Soulless Soul

Chapter 30: Into the Threshold

Crazy Hope often corrected his stance with only a few quiet, precise words. She would stand perfectly still by the edge of the frayed training mat, her ash-gray eyes tracking his chaotic movements like a hawk observing a frantic rabbit in the brush. She didn’t waste breath on long lectures. Instead, she waited for the exact moment his form faltered under the weight of his own momentum.

"Your balance is leaning too far back," she would murmur, her voice cutting through the humid air of the training room. "Lower your center of gravity. Too much unnecessary movement in your shoulders."

Her technical advice was remarkably simple, stripped of any academic pretense, yet every single correction she forced him to make served a brutal purpose. She was systematically grinding away the wild, desperate edges of his street-fighting style, sharpening his instinctual survival mechanics into something far more fluid, calculated, and lethal. Every punch he threw became shorter and more direct; every step he took became a deliberate anchor to the floor.

Meanwhile, Chloe watched each intense sparring session from the wooden sidelines, listening intently instead of seeing. Because her blindness forced her to rely entirely on her acute hearing and her spiritual soul-sight, she quickly learned to recognize subtle tells that even Sky was blind to. She could map their movements through the shifting pressure in the room, the scuff of leather on canvas, and the distinct cadence of their muscles tensing. She didn’t just track where Sky was; she tracked the underlying rhythm of every single attack.

"You always instinctively dodge to the left first whenever she lunges," Chloe told Sky one quiet afternoon, her voice soft but certain after a particularly brutal three-minute round.

Sky stopped mid-stride, his chest heaving as he wiped a thick layer of sweat from his forehead with the back of his bare arm. He blinked at her, his muscles twitching from exhaustion. "...I do?" "Mhm. You’ve done it exactly seven times in a row now," Chloe replied, tilting her head slightly with a gentle, knowing smile. "Every time her weight shifts to her right heel, your left foot drops back first."

Embarrassed by his own predictable pattern, Sky realized she was absolutely right. His old survival habits from the slums were turning into dangerous crutches. In the back alleys of District 9, a predictable dodge might just cost you a tooth or a coin purse. But out here, inside a high-tier dungeon, repetition was a formal invitation for a swift, unceremonious death. Monsters didn’t overlook patterns; they fed on them. Gritting his teeth, he immediately began forcing himself to break the habit, consciously mixing up his defensive angles and overriding the muscle memory that had kept him alive in the gutters. By the end of the second week of training, the three outcasts of the Commons had completely settled into a comfortable, seamless rhythm. They sparred until their muscles burned and their skin was mapped with fresh bruises. They spent late nights under Doctor Ronald’s watchful eye, memorizing the complex, shifting runes of the ancient languages of the Dungeon Realm until the symbols swam in their sleep. They laughed away the suffocating stress of their impending deployment over stale rations, clinging to each other’s presence. But before long, the definitive day that everyone in the freshman class had been quietly dreading finally arrived.

The entire first-year class assembled inside the academy’s massive, subterranean transfer chamber.

The scale of the room was oppressive. Dozens of sleek, silver sleeping capsules—known simply to the uncaring military bureaucracy as Sleep Cages—stood in neat, clinical rows like high-tech coffins. They sat directly beneath the glowing, pulsing violet light of the central dungeon Array, which hummed with a deep, subterranean frequency that vibrated straight through the soles of Sky’s boots. The air in the chamber was freezing, smelling heavily of chemical coolant, ozone, and the distinct, metallic tang of ancient magic. It was a stark, terrifying upgrade from the rusted, blood-stained holding pens of the Sinking Catacombs, yet the underlying purpose was exactly the same: it was a staging ground for a meat grinder.

Instructor Rex stepped forward onto the elevated central podium. His massive, scarred frame cast a long shadow over the assembled teenagers. Doctor Ronald stood quietly beside him, his usual eccentric, hyperactive energy replaced by a solemn, heavy expression that made him look a decade older.

"You’ve trained exceptionally hard over the past two weeks," Rex said, his deep, booming voice echoing powerfully off the reinforced metal walls. He didn’t offer a smile. "But training wheels are officially off." Doctor Ronald nodded his head slowly, his bushy eyebrows furrowing as he adjusted his glasses. "Today, you will officially leave the artificial safety of New Seoul. You are crossing the threshold into the Dungeon Realm."

He paused. The intentional silence allowed the terrifying weight of his words to sink deeply into the minds of the freshman class.

"Make no mistake, this is not a formal Dungeon Run," Instructor Rex reminded them, his sharp, predatory eyes sweeping across the rigid ranks of students. "You are not challenging a dungeon’s core entity today. You are not trying to advance humanity’s collective rank, nor are you hunting for legendary relics to please the high-ranking officers."

"Your mission is simpler, and far more brutal," Ronald added, gesturing toward the sterile rows of capsules. "You are to clear a localized, contained dungeon environment. Nothing more."

"Fight."

"Survive."

"Complete your assigned objective."

"And return to Earth alive."The final words hung in the air like a plea. Return back home alive as a new uncommon. Instructor Rex gritted his teeth, his weathered, heavily scarred face twisting into a grim, dark expression as he stared down at the teenagers. "I have seen a lot of young, ambitious students exactly like you guys standing in this very room over the years," he muttered, his voice dropping an octave.

The temperature in the room seemed to plummet further.

"Each one of them was once either a proud Common or an aspiring Uncommon. Some of them were weak, some of them were strong. Some were even considered incredibly powerful, untouchable geniuses by their legacy clans uptown. It didn’t matter. All of them have perished in the cold depths of the Dungeon Realm."

Their... their souls are completely gone, Sky realized, a sudden wave of familiar horror washing over him. The cold reality hit him like a physical blow to the chest. They hadn’t just died in the physical sense; their entire existences had been erased, swallowed up entirely by the threshold. It was just like the shattered, marrow-drained skeletons he had stumbled over during his very first trial. The dungeon didn’t just kill the body; it consumed the identity.

"If you’re lucky, once your spirit is destroyed by a dungeon creature, your physical body dies instantly along with it," Rex continued, his voice dropping into a harsh, hollow whisper that made the hair on Sky’s arms stand up. "But if you are unlucky... if your mental fortitude cracks before your health bar empties... your soul will be trapped. You’ll be left behind. And you’ll become just like them. A hollow, wandering husk. A complete void."

Instructor Rex glanced briefly toward the front of the ranks, his gaze lingering on the spot where Arthur and Vesper stood. The legacy heirs remained rigid, their expensive, custom-tailored starter gear catching the violet light of the array. Rex then added a final, blunt warning to the entire room: "So don’t you dare die out there. Don’t make me fill out the paperwork for another batch of ghosts."

A suffocating, heavy silence filled the transfer chamber. No one spoke. The arrogant, smirking expressions of the upper-district students had entirely evaporated, replaced by the grim, icy reality of the meat grinder they were about to enter. The division between rich and poor faded under the shadow of permanent death.

One by one, the electronic displays on the capsules began to flash with assigned student numbers. The Commons stepped forward first, shuffling toward their stations.

Sky walked over to his assigned capsule, his bare feet cold against the metal floor as he stepped over the threshold. Before he lowered himself onto the padded, form-fitting interior, he glanced back across the crowded room toward Chloe and Vesper.

The two girls returned his look from their respective stations. There were no words left to say, no grand promises to make. There was only a look of quiet, unyielding determination passing between the three friends. They had promised to watch each other’s backs in the dark, and now the clock had run out. It was time to prove it.

Sky climbed inside his capsule, lying flat on his back. The padded headrest molded to the back of his skull, right over the faint scar where the cultist’s iron staff had once broken his skin. The transparent, reinforced glass lid slowly lowered itself over him with a sharp, pressurized hiss, locking him inside the airtight chamber and cutting off the ambient noise of the room.

A familiar, high-pitched mechanical hum filled the small space, vibrating violently through his skull as the automated systems began to force a sync with his soul core. The violet lights of the ceiling array blurred together, spinning into a singular, blinding point of violet fire that seemed to pierce right through his retinas.

Then, the light snapped. An absolute, crushing darkness swallowed everything whole.

In the vast, echoing silence of his own digitized mind, a familiar, cold, and utterly uncaring mechanical voice chimed in the dark:

[Welcome to the Dungeon Realm, Skies!]

[End of volume one: Child of the Soulless.]

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