

Taking a deep breath, I steeled myself and stepped into the darkness.

The tunnel was a charnel house. The remains of defensive positions lined the walls—sandbagged machine gun nests now stained dark with what could only be long dried blood. Pradavarian bodies lay scattered throughout, many torn in half or missing limbs, their features frozen in expressions of terror and agony. Rangers, citizens, defenders—all dead, all broken by whatever force had crashed through here.

I picked my way through the carnage, the compass guiding me forward. The air in the tunnel was marginally better than outside—my skin still burned, but the flaking had slowed to a manageable level.

When I emerged from the tunnel's far side, I was greeted by silence. Ferguson Valley, once a vibrant, living community, was now a tomb.

The town spread out below me, a patchwork of ruins beneath the sickly sky. Buildings had collapsed or been torn apart, their frames jutting up like the ribs of long-dead beasts. The streets were littered with debris and more bodies—humans and pradavarians alike, their forms twisted and broken. Windows gaped empty in the buildings that still stood, dark eyes staring out at nothing.

I made my way down into the town proper, following the compass's direction. As I walked through the silent streets, I found more evidence of Ferguson's final stand—barricades hastily erected, now splintered and scattered; weapons lying beside the hands that had wielded them; vehicles and buildings crushed as if slapped by some giant hand.

The ranger station had been completely flattened, the rubble spread over a wide area as if the building had exploded from within. Nearby, I found the remains of what must have been Krysanthea's ranger cruiser, its frame compressed into a cube of metal no larger than a washing machine.

I continued through the ghost town, my heart heavy with the knowledge that everyone—every single person I'd met here, every face in every window, every shopkeeper, ranger and citizen—was gone. Erased. As if they'd never existed except as broken bodies left to decay under the alien sky filled with far too many stars.

Looking up, I saw what was the moon, or what remained of it.

Where the perfect silver disc should have hung, there was now a shattered ruin, a good third of its mass missing as if something had punched clean through it. The remaining pieces hung in the sky like some grotesque asteroids, slowly drifting above me.

The compass led me to what had once been the town square, surrounded by death and destruction.

I felt my hope beginning to drain away. There was nothing of value here. Nobody left to save.

"Fuck," I whispered, tears blurring my vision as I stared up at the shattered moon. My skin continued to peel away, flakes catching the sickly light as they drifted on the entropic breeze.

With trembling fingers, I raised the spider-watch to my face.

Right. Time to use the watch. To get back to a time when Ferguson still lived and breathed.

I pressed the red button on the watch's side, activating its rewind function.

[No Save Point Data Found]

The red text flashed across the watch's display, mocking my desperation. Of course—the watch could only take me back to points where it had been present. Points that had been saved in its memories. And this watch, grown from the Bulwichu tree, had never been in Ferguson.

I wasn't giving up. I turned the small metal dial on the side of the watch, watching as numbers appeared on the display, scrolling upward rapidly: 1.00, 2.00, 5.00, 10.00, eventually reaching 99.99.

The watch seemed to strain against my wrist, the spider legs digging deeper into my flesh as if seeking a stronger connection to my soul. It was adapting, changing, trying to find a way to do what I was asking of it.

I pressed the red button above the dial.

A flash of crimson light enveloped me, so bright it momentarily blinded me. When my vision cleared, I found myself standing in the same location—but everything had changed.

The ruins around me looked older, more decayed. Buildings that had stood partially intact were now little more than piles of rubble. The bodies that had littered the streets were gone, replaced by bleached bones scattered among the debris. Alien vegetation—strange, twisted plants with metallic leaves and glassy stems—had begun to reclaim parts of the town, growing through cracks in the pavement and across the ruins.

It looked as if a hundred years or more had passed in an instant.

"Wrong way," I muttered, the despair in my chest growing heavier.

My clothes began to disintegrate even more rapidly now, joining my flaking skin in the entropic air. Even my shoes crumbled, leaving me standing barefoot on ground that burned my soles with every step.

Gritting my teeth, I raised the watch again. I would not accept this outcome. I would not fail Nessy, not after everything I'd endured.

I tried turning the dial the other way but it wouldn't budge.

Then I remembered Nessy's last words to me 'Keep going forward, no matter what comes!'

I turned the dial again, pushing it harder, forcing it beyond its limits. The tiny wheel groaned under my fingers, the metal straining as I forced it past 99.99. Suddenly, with a small snap, the wheel broke off in my hand.

"Fuck!" I swore as the wheel came apart in my fingers.

On the watch's display, the numbers shifted and warped, eventually resolving into a red, sideways number eight.

[∞]

"Now or never," I whispered, and pressed the red button.

The world around me lurched sickeningly, colors and shapes blurring and stretching as if reality itself was being pulled apart at the seams. Blinding red engulfed me.

[SYSTEM ERROR - END OF LINE]

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