Chapter 20
At first, there was only darkness.
No map. No floors. No monsters. No Ultima. No shouting. No pain.
Just black.
Then the black began to pulse.
A pressure built behind my nonexistent eyes, like something trying to force itself into shape. My body—or core, or whatever I currently was—felt stretched thin across a boundary I didn’t understand. The world was gone, and in its place was a sensation so intense it almost felt like memory.
A human memory.
I saw light.
Not the blinding white of system notifications or invasion spells, but something softer, warmer, almost real. I saw the outline of my own hands—hands with five fingers each, pale skin, black nails, and no crystal shell. I saw sleeves of white cloth. Long robes trailing down from my shoulders. I saw the edge of long, spiky hair falling past my face, every strand sharp and alive, fading from blue near the roots into pink at the tips like a sunset caught in motion.
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Seventeen years old.
That thought arrived with eerie certainty.
Not a dungeon core.
A boy.
I couldn’t move.
I could only see.
For one impossible heartbeat, I looked at myself.
Gold eyes opened in the dark.
They were mine.
Or were they?
My breath caught in a body I had never used and yet somehow recognized. My heart—yes, I had one now, I was sure of it—beat once, hard and clear, in the center of my chest. The white robes hung around me like ceremonial cloth, loose and elegant. My hair lifted slightly as if stirred by a wind that existed only in this moment between forms.
Then the vision flickered.
I was still in the middle of the battle.
Still hearing the clash of steel and flame.
Still feeling the pressure of the Evolution Crystal tearing me open and rebuilding me from the inside out.
But that brief glimpse of human shape remained burned into me, too vivid to dismiss.
Around me, the fight was escalating beyond control.
Makkura roared. Kuroe cast something desperate and enormous. The Alves’ combined skills hammered at the heroes’ advance. The leader of the enemy party screamed an order I couldn’t quite catch over the noise. A holy blast and a blue flame tore into each other hard enough to shake the entire chamber.
My vision snapped back into black.
Then, through the dark, I heard Ultima’s voice like a distant signal.
“Master… your evolution is beginning.”
I wanted to answer.
I wanted to tell her to hold the line, to protect the dungeon, to make sure the heroes didn’t win while I was gone.
But I was falling deeper into whatever transformation had swallowed me whole.
And somewhere in the dark, something inside me was waking up.