- Kyle Valtier’s POV -
A brutal cold—one that did not belong to the world of the living—was the first thing that pulled from the depths of my coma. A cold that stabbed my spine like needles of poisoned ice.
I opened my eyes with extre difficulty, as if my eyelids had been sewn shut with threads of dried mud and coagulated blood.
The sky of Erebus was still drowned in a dark gray, but the torrential rain that had nearly drowned had stopped, leaving behind a faint drizzle and winds howling through the rocky crevices like the souls of children being tortured in hell.
It was late at night, and darkness devoured everything.
I sat up slowly, my muscles screaming with a pain beyond tearing—it felt like flesh being peeled away from bone.
"I’m still... alive?"
I muttered, my voice hoarse, rough, and broken like the grinding of millstones crushing the air.
There was no joy in my tone at surviving—only bitter disbelief.
Survival that tasted like absolute humiliation.
I raised my trembling hand to my face.
My numb fingers traced the edges of the black mask with the mocking blue smile.
I pulled it off slowly and tossed it beside into the mud.
I inhaled the cold, raw air—unfiltered by the mask I had hidden behind.
The frost slapped against my bare face, confirming that I had not left this hell.
My body was still here... but my soul—my soul had remained there, crushed beneath the feet of that entity.
I looked at my other hand.
I was still gripping my Glock with a convulsive force that had cut off the blood flow in my joints.
I lifted it in the dim darkness and slowly pulled out the magazine.
Empty. Not a single bullet remained.
I had emptied it entirely into the skulls of the Ash Hounds and the Rock Ghouls.
I slid the empty magazine back in with complete lethargy.
A gun? Eitra-infused bullets? Combat tactics? How ridiculous these things were!
They were nothing but plastic toys we humans arrogantly used to convince ourselves that we had a chance.
This scrap of tal held no weight in the scale of cosmic entities that folded space like paper.
"I’ll beco Eitra bullets later..." I muttered with a faint, dead smile, mocking my past promises to myself.
What Eitra? The J-rank Eitra that I used to climb to G? It was nothing but a candle trying to illuminate a black hole.
I leaned my exhausted back against the cold, wet rock behind and sat cross-legged in the mud.
My analytical mind—completely shut down by the shock of terror—began to pulse slowly, sickly, trying to piece together the fragnts of the puzzle that had nearly erased my existence monts ago.
What was that thing?
Was it an SS-rank monster? If so, then human classifications were nothing but a bad joke.
Ranks A and below dealt with physical strength, destroying buildings, burning forests.
They were disasters, yes—but the legends whispered in the alleys of Elysium about S-rank and above (SS and SSS) spoke of sothing else.
Entities at those levels did not break rocks...
They broke laws.
They broke mathematics.
They shattered the boundaries of logic.
I thought back to those nightmarish monts.
Was it a coincidence that every ti I looked at it... violet lightning illuminated the sky?
Impossible.
The lightning had not been a natural phenonon; it was as if the world itself, in utter submission, lit up like a stage to highlight the existence of that entity.
As if nature itself was kneeling, forcing to see it.
And what about my loss of hearing?
The rain was lashing the mud, the wind was howling—but I heard nothing except dead silence.
Absolute silence... except for one sound: the crack of its neck bones.
I heard the dry snap of its neck from fifty ters away with perfect clarity!
That was physically impossible.
It wasn’t deafness—it was a violation of reality.
That creature had decided to steal every sound around , stripping the world of its frequencies, allowing to hear only what it wanted to hear.
It distorted space, erased distance, and approached without taking a single step.
"It wasn’t chasing ..." I muttered, a wave of philosophical nausea washing over —the nausea of realizing our true scale in this universe.
"It was playing with distance. It folded reality, stole sound, manipulated lightning... then let live. Why? Where is the logic?"
There was no logic. That was the harshest lesson.
"There is nothing logical about this sick world..." I wiped my face with my dirty hands, saring it with Erebus mud.
"Physical laws, equations, survival strategies, human ambitions, guilds... they’re all just paper structures we build to hide the truth that we live in a slaughterhouse run by insane transcendents."
I looked around into the pitch-black darkness. Black mountains surrounded like the walls of an eternal prison.
And then, a different kind of fear struck .
The terror of absolute disorientation.
Where am I?
I had run blindly.
I ran in hysterical escape from its smooth face, never looking at any landmarks, never morizing any path.
I had no idea where I was now within the vast Erebus mountain range.
I rembered the cursed mandatory mission.
Retrieve the Forgotten Blade from the Deep Tunnels.
"The Deep Tunnels..." I let out a dry, hopeless laugh. "Where are they? Are they near the bloody waterfall I left behind? Did I run away from them? Or did I run toward them without realizing it? I’m a blind man stumbling inside the guts of a beast, not knowing where its heart lies."
I didn’t know whether I was ters away from my goal or hundreds of kiloters in the opposite direction.
I was completely lost in the most dangerous place on the planet.
One question—heavy and poisoned—rose to the surface of my consciousness: Do I continue?
And is there really a choice?
I examined my situation. I was standing in an unknown dark corridor inside a cosmic labyrinth.
I had only two paths—and neither had a real exit.
"Two paths..." I whispered to the wind brushing my wet hair, my voice carrying the wisdom of pure despair.
"The first path is surrender. Go back—or stay here until I freeze or get devoured by the Ash Hounds. That ans the system will mark as a failure. It will withdraw the Eitra from my body, and I’ll die a humiliating clinical death by the decision of a red screen."
I swallowed my dry saliva, which felt like razor blades in my throat.
"And the second path... is to move forward in this blindness. To continue searching for a tunnel I don’t know the location of—one that might be guarded by an army from the bloody waterfall, or worse than that long-limbed entity... just to obtain a sword I might not even live long enough to touch."
I closed my eyes, surrendering to the truth of my situation.
Neither path led to survival.
Both led to death.
It was like being trapped in a glass cell slowly filling with water, while your jailer stood outside holding a hamr, offering you a sadistic choice: do you prefer to drown slowly... or have shatter the glass over your head so the shards crush you while the current tears you apart?
You are not choosing to live.
You are only choosing the shape of the coffin you will wear.
But... dying by the decision of an electronic system implanted in my mind felt unbearably humiliating.
If I was going to die, let the monsters of Erebus tear apart.
I would leave my corpse to them—but I would not give the red screen the satisfaction of executing .
And as my mind sank into the deepest oceans of bleak philosophy, contemplating death and nothingness... I was struck.
Struck by a crude, rciless biological truth.
A truth that dragged all my cosmic theories back into the mud.
My throat made a sound like sandpaper scraping.
My lips were cracked, bleeding dried blood that I peeled away with my teeth.
"I feel... thirsty..."
I muttered with imnse difficulty, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth like a piece of dead flesh.
What bitter irony.
Monts ago, I was dissecting the absurdity of existence and contemplating the inevitability of death—and now...
Now I was ready to sell my soul, to trade all my philosophies, for a single drop of water.
The cosmic entity had let live—but my fragile human body had decided to kill with dehydration.
I stood up, swaying like a drunk man to whom the gates of hell had just been opened.
I leaned against the cold rock wall to support my broken body that refused to obey my commands.
I was lost.
I was broken.
I was powerless.
But...
I was very thirsty.
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