The blinding, clinical glare of the surgical lamps hummed with an indifferent, rhythmic buzz.
Inside the underground emergency operating theater, life-support monitors beeped in frantic, irregular spikes. A team of senior medics stood huddled around the stainless-steel operation table, their gloves drenched in fresh crimson blood as they worked with utmost intensity.
On the table lay twelve-year-old Hide. His chest was heaving in shallow, agonizing gasps, his skin as pale as winter frost. Across his lower abdomen, a horrific, jagged tear stretched —the brutal remnant of the moment Rosh’s talons had plunged into his flesh to forcibly rip out his core.
"He’s losing too much blood! His innards are trying to gush out." a surgeon shouted, as he picked up another pair of stiches, the ones he just did had ripped the skin out.
"Press harder! Give me the plate, we need to fix his organs first!" the head doctor barked, sweat pouring down his forehead.
For hours, the medical team fought against the cold shadow of death. Using advanced surgical techniques and high-tier artifacts as well, they managed to stitch the torn muscle layers and seal the severed blood vessels. The boy’s pulse, which had flickered on the edge of extinction, gradually settled into a steady, fragile rhythm.
The operation was a success. The boy would live. But the damage was far too severe for even magical artifacts to erase entirely; the deep, jagged cut across his abdomen would bind into a puckered, permanent scar—an indelible mark of the night his life was shattered.
The following afternoon, as Hide lay completely still in a private, high-security recovery room in the hospital’s central wing.
Monitoring cables snaked across his bare chest, and the quiet hum of an automated IV pump filled the sterile air. Outside the reinforced door, two heavily robotic guards stood watch.
SWIISH.
The biometric lock chimed, and the door slid open with a soft, pneumatic hiss. A man dressed in the crisp, white uniform of a hospital nurse stepped casually into the room. He carried a stainless-steel tray with medical gauze, his head tilted down.
The moment the door sealed shut behind him, the man stopped. He glanced back toward the hallway, looking through the one-way glass at the guards and scanning arrays, before letting out a long, amused sigh.
"Well, the humans sure are really cautious beings," he muttered, rolling his neck until his joints popped softly.
He turned around and walked over to the side of the bed, looming over the unconscious, silver-haired boy. A lazy smile curved his lips as he stared down at Hide’s peaceful, sleeping face.
"Hey buddy," the man murmured softly. "My master says it’s important we give you this so we can turn you into a perfect puppet like Roshhide, so there’s that."
He paused, raising a hand to scratch the back of his head with a light, careless chuckle.
"Uh, I mean you can’t listen to me or anything, but it feels wrong to do this without telling," he added, smirking.
Raising his hand, the disguised intruder opened his spatial inventory. A small, dense black ball materialized in his palm, pulsing with an ancient, unnatural energy. As he held it over Hide, the orb flickered, projecting a translucent, pale blue system window into the empty air above the mattress.
The window read: [Host not found.]
The man looked at the error prompt and simply shook his head. "Now it’s up to you how it will bloom. Let’s see."
Without a second thought, he pressed the black ball directly against Hide’s forehead. The dark sphere dissolved on contact, sinking seamlessly past his skin, muscle, and skull, embedding itself deep within the boy’s subconscious baseline.
The man offered a casual, two-finger wave, turned around, and vanished into thin air directly from the center of the room, leaving no mana signature behind.
Five days passed before Hide finally opened his eyes.
The harsh, artificial lights of the room blurred in his vision as his senses slowly returned. His throat felt like dried sandpaper, and a deep, throbbing ache burned across his lower abdomen.
Standing beside his bed was a grim-faced doctor and an official from the municipal welfare division. When Hide rasped his mother’s name, the room fell into a heavy, suffocating silence.
The doctor gently broke the news: Erin Volter was dead. She had perished during the gate break, her body recovered from the burnt ruins of their apartment.
That day, Hide Volter lost everything.
The weeks that followed were a chaotic blur of cold bureaucracy. Government agents from the National Exterminator Agency and corporate investigators came and went from his hospital room, subjecting the traumatized boy to endless interrogations. They demanded details about his mother and the events of that stormy night.
Hide could give them nothing. His memory of the event was a fragmented, locked vault. He remembered nothing beyond the terrifying image of a colossal Calamity beast lunging at him with gaping, razor-sharp jaws before everything went pitch black. When he asked how he had survived, the attending physicians simply told him that an unknown man had dropped his bleeding, unconscious body off at the emergency ward before vanishing into the night without leaving a name.
Unable to extract anything useful, the government marked the incident as a routine gate tragedy caused by a delayed Exterminator response team. They processed Hide as an orphaned minor, assigning him standard welfare credits and relocating him to Unit 4M of the Eastern Residential Block.
Meanwhile, on the other side of reality, deep within an unanchored Zone on Rilth, a storm of cataclysmic violence raged.
Rosh—in his true, Void-born form—was going utterly mad.
ROAAAR!
Spatial shockwaves detonated across the desolate landscape as Rosh slaughtered wave after wave of feral Calamity beasts. He tore through monsters with blind, maniacal fury, coating the jagged rocks in dark, smoking blood.
He was furious.
Consuming Hide’s stolen core had not granted him the Primordial Authority over Darkness. Instead, the act had triggered a horrific, volatile biological reaction inside his foundation.
Rosh’s spatial core was violently attempting to digest and assimilate the stolen energy, but Hide’s core—bound by the ancient, stubborn authority—was actively resisting. The two opposing forces clashed endlessly inside Rosh’s circulatory system.
Every single second, agonizing spikes of internal pain tore through Rosh’s spatial pathways. Rather than elevating him to godhood, the stolen core acted as a poison, severely restricting his higher-tier abilities and leaving him trapped in a state of perpetual, tormenting backlash.
For Hide, the years that followed were an empty, grueling survival.
He lived alone in the small, grey apartment in Area 17. He ate cheap welfare meals, attended the local public academy, and walked through the smog-filled streets like a forgotten ghost.
Night after night, whenever sleep finally claimed him, the exact same nightmare returned. He saw the dark blood on the floorboards. He felt the cold terror of his own helplessness. He saw his mother dying to protect him while he could do nothing.
That nightmare never faded. It burned into his soul, molding his grief into an absolute, unyielding vow: I will kill them. I will kill every last Calamity beast that steps foot on this Earth.
On his sixteenth birthday, according to federal law, Hide attended the Awakening Assessment Authority for his first official trial. He stepped onto the glowing diagnostic platform, bracing himself.
The scanner swept over his body with no result, but not failed. There was still chance.
On his seventeenth birthday, he returned for his second chance. Again, the blue scanner swept over him, but still there was no concrete result.
Two full years of failure marked him as a normal human outcast in the eyes of his peers and teachers. But Hide refused to give up. He trained his physical body relentlessly, waiting for his final shot.
Six years passed in quiet, agonizing solitude.
Until Hide’s eighteenth birthday.
"ARGHHHHHHHH— STOP, STOPPPP—!"
Hide’s eyes violently flew open!
He sat bolt upright at his school desk, his chest heaving frantically, his shirt completely drenched in cold sweat. His hands gripped the wooden edges of the desk so hard his knuckles turned chalk-white. The bright, fluorescent lights of the classroom dragged his mind out of the bloody nightmare.
That day was his third and final chance.
He stepped into the assessment bay and lay down on the scanning bed.
The diagnostic scanner head above him began to rotate, pulsing with a deep blue light. As the high-density sensory field swept over his body, the energy from the life stone slammed directly into the black ball that had been embedded inside his head for six years.
CRACK!
Deep within his mind, the six-year seal shattered completely!
The suppressed, dormant dregs of his dark core and his unique biological baseline unleashed a catastrophic surge of energy. Every single cell in Hide’s body ignited as a rapid climbing series of tones erupted from the medical monitors.
"The readings—the mana is moving!" the doctor gasped, scrambling to his feet in sheer shock as numbers scrolled across his tablet faster than normal readouts. He extended the tablet toward the bed. "Congratulations, Mr. Volter. You have Awakened."
That day Hide Volter awakened, and gained the Universal Adaptation system given to him by the unknown god.
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