What do you want to become in the future?
"Huh?"
A question surfaced in Voma's mind. But it was not one he asked himself, nor was it a self-reflective musing.
It came from somewhere else. From someone else. A voice that was not his own, yet it manifested in his head as if it were a fleeting thought drifting by.
And that very question... was what pulled him from the depths of his dream.
"Hey, Voma, wake up already!"
Voma jerked awake, rubbing his tired eyes before glancing at the one who had called out to him.
"What? Oh, it's you?"
"Don't give me that 'oh, it's you' tone! Do you even realize you're in the middle of class? You're coming to the teacher's office after this, understand?"
"Yeah, yeah, fine. So can I go back to sleep now?"
Thwack!
Before he could even finish, his homeroom teacher's book came down on his head in a firm, unceremonious smack.
A short while later, during the break.
"Voma, I remember you being quite diligent at the start of the year. What happened? Why do you look so... disillusioned with life now?"
In the quiet teacher's office, where only a few people lingered, Solan sat at her desk, gazing at her slouching student with a mix of disappointment and curiosity.
"That's because, at the start of the year, when I looked at the board, I was mostly looking at you."
Her face instantly turned a deep shade of red, like someone caught in a fever.
"I... I'll take that as a compliment." Flustered and a little embarrassed, the young teacher turned her head away, trying to keep her voice steady and serious despite the slight tremor in her tone.
"But that's not the point here!"
Realizing her own expression was slipping, Solan quickly switched to irritation, using it as a shield to steer the conversation away from her embarrassment.
"Keep going like this and your future will be in shambles, you understand? If things keep up, when you graduate from university, what exactly are you planning to do with yourself?"
Her voice grew stern, her gaze sharp, as if trying to pierce through the lazy nonchalance he carried like a second skin.
Voma stroked his chin thoughtfully for a few moments. But instead of answering, he asked her something completely different.
"Do you know what I'm going to eat this afternoon?"
"..." Solan stared at him silently.
"Because I don't know either."
The silence between them deepened, heavy yet strangely empty. After a long pause, Solan let out a sigh and waved him off.
"Forget it. Go on."
Without a shred of hesitation, Voma left the teacher's office. Once classes ended for the day, he headed home.
The air carried the cool edge of winter, the kind that brushed gently against the skin without biting.
The streets were not too crowded at this hour. The lack of bustling foot traffic kept the space open and breathable, though the same could not be said for the road. There, cars and motorbikes sped past in relentless streams, spewing noise and exhaust that tainted the otherwise crisp afternoon air.
"Guess I'll take the shortcut home today... oh yeah, i should go to the hospital later on..."
What do you want to become?
As he stood at a large intersection waiting for the traffic light to turn green, the question suddenly echoed in his mind again. At first, Voma didn't pay much attention. He figured it was nothing more than a lingering echo from his earlier conversation with Solan, a stray thought born of coincidence.
Yet, there was something different about it this time. The voice that spoke the question felt closer, sharper, as if it wasn't just an echo of the past but an intruder in the present.
The words pressed against his mind like the weight of an unseen hand, not forceful, yet impossible to ignore.
He blinked, glancing around at the throng of strangers. None of them seemed to notice anything unusual.
For the briefest moment, Voma wondered if perhaps the question had been meant for him all along, not as idle curiosity, but as a demand.
And somewhere deep inside, he felt that the answer, whatever it was, might decide far more than his so-called "future".
But it was only when he caught sight of the bewildered, half-stunned expressions of the people standing around him that a faint, uneasy realization began to take root in his mind.
"Hey, you... you heard that question just now too, didn't you?" Voma quickly turned to the girl standing beside him.
"Huh? Ah... yes." Caught off guard by the sudden question while she was still in a daze of astonishment, the girl responded instinctively, without even thinking.
The moment those words left her lips, Voma's vision suddenly dimmed, as though someone had snuffed out all light in the world.
"What the...!" The shock hit him so hard that he instinctively staggered backward.
In the blink of an eye, all that around him, the bustling city street had vanished without a trace. In its place stretched a dark, silent expanse where not even the faintest glimmer of light could be seen.
The silence was suffocating. Even though he had only been standing here for a single second, it was already enough to give birth to a crushing sense of pressure, a cold and heavy weight that seemed to press against his very soul. It was the kind of darkness that could make a man feel as though he were sinking into an endless abyss.
Then, without warning, a radiant beam of light burst forth from an unknown source above, striking directly upon the spot where Voma stood. The sudden illumination drove back the oppressive black, gifting him with a limited circle of vision. It wasn't much, but it was better than drowning in the void.
"This is..." His voice trailed off, uncertain, half-afraid to guess.
Beneath his feet, or perhaps in his mind, an ethereal line of text shimmered into existence, glowing faintly as though woven from threads of moonlight.
[Before you lies the method to become something that can help you survive. Choose what you wish to become.]
It was not a voice. No sound touched his ears. Instead, the message simply existed before him, floating in midair, as clear and real as if it were carved into reality itself. The sensation was eerily familiar, like the moment in a virtual reality game when the system presented a player with their starting options.
Before he could think too deeply, the glowing words faded away. In their place, dozens of translucent panels materialized, each one bearing a different hue, crimson, azure, amber, obsidian, and countless lines of text written upon them in neat columns.
"This is..." His mind began working quickly, the scattered pieces snapping together into a more coherent picture.
These were not ordinary panels. They had depth, a three-dimensional presence that seemed to exist both in front of and around him. They floated past at a steady pace, rotating slowly as they drifted through the air.
Ignoring the smaller text beneath, Voma's gaze was drawn to the larger, bolder words at the top of each panel. But they passed quickly, forcing him to snatch fragments as they went by.
Something was off. The resemblance was uncanny, almost too deliberate. It was exactly like the job selection interface in those role-playing action games he sometime interact with.
Gradually, the shock began to fade, replaced by a tenuous calm. He forced himself to take in his surroundings again. Aside from the panels and the shaft of light from above, there was something else here, something that felt more urgent.
Suspended high above was an enormous clock, its numbers glowing faintly, each tick resonating in the still air.
"Twenty-seven minutes... thirty-six seconds?" he muttered.
Judging by the situation, it seemed that the countdown had started at thirty minutes. Nearly three minutes had already slipped away.
"Don't tell me... the world's about to end?"
The thought wasn't as far-fetched as it might have seemed once. He had read plenty of stories on the internet built on that very premise, apocalypse arrives, humanity is forced to choose its own class, power, ability, unique trait or whatever... in order to survive the merciless days ahead.
It was a familiar pattern, one he had seen so often in those web novel ads, comics, and online games that it had almost become cliché. And yet, here he stood, not as a reader, not as a spectator, but as a participant caught in the gears of an unknown system.
"Man, I didn't even read those kind of stories."
[When the rules of the world change, the old truths die with them.]
Combined with the fact that, aside from himself, it seemed that other people, at least those standing nearby, could also see the strange floating text, Voma began forming his own conclusions.
"If I were the only one who could see this line of text, then this would probably be the usual 'chosen one' scenario. You know, the kind where you're pulled into some kind of battle against a great enemy or thrown into a brutal survival game. But if a whole crowd of people can see the exact same thing..."
Then it could only mean one thing.
This was the kind of scenario that heralded a Great Apocalypse.
Voma clenched his teeth, forcing himself to focus. He began scanning through the strange options that hovered in front of his eyes, reading them carefully as if the right choice might decide the weight of his very existence.
[Random selection in progress...]
A cluster of semi-transparent panels, each one glowing with a different hue, suddenly flared into brightness. They began spinning in the air at a dizzying speed, their colors flashing in and out like shards of light in a storm.
Voma's gaze drifted across them, lingering on each strange interface for a heartbeat. His fingers twitched with hesitation. The colors, the shapes, the endless unknown possibilities, they were both alluring and unnerving.
"Huh?! Only ten minutes left?!"
Panic began to creep into his voice. The tension in his chest coiled tighter, until it felt like a fist was gripping his lungs. He realized with an almost absurd sense of irony that this decision was far harder than customizing a character in a role-playing game. At least in those games, choosing between hair color, jawline, or eye shape was harmless fun.
But this, this was no game. Every fiber of his instincts screamed that the consequences of this choice would follow him for the rest of his life, perhaps even determine whether he had a life left to live. He could not, under any circumstance, just pick at random and hope for the best.
"Damn it... Think, think."
Yet no matter how he thought about it, whether he tried to reason it out, calculate probabilities, or make a safe bet, it made no difference. The selection was purely random. The result would be the same no matter how much effort he poured into the choice.
Perhaps this was simply human nature. No matter how much we know the odds are against us, there is still that flicker of hope, that stubborn belief that maybe luck will favor us this time.
"Out of options."
Voma exhaled sharply and extended his hand. He jabbed his finger toward one of the spinning panels without looking. The tip of his finger brushed against a pale, almost ghostly white screen.
At that very moment, the thirty-minute countdown that had been ticking away in his mind dropped to its final thirty seconds.
[Todes Ende: The race of death and annihilation, manifest in physical form...]
[Please proceed to the designated location to begin the tutorial...]
The panels dissolved into nothingness, like mist under a morning sun.
Gradually, Voma's vision returned. He found himself once again at the large intersection where all this had started.
"Ahhh... ha... ha... ha."
The girl beside him suddenly let out a strangled scream, collapsing to the ground as her chest heaved violently. Her breath came in heavy, ragged gasps, but there was a strange, almost unsettling quality to the sound something in it that didn't match the exhaustion on her face.
Voma didn't focus on her. His attention was drawn instead to the expressions of the people around them, faces caught somewhere between confusion, shock, and a bone-deep fatigue. It was as if they had all been thrust into a nightmare and woken up without knowing where reality began or ended.
Then, another detail caught his eye. The road ahead was littered with fallen motorbikes, some lying on their sides like discarded toys. Cars sat motionless, blocking the street in an unnatural standstill, as if time had stopped mid-traffic.
But what unsettled him most was the people. The drivers of those toppled motorcycles were not sprawled on the ground where they had fallen. Instead, they were standing, frozen in place, wearing the same bewildered expression as everyone else, as though they had just clawed their way out of a dream too vivid to bear.
"Looks like this isn't a dream, huh?"
Phup! Splurt...
The sound was sudden, wet, and final.
Before Voma's eyes, the head of a man standing only a few steps away simply vanished. It didn't fall, it was as if it had been erased from existence. A spray of fresh, crimson blood erupted from the ragged stump of his neck, fountaining into the air before splattering across the asphalt.
Voma froze. His mind stalled, caught in the shock of the moment. A shadow fell over him, blotting out what little light there was. Slowly, with the same dread one feels when turning toward the source of a predator's gaze, he lifted his head.
It was there.
At some point, without sound, without warning, a monster had appeared. A massive, hulking beast, its mouth dripping with fresh blood, stood over the corpse. It was chewing something with slow, deliberate bites, the crunch of bones echoing in the stillness like the snapping of dry branches.
The stench of iron filled the air.
And in that moment, Voma realized, the Apocalypse had already begun.