Chapter 33: Late
Darkness pressed down, total and still, like a sleep so deep it had emptied itself of every dream, every voice, every trace of time passing.
Bing.
A mechanical voice echoed through the void.
➤[Warning...]
➤[Host behavioural deviation detected.]
➤[Nightwalker Fragment Synchronisation: 9.9%]
Damien couldn’t move. He wasn’t even sure he still had a body.
➤[Anomaly Detected.]
➤[Deleted Class Signature Located.]
➤[Anomaly Deletion Process Initiated.]
The darkness pressed in on him, heavy and close, like a hand closing slowly around his chest. Something was trying to pull him apart from the inside, memory by memory.
Every memory, every thought, every trace of his existence. Something was trying to erase them.
➤[Deletion Failed.]
Silence fell again, then half a second later.
➤[Retrying...]
➤[Deletion Failed.]
Again.
➤[Retrying...]
➤[Deletion Failed.]
The words kept coming, over and over, each one landing like a fresh migraine behind his eyes.
Ringing filled his skull. His consciousness surfaced slowly, dragged upward through it. His fingers twitched. His eyelids trembled.
He forced his eyes open. White light flooded in and he threw an arm over his face, flinching the way you’d flinch from a slap you didn’t see coming.
The ringing didn’t stop. The words kept looping somewhere behind his skull.
"...Stop," he muttered, pressing both palms over his ears. It did nothing. The voice lived inside him, not outside.
His vision cleared in pieces. Blue sky. Green grass. A breeze moving through it. The same clearing where the tutorial had ended.
Something was wrong here, and he knew it before he understood why.
"Mr John?" His voice cracked halfway through the name.
Nothing answered.
He sat up too fast and the world tilted. He waited it out, jaw clenched, then tried again.
"Rahul?"
Silence.
"Imran?"
Only the notifications filled the quiet where their voices should have been.
His heart pounded. The clearing stretched empty in every direction. No packs, no footprints, no scuffed grass where three other people had stood minutes ago. Just him.
"...Hello?" The word came out small, and it didn’t even echo right, swallowed flat by air that felt thin, like sound itself didn’t want to travel here.
No birds. No insects. Even the wind sounded like it was coming from somewhere very far away.
Cold settled low in his stomach, the kind of feeling that shows up right before your body understands what your mind hasn’t caught up to yet.
He got to his feet, swaying once. "JOHN!"
His shout rolled out across the field and never came back.
He ran. Behind trees, over the low rise at the field’s edge, down into the treeline and back out again, searching the same stretch of ground like the answer might be hiding in a spot he’d already checked twice.
Five minutes later he stopped, hands on his knees, chest heaving. The system had erased everyone in this field but him.
Then, all at once, the notifications stopped.
The quiet that followed sat heavier than the noise had.
"...What happened?" He said it to the sky, like the sky might actually answer.
His breathing slowed. "Profile."
A familiar blue screen bloomed into view.
➤[Player Profile]
[Name: Damien]
[Alias: N/A]
[Level: 10]
[Class: Nightwalker (Uncommon)]
[Titles:]
• Boss Killer 17th (Legendary)
• Player Killer 99th (Legendary)
[Strength: 13]
[Endurance: 10]
[Intelligence: 23]
[Stamina: 13]
[Dexterity: 10]
[Agility: 10]
[Speed: 17]
[Mana: 10]
➤[Available Stat Points: 09]
Damien stared. "...Legendary titles?"
He hadn’t expected one title, let alone two. And certainly not legendary ones.
He selected the first.
➤[Boss Killer 17th]
Rank: Legendary
Requirement:
Become one of the first one hundred players to eliminate the Boss of the Second Tutorial single-handedly.
Effect:
• While battling Boss-class enemies...
All stats are +15%.
Damien blinked.
"...Seventeenth."
How many players had entered these tutorials? Billions? And somehow, he ranked seventeenth.
He touched the second. His stomach dropped before he’d even finished reading it.
➤[Player Killer 99th]
Rank: Legendary
Requirement:
Become one of the first hundred players to kill another player.
Effect:
• While battling ordinary players...
All Attributes -10%
• While battling players bearing the Murderer or Player Killer title.
All attributes +10%
Damien stared blankly. "...Player Killer?"
He whispered the words aloud. "I never..." The sentence died halfway out of his mouth.
He remembered. The dagger. The three of them, one after another. A forced revival dressed up as violence, so he could heal them before it was too late. He hadn’t meant it as murder.
"They weren’t..." He looked at the title again. "They weren’t really dead..."
The system apparently disagreed. Death was death; even temporary death counted.
A bitter smile appeared on Damien’s face.
The reward came with a cost built into it. Weaker against ordinary players, stronger only against people who’d done what he’d done. A leash and a blade handed over together.
He closed the window. His thoughts wouldn’t settle. Where was everyone? What deletion? Deletion of what, exactly?
His fingers curled slowly into fists. "Nightwalker..." Some instinct told him this started with his class. He just didn’t know how yet.
Bing.
➤[Anomaly deletion is impossible under the current system version.]
His pupils shrank. The next line arrived before the first had finished sinking in.
➤[Host Identified as Carrier of the Anomaly.]
"...Host?"
The word sat wrong in his chest, a colder label than player or survivor, as if the system had caught something living inside it and now needed to deal with the problem.
➤[Current Resolution Accepted.]
His pulse spiked. "What resolution?" His own voice sounded distant to him now, like it belonged to someone standing a few feet away.
The system answered almost immediately, and the ground under him seemed to lose some of its weight.
➤[The host of the anomaly shall be returned to Birth Planet.]
➤[Destination Confirmed.]
➤[Earth-69]
"...Earth... sixty-nine?" His voice echoed weakly.
Why add a number? Were there... More Earths?
His mind filled with questions; none were answered.
Instead... A final window appeared before him.
➤[Departure Scheduled]
➤[Returning Host to Birth Planet: Earth-69]
➤[Departure in:]
➤[10]
"...Wait." His voice sounded very small in a very large field.
➤[9]
"John! Rahul! Imran!" He screamed all three names at once, like volume alone could pull them back into the clearing.
➤[8]
He clawed at their profile icons, hunting for anything that would let him find them. Nothing opened. His fingers passed through light that gave no resistance, as if it had already decided he had no claim on it.
➤[7]
➤[6]
He tried to run toward the treeline anyway. His feet stayed rooted. The command left his brain and arrived nowhere, like a phone ringing in an empty house.
➤[5]
➤[4]
Light wrapped around him, cool and tight, winding him in something he couldn’t see and couldn’t fight.
➤[3]
The sky bent at the edges. The horizon curled inward the way paper curls near a flame, browning at the corners before it catches.
➤[2]
His chest heaved. He had a thousand more names to shout and no air left to shout them with.
➤[1]
He shut his eyes. "...Please." Barely a breath. "Let them be alive."
➤[0]
The world came apart like glass hit by something far bigger than itself, and Damien went with it.
He opened his eyes to a ceiling he didn’t recognize, in a room he’d never seen, and a voice on the other side of the door called him by a name that wasn’t his.