Chapter 209: Beginning (IX)
The sharp, absolute finality of his words hung suspended in the warm, pine-scented air.
"I will not."
Erin Volter stood frozen on the carpet of dark, damp moss, her piercing green eyes wide with a volatile mixture of utter disbelief, shock, and rising fury. Her chest heaved violently against the torn collar of her coat. She had sacrificed her entire career, committed treason against the National Exterminator Agency, stowed away in freezing cargo holds, and leaped blind into a dimensional tear leading to the origin world of monsters. She had done all of it to find answers. She had expectantly believed that logic governed the universe.
"What do you mean, you will not?!" Erin fought back, her voice cracking with desperate, trembling indignation as she took an aggressive step toward him. "You just dragged me out of the freezing sky! You wrapped dark wings around my shoulders and landed me safely on this grass! You explicitly told me that you didn’t want me to die in the snow, and that you respected my mind! Why are you keeping me prisoner here?!"
The Calamity Lord didn’t raise his voice. Instead, he slowly turned his head to look at her.
His ocean-blue eyes—which had spent the last hour exuding an unbothered, almost playful curiosity—suddenly shifted. A deep, abyssal dark light ignited from the depths of his irises, pulsing with a terrifying darkness. The crown of dark smoke above his head flared, drifting upward like an ascending shadow, and an invisible wave of primordial pressure crashed straight over Erin’s shoulders.
It was a suffocating, glaring gaze that made the breath freeze instantly in her windpipe.
THUMP.
Chills ran down her spine in a freezing cascade. Every single nerve ending in her fragile human body screamed in panic. Her joints locked on the spot. The warm breeze rustling through the glowing canopy seemed to die instantly, replaced by a crushing, gravitational mass that pressed down onto her skull, forcing her knees to tremble violently.
For three agonizing seconds, Erin was violently dragged back to reality. This was not a handsome, bare-chested young man sitting comfortably on a tree root. This was a monster. An entity capable of tearing shattering human armies, and erasing entire cities from the map without breaking a sweat.
Then, as quickly as the suffocating pressure had manifested, the dark glare vanished from his eyes. His irises relaxed, returning to their calm, oceanic blue.
He turned his gaze away from her, looking past the edge of the floating forest toward the endless, frozen white wasteland stretching out thousands of feet below the inverted mountain. He let out a long, heavy sigh, reaching up with one pale hand to gently rub the back of his neck in apparent annoyance.
"Well..." the beast murmured softly, his tone shifting back to that strangely modest cadence. "...looks like you can’t leave. At least not like this, and without me knowing what will happen to me."
Erin’s mind completely short-circuited.
She stood there trembling in the soft moss, her knuckles white as she clutched her coat tightly. Her heart was hammering against her ribs so hard and fast that it echoed like a war drum in her ears. Every passing second raised her heartbeat higher, pounding against her chest until it felt as though the very next beat would be the death of her. She was terrified—more terrified than she had ever been when sneaking past military perimeters or standing before the judgment of S-Rank commanders.
"What... what are you talking about?!" Erin demanded, her voice shaking uncontrollably as a cold, sickening surge of nausea coiled deep within her stomach. "Without you knowing what will happen to you?! What does that even mean?! Explain it to me! I am just a researcher! I have no weapons, no combat talent, and no knowledge of what my awakened abilities are! What could I possibly do to a creature like you?!"
The Calamity Lord finally opened his mouth and spoke. His tone was devoid of malice, anger, or mockery, yet it carried a heavy, inescapable weight that chilled her to the bone.
"The core inside you... it is like a kind of seed," he said slowly, raising a single, elegant finger and pointing it directly at the center of Erin’s chest. "Absorbing my Life mana to sustain itself."
The words floated through the quiet woods, but they brought no clarity—only more profound confusion and an overwhelming spike of anxiety that made Erin’s knees wobble.
"What... what does that mean?" Erin barely managed to speak, her throat feeling tight, dry, and painfully constricted as the creeping nausea threatened to make her sick.
"Well, in simple words..." the Calamity Lord explained casually, tilting his head to the side as if describing a mundane law of baseline biology. "...that core is draining my Life Mana. And life mana can only go from one living being to another. That means the core inside you is alive. It might become an entity in itself and be born."
BOOM.
Erin’s world shattered into a million irreparable pieces the exact moment those words reached her ears.
The glowing forest, the giant obsidian trees, the floating inverted mountain, the howling wind below—everything dissolved into a silent, spinning haze. Her breath hitched in her chest, her mind plunging instantly into a shock.
’What... no. This can’t be. This is impossible!’ her inner voice shrieked in terror. ’Entities related to a calamity beast... being born from me?! How... how in the name of God did it come to this?!’
The psychological horror of the realization hit her like a sledgehammer to the chest. Her legs, which had been barely supporting her weight, gave out completely. Her knees violently buckled beneath her. Erin collapsed hard onto the dark, damp moss, landing on her side before dragging her trembling body into a seated position.
She pulled her knees tightly against her chest, wrapping her thin arms around her legs and burying her pale, tear-stained face into her knees. Her entire body shivered with uncontrollable sobs of panic. Her brain, usually so disciplined and structured, spiraled backward in a frantic loop, replaying every single decision that had brought her to this living hell.
Really... she shouldn’t have made these decisions. She shouldn’t have eavesdropped on Maddox’s private summit. She shouldn’t have put trackers on the artifacts. She shouldn’t have jumped blindly into a forbidden Reverse Gate. She shouldn’t have come here!
She had wanted to be the savior of humanity. She had wanted to solve the mystery of the gates so that broken children like little Claire and herself wouldn’t have to sit alone on leather couches, holding the severed memories of their dead parents.
Instead, her arrogance and reckless obsession with the truth had turned her into a vessel for an alien monstrosity.
After several long, suffocating minutes of heavy silence, broken only by the rustle of the leaves and her own ragged breathing, Erin slowly lifted her head. Her face was deathly pale, stripped of every drop of color, her green eyes hollow and vacant.
"What else...?" she asked slowly, her voice barely a whisper in the vast, quiet woods. "What is the thing you want to see?"
The beast looked down at her from his perch on the root, his ocean-blue eyes completely unbothered by her emotional collapse.
"As you may know, the Life Mana is what constitutes the techniques and Authorities," he began smoothly. His phrasing was slightly different from human terminology, but Erin’s brilliant mind understood the underlying mechanics instantly. Life mana was the fundamental blueprint of an awakener’s existence, the source code of their power and soul.
He paused slightly.
"By the way... I think I should say this before telling anything further. I am Roshhide," he declared, his voice vibrated directly within her soul. "One of the five Overlords of Rilth, with authorities over Space and Darkness."
Erin’s green eyes widened in staggering disbelief. Her heart literally stopped beating for a full second.
’Roshhide.’ She never thought that Calamity beasts had names. They always disguised them based on species.
He wasn’t a Lesser Calamity Lord that was clear all along, but he wasn’t even a Higher Calamity Lord to her shock. He was one of the Five Overlords of Rilth— she did not understood that completely.
But what she did was that he was one of the five absolute strongest entities in existence.
"As it happens to be..." Roshhide continued smoothly, completely indifferent to the staggering shock paralyzing her, "...if my Life Mana is being absorbed by your core, then it will surely inherit my Authorities. For all there is, I cannot let the humans have the Entity that would be born from it. Also... I want to see if my techniques would be lost or not when the entity is born."
Roshhide kept speaking, his voice calm and melodic, but Erin’s brain completely stopped processing the rest of his words. Everything else in the universe faded into static, leaving only a single word echoing inside her skull again and again like a deafening, sirens-blaring alarm.
Space.
Authority over Space.
A cold, agonizing realization bloomed deep within her mind, connecting every single piece of spatial research she had spent her career analyzing. She looked at the bare-chested Overlord standing before her, a profound, sickening horror washing over her entire being.
Shaking violently, Erin dug her heels into the damp moss, desperately pushing herself backward along the ground to put distance between herself and the beast.
"You..." Erin stammered, her voice trembling so badly her teeth chattered together, utterly terrified of the answer she was about to receive. "You... are the one responsible for opening those gates?"
Roshhide looked down at her as she scrambled backward, his ocean-blue eyes narrowing into thoughtful, intelligent slits as he answered without a single shred of hesitation or remorse.
"Yes, I am..." the Overlord admitted calmly. "I open the gates and transport the broken pieces of our world to Earth."
Hearing his calm, effortless confession, Erin’s mind went through a torrential storm of conflicting emotions in a single fraction of a second. Horror, betrayal, grief, rage, despair, and the soul-crushing weight of the truth she had sacrificed her life to find.
The origin of the apocalypse. The murderer of millions of human beings. The creator of every tear in reality, every dungeon break, every ruined city, and every orphan on Earth... was standing right in front of her.
The gravity of the situation she had stepped into completely broke her remaining sanity. The overwhelming irony of her entire life’s work hit her so hard that she couldn’t contain it. She really didn’t want to, but a strange, broken sound escaped her throat.
She started to laugh.
It was a brittle and deeply tragic laugh that echoed painfully through the silent forest. Tears of utter helplessness spilled freely down her pale cheeks, burning her skin as she looked up at the Supreme Overlord of Space.
Laughing hysterically, Erin gasped for air, her voice crackling with pure madness as she asked, "Then... then why don’t you simply kill me?! That... that would be for the better, no?!"
Before the laughter could even die in her throat, Roshhide’s arm blurred. With terrifying, instantaneous, and physically impossible speed, the Calamity Lord’s hand went straight through her chest.