The fine, crimson mist that had been Thalen Vire hung in the blighted air, a grotesque perfume of shattered arrogance.
It hadn't even begun to settle on the jagged rocks before the creature that had created it took a single, ground-shaking step forward, fully revealing itself.
This was no Gutter Imp.
This was a walking blasphemy against nature. It stood on two powerfully built, reverse-jointed legs, its body a mass of hulking, twisted muscles sheathed in obsidian-black skin.
Through cracks in that dark carapace, a network of veins pulsed with a sickening red light, like lava flowing beneath cooled rock. Jagged, serrated bone protrusions, each the length of a short sword, jutted from its forearms, shoulders, and spine.
Its head was a nightmare of tusks and rage, but its eyes were the worst part—they glowed with the malevolent, shifting heat of molten embers. Drool, thick and acidic, dripped from its maw, sizzling and smoking as it hit the corrupted ground.
Its movements a feral, erratic series of lunges, a predator whose very biology screamed unstoppable.
The remaining members of Batch Seven were statues of terror. The C-Ranks, who moments before had been boasting about an easy clear, were now paralyzed, their weapons hanging limply in their hands.
One of them had wet himself, a dark patch spreading down his grey fatigues, the smell of urine cutting through the metallic punch of blood.
Their entire worldview, carefully constructed within the Institute's safe walls, had been obliterated in a single, wet tear.
This wasn't a low-level rift. This was a death sentence.
Lyra Kess was the first to shatter the paralysis. A tremor ran through her, a brief flicker of the same terror that held the others, but it was snuffed out by a surge of pure, honed instinct.
"Form a defensive circle! Now!" Her voice, sharp and commanding, cut through their numbness. "Rikard, shield on the left! Elara, be ready to heal anyone who gets grazed! Do not let it close on you!"
As she shouted, she moved. Her hands wove through the air, and a shimmering, spectral bow of pure, silver light materialized in her grasp.
This was her Will.
With a thought, she nocked an arrow of condensed energy and let it fly.
It wasn't a physical projectile; it was a lance of pure force that shrieked through the air and slammed into the creature's shoulder, carving a furrow in its obsidian hide. The beast roared, a sound that felt like needles in the brain, and its burning gaze fixed on her.
'So that's an A-Rank Will in action,' Kaisen thought, scrambling behind a jagged rock formation as the world erupted into chaos.
Spectral Archery? Or just pure force manifestation? His mind, even now, defaulted to analysis, a desperate attempt to impose order on the madness.
The internal narration was a frantic scroll of information, a defense mechanism against the overwhelming fear.
Every Awakened inherits a God's Will, he recited to himself, the Institute's lessons a familiar anchor.
A relic of the divine war, fragments of power left behind for humanity to find. The Will determines your type of ability—offense, defense, support, utility.
He peeked over the rock as Lyra launched another volley, forcing the Berserker to twist away from a pincer movement attempted by two brave, or foolish, C-Ranks.
Each Will has a rank, F to SSS, that defines its potential ceiling, not its immediate power. And your Level just measures how far you've climbed toward that ceiling.
He watched a boy with a C-Rank Stone-Skin Will throw up a barrier of earth.
The Berserker swatted it aside like it was made of sand. The boy's Will was low-ranked, but even if it were A-Rank, he was only Level 4. He lacked the raw power and fine control.
That's what got Thalen killed, Kaisen realized, ducking as a chunk of rock, sent flying by a wild swing of the monster's arm, shattered against his cover.
He had an A-Rank Will—probably some brute-force enhancement type—but he was only Level 14.
All that potential, and he faced a Berserker, a monster classified as a Level 20+ in threat degree, with nothing but arrogance.
Lyra's also A-Rank, but she's Level 19.
More experience, better control, actual tactics. That's the only reason she's surviving right now, and the only reason any of them have a chance.
The battle was a mix of light, sound, and terror.
Lyra was a director of the controlled violence, her spectral arrows always striking at joints, eyes, and the pulsing red veins, harrying the beast, keeping its attention divided.
The C-Ranks did their best, throwing up flickering shields, attempting distracting strikes with elemental Wills that sputtered against the creature's hide, and one girl with a weak Healing Touch Will desperately tried to staunch the bleeding of a boy who had taken a glancing blow from a bone spur.
And Kaisen?
Kaisen was a ghost in the machine, scrambling, dodging, and hiding.
His own Will felt like a lead weight in his soul. While others summoned fire and lightning, shields and blades, his was… nothing.
'Flicker Spark,' he thought with a bitterness as acidic as the monster's drool.
His F-Rank Will.
The grand, divine power he had been blessed with. He could generate a tiny, harmless static charge between his fingertips.
He could maybe, on a good day, short-circuit a cheap radio. The Institute evaluators had laughed.
They'd drilled it into him, over and over: "Worthless in battle, useless in war." Its ceiling was Level 10—a bottleneck he would never, ever break. He was Level 2.
In this life-or-death struggle, his contribution was negative. He was just another liability for Lyra to account for.
'If the monster doesn't kill me, my allies' stray shots will,' he thought, diving to the ground as a wild blast of fire from a panicking C-Rank scorched the air where his head had been.
He was a leaf in a hurricane, his survival dependent entirely on the competence of others and the whims of a creature that had already turned one of them into aerosol.
But Lyra was good. Brutally, efficiently good.
She saw an opening as the Berserker, enraged by her constant stings, overextended to crush a C-Rank's shield.
"Now! All power, on its right leg!" she commanded.
A concentrated volley of every remaining ability slammed into the creature's knee. Rock shattered, ice encased the joint, and Lyra's final, most powerful arrow—a beam of solid light—punched clean through.
The Berserker roared, a sound of pure agony this time, and crashed to the ground. It was the chance Lyra needed. She leaped, impossibly high, her body pivoting in mid-air.
Two final arrows materialized, glowing with an intensity that hurt to look at. She fired them both directly into the beast's open, screaming maw.
There was a flash, a sickening crunch, and then silence.
The Berserker twitched once, its ember-eyes dimming, and then its body began to dissolve, flaking away into a coarse, black dust that was carried away on a non-existent wind.
For a long moment, no one moved.
Then, a wave of relief so potent it was dizzying washed over the four remaining C-Ranks.
They slumped against rocks or each other, gasping, laughing hysterically, tears of sheer release streaming down their faces. They had survived.
Against a Berserker, they had survived.
But Lyra didn't relax. She landed softly, her spectral bow dissolving, and immediately scanned the hellish landscape, her brow furrowed. Her breathing was controlled, but Kaisen could see the tension coiled in her shoulders.
"This is wrong," she stated, her voice cutting through the relieved babble. "A Berserker. Here. It shouldn't be possible. This rift was scouted, classified as D-Rank. A Berserker is a D-Rank threat by itself. The ecosystem of a D-Rank rift can't support one."
The C-Ranks fell silent, their relief turning back to unease.
"Something has corrupted this place," Lyra continued, her eyes narrowing. "The stability is off. We don't have time to recover. We move. Now. The Guardian Temple is our only way out. We find it, we defeat the Guardian, and we collapse this rift before anything else comes for us."
No one argued. Her authority, forged in the crucible of the fight and proven by her survival, was absolute. They were sheep, and she was the only shepherd left.
They moved east, as all their training had dictated—the Guardian's anchoring point was always to the east of a rift's entry point. But the journey was deeply unsettling.
After the violent chaos of the Berserker fight, the silence that followed was oppressive, a physical weight on their ears. The distorted landscape of the rift seemed to watch them. The rock formations carried a faint, rhythmic dark energy, like a sleeping heart.
The blood-red sky offered no comfort, only a ceiling of impending doom. There were no skittering Imps, no corrupted Hounds, no signs of life at all.
It was a dead world, waiting for something they were yet to understand.
"This is odd," one of the C-Ranks, a boy named Jax, whispered. "It's too quiet."
"Shut up and keep moving," Lyra ordered, but even she glanced around with increasing wariness.
Kaisen felt the wrongness more acutely than any of them.
It was a pressure in his skull, a static hum at the edge of his perception that his pathetic Flicker Spark seemed to resonate with.
It felt like the entire rift was a single, massive eye, and they were insects crawling across its pupil.
Finally, they saw it. The Guardian Temple.
It was not a grand cathedral, but a ruin of the same black stone that comprised the landscape, looking less built and more like a cancerous growth that had been carved, eons ago, into a semblance of structure.
At its heart, in an open-air courtyard, stood the altar—a single, polished slab of dark stone, covered in faint, glowing runes that were unfamiliar to Kaisen.
"Alright," Lyra said, a note of grim hope in her voice. "Just as we learned, we place our hands or weapons on the altar as a group. It will channel our collective energy and transport us to the Guardian's chamber. Be ready for anything."
They approached the altar, the five of them forming a loose semi-circle around the ancient stone.
The C-Ranks looked to Lyra. She nodded, and as one, they reached out to touch the cold, dark surface.
But the moment their fingers were an inch away, the runes on the altar flared with a violent, blood-red light. The air itself seemed to tear, and glowing, crimson script unfurled before them like a scroll of damnation.
[ The Guardian demands a single Sacrifice. Let the blood of the chosen drip upon the Altar, and the Rift shall be cleared. ]
Silence. Absolute, stunned silence.
Then, panicked whispers broke out.
"What?"
"A sacrifice?"
"That's not...that's not in the manuals!"
"Has this ever happened before?"
Jax, his face pale, stammered, "W-what does it mean? Do we... do we draw straws?"
The suggestion hung in the air, toxic and terrifying.
Lyra's voice cut through the panic, cold, decisive, and utterly devoid of emotion.
"We don't need to draw straws." Her gaze, hard and unforgiving, swept past the terrified C-Ranks and landed squarely on Kaisen. "We all know who it should be."
The world seemed to tilt. Kaisen felt the blood drain from his face.
"His Will is F-Rank," Lyra continued, her logic as sharp and cruel as a razor. "He contributed nothing to the fight against the Berserker. He survived only because we protected him. He is, by every metric, dead weight. Sacrificing him preserves the strength of the Awakened who can actually make a difference. It's the only logical choice."
The others latched onto her words with the desperate fervor of the condemned granted a reprieve.
Their fear needed an outlet, and Lyra had just handed them a victim.
"Yeah! The F-Rank!"
"He's useless anyway!"
"It's him or all of us!"
"Should have been him instead of Thalen!"
The mockery they'd tossed around in the transport curdled into something darker, something violent. They formed a loose circle around him, their earlier terror now redirected as aggression.
"Come on, Kaisen," Jax said, his voice trembling but his knife steady. "Be a hero for once in your life."
"Don't make this harder than it has to be," another girl snarled, her hands crackling with weak electrical energy.
Kaisen looked at Lyra, searching for any hint of remorse, any flicker of the compassion that was supposed to separate them from the monsters.
He found none.
Her face was a mask of cold pragmatism. She had made the calculation, and he was the negative integer that balanced the equation.
He resisted at first, taking a step back, but he was surrounded. A blade pricked the skin of his throat, drawing a bead of blood. The message was clear: comply and die cleanly, or resist and die messily.
He was weaponless, powerless, and utterly alone.
The fight drained out of him, replaced by a cold, hollow acceptance. This was the world. This was what his worth had always been, in their eyes. He met Lyra's gaze one last time, trying to imprint the betrayal onto his soul, and then let his shoulders slump in surrender.
"Fine," he whispered, the word tasting like ash.
They forced him to the altar, shoving him forward until his hips slammed against the cold stone. One of them—Jax—grabbed his wrist and roughly dragged his palm across the sharp edge of the altar's surface.
A line of fire erupted across his hand, and blood, dark and red, welled up immediately. He watched, numb, as they forced his bleeding hand down onto the central rune.
His blood dripped onto the dark stone. It sizzled, not like the Berserker's drool, but with a sound like a thousand whispering voices.
The C-Ranks stepped back quickly, watching with a mixture of grim satisfaction and naked relief.
But the ritual wasn't what they expected. The altar didn't glow for the group. The runes didn't activate for them.
The blood-red light concentrated, swirling around Kaisen alone. It enveloped him, a vortex of crimson energy and shadow.
The world—the temple, the triumphant faces of his betrayers, the hellish rift—dissolved into nothing.
The last thing he heard was not the cheers of his comrades, but a distant, echoing chant, a chorus of voices from a forgotten age, speaking in a language he had never heard but somehow understood.
It spoke of cycles, of judgment, and of a debt that needed to be paid.
The darkness swallowed him whole.
When sensation returned, it was not the expected void of death. It was solid ground beneath his feet. The chanting faded, replaced by an immense, crushing silence.
He was standing in a vast, cylindrical chamber. The walls were not black, but a polished, milky-white stone that seemed to glow with an internal light.
The air was clean, sterile, and heavy with age and power. At the center of the chamber, there was no monstrous Guardian beast.
There was only a single throne.
And floating in the air before him, composed of the same glowing, crimson script as the altar, was a final, simple message.
[ You now stand before an Ascendant: Karihad, the Godslayer. ]