"Every power has a price.The only question is: who's paying the debt?"
After "That's Ten," nothing rewound.
No snap.No cold rush.No reset.
Just me… lying on the mat… blinking at the ceiling lights as they buzzed like angry insects above me.
Alive.Bruised.But still here.
I had let the fight go—on purpose—to test if the voice was bluffing.
It wasn't.
The crowd thought I'd been clipped. A weak chin. A fluke. They saw a man who finally ran out of luck.
But I saw something else.
I saw freedom.
Or so I thought.
The dreams started the next night.
Not nightmares. Those I could handle. These were worse.
They were memories—but not mine.
Different fights. Different bodies. Different voices screaming inside my skull.
I'd wake up gasping, drenched in sweat, hands balled into fists, blood vessels broken in my eyes like I'd just gone ten rounds in my sleep.
Each dream ended the same way:
A whisper in the dark."You're not the first."
That stuck with me.
"You're not the first."
Which meant—what?
Someone else had been through this?
Someone else had died, rewound, and crawled their way through the same sick game I was playing?
If so, I had questions.
A hundred of them.
And only one name that might hold answers:
Marcellus Grady.
He was a fighter—once. Long before my time.
The kind of legend you don't see on TV anymore. Fought in back-alley tournaments, no gloves, no rounds. Only rules: first blood or first body.
Grady disappeared a decade ago. Mid-prime. Vanished after a fight in Manila where both men were knocked out cold—simultaneously. The other guy never woke up.
Grady did.
But he walked out of the arena barefoot, shirtless, and mumbling numbers under his breath. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven.
Then… nothing. No interviews. No next fight.
Gone.
Until I started dreaming about his fights.
Fights I'd never seen.Fights I'd never lived.But knew like I'd bled in them.
So I found him.
Took three days. One bribe. A fake passport photo. A lot of questions asked in the kind of gyms where blood never makes it to the floor.
Turns out, Grady wasn't dead.
Just broken.
He lived in the basement of an old boxing gym in Baton Rouge. The place didn't even have a name. Just a rusted sign that read "CONDUCT CROWNS THE SOUL."
Whatever the hell that meant.
I stepped inside and smelled sweat, leather, and something else—like rotting wood. The lights flickered overhead. Nobody looked up. They were too busy hammering pads or bleeding on worn-out mats.
A wiry kid pointed me toward the back.
"You here for the ghost?" he asked.
I didn't answer.
Marcellus Grady sat in the dark, on a folding chair, wrapped in two sweatshirts despite the heat.
He didn't look like a legend.
He looked like someone who had seen God… and flinched.
His hands trembled in his lap. His eyes were glassy and unfocused, one pupil blown wide.
But when I stepped into the room, he looked up like he knew me.
"Ten," he rasped. "That's the limit."
I didn't speak at first. Just stood there, heart pounding like a war drum in my chest.
"You feel it too, don't you?" he said. "The pull. Like time ain't yours anymore."
I nodded.
He smiled. Not warmly.
More like someone who'd waited too long to be proven right.
"You on number eleven yet?"
"No," I said. "I stopped. After ten. It… told me to run."
His eyes sharpened for a split second.
"Smart. Most don't."
Grady told me the truth.
Or his version of it.
The loop isn't a gift. It's a loan.
A contract written in blood and seconds. You get ten. That's it. Ten losses. Ten deaths. Ten chances to fix your mistakes.
But every rewind costs something. Not just your sanity. Something deeper. Something spiritual.
He called it "soul-tax."
"You don't notice it at first," he said, rubbing his temples. "You just start feeling hollow. Like pieces of you aren't coming back with you."
I asked what happens after ten.
He looked at me like I should already know.
"Then comes the collection."
"From who?" I asked.
"Don't know. Never saw it. But I felt it. Like gravity. Like drowning from the inside."
He tried to cheat the loop.
Tried to lose fights in the gym, low-risk matches. Even faked deaths.
Didn't work.
"You can't trick it," he said. "You lose a real fight? One that matters? That's when it resets. That's when it watches."
"Watches?"
"Oh yeah. You ever feel like someone's in the room? Just outside the light? Watching you rewind?"
I swallowed.
Yes. More than once.
He grinned. "Then you're marked."
Before I left, I asked him something I'd been scared to admit:
"Is there any way out?"
He stared at me, silent for so long I thought he'd fallen asleep.
Then he whispered:
"There's one."
"Tell me."
"You gotta die clean. No rewind. No loop. A real death. One where you don't come back."
"That's the only way?"
"That's the only way to end it."
I drove the rest of the night.
Didn't speak. Didn't stop. Just thought.
If what he said was true, then the voice… the count… the rewinds… they weren't saving me.
They were trapping me.
Letting me climb the mountain just so it could throw me off.
I started noticing things I hadn't before.
People who looked… off.
Too still. Too silent. Like extras in a play who'd forgotten their lines.
One of them made eye contact with me in a parking lot. Her mouth moved—but not like she was talking. Like she was mimicking.
And then I heard it again.
"That's Eleven."
I hadn't fought.
Hadn't died.
But the voice said it anyway.
"That's Eleven."
Which meant...
Someone else had.
Or worse…
The loop wasn't done with me.
Now I have a choice.
Keep running.Try to die clean.Or go deeper.Find out what's waiting at the bottom of the loop.What's collecting the debt.
But if Grady's right…
Then every second I stay alive isn't a gift.
It's a delay.
And the collector is already on its way.