Chapter 128: Can’t I Have Just a Little Light on Me?
"What happened to you over there... my Heroine?"
In the middle of a floor plunged entirely into darkness stood a boy of about fifteen. The darkness was so complete that no walls, no ceiling, not even the ground beneath his feet could be made out, and yet, far from frightening him, it comforted him.
Around him reigned a leaden silence, broken only by the steady sound of a thin trickle of water somewhere farther across the floor.
This floor was the last of his dungeon, the lowest and the deepest. He hadn’t made it to trap anyone or to defend anything, but for himself alone and for his own well-being, because after the short life he had led before this one, it was the place that seemed perfect to him.
He lay there, curled on his side in the very middle of that darkness, knees drawn to his chest, chewing on his thumbnail without even realizing it. His eyes were wide open, but his gaze was elsewhere.
He was watching the entire world, not with his own eyes, but through his skills, and more precisely through the eyes of flies.
And, with his thumb still between his teeth, he was smiling. The corners of his lips curved gently, and his face wore a peaceful, almost happy expression that no one in that darkness could see.
At first, though, he had raged.
Why hadn’t he been chosen as an Overlord? Sure, he had never spoken in the chat, not even once, but he wasn’t comfortable with that kind of thing, and that wasn’t a reason. So why? Why hadn’t the system given him, too, the chance to impose his will on others, instead of always having theirs imposed on him?
He had raged, panicked and blamed himself, and for many days, curled into a ball at the bottom of his dungeon, he had cursed that very system until his voice went hoarse.
Because his first unique skill, [Fly Authority], only let him control flies. He could give them orders and, by having one fly touch another, extend his control from one to the next, and so on.
It was useful, he couldn’t deny that, but wasn’t it, once again, ridiculously weak compared to the so-called terrain reshaping of BlackFlame, whose messages he had read in the chat, or worse still, to Lucas’s time acceleration?
Flies, while others could reshape the earth or bend time. Once again, wasn’t it only natural for him to blame the system?
On Earth, he had never had the chance to read that kind of fiction, or even watch a film, so he knew nothing about it in detail. He still knew such works existed, those stories where ordinary people were thrown into other worlds.
"And those works should be fair, right?" he had muttered one night, his voice hoarse. "If you drop several characters into the same place with different advantages, and some of them cheat, doesn’t the story just become garbage?"
But something else came back to him too, a conversation he had once overheard through a window. It was a debate between two voices he had never been able to put faces to, about the hero of a story and about plot twists.
One of them explained that it made sense for more things to happen to the hero than to anyone else, because the one the reader followed wasn’t some random nobody. He was favored, sure, but also disfavored, and above all, he was the one at the center of everything.
Curled up in his darkness, the boy had gone back to those words again and again.
"So it isn’t me, in this life either?"
"Once again, in this life, I’m simply disfavored by fate?"
"Do I have to stay a side character my whole life... or rather, both my lives?"
"Can’t I have, just a little... some light on me?"
All sorts of questions and conclusions spun in his mind without ever finding an answer that satisfied him. Between his unique skill and the fact that he was just one Dungeon Lord among so many, with nothing special about him, he kept arriving at the same conclusion: in this life again, he would be nothing more than a living being in the shadow of others.
Until that particular day.
That day, he upgraded his dungeon system and unlocked a second unique skill along with it, [Myriad Mind]. It allowed his single consciousness to split itself among all his flies, to see and hear through each one of them, to give them orders and to process all their perceptions at once without his mind ever overflowing.
And the cherry on top? He could now extend his control from one fly to the next, no longer one at a time, but through all of them simultaneously.
His network exploded all at once.
In barely a few days, his flies spread out of his dungeon, then into the surrounding forests, then into the villages, and every new fly touched became a new eye, a new ear. His first unique skill, the one he had despised so much, suddenly made complete sense.
Whether it was the space he could watch or the information he gathered, everything leapt brutally to a whole other level, all the more so since his memory was now perfect and he no longer forgot anything he saw or heard.
So the questions from before, his doubts and everything else faded little by little, leaving him with nothing but amusement.
"So maybe I’m not disfavored in this world?" he breathed.
It was only a doubt, but it was enough for now, and it warmed his heart a little. So he kept going, and as he expanded, he naturally marked every key location with his flies: the cities, the roads, the guilds and anything that could hold even the slightest importance.
That was how he found the heroes of this story.
He was enjoying following them, watching their fights, their quarrels and their small victories, being amused by everything while gathering information on each of them, when a sudden pang squeezed his heart.
His smile vanished, and his heart slowly grew cold as he watched a woman with white hair and mauve eyes.
He followed her for days on end, from one fly to the next. No matter what she undertook in that city, no matter what she did, everything went her way and everything worked out for her, without a single obstacle ever managing to stop her. More than that, he suspected she had what he had envied so much at the beginning, the title of Overlord that had been denied to him.
𝑓𝓇𝖾ℯ𝔀𝔢𝒃𝙣𝒐𝚟𝖾ℓ.𝖈𝕠𝘮
So when she opened her [Status] in front of one of his flies, he understood.
Her status, the way she acted, her followers each stronger than the last, everything she gave off placed her above every other hero he watched, natives of this world or invaders, and above himself.
"I’m just one among so many..." he murmured. "She’s the true Heroine of this world."
"I’m only her shadow."
"She is the light."
Something cracked inside him at that revelation. He stayed still in the dark for a long time, his thumb still against his teeth, and when he finally moved, he was sure of himself, he knew, he finally understood.
"I wasn’t brought into this second life to become a hero... to become the light."
His heart grew colder still.
"I’m only her shadow. Her shadow."
And that conversation, the one from the window, the one that had filled him with so much doubt, came back to him then in full, clearer than ever.
In his first life, he had only ever known one room. His parents had kept him locked inside it from beginning to end, confined between walls he knew by heart, and of everything that existed outside, he had only ever had a window.
It was through that window that he had watched the seasons change, and through it that he had heard children laughing in the street, the footsteps of passersby and the conversations that drifted up to him before vanishing again. He spent hours with his forehead against the glass, listening to lives that weren’t his, knowing that no one on the other side even knew he existed.
That day, the window was open, and those two voices had stopped right below it. He had listened without daring to breathe, afraid they would leave too soon.
Until now, he had only held on to the first half of what they said: the hero favored as much as disfavored, at the center of everything. But now the rest came back to him. The voice had added that it was precisely those misfortunes and trials that made the story beautiful, and that made the hero shine brighter than everyone else.
Then the voices had moved away, and he had stayed there against the window long after they had gone quiet.
That night, and every night after, he had imagined being that hero. He pictured himself leaving that room, walking among people and becoming the one everyone looked at, the one the light fell on. It was the only dream he had ever had, and he had kept it until the end of that too-short life without ever getting to live it.
And now, at the bottom of his floor, he finally understood that the dream had never been his.
That hero was her, and he was meant to be the one who would make her shine even brighter, through the trials he would place in her path.
After all, he was only a cog, a being of the shadows.
So he acted.
His flies had gathered information effortlessly, because who paid attention to what they said, or to the documents they opened, in front of mere flies? But everything they had seen and heard, he had always kept to himself. He had watched the world from afar, in silence, never saying a word to anyone, just as he had done behind his window his whole first life.
He opened the global chat.
It was where everyone had first exchanged words, where he had written and deleted message after message without ever daring to send them, and where he had watched the others have fun and talk among themselves, once again from the other side of a pane of glass.
He stayed still in front of it for a long time, his thumb against his teeth, his hands shaking and his heart hammering against his ribs. All the while, the room from his first life was there, with its walls, its window and that door he had never been able to open.
For her, he stepped through that door.
His fingers trembled over the words, but this time he didn’t erase them, and he wrote his first message.
For the first time in both his lives, he was no longer watching others from afar; he was speaking to them. Everything his flies had seen, he laid out before their eyes, and he brought pressure down on the entire continent and on every so-called hero he had found.
They all had to know, and they all had to become cogs like him, shadows in service of this story’s light.
And when he had found himself face to face with her, he had even told her he was doing all of it for fun.
It was only a role, or at least, that was what he thought. He had given himself the light, detached tone of someone amused by another’s story, simply to pass the time.
Back at the bottom of his floor, he stayed there, curled up, reliving the scene over and over with his perfect memory: his own tone, his own words and the way she had looked at him.
"Did I play my part well?" he breathed.
He waited for the shame to come, or the fear, or that familiar urge to disappear. But none of it came.
Instead, his heart was pounding so hard he could hear it over the trickling water, and a warmth he didn’t recognize slowly spread through his chest, then down his arms, all the way to his trembling fingertips.
Slowly, he raised his hand to his mouth, and beneath his fingers he felt his lips curved upward.
He was smiling.
"Am I... am I having fun...?" he whispered into the dark, in a voice that didn’t quite sound like his own. "Me...?"
And on that question, his heart pounding, he continued his expansion. He kept learning through his flies and following the important side characters, but above all, he followed his main character without ever letting her go, not even once.
That was why he was so surprised when something happened that he hadn’t been able to follow, what she had called a meeting of the Overlords, and by the changes she displayed when she came back.
"What happened to you over there... my Heroine?"