It was so cold that Leo thought his blood had frozen solid—each heartbeat a slow, painful shove through ice.
FWOOOOSH—
A razor wind screamed across his skin.
He opened his eyes, expecting the sagging gray ceiling of the cheap hostel he'd been crashing in for the past month. Instead, an endless sky loomed above him—vast, indifferent, stained in shades of ash and dying crimson. The light of a broken sun bled across a desolate mountainside littered with jagged stone and patches of black, fungus-like moss.
Leo jolted upright.
"Where…?"
His voice sounded wrong—thin, hollow, instantly shredded by the howling wind. He wore ragged cloth that might as well have been wet paper. The cold bit deep, gnawing straight into bone. His body ached—not from injury, but from exhaustion so complete it felt ancient.
Then a voice detonated inside his skull.
[Awakening Sequence initiated.]
Leo flinched. The voice wasn't echoing—it was rooted in his mind, a presence that bypassed ears entirely.
[Name: Leo.]
[True Name: faceless sun.]
He blinked.
"Faceless… Sun?"
What kind of melodramatic MMO nonsense was that?
But the voice wasn't done.
[Flaw: Slave.]
[Preparing to initiate the First Nightmare…]
Leo's stomach dropped into his heels.
Nightmare.
Not a dream.
A title. A trial. A sentence.
He scrambled to his feet, heart punching his ribs from the inside. The wind clawed at him like something alive. He spun, searching for shelter, a cave, a shadow—anything. The mountainside stretched infinitely upward and downward, a world made entirely of stone, silence, and despair.
No shelter.
No life.
Only him… and the voice.
Then a countdown ignited across his vision, burning crimson.
[02:59… 02:58…]
"O-okay—okay, sure. That's normal."
He laughed weakly. The wind swallowed it whole.
He'd heard rumors. Urban legends whispered at 3 A.M. about people vanishing for days and returning changed. Some stronger. Some broken. Most never returning at all.
The Spell.
The Awakening.
Requiem.
He never believed any of it.
He believed now.
"Of course," Leo muttered bitterly. "Of course this would happen to me."
His life had always been a series of wrong answers. Born unlucky, raised invisible, surviving on crumbs in a world that never noticed him. Why would a cosmic nightmare pick a hero?
It would pick him.
Someone disposable.
[02:01… 02:00…]
Leo gritted his teeth and moved. Standing still felt like volunteering for a grave.
He staggered across the rocks, bare feet slicing open on the uneven ground, every step leaving droplets of red on black stone. He ignored it. Pain meant alive. Alive meant options.
He dug through debris until he spotted it—a jagged piece of obsidian-like rock. Shard of the mountain's own bones.
He gripped it tight.
A pathetic weapon—but his weapon.
[01:12… 01:11…]
The wind shifted.
WHOOOOOO—
A low, distant howl threaded through it. Not human. Not animal. Something wrong.
Leo's skin crawled. He spun, obsidian shard raised.
The sun dimmed.
Not set—dimmed, as though something vast and invisible slid across its face. Darkness flooded the slope, heavier than the cold.
The temperature dropped in a single brutal wave.
CRACK—CRACK—
Leo's teeth clattered uncontrollably.
[Initiating the First Nightmare.]
The world tore open.
A rift burst into existence a dozen meters away—vertical, like a wound carved into reality. Darkness spilled from it, thick and oily, carrying a stench that made his stomach heave: rot baked under ancient sun, and something older… something that remembered him.
Then it stepped out.
The creature was tall. Too tall. A human shape stretched beyond all reasonable proportions, pale translucent skin stretched tight over elongated bones. Joints bent backward, sideways—ways they should not. Something pulsed beneath its skin, like veins full of liquid shadow.
Its face—
Leo's mind recoiled instinctively, as if touching a hot stove. Something primal screamed look away.
He couldn't.
The thing tilted its head with a slow, predatory curiosity.
Then it smiled.
Leo nearly collapsed.
A blue interface burned itself into his vision.
[Name: Mountain King's Larva.]
[Rank: Awakened Beast.]
[Tier: 1.]
A final word materialized like a blade.
[Survive.]
The ground rumbled as the creature took one impossibly long step forward.
Leo ran.
There was no plan. No strategy. Just pure, animal instinct. He spun and sprinted down the slope, leaping over rocks, tearing open his feet anew. Behind him came the sound:
SKRRRRRT—
SKRCH—SKRRRCH—
The scrape of claws on stone.
Fast. Precise. Terrifyingly controlled.
He didn't dare look back.
His lungs burned like molten iron. His vision wavered. The cold slashed at his exposed skin, turning every breath into a knife.
But he kept running.
Because stopping meant being unmade.
For the first time in years—maybe ever—Leo felt it:
He didn't want to die.
Not here.
Not like this.
Not devoured by some nightmare thing on a corpse-mountain under a bleeding sky.
A wild, reckless laugh erupted from him, ripped away by the wind.
"COME ON THEN!" he roared.
"If you want me—
you'll have to catch me!"
The creature answered with a shriek that split the heavens.
SFX: KRIEEEEEEEEEEH—!
And so, under a dying sun on a dead mountain in a world that wasn't a world—
The First Nightmare began.