The next batch of Martyrs stood at the threshold and didn't move. They had watched through the chamber's translucent walls. They had seen the sigils. They had seen the grey silt close over a man like a mouth.
They had counted the red notifications.
Five of them. In under a minute.
So now they stood at the edge of the runeword circle and did nothing, because doing nothing was the only choice that hadn't killed anyone yet.
"Should we run?" a woman whispered. "The Mandate said we had to come here, but do we have to step into it?"
Nobody answered her.
"This is your moment, Ren." An Asian teenager nearby muttered, his eyes glazed with a manic, delusional fervor. He stood tall, as if he were the hero of an isekai story. "Earth... prepare for my homecoming."
Val felt a phantom ache in his own obsidian veins. He didn't just hear the words; he felt the static they left in the air.
This wasn't just a boy reading too many comics. This was a mind vibrating at a different frequency.
He pushed past the huddle, his gaze scanning the crowd until it locked onto a young man backing away from an invisible prompt.
"This is not real," a voice croaked.
Val turned. A young man, barely twenty, backed away from an invisible prompt, hands shaking. "This is a hallucination. We’re all dying in a basement in Fermilab. This is just the brain firing off its final chemicals."
Val knew he shouldn’t interfere, but the boy reminded him of his old self.
"Noah, isn’t it?" Val’s eyes drifted to the name tag on the white uniform. "You’re alive. That is what matters."
"That coat…" Noah’s face twisted with hope and terror. "You're a scientist? From Geneva?”
Val didn’t answer. His gaze slid past Noah to the woman near a cluster of obsidian ferns.
Val recognized her face the way you recognize a face from a recurring dream, not from knowing her, but from having seen her everywhere.
Lysa was reading her Halo interface with the focused expression of someone reviewing a termination clause on her contract.
She felt him looking.
"Don't," she said, without turning her head.
Val looked away.
Rafa jerked his chin. His group moved. They left Noah, Lysa, and the trembling newcomers to the Dissonance Chamber’s rite of passage.
The walk was a funeral march through a forest of metallic leaves. Three hundred meters in, they passed their first corpse.
It had been a man, once. Now, his entrails draped over Iron-Oak roots like tinsel on a Christmas tree. No blood pooled on the silver silt. Ortho consumed its waste instantly.
Death was no longer tragedy. It was the new normal.
“Keep moving,” Marcus growled, his bronze Rungu resting on his shoulder. “Don’t look at the dead. Look for the light.”
They were searching for the Vending Beacon, but the forest offered only shadows of the Primeval Sector.
Then, from the distance, they heard it.
A pop melody from the 90s. Perfectly normal on earth, uncanny in the thick of Iron-Oaks forest.
Through the fractal shadows, a man strolled into the clearing. He looked like he was on a Sunday hike, not trapped in a cosmic crucible. A bald man in his 50s, wearing a yellow Hawaiian shirt.
“I feel good...” he sang, his voice bouncy and light.
Rafa leveled his Rungu, his muscles tensing. “Hey! Hey you! Why are you so happy in this hell, man? Something wrong with your head?”
The man stopped. He had the kind of wide, toothy grin you only see in toothpaste commercials. “Hey man! I’m a happy boy! These past three days? Best days of my life.”
“Best days?” Val interjected, his voice flat. “The world just underwent a planetary collapse. How is this the best?”
Dan let out a carefree chuckle. “Look, Mr. Scientist. I got away free from my wife, man! No more lawyers, no more alimony, no more ‘Dan, did you take out the trash?’ The world ended, and my mortgage ended with it! I’m debt-free for the first time in twenty years!”
Rafa stared at him for a heartbeat, his grip on the Rungu loosening. Then, he let out a booming, jagged laugh. “That’s the spirit! The world’s a grave, but at least the bill collector is dead!”
“See you around, folks. Don’t die!” Dan gave a casual two-finger salute and continued his stroll.
“What do we call you?”
“Hey, man. On Earth I go by senior manager Daniel. In here, you may call me Happy Dan.”
They watched him disappear into the wilderness, his humming fading into the distance.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Crazy ass crackhead,” Rafa muttered, shaking his head.
Val let out a soft, weary sigh, “Precisely what you need to survive in this hell.”
“Fog’s getting thicker. Let’s move on.”
The group pressed deeper into the dark woods, following the pathfinding route lights.
Ethereal pulses of blue that marked the "safe" trail to the Beacon.
Val’s neck hair prickled.
Something was measuring the distance between them.
An entity that lacked eyes, yet possessed a predatory intent.
"Something's wrong," Val whispered.
"Shut up and walk," Marcus hissed. "Forward. You’re the bait. Go!"
The catatonic woman at the back didn't even have time to scream.
From the shadows, a shape rose.
The beast was a biological blasphemy: a wolfen frame draped in sickly blues. Yellowed bones jutted from its spine like serrated tombstones. Its hide wept necrotic lesions, dark pits that resembled hollow eyes.
A guttural vibration rattled its chest, the sound of a predator designed solely for the kill. The air around them pulsed with it, making Val’s core thrum.
[MANDATE: NEUTRALIZE THREAT – ABYSSAL HOUND (LV. 1)]
[REWARD: 100 CALIBRATION GAIN (CP); ABYSSAL HOUND PELT x1]
The Abyssal Hound vanished in a blur of gray motion and reappeared directly behind her. It was a jagged silhouette of smoke, a "stain" in reality.
A single slash of its shadow-claw opened her from shoulder to hip. She didn’t fall; her form simply unraveled. Rafa flinched, Rungu trembling in his grip.
"CONTACT!" Marcus roared, the bronze wood of his weapon igniting with savage heat.
The survivors broke.
Elena screamed for everyone to move to the perimeter. Marcus simply stepped into the shadows, his eyes never leaving the predator.
Val didn't move. He watched the Hound.
Slash. Lunge. Spin. It was a loop. A predictable sequence of variables.
"It's a pattern," Val whispered, his obsidian veins beginning to glow with a hungry light. He didn't feel like a victim; he felt like a researcher before an experiment. To the others, the Hound was a blur of death. To Val, it was an equation.
For half a second, his mind went blank.
‘Get a grip of yourself, Val. It’s not hypothetical case anymore.’
‘It’s a matter of life and death now!’
BREATHE
‘It doesn’t react to our existence,’ Val continued his analysis of the beast.
‘It reacts to noise.’
He grabbed a fist-sized shard of obsidian from the silt and hurled it toward the left. The Hound’s head snapped toward the sliding rock. Delay: 0.4 seconds. Priority: High-velocity movement.
"You!" Val’s voice cut through the chaos, sharp as a scalpel. He pointed at Rafa. "Agitate it! Draw its focus North!"
Rafa roared, charging with a frontal aggression that pulled the monster’s aggro like a magnet.
Elena moved in, pulling weeping researchers into a tight, silent huddle to blind the creature’s secondary sensors.
Marcus sneaked into the blind spot.
The trap was set. Rafa was the Noise. Elena was the Silence. Marcus was the Blade.
The Hound’s motion fractured. Overwhelmed by conflicting targets, it froze, joints snapping in discord.
Val saw a frozen process.
"The Iron-Oak Rungu. STRIKE NOW!"
Marcus didn’t even wait for the command; he just charged. Rafa followed.
The synchronized arc of ether-imbued weapons slammed into the beast. CLANG! Shards of obsidian glass flew into the silt. But the Hound didn't falter. It adapted.
It let out a screech that nearly shattered the Rungus, then locked its empty sockets behind it.
The one who wasn’t fighting. The one pulling the strings.
"GROOAR!"
It lunged with chaotic desperation. Val was thrown backward into the silver mud. As the jaws snapped toward his throat, his right arm moved on its own. He caught the creature’s maw with his corrupted hand.
The Hound’s saliva dripped onto Val’s face. The pressure was soul-crushing.
'Move,' a primal voice hissed.
His muscles expanded with a tearing sound; black veins erupted from his skin. Then, the seam in his palm snapped open.
It wasn't a mouth. It was an Eye.
Large, lidless, and weeping a thin trail of violet ichor.
The vicious iris didn't just see the Abyssal Hound; it appreciated it.
The Hound’s weight was absolute. Val’s back hit the silt, his lungs flattening under the creature’s mass.
?[ABYSSAL VERSE: GRIM COIL — INITIALIZING]
[ESTIMATED CHARGE TIME: 5.0 SECONDS]
?The world slowed to a crawl of red static.
?5— The Hound’s jaws unhinged, a wet, tearing sound as it prepared to erase his throat.
4— A cold, mocking whisper echoed not in his ears, but in his marrow.
‘Try not to die in five seconds, child,’ the voice murmured. It wasn't a wish for luck; it was a bet against his survival.
3— The pressure intensified. Teeth found the soft meat of his shoulder. Val’s vision sparked white as the first puncture hit bone. He didn't scream; he didn't have the oxygen.
?2— The jaw locked. Death was a millisecond away.
'Inventory... think!' Val's mind raced through a blur of blue and violet data.
He was a Null-Unit; he had no steel, no frost, no fire. The Golden Rubal? Useless currency for a corpse. His Singularity Anomaly? Still charging, too slow to stop the snap of those teeth.
Then, a jagged memory jolted through his spine.
The sensation of the [Abyssal Child] insignia anchoring into his marrow. It was a forbidden tool, a "collar" from the Divine Throne, but right now, it was the only variable left in the equation.
'If I'm a leak in the system,' Val thought, his vision blurring, 'then let the system break.'
He didn't just push; he gambled his remaining sanity on a command he barely understood.
[TARGET: ABYSSAL HOUND DETECTED. ABYSSAL CHILD ACTIVATED]
‘NOW!’
[ABYSSAL REPEL]
?THUMP. The magnetic repulsion was violent, localized rejection of physics.
The Hound was shoved back two meters, its claws leaving bloody furrows in Val’s chest as it fought the displacement.
It recovered instantly, coiling its muscles to spring back for the killing bite.
?1— The Eye in Val’s palm dilated until it was a needle-point of absolute void. The air around his hand began to scream, pulled into the singularity of the charge.
0. Val held his breath. His life flashed before his eyes.
[ABYSSAL VERSE: GRIM COIL]
The power didn't flow through Val; it tore through him.
[ETHER COST: UMBRA x1]
[SYSTEM ERROR! SUBJECT: MARTYR 0996 ETHER POOL:
Above Val’s head, the grey Phaistos disc convulsed.
Sparks of black static jumped between the cracks, hissing like short-circuiting wires.
Val didn’t just strike. He fired.
His blackened arm snapped forward.
The air around his palm condensed into a focal point of absolute shadow.
Then, a roar of displaced physics.
A beam of raw, dark energy erupted from his hand like a black cannon, a solid pillar of void that punched through.
It hit the Hound squarely in the face. There was no resistance, only the sound of reality being erased.
The Hound’s body skidded backward and slumped, headless. Where the skull had been, there was only a charred, jagged crater of shadow. Thick black smoke curled from the neck remains, smelling of ancient rot.
The moment he made contact, Val knew with absolute certainty that the power answering him did not belong to him—and never would.
daily for the next two weeks . After that, updates will continue at one chapter every two days .