The shockwave flashbang rested between his teeth as the young man ran straight at the serpent.
Its massive body writhed across the cavern floor, scales split open, flesh charred black in places, one ruined eye leaking blood down the side of its monstrous head.
It should have been dead already. It had taken bullets to the face, electricity through the water, steel in the eye, and somehow it still moved, still hunted, still refused to collapse.
So did the young man…
His body was a wreck. Blood streamed down his arms. His lungs burned. Every step sent pain crashing up through his legs.
Somewhere behind him, his allies were shouting, but the sounds barely reached him over the roaring in his ears.
The serpent opened its jaws.
He leapt.
With both hands locked around the hilt of his friend's katana, he drove the blade down with everything he had left.
The steel punched deep into the serpent's burned snout.
The creature convulsed.
A sound ripped through the cavern, too raw to be called a hiss, too furious to be called a scream. Its head snapped upward in violent reflex, almost tearing the sword from his hands.
The young man held on for half a second, maybe less.
Blood from his shredded palms slicked the hilt.
His grip failed.
The world dropped out from under him.
He was thrown into the air, weightless for one impossible instant, staring down at the writhing nightmare beneath him.
Then gravity took him.
The serpent's jaws lunged up to meet him.
Its mouth did not open all the way.
Too much damage.
Too much pain.
The lower jaw dragged, the upper fangs trembling as it tried to force itself wider.
The half-broken maw looked less like a mouth and more like a cave lined with butcher's hooks.
He was falling straight into it.
Move.
Pure instinct seized him. His left arm shot out. His palm slammed against the inside of the serpent's upper jaw, stopping his body from dropping deeper into its throat.
For the briefest instant, he hung there.
Then the jaws snapped shut.
Pain exploded.
One of the larger fangs punched through his left elbow with a wet, splintering crunch.
The young man's scream tore through the cavern.
The fang burst out the other side, carrying blood and fragments of shattered bone with it.
His entire arm locked up from the shock. White agony blasted through his nerves so hard his vision flickered.
His body jerked, hanging from the serpent's mouth like a rag caught on a spike.
The flashbang was still clenched between his teeth.
He almost bit down hard enough to set it off.
The serpent thrashed.
Its wounded head whipped from side to side, trying to rip him apart, trying to tear his arm free, trying to finish what it had started. But it was too damaged to do it cleanly.
Instead of tearing the arm off, each movement ground the fang deeper through the joint.
The pain became something beyond pain. A blinding, nauseating force that hollowed him out from the inside.
Tears spilled from the man's bloodshot eyes. Blood ran down his forearm in hot streams. His shoulder felt like it was being pulled from its socket.
Still the creature shook him, as if enraged by the simple fact that he remained alive.
His gaze lifted through the blur.
He saw the serpent's ruined face.
The burnt snout.
The blade still buried deep in its flesh.
And something inside him hardened.
You filthy bastard.
His right hand shot to the flashbang.
With trembling fingers, he yanked the pin.
A sharp electronic chirp cut through the chaos.
Five.
The device came alive in his palm.
The countdown had started.
The young man sucked in a broken breath through his nose, jaw clenched so hard it ached.
He had no angle. No footing. One arm pinned, one hand barely working, body swinging wildly as the serpent tried to smash him against the cavern floor.
Then the creature reared back again, opening its wounded maw just enough for him to see past the rows of fangs and into the dark tunnel of its throat.
An opening.
That was all he needed.
As the serpent flung him sideways, he hurled the shockwave flashbang with every ounce of strength his body could still command.
The device disappeared into the creature's throat.
Four.
The serpent jerked.
Maybe it felt the object slide down into its flesh.
Maybe it sensed death at last. Its movements became even more violent, a panicked frenzy of muscle and blood and hatred. It slammed its head against the cavern wall hard enough to crack stone.
The impact nearly made him black out.
His arm twisted around the fang.
A fresh burst of agony ripped through him so hard his vision dimmed at the edges.
For one sick, sinking second, he thought it was over.
He was trapped in the mouth of a dying monster with a live explosive ticking inside it. There was no clean escape.
No miracle.
No sudden rescue.
Just blood. Steel. Bone. And a countdown.
His eyes found the katana.
Still lodged in the serpent's burned nose.
A savage little spark flared in the darkness of his mind.
Not hope.
Something meaner.
He reached.
The first grab slipped off the hilt.
The second stuck.
Using the serpent's own thrashing momentum, he ripped the katana free with a wet spray of blood.
The blade came loose.
Three.
His body swung again, hanging from the fang through his elbow.
He looked once at his trapped arm.
Then he brought the katana down.
The blade hacked into his left bicep.
He screamed.
Steel bit through flesh. Blood sprayed across the serpent's teeth. But the angle was wrong. The cut was deep, horrible, useless. Bone stopped the strike cold.
His breath hitched. His vision swam. The world tilted.
The serpent bucked wildly, almost throwing him off the fang and deeper into its throat.
He raised the blade again.
Again.
Two.
This strike went deeper.
The katana split farther through muscle, tendon, shattered bone.
The sensation was so monstrous, so all-consuming, that it barely even felt like pain anymore.
It felt like his body had become nothing but raw fire and noise.
Still the arm held.
Still he was trapped.
Still the serpent would not die.
His grip slipped.
He corrected it. Blood ran down the sword, down his wrist, down the stump of what his arm was about to become.
The next beep came like a death sentence.
One.
He roared.
Not a cry of fear orf pain.
A raw, animal sound dragged up from someplace deeper than thought.
He brought the katana down with everything left in him.
This time the blade cleaved through.
The last strands of flesh parted.
His arm came free.
For one dizzy, impossible moment, he was falling again, spinning away from the serpent's jaws in a spray of blood.
Then the world turned white.
The explosion tore through the serpent from the inside out.
A blinding flash erupted from its throat, so bright it burned through his half-closed eyes. The shockwave hit a heartbeat later, a violent wall of force that punched through the cavern and sent chunks of flesh, shattered scales, and ropes of gore blasting in every direction.
The serpent's upper body came apart.
Its head ripped free in a storm of blood and meat.
Its ruined neck sprayed black-red sheets across the cavern floor. Fragments of scale clattered against stone.
Strings of viscera slapped wetly against the walls.
Midair, disoriented and half-dead, the young man was swallowed by the blast's aftermath. Blood and chunks of steaming flesh rained over him as he hit the ground shoulder-first and rolled.
Pain flared through every inch of him.
He skidded to a stop on his back, drenched in gore, one sleeve ending in a savage ruin of torn flesh and shattered bone.
For a few seconds he could not breathe.
Could not think.
Could only stare upward through blurred vision as something vast sailed over him.
The serpent's severed head.
It spun once through the smoky air, mouth hanging open, dead eye staring blankly down at him.
Then it crashed into a cluster of jagged rocks.
Stone punched through the skull.
The head stuck there, twitching once before going still.
Silence followed.
Not true silence.
The cavern still dripped.
Pebbles still shifted.
Somewhere far away, someone was shouting his name.
But after the screaming, the explosion, the wet thunder of torn flesh, it felt like silence.
The young man lay there in the blood-soaked dark, staring at the monster he had killed.
His fingers twitched once.
His vision dimmed.
And just before the black swallowed him whole, the narrator finally spoke.
That young man was Xander Shayden. And if you think losing an arm in the jaws of a giant serpent was the worst thing that would happen to him before the month was over, you'd be very, very wrong.
At the time, he did not yet understand that this was only the first time he would die.
To understand how he ended up half-dead in a blood-soaked cavern, you have to go back to where this story truly began….
The year was 1937.
It marked the beginning of a new age later known as the Great Cataclysm.
At first, they were called anomalies, strange distortions appearing across the world without warning. Later, they would be known as nexuses. The first recorded case appeared in the frozen regions of Russia, where the air itself seemed to twist and bend in impossible ways.
Over the years, more anomalies appeared. They came suddenly and vanished just as fast, leaving behind unknown particles that slowly began to change the world.
The climate shifted. The air grew cleaner. Wildlife flourished. Crops improved. Even poverty fell. For a time, many believed the anomalies were a blessing.
Then the mutations began.
Children were born stronger, healthier, sharper than those before them. Animals changed too, adapting in strange and unexpected ways. Scientists warned that humanity was being altered at its core, but by then the transformation had already begun.
Then came the true turning point.
Twenty-six years after the first anomaly, a stable dimensional rift opened near the mountains of North Carolina. It would later be called the First Ingress. Strange bird-like creatures emerged from the portal and attacked nearby civilians before they were put down by conventional weapons.
That incident changed everything.
More portals appeared across the world, and over time they stabilized enough to be explored. A new era began, the Era of Nexonian Exploration. A new profession was born alongside it: explorers, individuals who crossed into other dimensions, harvested their resources, and grew stronger by absorbing the cores left behind.
"Furthermore, th..."
*Ding ding.*
The ringing bell cut through the lecture hall, and students immediately began gathering their things.
"Oh my, it seems our time is up for today," Professor Hartenstien said with a smile. "That was a wonderful presentation, Mr. Shayden. I'd love to hear the rest of it, so please email me the file."
"Thank you, Professor Hartenstein. Have a great weekend."
Currently, it was the year 2027, the new age of exploration.
Almost four generations had passed since the beginning of the Great Cataclysm, and the world was still changing, still adapting, still evolving with each passing year.
In a world like that, people did their best to live meaningful lives.
One of those people was Xander Shayden.
He sat alone at a table after class, eating a late meal while looking over the unfinished portion of his presentation. He had fair skin and dark brown hair that fell just past his ears, streaked with dyed blonde. A half-eaten piece of steak rested in his mouth as he scanned the papers in front of him.
"Oi, Xander. Look at you, sitting here by yourself. And after ignoring all my texts, too."
Another student walked up with a drink in hand and stopped beside the table. He was light-skinned, with dreads hanging down around his forehead and along the sides of his face.
Xander glanced up. "Yo, Mikael. Sorry. My phone broke last night. Dropped it on the subway tracks on my way back from the hospital. The bullet bus turned it into scrap metal."
Mikael stared at him for a second. "You make that up just now?"
Xander shrugged and took another bite.
Mikael sighed. "Whatever. I just wanted to ask about that thing I mentioned earlier."
"Mm. I'll check it out when I get back to the dorm," Xander said, still reading. "Probably not happening, though."
Mikael took a sip of his drink, eyeing the thick stack of papers on the table.
"Is that your Nexonian History presentation?"
"Yeah. And guess what? I didn't even finish it. Class ended halfway through."
"Well, that sucks."
"Doesn't matter. I'll get a good grade anyway. I doubt they wanted to hear all of it."
"That's because everyone's heard this stuff a thousand times."
Xander smirked. "Never gets old to me."
"Well, I'll see you back at the dorm, then, Z."
"Later, Mika."
Mikael turned to leave, then paused. "Give my regards to your sister."
Xander's expression softened. "I will."
The two parted ways, and Xander made his way toward the city's underground transit station.
Along the route, he passed glowing billboards and digital signs, most of them advertising the same kinds of opportunities.
Looking for new explorers.
Now hiring experienced porters for the Lion's Den Guild.
Xander boarded the bullet bus and slipped on his battered old Epods, filling his ears with music. His transit card was charged automatically as he passed through the scanners near the doors.
"All standing passengers, please hold on to the straphangers."
The train pulled away from the station at a steady pace. Once it cleared the underground tunnel and entered the open transit line, it surged to its full speed of four hundred kilometers per hour.
Outside the windows, the city smeared into streaks of light and steel.
Even moving that fast, it still took ten minutes to reach the stop nearest the hospital.
Small screens lined the inside of the metro, each one flashing a different mix of news headlines, ads, and entertainment segments.
One headline caught Xander's eye.
Should abortion remain legal with the population declining at such a high rate?
Below it was a chart comparing births and deaths over the past fifty years. The death toll had risen by a small but steady percentage each year.
A moment later, another headline replaced it.
[Breaking News]
A new dungeon portal has appeared in the southern district of Apex City. Energy readings suggest it may be Alpha-ranked.
"We've arrived at Stop 17. Please remember to take all your belongings with you and..."
Xander stepped off the metro with his hands in his pockets and headed toward the large hospital building in the distance.
On the way, he stopped by a nearby shop and picked up a basket of clementines and a box of caramel chocolates.
[Apex City Central Hospital]
"I'm here to see my sister. Room 645."
The receptionist nodded and handed him an access card. He was a regular visitor by now.
Xander took the elevator to the sixth floor and walked down the hall until he reached Room 645.
A nameplate was mounted beneath the number.
[Kristella Shayden]
Swiping the card through the digital lock, he knocked lightly.
"Sis, it's Xander. Can I come in?"
A cheerful voice answered from inside.
"Yes. Come in."
Xander stepped into the room with a smile and set the clementines and chocolates on the bedside table.
His sister lay in bed, a woman in her late twenties with pale skin and long black hair. She looked a little thinner than she should have, but there was still a healthy softness in her face.
"How're you feeling?"
Kristella picked up one of the clementines and began peeling it.
"A lot better, actually. They're even letting me go outside for a few minutes every day." She smiled faintly. "With supervision, of course."
"Look at you. Freedom."
She laughed softly, then popped a piece of clementine into her mouth.
"But enough about me. How did your presentation go?"
"It went great," Xander said with an easy grin. "They loved it."
"That's wonderful. And you know what? The doctors said I might be able to go to your graduation next year if I recover enough by then."
Xander's eyes lit up. "Seriously? That's amazing."
"Yep."
"Then I guess I've got no choice but to graduate now."
Kristella giggled, and the two of them spent the next hour talking about everything and nothing, college, old memories, their parents, and the kind of small, ordinary things that felt more precious in a hospital room than anywhere else.
By the time visiting hours ended, the sky outside had already gone dark.
"Oh wow," Kristella said. "It's already evening. Time really does fly when you're having fun."
"It really does," Xander replied with a sigh. "Next time I'll come earlier. I've got a week of paid leave saved up from work, so I should be able to."
She smiled. "I'll hold you to that. And bring me peaches next time."
"Done."
After saying goodbye, Xander left the hospital and made his way back toward the metro.
The evening commute was much more crowded than before, packed with workers heading home after long shifts.
Inside the bullet bus, every screen displayed the same urgent headline.
[Breaking News! Four explorers dead and one missing in the aftermath of the new Alpha dungeon emergence in the southern district of Apex City.]
These dungeon outbreaks really are happening more often in the south, Xander thought as he stared out into the blur of passing lights.
This city never used to attract high-level explorers. At this rate, that's going to change.
His thoughts drifted, as they often did, toward a life he had imagined countless times before.
A life where he was strong.
Successful.
Important.
A life where money was no longer a constant shadow hanging over him.
A life where he could afford a better treatment facility for Kristella.
If I made money like that, I could help her.
But becoming an explorer was no simple thing, especially for beginners.
Dungeons were merciless places, filled with monsters, chaos, and death. Worse still, there were barely any rules once you stepped inside. Sometimes other humans were more dangerous than the creatures lurking in the dark.
Kristella would never let me do something that dangerous, he thought. And if something happened to me... who would take care of her?
By the time he got back to the dorm, the thought still lingered in the back of his mind.
His room was a mess.
Clothes were scattered across the floor. Books, empty containers, and loose papers claimed nearly every visible surface. The whole place looked like it had been losing a slow battle against exhaustion for weeks.
Xander stood in the doorway for a moment and let out a tired sigh.
Then he stepped inside, took a hot shower, and threw together a late dinner, instant ramen with a fried egg on top.
It was cheap, quick, and filling enough.
Sitting at his desk with the bowl in one hand, he opened his laptop and checked his notifications.
Over ninety-nine messages.
Three new emails.
A pile of miscellaneous alerts he had no energy to care about.
He clicked into his inbox and opened the first message marked important.
It was from Nano Genics.
Congratulations, dear intern!
Due to having the highest contribution points within your department, you have been selected for the upcoming research field trip to our main Knoxville facility.
The trip is scheduled for Monday through Wednesday of next week. Lodging and meals will be provided by Nano Genics, along with a guided facility tour and several limited complimentary activities.
We look forward to seeing you.
VP
Xander leaned back slightly, rereading the message.
"So I finally get to do something interesting after all that time spent helping with research," he muttered.
A faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"Well... better late than never."
For the first time that day, something close to excitement stirred in his chest.
It wasn't much, but it was enough.
The room was quiet. The city outside had gone dim. His body, drained from classes, work, the hospital visit, and the weight of everything else, finally began to give in.
Xander set the empty bowl aside, shut his laptop, and dropped onto his bed.
The mattress dipped under him like it had been waiting all day.
Within minutes, sleep took him.
He had no way of knowing that the days ahead would change his life forever.