Chapter 208: Beginning (VIII)
The wind roared like a feral beast, tearing at Erin Volter’s hair.
She was falling.
The world was a violent, spinning abyss of bruised violet sky and blinding white snow thousands of feet below. The velocity of her descent dragged the air straight out of her lungs, leaving her gasping on empty, freezing air. The instinctual, primal terror of death clamped around her throat like a vice. Her heart hammered against her ribs so violently it felt as though it would shatter her chest.
Then, mid-fall, the howling gale seemed to drown out. Time dilated into an agonizingly slow crawl, and her mind was abruptly overwhelmed by an influx of erratic, blinding flashes.
They weren’t memories. They were vivid, impossible images of a place she had never seen in her life, yet recognized with terrifying certainty.
It was Earth. It was Varisus. She could clearly see the sprawling layout of Area 5, anchored by the familiar architectural silhouette of the National Exterminator Agency Headquarters. But everything surrounding the government quarter had been transformed.
It was a vision of a distant future.
The grey, industrial smog that usually choked the Southern Continent was completely gone, replaced by a pristine, sky-blue canopy dotted with soft white clouds. Towering, hyper-futuristic glass monoliths pierced the heavens, their polished surfaces reflecting sunlight like colossal crystals. Multi-tiered, elevated walkways wove between fifty-story high-rises in mid-air, while sleek, silent mag-trains and trams threaded directly through the hollowed centers of commercial buildings like rivers of light. It was a thriving, glittering metropolis—a world that had somehow adapted to the era of gates and built a sprawling utopia atop the concrete ruins of the past.
The images flashed through her retinas in a microsecond, sharp and luminous, before shattering like thin glass.
Reality slammed back into her chest with the weight of a physical blow. The freezing, dark-mana-saturated wind rushed past her ears, and the white wasteland below expanded at terrifying speed.
She wasn’t standing in a futuristic city. She was falling to her death in the origin world of monsters.
’No... no!’ her mind shrieked.
She didn’t want to die. She couldn’t die here! She was Erin Volter. She had crossed an ocean in the freezing belly of a cargo plane, hacked government databases, bypassed highest security grids, and leaped into a forbidden Reverse Gate to find the truth. There were so many mysteries left unsolved. There were so many papers left unwritten. There was a little blonde girl with empty red eyes sitting on Maddox’s couch, waiting for a world where orphans like her no longer had to exist.
She had so much left to do.
"Help..." Erin choked out, her voice barely a whisper against the deafening slipstream. She squeezed her eyes shut, discarding every ounce of her pride, and screamed at the absolute top of her lungs into the empty abyss. "HELP ME! PLEASE HELP ME!"
The response was instantaneous.
Below her, the swirling violet clouds violently agitated. Thick, pitch-black wisps of dark mana condensed out of thin air, solidifying into a colossal, shadowy hand that snapped out of the void. The hand caught her mid-fall, wrapping its fingers around her waist with fluid, improbable softness that completely neutralized her downward momentum.
Before Erin could even register the sudden stop, the shadowy fingers dissolved, reforming into a pair of massive, smoky dark wings that wrapped securely around her shoulders. The wings flapped once with a silent, concussive surge of spatial energy, hoisting her straight back up toward the sky.
As she was rapidly dragged upward through the freezing atmosphere, Erin looked back toward the landmass she had just fallen from. Her green eyes widened in awe.
From below, the structure of the island was fully laid bare. It wasn’t a normal floating piece of land. It was a colossal, inverted mountain—an upside-down peak hanging suspended in the sky. Its razor-sharp, jagged bottom pointed directly down toward the snowy wasteland below, while its massive, flattened top cradled the ancient, violet-leafed forest facing the heavens. It defied every law of gravitational physics she had ever studied in human textbooks.
The dark wings carried her over the lip of the plateau, ascending back into the warm, pine-scented breeze of the canopy.
The smoky energy gently set her boots onto the soft carpet of damp moss. The moment her feet touched solid ground, the wings shifted once more, morphing into two shadowy hands that softly pressed against her back, nudging her several paces forward away from the treacherous edge of the cliff.
Erin stumbled forward, her knees trembling so badly she nearly collapsed onto the moss. She clutched her chest, her breath coming in ragged, hyperventilating gasps as the adrenaline slowly drained from her blood.
"Are all humans this foolish?"
The smooth, melodic voice broke the quiet rustle of the leaves.
Erin snapped her head around, her heart skipping a beat. Sitting cross-legged on a protruding tree root less than ten feet away was the bare-chested Calamity Lord. The crown of dark smoke above his head drifted lazily in the warm air, and his piercing, ocean-blue eyes watched her with a mixture of quiet curiosity and profound perplexity.
"I have never seen one, other than you..." he continued softly, tilting his handsome head to the side as he rested his elbows on his knees. "...and so far, you have been utterly foolish."
Erin’s face flushed a furious, burning red. The humiliation of her earlier breakdown, combined with his unbothered, casual demeanor, made a surge of sharp, defensive anger rise in her throat. She pushed herself up to her full height, wrapping her jacket tightly around her shoulders as she glared at him.
"Foolish?!" Erin shot back, her voice shaking despite her best efforts to sound authoritative. "I fell off a cliff because I was trying to get away from a monster who casually admitted to... to..." She choked on the words, unable to even articulate the sentence without her face burning hotter. "Why did you save me?! If I’m so foolish, why didn’t you just let me hit the snow?!"
The Calamity Lord didn’t flinch at her outburst. He didn’t raise his voice, nor did he manifest a single drop of hostiles or bloodlust. He simply stared at her with that unsettling, serene calmness that felt entirely too human for an apocalyptic entity.
"Because you are the first human I have ever encountered," he answered simply, his tone carrying a quiet, unyielding sincerity. "And I had no desire to watch you die."
Erin blinked, her aggressive stance wavering slightly. "That’s it? Curiosities don’t warrant saving."
"It is not merely curiosity, Erin," he replied smoothly, using her name with precise, accentless clarity. "I watched you step through the Reverse Gate. An unawakened, fragile creature, carrying no weapons, wearing no combat gear, walking willingly into the abyss. Such foolishness... yet such rare, breathtaking courage." A faint, modest smile touched the corners of his lips.
Erin stared at him in complete, stunned silence. Her hyper-analytical brain, which usually processed data at blinding speeds, struggled to reconcile his words. She had been taught her entire life that Calamity Beasts were feral, bloodthirsty abominations driven solely by the urge to eradicate humanity. Yet the creature sitting in front of her spoke with more elegance, modesty, and emotional intelligence than most high-ranking military commanders she had worked with at the NEA.
"You speak as if you care about human life," Erin said quietly, her green eyes narrowing into cautious slits as she took a slow step backward. "If that’s true... why do your kind open the gates? Why do you send monsters to butcher innocent people on Earth?"
The Calamity Lord’s blue eyes darkened slightly, a shadow of profound, ancient sorrow passing over his handsome features.
"The gates are not a war of choice, Erin," he murmured, looking down at his open palms. "Our world, Rilth, is dying. The core of this realm is collapsing into the void. The beasts you fight are desperate, starved refugees fleeing a crumbling home. They do not attack your world out of malice, but out of a feral, instinctual struggle for survival. Your pure mana burns them, just as our dark mana poisons you."
He lifted his gaze back to hers, his expression completely open. "It is a tragedy of two worlds colliding... not a grand conquest."
Erin’s mind raced, storing every single piece of forbidden information. The origin of the gates, the name of the alien planet, the biological conflict of pure and dark mana—everything the International Exterminator Corporation had spent decades suppressing was being laid bare in a quiet forest on a floating mountain.
She took a deep, grounding breath, forcing her analytical discipline to completely override her remaining fear. If he wasn’t going to kill her, and if he possessed the power to manipulate dark mana, then there was only one logical conclusion.
"If you truly mean what you say," Erin declared, her voice hardening into a firm, unyielding demand, "then send me home. Send me back to Earth."
The Calamity Lord looked at her for a long, heavy moment. The gentle warmth in his ocean-blue eyes did not vanish, but his posture straightened slightly, carrying the immovable authority of a primordial entity.
Slowly, he shook his head.
"No," he said softly.
Erin’s breath hitched. "Why?! You said you didn’t want me to die! You said you respected my mind! If you - "
"I will not." He Interrupted.