Chapter 2 Voice from the Void

It was a voice that came from nowhere. Not from the walls, not from the ceiling, not from the corners of a house that still smelled of his grandfather’s blood. It had come from inside — as if someone had plopped down behind his rib cage and suddenly decided to start talking.

「Still kneeling? Your knees are probably numb by now. 」

Ren flinched. His eyes scanned the room — empty. Just him, a toppled wheelchair and a pool of blood that was starting to dry.

"Who's there?"

「Inside, not there. Different preposition, different situation. Oh, and I’m Lyra, before you start calling me “ghost” or something equally uninspired. 」

Ren swallowed. It was a feminine, cold voice with an undercurrent that made anything it said sound like an insult she had wrapped in silk.

"I've lost my mind."

「Not yet. Yeah, but left to pontificate in an empty blood-soaked house for long enough — people start reaching their own conclusions. 」

Explanation, Lyra explained — if “explained” could mean to hurtle information like stones into a pond. She said she was bound to a thing known as the Void Core, an entity that had been embedded in Ren’s body since his birth. Gareth — his grandfather — had sealed the Core with an ancient technique that should have lasted until Ren turned twenty-five.

Should have.

“But your grandfather was seized. The seal cracked. The Void Core’s awakening, and your body, this current one — weak, untrained, comically pathetic — is incapable of containing it. 」

"How long?"

「Thirty days. From there, the Core fully emerges. If you’re not up to it, you die. Explode from the inside. Your organs will line the walls very decoratively. 」

Ren was silent for a few seconds.

“Oh, so you’re the one the Void chose to assist me?”

“And I was imagining my life without a ghost whispering in my skull. We're both disappointed."

This time, Lyra didn’t respond immediately. Then — almost too quietly:

‘… you may not be as bad as I thought. 」

A knock at the door.

Ren snatched the kitchen knife before opening — but what awaited on the other side wasn’t a threat. Kael Draven. Black hair tousled, bags heavy under his eyes, wearily carrying a bag of food containers already creased and dented from being carried at a run.

"You're alive." Kael came in uninvited, put down the food on the table, and then noticed the blood on the floor. His face changed. "Ren... is this—"

"Gramps is gone. Someone took him."

Kael didn't ask who. Didn't ask why. He simply sat down, opened the food container and pushed it over to Ren. "Eat first. The bad news is long."

Grade-C, Class Healer — no combat power, but at least he made it, Kael just woke. And he was here. Inside a Null house, in the Null district, delivering food to someone that world said didn’t deserve to eat.

The bad news was indeed long. Ren was on a black list — if he had no guild or institution, as well as to prevent Null from entering there even a weapon shop. Even worse: Dorian Hart had spread a lie that Ren assaulted Sera after he was rejected.

“Dorian wants you dead in a social sense, Ren. There is no road back into this city for you.’

Ren laughed. A dry, hollow sound. "Dead socially? He lacks ambition. “I’ll literally be dead in a few hours if I don’t do something.”

Kael looked quizzically but Ren didn't say anything regarding Lyra or the Void Core. Not yet.

“I’m going into the Fractured Lands.”

Kael stopped chewing. "That's suicide."

“Everything from here on out is suicide too. Well, at least this one has a view.”

"Then I'm coming with you."

"Kael—"

"Don't waste your breath refusing. I'm a Healer. You need me alive more than you need me safe.'

Ren wanted to argue. But Kael gazed at him with eyes that had already made up their mind — the sort of look words couldn’t alter.

They left the city when the moon tucked itself behind clouds.

The Null District at night was eerily similar to a graveyard — because in a graveyard, at least the dead had been buried with some respect. Here, people just vanished. Ren knew that. He'd grown up here.

But tonight, it was clearer to him than ever.

In a narrow alley between two taught and crumbling buildings, the power of a Grade-B Awakener was this — to drag a young girl from her own home. The girl screamed silently — mouth agape but her throat too trained to be quiet. Her family dropped to their knees in the street. Her father begged. She kick the Awakener father face like when you kick an empty can.

Two officers at the road’s end turned away.

Ren's feet stopped. The body turned toward the alley.

"Ren. Don't." Kael grabbed his shoulder.

"She—"

"I know. I know. But who’s going to change this if you die here?”

Ren waited, five seconds that seemed like five years. His fists bled, nails piercing his palms — drops of blood fell through his fingers, drowned in the dust of a district that had already swallowed too much blood.

He walked away. But something in his eyes changed that night. A vow unspoken, only chiseled on bone:

I will rise to the top. And these chains — I will break them. Every single link. One by one.

Lyra sent them to a low-grade unregistered dungeon near the border of the Fractured Lands — Grade-E, she said. The best place to start the first Devour with weak monsters.

They arrived at midnight. The cave mouth yawned like the unhinged jaw of a beast — all blackness, the air inside colder than that outside. A cracked stone plaque clung to the wall by the entrance. Some of the letters were eaten away by time:

「Dungeon — Gra...E」

“Grade-E,” Kael read, and breathed a sigh of relief. “Well at least you’ve still got some sense.”

They went in.

The first fifty meters — normal. Stone corridors that are narrow, moss faintly glowing on the walls, water dripping from the ceiling. Like a low level dungeon from some guidebook.

A hundred meters — there was a change.

The air became heavy. Not stuffy — heavy, as if someone had dropped an invisible boulder on the shoulders. Kael started sweating. His hands were shaking.

"Ren..." His voice trembled. “Mana pressure in here is far too high for a Grade-E dungeon.”

The ground shook. Pebbles on the floor shifted. From the darkness at the far end of the corridor — two red points flared to life. Eyes. The presence that washed out of that dark cavity struck them like a physical force — Kael immediately fell to his knees, both hands raking at the grass beneath him, his face pale as death.

"W-what... is this..."

Lyra whispered inside Ren's head. For the first time — not sarcasm, no humor, just raw fear:

「...Ren. That missing letter on that plaque was not 'E'. It was 'EX'. This is a Grade-EX Dungeon. We need to—」

The monster was already moving.