The air didn't just get cold; it stopped being air.
Every breath I took felt like inhaling crushed glass. My knees hit the metal floor of the bunker with a dull thud that echoed through the hollow corridor. I tried to push myself up, but my arms felt like they were made of wet paper. My vision swam, the clean white tiles of the floor turning into a muddy blur.
[Warning: Physical Collapse Imminent.] [Warning: Mana Circuits have fractured. Recovery is impossible in current state.]
I looked at my hands. They weren't just shaking; the skin was starting to turn a translucent, sickly grey. In my mind, I was still the Sovereign who had looked down on kings and commanded legions of the dead. But here, in this cold hallway, I was just an eighteen-year-old kid who had overplayed his hand. I was a bug under the heel of a boot I hadn't even seen coming. I had the memories of a god, but the meat of a mortal.
"Han Chen! Get up! Please!"
Lee Sung-min's voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a deep well, muffled and distorted. I looked back and saw him standing by the inner vault. He took one frantic step toward me, but the moment his foot touched the air near the entrance, he let out a strangled scream and collapsed, clutching his throat.
The pressure was too much. The mere presence of what was outside was enough to crush a normal human's lungs. The air itself had become heavy, dense with a power that didn't belong to this world.
"Stay... back..." I choked out. A glob of dark, thick blood hit the floor, splattering against my boots.
I leaned my head against the cold steel of the observation slit. I wanted to see my executioner. I wanted to know what kind of monster the System had sent to fix the "mistake" that was me.
Outside, the world had been erased. The quarry, the rocks, the trees—all gone. There was only a thick, swirling fog the color of a dead man's eyes. Standing in the center of that fog was the Apostle. He didn't look like a monster. He looked like a hole in the universe. He was tall, draped in white rags that didn't move, and his face was a smooth mask of grey flesh with two horizontal slits that leaked a faint, oily smoke.
He wasn't a "Boss" I could learn patterns for. He wasn't something I could defeat with a clever strategy. He was a fundamental law of the universe coming to correct a mistake. And I was the mistake.
The Apostle raised a finger.
CREAK.
The ten-ton, reinforced bunker door—the door I had spent my last life's secrets to find and secure—didn't just break. It began to turn into dust. The steel flaked away in the wind, layer by layer, as if time itself was being sped up by a thousand years every second. The high-tech alloy turned to rust, then to sand, then to nothing.
I gripped the hilt of my Shadow-Slaying Blade.
Tusk? Nero? Anyone?
I screamed the names in my mind, over and over, but there was only silence. The mental links were severed. I couldn't feel the mall. I couldn't feel the phoenix essence. I was completely, utterly alone. For the first time since I regressed, I felt a cold, oily coil of genuine terror wrap around my heart.
The door vanished.
The Apostle stepped into the hallway. Every golden leaf on the World-Tree roots above me instantly turned black and fell to the floor like ash. The light died, leaving us in a suffocating twilight. The only thing left was the Apostle and the sound of my own frantic, shallow heartbeat.
He looked at me. He didn't speak, but I felt his "voice" inside my marrow. It felt like needles being driven into my bones.
"G L I T C H."
He raised his hand, and the gravity in the hallway increased by ten times. I was slammed face-first into the floor. My nose shattered against the metal, the taste of copper filling my mouth. I tried to crawl, to reach for my sword, but the Apostle simply stepped on my hand.
CRUNCH.
I didn't even have the breath left to scream. I watched, pinned to the floor, as my fingers were crushed into the metal plating. The Apostle leaned down, his featureless face inches from mine. The grey fog leaking from his eyes smelled like old graves and empty space. This wasn't a fight. This was an extermination.
He reached out a long, thin hand toward my chest, his fingers glowing with a sickly grey light. He was going to reach inside and pull out my soul before it could even finish its second life.
Is this it? I thought. My vision was fading to black. I came back... just to die even sooner?
I felt his cold fingers sink into my chest. It didn't hurt. It felt like my very essence was being erased, like I was being forgotten by the world. I looked at the dark ceiling, the last of my strength leaving me. I was powerless. I was nothing.
Then, the Apostle stopped.
He didn't pull back. He just froze. A single drop of liquid fell from the ceiling and landed on the back of the Apostle's hand.
It wasn't water. It was a drop of pure, brilliant white light.
The Apostle's hand didn't just burn; it evaporated. He let out a sound like a thousand dying radios, jumping back into the fog as his arm vanished into white sparks.
I lay there, gasping for air that finally returned to the hallway. I couldn't move my head, but I saw a pair of boots walk slowly past me toward the Apostle. They weren't heavy combat boots or the shoes of a student. They were light, silent, and moved with a grace that made the world seem to hold its breath.
"You're in the wrong house," a voice said.
It was a voice I didn't recognize—cool, melodic, and humming with a power that made the Apostle's void-energy feel like a child's toy.
I tried to whisper a name, to ask who it was, but my lungs were too damaged. I watched through a blur of blood as the stranger stepped into the grey fog. The figure was shrouded in a cloak that seemed to shimmer like moonlight, and as they moved, the darkness didn't just move aside—it recoiled in fear.
The Apostle hissed, trying to raise his remaining hand, but the stranger was too fast. A flash of silver, brighter than any star, sliced through the grey fog.
The stranger reached out and caught the Apostle's throat.
SNAP.
The sound of the "unbeatable" executioner's neck breaking was the last thing I heard. The grey fog began to melt away, and for a split second, the stranger turned their head. I couldn't see a face, only a pair of eyes that glowed with a piercing, electric violet light.
Those eyes didn't look at me with pity. They looked at me as if I were a piece of a puzzle that didn't fit.
"Don't die yet, Sovereign," the voice whispered, echoing in the metal walls. "The game has only just started."
Before the figure could step closer, my mind finally snapped under the pressure, and I drifted into the dark.
I woke up hours later to the sound of silence. The bunker door was closed. There was no grey ash. No Apostle. My hand was healed, but my mana was still at zero. I looked at the spot where the stranger had stood, and for a moment, I wondered if it had all been a dream.
But then, I saw it.
On the floor, exactly where the Apostle had died, lay a single, small item. It was a silver hair ribbon, glowing with a light that didn't belong to the System.
I picked it up, and my hand trembled. Someone else was playing this game. And they were much, much stronger than me.