Luke felt his body dissolve as he drifted through a space flooded with blue light. A sharp headache blood behind his eyes, the kind that ca from knowledge being forced into his mind all at once. He rembered leaping into the portal… and then being sowhere else entirely, yet sohow still caught mid teleportation.
The brightness thinned, surrendering to darkness. His body began to reappear. He didn't understand how he could see anything in that pitch black void, but when he focused, he noticed a glow, soft and white, pulsing like a heartbeat. His soul core. He recognized it instantly; it was the sa vision he'd experienced when learning how to strip marks from a soul.
The sphere throbbed, and from its radiance, matter began to bloom. Flesh sprouted like a seedling pushing out of soil. Veins ford. Red blood. Black blood. Tissue knitting itself together around the glowing center. He watched from outside his own body as it built itself layer by layer. This was the Rank advancent… and it was literal. His body was being rebuilt from nothing, sculpted into sothing new, seamless, without flaws, born entirely from that strange living light within his core.
Suddenly the perspective shifted. He was back inside his own head, seeing through his own eyes. He looked down just in ti to watch his hands forming: bones first, then tendons, then muscles, then flesh rising like a tide to cover them.
Mana coursed through him. He felt it moving the sa way he felt blood in his veins, warm, alive, aware. When he tried to step forward, the darkness shattered around him and gravity returned violently.
He fell. Branches slapped into him on the way down, snapping beneath his weight. He crashed from one tree to another until he finally hit the ground in a thud that should have broken bones. It didn't hurt. Not even a little.
Only a lingering headache throbbed behind his temples. He felt, distinctly, his brain finishing its reconstruction… then silence. A faint buzzing lingered for a few seconds, and then even that faded.
He was back. Sowhere new. Sowhere real. Not a dream, because he could finally breathe again.
"Oh gods, finally. Finally we're sowhere safe where nothing is actively trying to kill us," Artemis said.
Luke pushed himself up. "Where am I?"
This wasn't his room in Maine. Not even close. For a wild mont he wondered if his house had sohow been demolished during the teleportation. But one glance at the endless forest around him killed that idea instantly. Too many trees. Too dense. Too old. Nothing human built could hide this much wilderness.
He looked down at his hand and saw the item he'd bought: the wand ring, resting against his skin like an ordinary piece of jewelry.
"At least that wasn't a dream…" He rose to his feet and imdiately felt odd.
His body was heavy. Very heavy. But when he moved, that heaviness flipped into sothing featherlight. He took a step, then another, and suddenly he was much farther from where he ant to be. His body responded too quickly, as if overclocked. Luke stumbled straight into a tree. The trunk shuddered.
What?
He stepped back, heartbeat picking up as the realization hit him: he was stronger. Much stronger. His vision sharpened with a clarity he didn't even have words for. It was like he'd gone his whole life with HD and soone had just switched him to 8K. He could see every detail, every texture, every microscopic crease on his own knuckles. When he focused, his pores beca crisp points of detail, each one distinct.
"That's… creepy," he whispered.
When he glanced at his fingernails, he noticed they were a bit long. Then a curtain of hair slid into his vision as he looked down. That caught him off guard. His hair had grown during the tutorial, sure, but not this much. He figured it made sense, though. This was an entirely new body, restored and rebuilt from the old one. His skin looked paler too.
A faint burn pulsed in his abdon, and he beca aware of the core nestled within his soul. Along with that sensation ca an instinctive understanding of his mana, how it flowed through him. The core was the heart of the soul. It didn't pump blood, but mana. From it ca his stamina, his HP, his mana pool. Every part of his power originated there. The System lived there as well. Every notification, every window he saw, all of it was a translation of that strange internal energy.
And he understood even more. The core was like a small fla. A divine spark sitting inside him. Now that he could see it naturally, see the very nucleus of his soul, he realized he had actually taken a step forward in evolution. He wasn't just a mortal anymore. He was an apprentice on the path toward becoming a god.
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"Okay, sothing is very wrong," Artemis said. "This does not look like a suburban house with a welco-back party waiting. I think your cosmic bad luck is acting up again."
Luke heard voices echoing from deeper in the forest. He pulled up his bars for stamina, mana, and HP. Everything was full. He took off running through the trees with a throwing knife drawn from the holster on his leg.
"You're seriously going to run around with a knife in your hand? What if you landed in soone's backyard? You're going to sprint around like a lunatic holding a weapon? And that hair—along with the branches and leaves stuck in it—does not scream friendly neighbor," Artemis muttered.
Luke slid the knife back into its holster.
"I think we ended up in the wrong place," he said.
"Oh no," Artemis whispered. "Gods, please don't tell this unlucky brat dropped us into an alternate world."
"This isn't my house. Or my street," Luke called back as he kept running. "And there wasn't a forest this big anywhere near the Baumanns' place."
"It's your fault! All of this is your fault," Artemis snapped.
"My fault?" He stopped and looked around, listening. Even his hearing had changed; he was picking up dozens of new sounds.
"Everything turned out fine. We escaped the tutorial," he said, focusing again.
"You only got out of there by a miracle. So ridiculous kind of plot armor," she shot back.
"In the end, both of us went through the portal at the last second. Pretty standard for us," he muttered.
He quieted his breathing and listened. Eventually, his ears filtered out the right noise. He moved toward the source and spotted a woman standing there, a hatchet in hand.
"Are you insane? We almost died because of your stupidity! Why did you have to help Mr. Shitpants? Why didn't you just go through the damn portal? Why did you stall? You only put in life or death situations!" Artemis ranted.
More sounds rose around them. People were shouting nearby, sothing like a celebration.
"Alright, alright. I promise I won't put you through anything like that again. I think…" he answered, trying to calm her down. "But how was I supposed to know the throne was going to malfunction?"
Luke took a step closer. That place wasn't his street. And there was absolutely no universe in which his quiet, boring neighborhood would ever include a woman casually holding an axe.
"With your track record of bad luck and attracting insane situations, you should be the one expecting this kind of crap. At least we're on Earth now. I hope you calm down for a while, enough diving into danger."
He brushed off branches and leaves tangled in his hair, realizing he probably looked like so feral creature crawling out of the woods. The woman stared at him as if he had materialized out of thin air, equally startled and ready to swing that axe if he so much as twitched wrong.
"Excuse ," Luke said, raising his hands slightly in a non-threatening gesture. "This is going to sound a bit strange, but… are we in Maine?"
***
"New World?" he echoed, blinking in surprise.
The woman in front of him kept rambling, clearly rattled, spilling words about protocols and procedures and a nine-year project involving kaiju of all things. But he caught the important part. This definitely wasn't his Maine. This was the New World.
He had made it back to Earth… just on the opposite side of the planet. A continent so far away it might as well have been another reality.
"Oh gods, we landed in Jurassic World," Artemis muttered. "Why do you always have to be this unlucky?"
Luke bolted through the trees until the forest opened into what looked like a settlent. Dozens of wooden houses spread out ahead, crude yet sturdy. And more importantly… people. Actual people.
His heart kicked as he recognized a few faces. Survivors. Tutorial participants. Many wore gear crafted by the blacksmiths and artisans back in the Bastion. So even had the Bastion emblem proudly stamped on their armor.
He sprinted through the crowd. People were laughing, crying, hugging each other, so dropping to their knees in prayer. It didn't take long for the picture to form: they had all returned to Earth together, dropped in the sa place by the portal. A village in the New World. A hocoming, but not his ho.
A knot twisted in his chest. Two worries hit at once. Luke yanked two throwing knives from his holster and kept running.
Jonathan.
He had to find him. He was going to end that bastard. Luke dashed between clusters of people, ignoring the ones calling after him. A few of those wearing the sa uniform as the woman, Judith, he recalled, noticed him leaping between houses and imdiately moved to follow.
Luke scaled the nearest rooftop in one fluid motion. From there he scanned the sea of bodies below, close to eighteen hundred people cramd into the area, and beyond them the thick band of forest circling the settlent.
He jumped to another roof. His gaze skimd every face he could catch, hunting for the one man he needed to find. Jonathan had used so kind of skill to steal Quinn's appearance… which ant he could probably change faces whenever he wanted.
If he can swap faces, finding him in this crowd is… impossible.
Luke gritted his teeth and leapt again.
"Hey! Knife guy!" a man shouted from below. "Get down from there! I promise we'll explain everything!"
Luke didn't respond. Sothing else had caught his eye.
A familiar silhouette stood on a roof across from him, hands shaped like binoculars in front of her face. Except with her skill, they weren't just a gesture. Her hands actually worked like binoculars.
Evangeline. It looked like she had spotted him as well. Luke headed toward her without hesitation. There was soone else, soone far more important, he had to find in this place. He needed to know if Allison was alive.
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