Chapter 211: Beginning (XI)
The world was an inferno.
Erin Volter stood in the center of an unfamiliar, burning wasteland, her breath catching in her throat as waves of suffocating heat licked at her skin. High above, the sky was not the bruised violet of Rilth nor the overcast grey of Varisus, but a swirling, apocalyptic canopy of ash and bleeding crimson.
A hundred yards ahead of her, a massive glass-and-steel skyscraper groaned under severe strain. The concrete columns buckled, and with a deafening, earth-shattering roar, the entire multi-story monolith collapsed inward. A catastrophic wave of pulverized rubble, shattered glass, jagged rebar, and burning debris rushed directly toward her like a tidal wave.
Erin gasped, reflexively throwing her arms in front of her face and squeezing her eyes shut, bracing for the terminal impact.
SWOOSH.
The impact never came.
Instead, a strange, hollow sensation passed through her body. Erin opened her eyes just in time to see a five-ton steel girder pass cleanly through her chest as if she were a ghost. Falling boulders, razor-sharp glass shards, and torrents of burning ash moved straight through her flesh, leaving her completely unharmed. She wasn’t physically standing in this hellscape; she was observing it.
Her breath hitched, her heart hammering against her ribs as she forced her trembling legs to take a step forward.
As the billowing cloud of dust slowly settled over the pulverized street, the cause of the destruction was laid bare. Standing at the epicenter of the crater, towering where the skyscraper had once stood, was a colossal Calamity Beast. It was an abomination of terrifying scale—easily twice the size of the fifty-story building it had just flattened, its skin covered in thick, dark-steel plating that absorbed the surrounding light.
Instinctual terror seized Erin’s chest. Her knees buckled, and she fell hard onto her butt against the ash-covered pavement.
Suddenly, high above the monster’s towering shoulder, a radiant, fierce red light ignited in the sky. The light burned with an intense, divine brilliance, painting the clouds in blinding crimson. Erin strained her neck, trying to see the source of the luminescence, but the massive, mountainous silhouette of the beast completely blocked her line of sight.
Before she could process what was happening, the colossal beast shifted its weight. Its towering figure tilted backward, its massive shadow completely engulfing Erin’s small form.
Erin shrieked as the mountain of flesh and dark metal plummeted straight down, crushing her into the abyss.
"AHHHHHHH!"
Erin shot upright in her bed, a panicked scream tearing from her throat.
Her chest heaved in ragged, violent gasps, her shirt completely soaked through with cold sweat. Her hands trembled uncontrollably as she pressed her palms against her temples, clutching her head as a dull, throbbing ache pulsed behind her eyes.
"Another vision..." she grumbled, her voice raw and hoarse in the quiet room.
"Are you alright, my lady? Is something the problem?"
A quiet, chittering sound echoed from the edge of the mattress. Erin’s green eyes snapped to the side. Materializing out of thin air beside her wooden bed frame was a small, three-foot-tall creature. It looked like a praying mantis crossed with a grasshopper, its thin body constructed entirely out of swirling, pitch-black dark mana and polished obsidian chitin. Four small, blood-red eye slits burned faintly on its face.
It was one of Roshhide’s phantoms.
In the weeks following her capture, Erin had learned the terrifying mechanics of the Supreme Overlord’s power. He didn’t just command the living; he possessed a limitless army of dead Calamity Beasts—constructs forged from dark mana and anchored by the cores of slain monsters. They were devoid of free will, and fanatically devoted to Roshhide’s every command.
And as if an army f dead wasn’t enough, Roshhide also ruled over a vast legion of living Calamity Beasts across the domain. Under his direct command sat three A-Rank Calamity Lords and nearly ten B-Rank Higher Lords, an arsenal of raw power capable of wiping out Earth’s entire military infrastructure in a single afternoon.
Erin glared at the grasshopper phantom, her jaw clenching tightly. "No..." she hissed through gritted teeth, waving her hand dismissively. "Just leave. Get out."
The shadowy insect offered a low, silent bow before dissolving into a wisp of dark smoke, sinking back into the floorboards.
Erin let out a long, exhausted sigh. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stood up, her bare feet touching the cool, polished wood. She walked slowly over to the single window in the room and pushed the heavy wooden shutters open.
There was no glass in the frame. The crisp, high-altitude wind immediately rushed inside, whipping her silver-white hair across her face and cooling the sticky sweat on her skin.
Erin looked out over the vast landscape stretching below.
It had been two months. Two long, agonizing months since she had stepped through the Reverse One-Way Gate into this nightmare.
The initial weeks had been a living hell. Roshhide, the Overlord had locked her in a cage at the edge of the plateau. She had been treated like an exotic, dangerous prisoner, subjected to the cold, unblinking gazes of his monster guards until her spirit was pushed to the absolute brink. It was only when she finally stopped fighting, gritting her teeth and agreeing to his basic terms of docility, that he had released her from the cage.
He had ordered his constructs to build her this small, simple wooden house amidst the ancient, violet-leafed forest.
From her elevated vantage point on the floating mountain, Erin watched the sky. This inverted mountain was not stationary. It was a massive, airborne landmass—the mobile stronghold of the Overlord—that continuously drifted through the atmosphere of Rilth.
And over the past sixty days, Erin’s brilliant, analytical mind had pieced together the horrifying, tragic reality of this alien world.
Rilth was dying.
It was a realm undergoing a slow, irreversible environmental collapse. But unlike Earth, which was currently being invaded and corrupted by dark mana, Rilth’s death was caused by the exact opposite phenomenon.
It was being eaten from the inside out by pure mana.
To the ecosystem of Rilth, the pure, untainted mana that fueled human Exterminators was a highly destructive, acidic rot. It poisoned the soil, withered the dark vegetation, and fractured the core of the planet.
Whenever a region of Rilth became critically saturated with pure mana, the land would begin to decay and crumble into the dimensional void. If left unchecked, the spatial rot would spread exponentially, dragging the entire world into total annihilation.
To prevent the destruction of his home, Roshhide—the Overlord possessing Authority over Space and Darkness—used his power to perform a brutal, surgical operation. He would locate the decayed, collapsing landmasses, sever their spatial anchors from Rilth, and tear open dimensional tears to forcibly transfer those broken pieces onto Earth.
The gates on Earth weren’t random natural disasters. They were garbage chutes. They were quarantine zones. Roshhide was dumping his world’s dying, radioactive trash onto humanity’s doorstep to keep Rilth alive.
’It’s a tragedy of survival...’ Erin thought, her hands gripping the wooden window sill until her knuckles turned white. ’He is destroying my world to save his own.’
Yet, one massive, nagging question remained unanswered in her mind. Why Earth? Out of the infinite expanse of the spatial void, why had Roshhide specifically targeted humanity’s realm? What was so special on Earth?
She had wanted to ask him—had demanded an audience multiple times—but the Overlord rarely visited the wooden house, remaining secluded in his central stone palace at the heart of the mountain.
Erin slowly brought a trembling hand down, resting her palm over her flat stomach.
A cold, sickening wave of shame and self-loathing coiled in her chest.
She was pregnant.
The physical merge Roshhide had forced upon her to save her from lethal dark mana poisoning had left a permanent, living seed inside her core. An entity born from a human woman and a Primordial Calamity Lord was growing within her body.
In the second week of her imprisonment, the horror of the pregnancy had broken her completely. She had found a sharp piece of metal in her cage and held it against her own neck, fully intent on ending her life and taking the monster’s spawn to the grave with her.
But her hand had frozen.
Whether it was a subconscious survival instinct, the protective dark mana pulsing from her newly awakened core, or a strange, twisted thread of curiosity, she hadn’t been able to pull the blade. As the weeks passed, a quiet, reluctant fascination had taken root beneath her disgust. She was a researcher. She couldn’t help but wonder what kind of existence would emerge from such an impossible, unprecedented biological union.
Furthermore, her awakening on the day of her rescue had altered her forever.
She hadn’t awakened a combat talent like fire or telekinesis. Her core, saturated with Rilth’s dark mana, had unlocked an ultra-rare, mythic framework. She was an Oracle. A Seer.
For the past two months, her sleep had been plagued by erratic, vivid visions of the future. She saw visions of Earth falling, of colossal gates tearing open over major cities, of S-Rank commanders bleeding in the dirt.
The visions were a curse, filling her days with a gloom.
Erin took a deep, shaky breath, pushing the grim thoughts into the dark corners of her mind. Her face hardened, her green eyes flashing with a cold, unyielding resolve.
Her circumstances had changed, her body had changed, and her world was ending... but her primary objective had never wavered.
She was going to kill Roshhide.
She would observe him. She would study his movements and find the single, infinitesimal vulnerability in a Primordial Overlord’s defenses.
Someday, somehow, she would drive a blade through his core and seal the gates forever.
Turning away from the window, Erin stepped out of the wooden house and walked down a narrow dirt trail winding through the glowing violet woods.
A few hundred yards away sat a small, secluded lake. Like everything else in Rilth, the lake was a magical, thermoregulating anomaly. The water possessed natural magical properties, automatically heating up when the ambient air turned freezing, and cooling down into a refreshing, crisp temperature when the weather grew stifling. It had become her daily sanctuary—the place where she bathed and gathered her thoughts away from the watchful eyes of the phantom guards.
Erin reached the grassy bank of the lake and knelt by the water, dipping her pale fingers into the pleasantly warm surface.
BOOM!
Without a single microsecond of warning, the entire floating mountain violently lurched.
The shockwave was so massive that the ground beneath her feet buckled. Erin lost her balance, letting out a sharp gasp as she tumbled sideways into the damp moss. She desperately reached out, her fingers digging into the thick bark of an ancient tree trunk to anchor herself as the mountain shuddered again.
The tranquil, twilight atmosphere of the forest vanished instantly.
High above the canopy, the sky ruptured. Massive, pitch-black storm clouds boiled into existence, swirling into a terrifying, hurricane-force vortex directly over the floating island. The wind howled, snapping thick branches and tearing violet leaves from the trees.
Then, from the center of the black tempest, a beam of dark light descended from the heavens.
The cataclysmic pillar of light shot straight down, slamming with nuclear force directly into the central palace at the heart of the island—the exact domain where the Supreme Overlord himself resided!