Two moons hung heavy in the sky, one blazing with a furious red heat, the other pale white and familiar, like the moon of his world.
"What happened?" All Alex remembered was the goddess doing something with that broken golden thread, saying something about bearing causality, and then his vision had collapsed into darkness. And when he opened his eyes he found himself lying on his back, staring up at those two impossible moons. It had all happened so fast that he was feeling hard digesting everything.
He pushed himself upright and swept his gaze across the barren landscape. He was unsettled because there were no goblins, and the massive, hulking goblin warrior that had killed him was nowhere to be found.
His eyes then landed on a dark pool of blazing red liquid ahead of him, and he instinctively took a back step. The moment he took a single step, he stopped. His body felt light, impossibly so, and his stride carried him further than it should have.
He glanced down at his leg, the one that had been blackened and coiled dark, and found it had been perfectly healed. He ran his hands frantically along his tattered uniform, pressing his palms against his skin, and found his skin smooth and unmarked, without a bruise, without a scar, without a single trace of the pain he had endured. Then he froze completely and raised both hands before his face, and stared at them. The hands that had been severed, now restored and whole as if nothing had ever happened to them.
And while his mind was still struggling to comprehend these miraculous things, a notification appeared before his vision and stopped him from his thoughts.
***
[STATUS WINDOW]
Gate Clearance: Successful
Reward Issued: Yes
EXP Gained: +250
Bonus Reward: Robust Gloves (Enchanted Grade)
***
Alex was startled at the sudden text hanging in the air before him, and a moment later a pair of red gloves dropped materialized out of thin air and hit the ground at his feet. A powerful, instinctive urge pulled at him then, a deep certainty that whatever the goddess had done, it had changed something fundamental about who he was.
"Status window," Alex murmured, his voice barely above a whisper, his heart already thundering inside his ribcage.
***
⟦ STATUS WINDOW ⟧
Name: Alex Drakethorne
Race: Human
Realm: Mortal
Level: 25
Bloodline: Black Dragon
Main Class: Unclassed [Increase Levels to Reveal True Name]
Secondary Class: Death Swordsman
Affinity: Death
----------------------------------------------
Level Progression
Current Level: 25
Level EXP: 10%+
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Resources
Health: 263/263
Stamina: 300/300
Mana: 275/275
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Stats
Strength: 30
Agility: 27
Endurance: 26
Vitality: 27
Soul: 25
----------------------------------------------
Skills
Unclaimed By Death [Uncommon]
Minor Death Sword Aura [Uncommon]
***
Alex took a step back and blinked his eyes several times in disbelief. He pinched his cheek hard, and then opened and closed his status window again and again, but his level remained fixed at twenty-five. The status abnormality section had vanished entirely, scrubbed clean as though it had never existed.
"Thank you, goddess," Alex murmured, tilting his face up toward the sky and pressing his palms together before him, bowing his head slowly several times.
After paying his prayers, he reached down and picked up the red gloves. They were firm and rigid to the touch, and the moment he slipped them on, the material contracted and shaped itself perfectly around his hands. He flexed his fingers experimentally, closing and opening his fist, and found that despite the hardness of the material, his flexibility was completely unimpeded.
He turned and scanned the area until his eyes settled on a nearby boulder, and he ran toward it. For some reason, even the exposed foot did not burn against the scorching ground the way he would have expected, and he suspected his increased vitality had something to do with that. He barely had time to think about it, because he crossed the distance to the boulder far faster than he had anticipated, arriving in front of it almost before he could have ever imagined.
He threw his hands out and braced himself against the boulder to stop his momentum, and the stone surface fractured and cracked under his palms, a clean crack spiderwebbing outward from where he had pressed his hands to stop himself.
He leaned in slowly and examined the damage, tracing the tip of a gloved finger along the fissured surface. He could feel the grooves and ridges of the cracks through the thick material, though the warmth of the stone itself did not reach him.
He straightened, drew his right fist back behind his body, and threw it forward in one clean motion. The air swished and cracked with the force of his punch, and the boulder exploded apart. He threw his arms up to shield his face as the debrises came hurtling back toward him, chunks of dark brown stone battering against his forearms, but where he would have once screamed, he now simply weathered it. The pain was there, but it was tolerable. When the last of the debris clattered to the ground, he lowered his arms and stared at the ruin of what had once been a sturdy boulder, its upper half reduced to scattered rubble. He could not help but marvel at himself.
Then another notification blinked into his vision.
***
[STATUS WINDOW]
Remaining time to exit the gate: 1 min
***
Alex spun toward the north, where a yellow gate had been sprawled open since he first arrived, identical in shape to the one that had brought him here. He had barely registered it before, too consumed by the need to understand what had happened to his body, what had changed, what the goddess had given him. The gate had slipped entirely from his mind until this very moment.
He quickly dashed toward it.
"So I am finally leveling up," Alex smiled, a wide grin breaking across his face as he ran. "I am not going to run away from my problems anymore."
***
Inside a carriage adorned with an extravagance that most nobles would never see in their lifetimes, its interior walls set with gilded ornaments and jewellery, its seats upholstered in cushions of a softness that very few had a chance of sitting, sat Shane. His wife had her head resting against his shoulder, and her hands clutched Alex's soul lamp with a desperate, white-knuckled grip, as though squeezing it hard enough might somehow coax the light back into it. Her eyes were closed, and tears fell from them in a continuous, silent stream, and her azure hair was messy, long strands spilling forward across her cheeks, others trailing down Shane's waist.
She looked utterly destroyed, and he was no less so, though he carried it differently. His hands were clasped together in front of him, elbows braced on his knees, his body hunched forward under the weight of what he was feeling, his eyes drifting helplessly back and forth between the lamp and Sera. He was fighting to keep his mind from going insane entirely. Everything inside him screamed to fling open the carriage door and tear across the countryside toward the academy, and the impulse was so overwhelming that his nails had carved deep crescents into his palms simply from the effort of suppressing it.
But he could not leave Sera. If he left, she would follow, stumbling after him in this broken state, and running toward the academy right now was the wrong decision regardless. The teleportation portals from the capital city of his grand duchy would lead them to Sheron city. And, from Sheron city it was only some hours away, and he knew that completely. So he stayed, anchored to the seat beside her because she needed him to be here.
He kept his gaze fixed on the soul lamp that Sera clutched so tightly, and with every moment that passed in which its light did not return, his nails pressed deeper.
The lamps were never wrong. In all of recorded history, he had never once heard of a soul lamp going dark while its bearer still lived. There was no such situation for it, not a single documented case, and that absence of case was eating him alive from the inside. He shifted in his seat, unable to keep still.
"Dear," Sera suddenly cried, her voice leaping to a high, raw pitch that filled the carriage entirely. "Our son is not dead." Shane continued her words. Sera seized his arm with her one hand, her eyes wide and trembling. "The soul lamp is not malfunctioning, is it?" she demanded, her voice caught somewhere between desperate relief and barely contained terror.
"It is working correctly," Shane answered, his voice quiet and slow, and he hoped his words to be true, because if the soul lamp was not working correctly and Alex was no longer Alive. Then he would burn the world down to find whoever was responsible. He would tear the hearts from the chests of anyone who had taken Alex from them. He would not stop. He would never stop until he would avenge his son.
***
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