Chapter 3 0.00%
Abyssal Direwolf.
Ren didn’t have to know its name to recognize one thing — this creature was not meant to be here, and they were not meant to still be alive. Its body was small house-sized and fur as black as the void itself, while every breath it exhaled reverberated through the air like a mini earthquake.
One swipe of its claw.
The stone wall on their left burst — not cracked, burst — spraying the hallway with shattered chunks of rock the size of human heads. Kael put both hands up, and a ring of pale green light made a thin shield in the air. Heal Shield — his one and only defensive skill.
The other claw hit the shield. The green light stuttered, shattered like glass, then exploded. Kael hit the back wall with a noise that made Ren want to vomit. His friend’s body fell — mouth full of blood, ribs on the left side broken that clearly from the way his torso bent wrong.
But the first thing Kael didn’t do was groan.
"REN! GO! I’LL STALL HIM FOR THIRTY SECONDS! RUN!"
The Direwolf lowered its head. Those crimson eyes were fixed on Kael — prey that could never move again. Thirty seconds? Kael didn't have three.
Ren looked at his best friend. The second person in a day willing to die for him.
"No."
Something broke.
Not outside — inside. Like an iron chain that had twined itself around something deep at the bottom of his being for seventeen years for the first time lost a single link. The initial fissure in the Void Core's seal.
The pain was more than Ren had ever envisioned. Blood cascaded from his nose, from the corners of his eyes, from behind his ears — not dribbling but gushing, as if his body was mouthing itself out dry from within. His bones felt as if they were being ground and then reattached by hands ignorant of mercy.
Lyra screamed — and it wasn’t sarcasm this time. It was panic.
「NO! NOT YET! YOUR BODY ISN'T—」
The Void Core didn't care.
Lines of text appeared before Ren’s darkening eyes — not holograms like the Crystal Orb at the Academy. This was more primitive. More ancient. Letters of darkness that burned in his consciousness itself:
「Void Core — Emergency Awakening」 「Threat Level: A-Rank」 「Host Integrity: 12%」 「Forced Evolution: Stage 0 → Stage 1 」 「Survival Probability: 0.00% 」
0.00%.
The same number. The number that this morning had in front of a thousand people damned his life. The number Sera had used to quantify his value. That number would have been his tombstone.
Ren smiled.
"0.00%? I just heard that number today. And I'm still here."
Darkness radiated from his body.
Void Step — active. The world around Ren shifted. Color disappeared, sound faded away, and for ten seconds he found himself in a dimension that did not belong to the living. He couldn’t strike — his body was too mangled for that. But he could move.
Ten seconds. Just enough to rush toward Kael, pull his bleeding body into the safest crevice of rock on the corner of the corridor.
The dimension collapsed. Reality returned.
The Direwolf was already waiting.
A claw struck Ren from the side; his body flew twenty meters, bounced once off the ground, and hit a stone wall with a wet sound that made Kael scream. Spine broken. Ren crumpled to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut.”
「Host Integrity: 3%」
The world faded around the edges of his vision. But the Direwolf leaned in closer — slowly, like a predator that never has to rush its food when it’s already dead.
「Devour Function: UNLOCKED」
Ren’s right hand — a hand that made no sense, that shouldn’t havehad use of itself, whose own bones had already shattered on threesides of its palm — lifted. His fingers brushed the Direwolf front leg.
One word. Not spoken. Not thought. Felt — from the deepest, darkest place within him.
「Devour.」
Darkness seeped out of Ren's hand onto the monster's body. Like ink plopped on wet paper — slow at first and then unfurling at a pace that couldn’t be sopped up. The Direwolf’s black fur deepened into a deeper black — a black that devoured light.
The Grade-A monster roared. Not a roar of attack. A roar of terror.
The predator became the prey.
"Completed growth" "Acquired: Core of Beastly Beings (Mutant) — Category D" "Species Upgrade: NULL → E" "Ability: Hunter's Intuition (Passive) — Detects the presence of creatures within a 50m radius" "Ability: Shadow Claws (Active) — Shadow attack" "Body remodeling in progress..."
Ren was lying in a pool of his own blood. Inside his body, broken bones knitted together — every joint snapping with a crunch that made teeth snap. Muscle knitted itself together like thread drawn from an invisible needle.
Kael crawled toward him. His face was drenched — tears and blood, and he was laughing. The laugh of a man who had just seen God in what should have been their tomb.
"You're insane. You're absolutely insane."
Ren raised his right hand. On the back of it — the part that had only this morning remained naked, the spot on which the Crystal Orb had refused to place a mark — there formed a black tattoo. The Void symbol, thrumming gently like a second heart.
"Kael. … my Grade is no longer zero.”
Lyra spoke. Her voice was shaking — and Ren had only known this voice for a matter of hours, but he knew: Lyra never shook.
「Ren... lovingly enough so a first absorption should give Grade-F max. You devoured an A-Rank monster and ended up with E — not due to a failing Core. But that’s because ninety-five percent of the energy went to reconstructing your body from the brink of death. 」
"So?"
“If you absorb while healthy, an A-Rank… it propels you immediately to B. To maybe A.”A pause. 「This Core shouldn't exist. The last time something like this happened—」
"What happened?"
A long pause. Longer than anything she had ever given Lyra.
“...the civilization that raised it disappeared from history. That’s what your people refer to as The Collapse. 」
Far to the north, deep within a windowless chamber with obsidian flooring never once warmed by sunlight, a thousand-year-dead crystal ball began to glow.
Its light was rich violet — the same color as the blackness that had just devoured a Direwolf in that far-flung dungeon.
The ghostly form bowed toward the crystal ball. Grinned — a grin that resembled an open wound more than any human emotion.
"The Void has returned."
At that exact moment, somewhere within the chambers of Sentinel Corps' headquarters in Eryndal, a report was handed to Commander Voss. The paper quaked in his hands — not from the wind.
Fractured Lands Anomaly alert detected. Signal type: Void-class.
The teacup fell from his fingers. Shattered on the marble floor. He didn't hear it.
"...impossible. Gareth already—"
His sentence never finished. His eyes hardened — fear replaced with something much more dangerous: resolve.
"Send a reconnaissance unit. Now." His voice was low, like a sword sliding from its scabbard. “And do not tell the High Council about this. Not yet."
