Ronan had lost track of how many times the panel had popped up by now. Pain resistance, plus one, over and over, flashing at the corner of his eye every time the captain landed something. And after enough of them, he finally got what the system was doing.
It wasn’t making the pain go away. Every hit still hurt exactly as much as it should — that part hadn’t changed.
What changed was that he could take it now. He could stay in his head through it instead of folding the second a fist landed.
That was enough to flip the fight. He stopped backing up and started pushing forward — slipped a punch, buried one in the captain’s gut, cracked him across the jaw, caught him in the ribs. Now it was the captain giving ground, stumbling around the deck, that big grin long gone off his face.
One more shot put him down on a knee.
That was when the guy quit playing fair. Ronan saw his eyes drop to the deck, to one of the cutlasses they’d both tossed aside earlier, and he grabbed for it. Came up swinging it straight at Ronan’s chest.
Ronan’s stomach turned over.
’Okay. So this is the part where I die, right?’
The fear hit him fast and real. He knew the scene — knew Thomas was supposed to take the blade here and go down for it. And by now he knew what this place did to him.
’The punches already hurt like hell. Getting a sword through the chest?’ His whole body said no. ’Yeah, I’m not doing that.’
He’d never been stabbed in his life. Not once. So when the captain came at him, he didn’t stand there and take it. He moved on instinct and got out of the way, and the blade went through empty air.
Back in the casting office, nobody saw any of that. All Jenny, Hill, and Felix saw was the kid flinching backward from nothing at all.
Jenny set her pen down. "What’s he doing?" She watched him a second. "He looks like he’s running for his life. You see his face? That’s real fear."
Felix leaned forward. "Yeah, and now he’s dodging, right? Like he doesn’t want to get hit." He glanced at Hill. "You want me to just move him along to the next part?"
"Yeah, go ahead—"
"No." Hill shook his head, eyes on the kid. "Leave him. He’s got it in his head that pirate’s really about to kill him, and he’s playing it exactly how Thomas would. That’s the whole character — he’s feeling Thomas’s fear, fighting for his life like it’s actually happening to him. You don’t see actors get that deep in a room."
Jenny looked back at Ronan, slower this time. He was right. Thomas, in this moment, would be scared to death — that was the point of the scene. "...Huh. I didn’t even think about it like that." A little amazed, she added, "I think we might’ve actually found ourselves a diamond in the rough."
"Yeah, we might have." Hill kept watching. "And that imagination of his isn’t normal. You saw him earlier — took a punch to the head, snapped his neck around like it really landed. Regular actor can’t pull that off." He nodded toward Ronan. "Stunt guys can. They train the muscle control, sell a hit even when nothing touched them. But this kid’s doing it better than stunt guys I’ve worked with." He paused. "Honestly, I’m a little worried he’s actually getting hurt out there."
That gave Felix a chill. "Wait. So earlier, when he almost fell over and said it was ’cause he pictured himself on a ship..." He looked at them. "He wasn’t making that up? He actually felt it?"
Both of them remembered it — the way he’d swayed, the excuse none of them had bought.
Hill’s face went complicated. "Can’t tell you it’s not partly nerves. But yeah — I don’t think he’s making the whole imagination thing up."
Jenny nodded. "And look at him right now. He’s terrified of dying, probably because in his head he’s already feeling the death, the pain." Her eyes stayed on the kid. "That says something."
If Ronan could hear what they were saying, he’d have told them they had it right — he really was scared of dying here. But not only because he was Thomas. It was because he could feel pain in this place.
He knew the scene. He knew none of it was real. It didn’t matter. The pain was real anyway.
His chest heaved, his eyes worn out. ’Am I gonna keep dodging this forever? Damn it. I’m all the way Thomas in here — and I’m still me under it, still Ronan, still scared of getting hurt.’
Right as he thought it, he caught the captain’s face. The guy was smirking now. And something felt wrong.
"No—" He spun around. Too late. A crewman stood behind him, and the man’s sword was already buried in his back, the point of it standing out through the front of his chest. "Urgh... ack..." It caught him completely off guard.
With the blade through him, he couldn’t even get the words out right.
"Cough—" His voice came out wrecked. Veins stood up on his forehead, and cold sweat slid down his cheek.
The pain was past anything he’d ever felt.
’So even if I try to change it, the scene drags Thomas to the same ending. He dies no matter what.’ He ground his teeth. ’God, this hurts.’
[Blow endured: chest, pierced. | Pain Resistance +3 (chest)]
He wanted to curse at the notification. Blood was soaking through his shirt around the blade, and the pain was unbearable — but he knew there’d be nothing on that office floor for the others to see. His hand shook as he closed it around the hilt in his chest, and his legs gave out under him.
He was already here, already dying. If this was the end, he’d rather go out as Thomas than as some extra who broke character on the floor of a casting room. He didn’t even know whether the death was real — but walking away from the role now meant losing the only shot he had left, and that was its own kind of dying. So he reached for Thomas’s lines anyway.
His mouth opened and closed. Nothing came. Then he forced it out, the words breaking apart on their own as the pain shook them loose.
"M-my Rose..." Even her name took everything he had. "I love you. I always have — since the very first day." A breath that wouldn’t fill his chest. "So live. Live for the both of us now... and don’t you weep for me, my Rose."
Jenny flinched at the last words. Then she looked at his face, and her hand came up to her mouth. Her throat had gone tight and hot, and it took everything she had to keep the tears from spilling over.
And it wasn’t only her. Hill and Felix had fallen for it too, all the way.
They knew he was acting. It was a read, an audition, nothing more than that. But you’d never have guessed it from watching him — the body, the face, every part of him sold a man in real pain, a man who knew his life was running out.
His eyes were the worst of it.
People always said the eyes were the window to the soul, and looking into his right now, the three of them finally understood the phrase. It was hard to put into words. They were the eyes of a man leaving the world.
And then the light did go out of them. Tears slipped down his face on their own, his lips still trembling around the last of the words. His eyelids dragged down, heavier and heavier, until they closed for good. One last tear ran down to his neck.
Then he stopped breathing.
For a moment, none of the three could move. They’d just watched one actor carry the closing scene of an entire film — one man, no one across from him, nothing but Felix reading the other lines off a page — and it had leveled them.
Jenny was the first to speak, her voice rough. "Get his contract ready." She didn’t look away from Ronan. "Whatever it takes — I’m not letting him leave this building."