Chapter 210: Beginning (X)
The air went dead silent as Roshhide’s hand struck.
Erin Volter squeezed her eyes shut, her jaw locking as she gritted her teeth so hard her gums ached. She braced every muscle in her body for the terminal impact. She knew what a Calamity Lord’s physical strike did to human flesh; she had read hundreds of autopsy reports from gate incidents over her twenty-year career. She expected a sharp, sickening crunch of bone, the tearing of her lungs, and an agonizing spike of white-hot pain before dark oblivion claimed her.
In that single microsecond where time seemed to stretch into eternity, a crushing wave of profound sadness, raw anger, and utter hopelessness flooded her mind.
’So this is how it ends...’ Erin thought bitterly, her spirit breaking under the weight of her own choices. ’I came across the threshold seeking answers, only to die on the grass like an idiot. It’s all my fault... everything that happened, everything I lost, it’s all because of my own foolishness.’
She waited for the cold steel of death. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.
The agonizing pain never came.
Instead, a strange, surreal sensation rippled through the center of her chest. Rather than flesh being torn apart, Erin felt a sudden, torrential surge of pure, warm energy erupting deep within her sternum. It wasn’t the agonizing, burning corruption of dark mana poisoning, but a dense, vibrant current that rushed through her circulatory system like a reawakened river, filling her exhausted limbs with sudden, unnatural vitality.
Confused and breathless, Erin slowly blinked her eyes open.
The moment her eyelids fluttered, her vision was filled by the striking, handsome face of the Calamity Lord. Roshhide was leaning directly over her, his pale, carved face suspended mere inches from her own. His ocean-blue eyes were wide, staring down at her with a mixture of profound shock and deep annoyance.
Erin’s breath hitched. A sudden, burning red flush crept up her neck and coated her pale cheeks at their overwhelming physical proximity. She flinched violently, instinctively trying to throw her body backward onto the damp moss.
That was when she looked down.
The moment her gaze landed on her chest, her mind completely froze.
At first, Erin genuinely believed that her brain had snapped—that her dying mind was conjuring an impossible, vivid hallucination to spare her from the trauma of her execution. But as the seconds ticked by in the quiet forest, the scientific reality before her remained unyielding.
Roshhide’s thick, pale forearm was buried deep into the center of her chest, right where her dark mana core resided. Yet, there was no blood. There were no severed arteries, no torn muscle tissue, and not a single tear in the fabric of her shirt.
The Supreme Overlord’s hand was phasing clean through her chest as if her body were made of air.
Erin stared in absolute, paralyzing horror. She watched as Roshhide narrowed his blue eyes, his jaw tightening as he slowly, deliberately pulled his arm back. As his limb shifted, Erin saw the edge of his flesh. The moment his physical skin came close to her body, the solid matter of his arm lost its cohesion. It turned semi-transparent and illusory, wavering like a smoky, dark reflection in ripples of water.
More terrifyingly, as he dragged his arm completely out of her chest, thick wisps of dark, golden-tinged mana broke off from his hand. Instead of dissipating into the surrounding atmosphere, the energy was violently sucked inward, disappearing straight into Erin’s sternum like iron filings drawn to a powerful magnet.
Roshhide pulled his hand entirely clear, letting out a long, heavy grumble of frustration. He didn’t stand up, nor did he attempt to strike her again. Instead, the bare-chested Overlord slumped heavily onto the carpet of moss right beside her, crossing his legs and resting his elbow against his knee as he glared down at the ground.
"See...?" Roshhide grumbled, his voice dropping into a moody, irritated rasp. "I can’t even touch you now."
Erin lay on her side in the damp grass, clutching her chest with trembling, pale fingers, completely unable to process the words.
Roshhide turned his head slightly, glancing at her with a look of bitter self-deprecation. "You think I didn’t try killing you the moment I realized you had become a threat to me?" he asked, letting out a dry, mocking scoff. "I tried to crush your neck the minute I saved you. But my hand simply passed through you."
He lifted his right palm, opening and closing his long fingers as faint, smoky tendrils of dark mana drifted off his skin.
"I didn’t know that saving a human would cost me so much..." the Overlord clarified, his tone carrying a heavy, begrudging weight. "Because I used my own Life Mana to reconstruct your failing pathways and forcibly awaken a dark core inside you, our foundational energies have become permanently tethered. I am the source of the Life Mana sustaining your new core. Therefore, my Authorities recognize your vessel as an extension of my own existence."
He turned his gaze back to her, his ocean-blue eyes cold and unyielding. "I cannot attack you on my own. My own power rejects the command to harm its own origin. And worse..." Roshhide’s jaw clenched. "...I cannot let anyone else kill you either. The core inside you holds a vital piece of my Life Mana. If a third party slays you, that energy will disperse into the void or be claimed by them. No one but I should be the one to absorb it back."
Erin sat up very slowly, her hands still pressed firmly over her heart. The cold, sickening nausea that had paralyzed her earlier began to recede, replaced by the razor-sharp clarity of her analytical mind.
She processed his explanation, line by line, fact by fact.
He couldn’t touch her. He couldn’t strike her. He couldn’t cast a offensive spell against her. A creature whose raw power sat at the absolute apex of existence—a god-like entity capable of tearing spatial boundaries, summoning dimensional gates, and erasing human armies—was physically, fundamentally incapable of inflicting a single scratch upon her.
A faint, fragile sense of safety settled deep within her chest.
Yet, it was only a fraction of relief. Every single nerve ending in her body, every biological instinct, and her entire human morality still screamed at her that this was wrong. Sitting beside her was a monster. A creature that looked human, spoke with elegant modesty, and yet commanded the catastrophic forces that were systematically destroying her home world.
Erin closed her eyes for a brief moment, letting the warm, pine-scented wind ruffle her silver-white hair. In the quiet dark behind her eyelids, memories of her childhood suddenly floated up to the surface.
She remembered her father.
It was a blurry, chaotic memory buried deep beneath years of trauma—the image of a broad, soot-stained man holding up a massive, collapsing steel beam inside a burning concrete shelter. She remembered the deafening roar of falling rubble, the blinding purple glare of a gate tearing through the sky, and her father’s desperate, blood-slicked face as he shoved her small, five-year-old body into an escape hatch before the building collapsed and buried him alive.
And her mother... her mother was a complete void. Erin had never seen her face. She didn’t know her name, what she sounded like, or why she had vanished. In Erin’s life, her mother was simply someone who had never existed—a ghost who left behind no photographs and no answers.
Erin had grown up alone in a world devastated by the Awakened Era. She had watched orphanages fill to capacity, watched cities burn, and watched humanity bleed. That was why she had joined the Gate Research Division. That was why she had climbed the military ranks to become one of the top five spatial researchers on the entire planet. She had sworn an unbreakable vow to uncover the truth behind the gates and fix this broken world, so that no more five-year-old children would have to watch their parents die under falling rubble.
Erin slowly opened her eyes. The fear, the confusion, and the self-pity were completely gone, utterly incinerated by a sudden, terrifying inferno of righteous resolve.
Maybe this wasn’t an accident. Maybe her illegal entry into the Reverse Gate, her near-fatal mana poisoning, and this horrific, intimate tether with the Calamity Lord hadn’t happened out of tragic bad luck. Maybe fate had brought her to this floating mountain for a singular, monumental purpose.
She had found the truth. She was looking right at it.
Roshhide was the root of all the world’s suffering. He was the Supreme Overlord of Space who opened the gates, transported the ruined pieces of Rilth to Earth, and caused every dungeon break in human history. He was the architect of the apocalypse.
And now, he was sitting right beside her, completely defenseless against her presence, unable to raise a single hand to harm her.
Erin turned her head, her green eyes locking onto Roshhide with a fierce, blinding hostility. Her gaze burned with a raw, unfiltered hatred so intense that the warm air between them seemed to chill.
’He can’t harm me...’ Erin realized, her heart hammering against her ribs with a new, lethal cadence. ’He can’t touch me, but he never said I couldn’t touch him.’
If she killed him—if she found a way to—the gates would stop. The dimensional tears on Earth would seal forever. No more cities would be flattened. No more Exterminators would bleed. No more little girls like Claire would sit on leather couches.
She would fix the world. She would fulfill her vow.
At that exact second, kneeling on the damp moss of an alien world, an unawakened human researcher made the absolute, unshakeable decision to murder a Primordial Overlord.
A subtle, sharp shift rippled through the ambient mana. The dark core in Erin’s chest pulsed violently, reacting to her sudden, murderous intent and broadcasting her psychological state into the surrounding space.
Roshhide’s ocean-blue eyes flickered. He slowly turned his head to look at her, his expression unbothered, yet carrying a faint, amused curiosity.
"I can feel your killing intent," Roshhide noted softly, resting his hand casually on his knee. "So wild... and so chaotic."
He didn’t panic or reach for a blade.
Instead, Roshhide smoothly pushed himself up from the moss, rising to his full height. He stood towering above her under the glowing violet canopy, his shadow covering her seated form.
Raising his right hand, the Overlord casually snapped his thumb and middle finger together.
SNAP.
The crisp sound echoed sharply through the quiet woods.
Instantly, the atmosphere around his body ruptured. A massive, billowing cloud of pitch-black dark mana erupted from Roshhide’s chest, pouring onto the ground like a heavy, suffocating fog. The darkness rapidly swirled and condensed, twisting into two distinct, towering shapes.
Out of the pitch-black mist, two colossal, humanoid Calamity Beasts materialized. Their bodies were wrapped in bio-mechanical, dark-steel armor, and four glowing, blood-red eye slits burned through their featureless visors. They radiated a heavy, C-Rank pressure that flattened the grass surrounding them.
The two beasts lowered their heads in submission before their master.
Roshhide turned his back on Erin, stepping casually toward the edge of the floating mountain as the wind caught his dark smoke-hair. He didn’t offer her another glance.
"Put her in the cage," He ordered coldly.