Standing at the top of the shattered staircase, twelve-year-old Hide clutched the splintered wooden banister, his knuckles white, tears streaming silently down his pale cheeks.
His large ocean-blue eyes—so innocent, so unaccustomed to the cruel realities of the world—were locked in pure, helpless terror on the scene below.
"Mom...?" Hide whimpered, his voice trembling so violently it barely carried across the room.
Rosh slowly rotated his featureless, starry head away from Erin. For the first time in his life, Rosh faced his own brother.
Rosh stood completely silent. Beneath his shifting, non-Euclidean void form, his mind was a storm of alien instincts and fragmented memories. He didn’t know what to say to this human child who carried their mother’s hair. He felt no brotherly affection, only a strange, unsettling curiosity.
Without uttering a single word, Rosh casually raised a dark, talon-like finger and pointed it directly at Hide.
Grrr-RAAAR!
From the shattered doorway, one of the larger E-Rank beasts—a hulking, armored quadruped covered in jagged chitin—let out a guttural, bloodthirsty roar and lunged up the staircase! Its heavy claws splintered the wooden steps, its gaping maw dripping with acidic saliva as it closed the distance in a fraction of a second.
By every law of survival, Hide should have run. He should have turned his back and fled into the dark hallway.
He didn’t run even as the colossal monster leaped toward him, its razor-sharp jaws opening wide to tear his young body to shreds, Hide’s gaze never left his mother.
"Mom! Run!" Hide screamed at the top of his lungs, his voice cracking with desperate, selfless panic. "Mom, get out of here! Run!"
"HIDE—!" Erin’s maternal soul exploded.
The woman who had spent twelve years hiding from her past, pretending to be a fragile, mundane civilian, completely vanished.
The dark mana core buried inside her chest—the core created by the Supreme Overlord himself, worked to its full capacity.
Erin moved in a blinding, instantaneous blur. Bypassing physical limitations through pure, desperate adrenaline and dark mana reinforcement, she intercepted the beast mid-air right before its jaws could clamp down on Hide’s neck.
She channeled every dregs of dark energy into her right fist and struck the E-Rank beast directly in the side of its head!
CRACK!
The impact sounded like a thunderclap inside the enclosed hallway. The concentrated density of her dark mana shattered the monster’s armored skull into a hundred pieces.
Bone fragments and dark blood exploded outward, and the massive creature died in an instantaneous instant, its limp carcass crashing heavily onto the stairs.
However, the beast’s dying momentum carried its razor-sharp gauntlet forward. As it fell, its jagged claws raked violently across the side of Erin’s abdomen.
Erin gasped, stumbling backward onto the landing. It was not a fatal blow, but the claws had sheared through her thin shirt, leaving a deep, jagged laceration. Hot, crimson blood immediately began dripping from her waist, staining her clothes and pooling on the wooden floor.
Below the stairs, Rosh watched his mother’s blood hit the ground.
Something chaoticfeeling ignited inside his mind. A sudden, overwhelming surge of irrational, possessive rage flooded Rosh’s mind. How dare she bleed? How dare a filthy beast touch her?!
It was because of the child. The damned kid. And why was she the one protecting him? Why? When she had abandoned him then why this child?
In a fit of wild, unrestrained anger, Rosh blurred across the living room and launched a physical strike at Erin.
He didn’t use his spatial authority to erase her, nor did he use full force; his strike was restrained, born of erratic, childish fury rather than intent to slaughter.
His dark void hand slammed into her chest, blasting her backward into the wall. Erin hit the plaster hard, letting out a choked cough as she slid weakly down to her knees, clutching her bleeding side.
Rosh stepped forward to strike again—
—when suddenly, a bone-chilling sensation shot straight through his form.
Rosh froze dead in his tracks. A primal shudder rippled through his core. It felt as though an ancient, omnipotent entity—a very familiar cosmic power—had just opened its eyes in the dark and was staring dead into his soul.
Rosh slowly turned his featureless head toward the top of the stairs.
What he saw made even a Primordial Void-born entity recoil in shock.
Twelve-year-old Hide was standing over the bead beast’s body. The boy was crying hysterically, tears washing through the grime on his face, but his ocean-blue eyes had completely transformed. They were glowing with a terrifying intensity.
Every drop of dark mana in the surrounding atmosphere—the dense, toxic energy leaking from the gate and the environment—was violently churning.
It responded to the boy’s grief and rage like loyal subject answering their King. Swirling into a massive, concentrated vortex around Hide’s small frame.
"DON’T YOU HURT MY MOM!" Hide screamed, a sound that carried a double-layered resonance.
The condensed dark mana violently formed a lance of pitch-black energy and shot straight down the hallway at Rosh!
Rosh raised his hand, his spatial authority flaring to deflect the dark blast. The collision created a shockwave that blew out the remaining windows of the apartment.
Rosh was pushed back half a step, his starry eyes widening.
He didn’t engage the boy head-on. Instead, Rosh snapped his fingers, commanding another E-Rank reptilian beast prowling the side alley to flank. The beast smashed through the wall behind Hide, its heavy, tail-sweep striking the oblivious boy directly in the back.
Hide let out a small, painful gasp as the kinetic impact slammed his fragile, unawakened body into the wooden floorboards.
The swirling dark mana instantly dissipated, and the twelve-year-old boy went completely limp, losing consciousness.
Silence reclaimed the ruined room.
Rosh stood amidst the dust, a dark, sinister grin spreading across his void face. A faint trace of fear lingered in his mind, but it was completely eclipsed by wild, greedy realization.
What that guy had said was true. He did find what he was looking for, this weak, pathetic little boy—carried the Primordial Authority over Darkness.
Because of Rosh’s dominant Calamity genes, he had grown at twice the rate of a normal human, possessing the physical frame and power of an adult.
Hide, on the other hand, was just a fragile, undeveloped child who couldn’t even defend himself or control the cosmic power sleeping within him.
Rosh walked up the unconscious boy. He reached down, grabbing the unconscious twelve-year-old by the collar of his shirt and lifting him off the floor like a ragdoll.
Rosh raised his void talons. He was going to slaughter his brother right here, and absorb the Authority over Darkness into his own core.
"Please..."
A small, broken, and desperate voice rasped from the floor below.
Rosh froze, his void talons hovering inches from Hide’s throat.
Erin was crawling across the blood-slick floorboards on her hands and knees. She was bleeding heavily from her side, her face deathly pale, tears streaming uncontrollably down her cheeks as she looked up at him.
"Please... I... I beg you..." Erin sobbed. "Don’t harm him... Please don’t harm him... Take whatever you want... but leave that boy alive... I beg you, Rosh..."
Rosh looked down at her. Hearing her beg, hearing her call him by the name she had given him, sent a strange, painful tremor through him. At the end he still had some human parts.
Gritting his teeth in frustration, Rosh abandoned the idea of executing the child. He didn’t need to kill him.
With a cold, brutal motion, Rosh plunged his void hand directly into Hide’s lower abdomen!
Rosh’s hand phased into his flesh, then his fingers closed around the nascent dark core. With a violent jerk, Rosh ripped his hand back out. A glowing, dark-violet core pulsed in Rosh’s palm.
He had what he came for.
Whether the child lived or bled to death was no longer his concern. Rosh carelessly tossed Hide’s limp, bleeding body onto the floor near Erin, turned his back, and stepped cleanly into the bruised-purple dimensional tear. The gate collapsed behind him with a sharp, imploding snap, leaving the apartment in dead, horrifying silence.
Ten minutes passed.
The rain outside began to fall, pattering against the shattered windowpanes.
Erin lay on the floorboards, her trembling arms wrapped around Hide’s unconscious, pale body. The wound on her side was bleeding steadily, but the hole in Hide’s abdomen was far more critical. His life force was fading rapidly.
SWIISH!
Through the broken door a compact, stern man dressed in a dark, tailored utility coat stepped into the blood-soaked apartment. It was Ren Sihue, the young master of the Sihue Clan.
His wife, Roxana, had felt an unbearable dread in her chest minutes ago and had pleaded with him to check on Erin because a gate opened close to her house.
Ren’s oceanic eyes scanned the room, his disciplined face turning utterly rigid as he registered the slaughtered Exterminators, the shattered walls, and the dying mother and child.
"Erin..." Ren muttered, dropping to one knee beside her and removed his mask.
Erin slowly lifted her gaze. She was on the absolute threshold of death, her vision dimming into darkness. With the last dregs of her strength, she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a heavy, dark metal ring—the black ring Roshhide had shoved into her hands on the floating mountain before sending her back to Earth.
"Ren..." Erin whispered, her voice a dying, raspy thread. "Take... take this... It is the key... to Roshhide’s greatest treasure..."
Ren looked at the black ring, sensing the unfathomable energy in the metal. He reached out and accepted it. He didn’t know who or what Roshhide was, or what this treasure of his was, but if it was important to Erin then he had to take it.
"Promise me..." Erin choked, blood welling in her mouth. "Promise me... you will never tell anyone... about this..."
Ren’s eyes widened once, but he closed his fingers around the ring, looking into her dying green eyes with absolute, solemn resolve. "I promise you," Ren declared, his voice carrying the unbreakable vow of an assassin. "I will keep your secret to my grave."
Ren couldn’t stay a second longer. Hide’s pulse was fading to a microscopic whisper. If he didn’t receive high-tier medical intervention and a stabilizing artifact immediately, the boy would die within minutes.
Ren scooped the silver-haired boy into his arms, and vanished from the apartment, leaving Erin behind in the quiet, dimming light.
Twenty minutes later, two men dressed in unmarked, black suits stepped into the ruined apartment.
One of the men walked over to Erin’s body, bending down to check her neck, she was alive barely.
The man stood back up and kicked her hard in the chest, stopping her heart.
Then he pulled out an encrypted communicator, tapping the screen and placing it against his ear.
"Sir," the agent reported flatly into the line. " The target, Erin Volter, has been neutralized. There are no other survivors or subjects found at the scene."
He cut the line, turned to his partner, with a frown. "Whatever happened here, it is no significance to us. It only made our work easier so don’t say a word to the higher ups." He gestured toward the rain outside.
"Burn this house."
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