Soulless Soul

Chapter 2: The Voice

"The dungeon array appeared over a decade ago," the officer said, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly hum. "Back in the time of the Old World."

Outside the interrogation room, the muffled wail of sirens finally began to fade. In here, the only sounds were the steady drone of heavy machinery and the rhythmic lashing of rain against the high, narrow windows.

Sky sat on a cold metal bench inside a heavy steel cage. Bars hemmed him in on three sides. A thin, stained mattress lay in the corner beneath a blinking security camera. In the hallway beyond, three guards kept their rifles aimed dead at his chest.

He blinked, his mind struggling to process the shift. "What?"

"You heard me," the officer said, settling into a chair across from the bars. Same dark suit. Same exhausted eyes. But his pen was gone, replaced by a sleek, military-grade tablet. "The Call. The Gem. The Black Shatter. You don’t get to play dumb anymore, kid."

Sky swallowed hard, his throat tight. "I wasn’t playing. I just... I didn’t know it was that serious."

The officer exhaled a sharp breath through his nose and tapped the tablet. He spun it around, letting the screen roll grainy, decade-old news clips.

Initially, no one knew what the dungeon array was, or where it came from. The public debated whether it was God, the Devil, or an alien anomaly. At first, it was nothing more than a whisper. Millions of people across the globe started waking up in the dead of night to the exact same phantom sound—a low, raspy murmur echoing directly inside their minds.

Come. To the dungeon realm. You are Called.

Most people ignored it. Governments dismissed it as mass hysteria, psychologists called it a viral psychosis, and religious leaders claimed it was divine judgment.

They turned a blind eye. That was humanity’s fatal mistake.

Because when the voices were ignored, they only grew louder. People stopped sleeping. They stopped eating. Thousands went mad in the streets, clawing at their own scalps until they bled, screaming for the voice to stop.

Then, the gates tore open.

The first crack ripped through the sky over New Seoul like wet paper, bleeding a toxic blue light. Then another split the Egyptian desert. Then Antarctica. Suddenly, the sky itself was fracturing. From those cracks poured things that defied nature. Scaled beasts with rows of mismatched teeth. Living smoke that hunted like wolves. Monsters that screamed without mouths.

Civilization plummeted into a dark age overnight. Power grids died, conventional armies were wiped out, and millions perished in the first month alone.

Just as humanity faced total extinction, the Awakened emerged.

These were the rare few who had answered the Call instead of fighting it. The dungeon array had yanked them through the light and into an alternate dimension: the Dungeon Realm. There, they fought not for glory or gold, but for time. They survived impossible trials, conquered dungeon runs, and returned to Earth with supernatural power.

One by one, the Awakened sealed the gates and pushed the monsters back, dragging humanity out of the ashes.

The tablet screen flickered, displaying a younger, heavily armored General Vance standing victoriously atop the corpse of a mountain-sized behemoth.

The video cut to black.

The officer pulled the tablet back. "That’s why we have protocols now. You hear the Call, you report within seventy-two hours. You get processed, trained, and sent inside before the gate forces its way out here."

Sky stared down at his hands. They wouldn’t stop shaking. "But I heard it a month ago."

"I know." The officer’s gaze turned razor-sharp. "Do you know what happens when someone waits a month?"

Sky shook his head.

"The Call doesn’t fade. It festers. And if you don’t answer it, the array forces its way to you." The officer leaned forward, his eyes burning. "That’s why the gem shattered. That’s why it turned black. You were one second away from tearing a hole in reality right here. In this building. In your slums."

The words hit Sky like a bucket of freezing water. "Me? I would’ve..." "Yeah. A Class-3 catastrophe, minimum," the officer muttered, tapping the reinforced glass. "You got lucky, kid. Real lucky."

Two heavy-set guards stepped forward and unlocked the cage. "Move."

Sky stood up, his legs feeling like brittle straw.

They marched him out of the holding cell and down the facility’s main terminal. It was a chaotic mix of military precision and absolute despair.

To his left, a long line of civilians in identical grey jumpsuits shuffled forward with the exact same hollow, terrified expression Sky had seen in his own reflection. The new recruits. They were being shuffled through medical checks, gear hand-outs, and final letters home.

To his right were the sleep cages. Dozens of them lined the walls. Inside, people slept fitfully or rock-backed and whispered to themselves. Doctors moved between the cells with clipboards, while a nurse tried to calm a woman who was sobbing and laughing simultaneously.

Through it all vibrated a low, physical hum. It sounded like an choir singing from miles underground.

Sky passed a cage where a man was frantically carving symbols into the wall with his fingernails. He passed another where two kids, both younger than him, shared a single threadbare blanket and stared blankly at the ceiling.

Nobody looked at him. They were all trapped in their own personal hells.

At the end of the hall, a heavy, reinforced vault door hissed open. "Inside," a guard ordered, shoving him gently.

Sky stepped in, and the door sealed behind him with a heavy, pressurized thud.

This room was smaller, containing only a bench, a toilet, a security camera, and a cot. On the small table sat a tray with fresh water and a loaf of thick bread. His knees finally buckled, and he collapsed onto the edge of the cot.

He still didn’t understand. Why him? Why now? Why hadn’t he gone mad from a month of sleep deprivation? The vault door hissed open again. The officer from the counter walked in alone, pulling up a metal folding chair to face Sky through the inner partition.

"So. A whole month."

Sky looked up, his voice cracking. "I was... busy. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind."

The officer evaluated him for a long, silent moment. Then, the corner of his mouth twitched into a grim, humorless smile. "You’re incredibly fortunate," the officer said. "If you hadn’t walked through our doors today, the array would have dragged you through anyway, and it wouldn’t have been gentle. The gem exploded because your internal Resonance was already peaking. Another twenty-four hours, and we’d be scraping a dungeon gate off this floor."

Sky swallowed, his mouth completely dry.

"What happens to me now?"

"Now?" The officer stood up, folding his chair. "Now you sleep. For real this time. No voices. We’re going to medically dose you. In forty-eight hours, you’ll clear processing, and then we’re dropping you straight into an evaluation dungeon run."

He nodded toward the paused tablet screen, where the armored heroes stood proud.

"Survive that, and you get to be one of them." He turned toward the exit, stopping right at the threshold. "And kid? Next time the world tells you to come, you don’t make it wait."

The door sealed. Sky was left entirely alone with the hum.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!