Kai had grown used to rejection.
Every guild board, every raid call, every team leader gave the same look once the scanner branded him Zero Sync. A dull, lifeless mark that never glowed, never showed numbers. "Why waste a slot?" they always said, sometimes with pity, sometimes with scorn.
This time had been no different. At the staging ground by Gate 314, the party of twenty-one gathered in a half-circle of mismatched armor and nervous bravado. When Kai approached, their captain, Harker, squinted at him like he was a smudge on glass.
"You again?" Harker's lips curled. "I thought I told you, we don't take trash."
Kai bowed his head, fingers tight on the strap of his cheap chestguard. "I'll carry supplies. I won't slow you down."
Laughter trickled through the group. A few muttered "Zero Sync" under their breath, as if it were his name.
Only one voice cut in—Darin, leaning on his bow, grin wry. "He's stubborn. You want someone to haul crates, let him. If he dies, that's one less meal ticket to split."
Harker spat, then shrugged. "Fine. Carry packs. Stay out of the way."
It wasn't acceptance, but Kai took it. He had to. For his mother's medicine. For his sister's school fees. He couldn't keep scraping coins off delivery runs forever. Even Zero Syncs had to try.
The gate yawned like a wound in the air, swallowing them one after another.
Inside, the world stank of mold and wet stone. Pale fungi clung to cavern walls, casting a sickly green light. Kai kept to the rear, shouldering extra gear, eyes sharp for loose stones, small hazards, anything he could do to prove he wasn't only a burden.
The first fights were smooth. Goblins and lesser beasts snarled from the shadows, but the frontliners cut them down with practiced efficiency. The team laughed, even bragged.
"E-rank gate, easiest money we'll make all week!" someone cheered.
Kai's heart eased.
For once, the raid had gone smoothly. Goblins fell easily, their shrieks cut short by steel and flame. The vanguard laughed between strikes; the healers hummed their spells as if practicing scales. Even Kai, weighted down with discarded gear, felt a flicker of relief.
Maybe this time they would finish without incident.
Maybe this time they wouldn't look at him like dead weight.
Rumble. Rumble.
Pebbles cascaded from the ceiling. The laughter died when the cavern itself began to shake.
From the deeper tunnels, a roar pulsed through stone — not a sound, but a pressure, vibrating teeth, crushing lungs. Torches guttered. Every spine bent instinctively, bodies bowing as if the noise itself demanded obedience.
A shape crawled into the fungi light.
Not a goblin. Not even a troll.
A centipede. Massive. Its plated body scraped against both walls at once, armored scales clashing like shields. Rows of eyes, pale-blue and cold as cracking glaciers, ignited in sequence. Each pulse of its aura pressed down like invisible weight.
"Th-that—" Mara's bowstring creaked, her hands trembling. "That's not supposed to be here!"
"Boss!" Harker's bellow cracked through the panic. "Formation! Take it down before it wipes us!"
Boss monster.
A gate's tyrant. The heart of its army. Stronger by magnitudes than the beasts around it.
The rank of every gate — E through S — was decided by experts who read the mana signature of the boss. The math never failed. Hunters were dispatched based on those readings, their strength balanced against the threat. It was a system that had kept casualties minimal for years.
And this gate had been rated E-rank. The lowest. Supposed to be routine.
They fought. Gods, how they fought.
Spells blazed, scorching chitin. Shields splintered under the crush of armored legs. Swords screamed against plates harder than steel.
Blood sprayed the cavern floor, black mixing with red. Screams echoed until they cracked into silence.
Seventy percent of them fell before the centipede finally shuddered, convulsed, and collapsed. Its death-roar dwindled to a fading hiss.
The survivors — ragged, bleeding, stunned — stared at the corpse.
"A D-rank…" Alek panted, clutching his bleeding side. "A D-rank in an E-rank gate?"
"Doesn't matter." Harker's voice was hoarse, his sword arm trembling. "It's dead."
It should have ended there.
The ground pulsed. Red.
The air thickened with heat. The gate walls twisted, veins of crimson spiderwebbing across stone.
The centipede's carcass convulsed. Plates realigned with sickening cracks. Shattered armor reformed, wounds sealing shut as though time itself rewound.
Its eyes reignited — no longer pale, but blazing. Malice radiated from them like a furnace.
Darkness surged outward, swallowing the fungi light whole. The cavern was drowned in black.
Panicked voices shrieked.
"What—what is happening?!"
"The boss is—!"
"Run!"
A voice boomed from within the shadow, ancient, seething, too vast to belong to anything mortal.
"I feel it. His presence. Somewhere… hidden. I will not allow it. He must be extinguished."
Kai's breath locked. The words vibrated inside his bones, targeting something behind his ribs — as if spoken to him alone.
The monster rose again, larger than before, its aura solidified rage.
"Run!" Harker screamed. "Get to the gate!"
They ran. Boots pounded. Armor clanged. Every breath was a scream.
But the darkness moved faster. It swept through the cavern like a living tide. Hunters were caught mid-stride, their cries cut short as bodies split apart, erased into mist.
The gate shimmered ahead, salvation in sight — until a crimson barrier slammed down, sealing it like a prison door.
"No! No, no, no!" Mara's sob was shredded by the centipede's roar.
Kai ran too, lungs burning, heart tearing itself raw. Darin stayed with him, as always, his bow long gone, his hand shoving Kai forward.
"Keep moving!" Darin rasped, breath ragged. "Don't stop!"
The centipede descended.
Darin vanished beneath its strike.
"Darin!" someone screamed.
"A… a C-rank Hunter—killed in one blow?!" another shouted, voice breaking.
Kai stumbled into the wall, blood spraying from his mouth, ribs screaming. His body convulsed as the rock cracked under the impact. Pain blurred his vision.
Not yet. His mind screamed even as darkness threatened to pull him under. Not yet.
Because waiting for him at home was Mei — his younger sister, bright-eyed, always smiling, always pretending everything was fine. She wasn't starving like him. He had made sure of that. She went to school, laughed with friends, ate like any normal student. He had carried that burden so she could live untouched by poverty.
Every raid, every humiliation, every sneer of "Zero Sync" — he endured them for her. To pay her study fees. To slip pocket money into her hands so she could go out with friends without shame, so she could eat without counting coins.
He thought of her words the last time he visited home, her hands clutching his sleeve:
"Kai, you don't have to do this. Don't risk yourself in the gates for me. I can work part-time. I can cover my own things. Just… don't die out there."
She had smiled when she said it, but Kai had seen the fear hidden behind her eyes.
And beyond her, deeper in the house, lay his mother — silent, unresponsive since the day their father vanished in the first outbreak. Doctors, healers, technomancers — none could name the illness. She breathed, she slept, but her soul seemed absent, lost somewhere else.
Every time Kai returned, he would sit beside her bed, holding her limp hand, whispering updates she would never answer.
If he died here… his sister would be left alone, clinging to a ghost of a family.
His heart hammered, not for himself, but for them.
"No… not yet…"
The beast's shadow swelled over him, eyes blazing with hatred, its roar shaking the marrow in his bones.
Kai pressed his back harder into the stone, coughing blood, ribs screaming in protest. But his mind clung to Mei's smile, to his mother's vacant eyes, to the promise he had made silently in the dormitory bunk when hunger kept him awake: I'll keep going. Even if they all laugh. Even if I'm Zero Sync. I'll endure.
The centipede's plates split apart, descending to crush him—
—and then the ceiling fractured.
Something black, veined with silver, tumbled with the debris. He barely registered it before it struck his Mark.
It dissolved instantly.
His wrist flared. The Broken Seal, mocked his entire life for never glowing, ignited with light. Not bright, not golden—an alien, shifting glow that seared deeper than sight.
Power exploded outward. His body moved, but not under his will. His mind blanked as something else steered.
The beast screamed once before its body split, torn apart by force it couldn't comprehend. Darkness shattered. The red barrier cracked. Silence thundered back into the cavern.
Kai's knees buckled. His consciousness slipped away.
The last thing he felt was the heat of his Mark and the impossible echo whispering:
[Eclipse] Shard signature accepted.
[Algorithm] Initializing…
Then nothing.
Healing Ward — Earth
He woke to antiseptic light. Canvas ceiling. Machines beeping.
Alive. Alone.
They told him he was the only survivor. The raid team was gone. The reports would call him "lucky." A fluke.
His wrist showed only the same dull Mark. The glow was gone.
Had it even happened?
The whispers were silent.
Kai closed his eyes. He told himself it had been a hallucination. Blood loss. Trauma. Nothing more.
But deep inside, something waited, quiet and patient, in the silence of his bones.