The thick, blood-red haze that had been erupting from the orc's enormous corpse like a volcano finally dispersed completely into the air and faded away.
Kyle stood silently in the middle of the forest, where the stench of blood hung heavy, and slowly looked down at his hands.
His fingers, once gaunt and skeletal from malnutrition, were now packed with sinewy muscles as tough as a beast's. Merely clenching and unclenching his fists, still caked in the orc's dark red blood as it dried, transmitted the density of a heavy strength utterly different from what he had possessed before beneath his skin.
'I've changed completely.'
When he had first opened his eyes in the body of this frail fifteen-year-old orphan, the hidden trait Curse of Greed had torn his stomach apart and gnawed away at his reason.
That horrible hunger, which had clawed at his brain and demanded that he rip open the throat of a living person and drink their blood at once, had vanished without a trace.
Two massive mutant orcs and five armed mercenaries.
Kyle's body, having ravenously devoured their immense vitality and essence, had completely suppressed the curse's penalty and was instead regaining a stability so extreme it bordered on the abnormal.
It wasn't simple fullness.
The explosive, brutish strength unique to the orc race had been etched deep into every cell and bone in his body.
A crimson mana core the size of one and a half fists throbbed heavily in his lower abdomen, flooding his entire body with vitality that felt ready to burst through his veins and boil over at any moment.
Even the texture of the air entering his lungs with every breath felt different.
"Damn it all... Every bone in my body aches. I really ought to retire and quit working like a hunting dog. I can't take this anymore. My bones are killing me."
Antonio's rough, hoarse voice shattered the quiet contemplation.
He had somehow managed to calm his two hands, which had been trembling like aspens, and now groaned as he thumped his stiff back and shoulders with his fists.
He scrubbed at an old steel sword drenched in blood with a torn strip of cloth and approached Kyle.
Deeply furrowed wrinkles framed his eyes, and within them still flickered intense wariness toward Kyle and an instinctive fear.
But like the veteran mercenary he was, a man who had spent thirty-one long years rolling through bloody frontline battlefields and back alleys, he placed surviving and dealing with the horrific reality before him above allowing fear to consume him.
"No time to get sentimental, kid. I took a quick look around the wagon."
Antonio pointed with his chin toward the remains of the wagon, utterly smashed and strewn miserably across the ground.
"The armed escort mercenaries and the driver are all dead, except for us. A few of the slaves being dragged along as meat shields escaped into the woods in the confusion, but there isn't a chance they made it out of this beast's den of a forest without a single weapon. Can't confirm whether they're alive or dead, but odds are they ended up in the bellies of wild monsters."
Antonio's voice was brutally dry.
Even in the face of dozens of lives vanishing as easily as flies, his expression held not the slightest trace of sympathy or sorrow.
Only the cold calculation of how to use this situation to continue surviving lay beneath it.
"Go grab every weapon, piece of equipment, and anything worth money. The whole area reeks of blood from that fight, so it's only a matter of time before a starving pack of monsters comes running. We need to leave now, before that happens."
Kyle silently nodded at Antonio's orders and walked toward the scene of the horrific slaughter.
The surroundings were nothing short of hell.
Corpses with their rib cages caved in by the orc's massive club, mercenaries with their entire backs torn away, and the driver lying dead with his eyes rolled back and his intestines spilling out.
But Kyle's eyes did not tremble even once at the gruesome sight, like something out of a gore film.
The carnage in his field of vision had simply been converted into objects available for looting and coldly recognized as such.
The two of them quickly and impassively turned over the corpses, stripping them of anything useful.
Kyle searched the half-severed driver's clothes and took a pouch of dry jerky untouched by blood and two leather canteens.
From the dead escort mercenaries' belts, he removed two usable steel daggers, a sturdy leather belt, and a pair of fairly durable leather boots, which he exchanged for his old shoes.
Antonio likewise slashed open the corpses' pockets without hesitation and took more than ten bloodstained silver coins, then swept survival supplies essential for camping in the forest—flint, bandages, and a thick cloak—into a sack.
"This is enough. We've got everything worth taking. We're moving now."
Several hours after they began walking deeper into the forest, leaving the horrific stench of blood behind, the sun finally vanished completely and thick darkness settled over the woods.
The forest at night exuded a far stranger and more overwhelming terror than it had during the day.
In the pitch-black darkness, the grotesque cries of unidentified beasts echoed through the trees, and hungry eyes began to glint between the bushes.
But Antonio showed no sign of panic as he skillfully surveyed the terrain.
After calculating the direction of the wind and the beasts' paths, he settled them in a natural fortress of a safe zone, where a massive rock wall rose in a U-shape, blocking the wind and protecting their backs.
"We'll camp here tonight."
The old hunting dog's survival skills were so clean and efficient they inspired admiration.
In an instant, he dug into the ground and made a concealed Dakota fire pit that kept the warmth in without allowing smoke to escape.
While they were traveling, Kyle had hunted a fat forest rat and a mountain hare by throwing daggers at them. Antonio expertly skinned and gutted them, then skewered them on branches and set them over the fire.
Crackle, crackle.
The small campfire burned red, and the gamy smell of roasting meat spread through the air.
For a while, the two of them said nothing as they tore into bone-dry jerky and tough, blood-flavored rabbit meat like beasts, filling their empty stomachs.
Antonio, his face cast in the shadows of the flames beyond the firelight as he kept glancing at Kyle, finally broke the heavy silence.
"Antonio. That's my name."
Kyle's gaze turned toward him as he chewed on a tough rabbit leg.
Antonio stirred the ashes with a piece of kindling and asked as casually as if tossing out a remark,
"Just where the hell did you crawl out of, kid? You slit an orc's throat with nothing but skin and bones, then watched how I handled mana for thirty years and evolved it in an instant before blasting it back out. You don't seem like any ordinary punk. What are you, some hidden descendant of the fallen Kruger family?"
It was a probing question laced with the joking tone unique to a veteran, accompanied by a light, hollow chuckle.
But Kyle's movements stopped dead at those words. Unable even to swallow the tough meat he was chewing, his pitch-black eyes hardened coldly.
'The Kruger family... fell?'
The overwhelming great house that had been the absolute bulwark of the Empire's north in the game, producing Swordmasters and Sword Saints generation after generation and ruling as the strongest military power on the continent of Vertus.
Back when Kyle played the game, countless users challenged Kruger's knights, only to be wiped out without even being able to recover their bones.
The news that the family had been wiped out was alien information that did not exist anywhere in Kyle's vast knowledge of the game.
"Wiped out...? The Kruger family in the northern Empire?"
When Kyle asked in a suppressed, metallic voice, Antonio's brow sharply furrowed and his face twisted in disbelief.
"The northern Empire? Did that orc club smack you in the head back in the woods? The Unified Empire was shattered and destroyed ages ago, and you're still going on about the Empire?"
At that moment, a massive alarm began ringing in Kyle's mind.
Something—something had gone terribly wrong. He had not simply possessed a body inside the game. The gap between the setting he knew and reality was far too vast.
Ignoring Antonio's rebuke, Kyle stared intently into the burning campfire and asked urgently,
"...What year is it? What year of Gaia?"
Gaia—the name of the earth goddess and the absolute god who had created this world.
In the world of Vertus, it was the universal calendar used across the continent to mark the year.
The era of Vertus that Kyle remembered from the game was Gaia Year 750.
He had been certain he would fall into that period, or somewhere close to the point when the game began.
But Antonio's irritated answer sent a massive earthquake through Kyle's cold reason.
"Gaia? Why the hell are you suddenly asking about the year? It's Gaia Year 1000. Fall will end in a month, and it'll be 1001."
"...What?"
For the first time since falling into this world, Kyle's previously vacant black pupils shook violently.
Gaia Year 1000. An impossibly distant future, twisted a full 250 years beyond the world he knew.
"The Empire was destroyed?"
Antonio clicked his tongue and answered while noisily chewing the tough meat.
"Yeah, you dense little brat. It wasn't just the Kruger family. The Unified Empire itself, which once commanded the entire continent, was shattered and destroyed. That was over a hundred years ago. Ancient history."
Kyle's fingers unconsciously closed around the hilt of his sword.
The Empire's destruction meant that the entire foundation of Vertus as Kyle knew it had been overturned. If the Empire had vanished, then the knightly orders beneath it, the magic academies, the military structures of the great houses, and even the system by which the realms of power were passed down had likely all changed.
Antonio tossed the kindling onto the ground and continued.
"It was those damn fanatics. The fanatical kingdom that made its nest in the center of the continent—the Holy Kingdom. They were a religious group, but they used insane military power and miracles to destroy the Empire and carve up the world like this."
'The Holy Kingdom.'
There was no such name anywhere in Kyle's knowledge of the game. For a religious group to destroy the most powerful unified empire on the continent meant that its leader possessed transcendent power capable of overwhelming all the Empire's military might. Kyle's reason instinctively sounded another alarm.
Antonio added roughly,
"After the Empire fell, its vassals and the surviving great houses scattered into various kingdoms to save their own skins. That's how this lawless mess came to be."
Deep hatred—and an inexplicable, profound fear—passed through Antonio's wrinkled eyes.
"Worst of all is the bastard leading that insane fanatic group, the head of the Holy Kingdom. It's only a rumor, but... they say the bastard is an immortal monster who neither ages nor dies. A man with no past and no clear origin suddenly appeared in history, performed abilities and miracles stranger than any monster, and swallowed the world whole in an instant."
A leader who neither aged nor died, with no past.
And an unfamiliar continent lying 250 years beyond everything he knew.
'This isn't the Vertus I knew.'
The shattered Unified Empire, the great Kruger family wiped from existence, and the Holy Kingdom ruled by an immortal leader.
Half of the knowledge from the game had become legends in a museum, while the other half had transformed into something horrifying beyond Kyle's imagination.
Yet even in this situation, there was no clear evidence from which to infer the interference of another player or traces of someone reincarnated from another life.
This world of brutal, hardcore difficulty had simply spent the last 250 years evolving on its own, carrying its own malice as it became more vicious and grotesque.
Antonio tossed the kindling onto the ground and asked Kyle in return,
"Anyway, my past is my business. What's your real name? I was joking earlier, but anyone who handles mana like that at your age has to come from some important bloodline, right?"
Kyle unconsciously began to open his mouth to answer, then stopped.
His real name.
Before possessing this unimpressive fifteen-year-old orphan's body, he tried to remember the real name he had been called on Earth, in the real world beyond the monitor.
'What was my name...? What did I do for a living on Earth? Did I have a family?'
But as if the deepest part of his brain had been carved away with a keen surgical scalpel, vicious gray static churned in his mind, and no memories surfaced.
The fact that he had possessed a vicious personality, one that had been obsessed with the brutal game Vertus; the rage of mutually destroying himself alongside the transcendent entity Greed; and his vast knowledge of the game all remained perfectly clear.
But his personal past on Earth, his name, and his identity as a human being had been completely erased, as if swallowed by fog.
Only the red text that the system had assigned to this possessed body remained branded in his mind.
Kyle pressed lightly against his temple and forced out a dry, metallic voice through his torn vocal cords.
"...Kyle."
"Kyle? No last name?"
"...I don't know. I can't remember."
A curt, rough answer.
Seeing Kyle's calm, emotionless expression, Antonio gave up on asking further questions.
Whether he had lost his memory from trauma after being dragged through the back alleys in misery, or was truly a monstrous genius hiding his past, it wasn't important right now.
"Fine. Enough with the weird questions. Get some sleep, Kyle. We need to move at first light tomorrow. I'll take the first watch."
Antonio sprinkled sand over the campfire, reducing the embers as much as possible, and muttered the words.
Kyle stared into the ashes as they cooled, then gripped the bloodstained steel sword in his arms and sat with his back against the rough rock wall.
Gaia Year 1000.
A shattered Empire.
And his memories of Earth, completely erased.
Everything about the circumstances was unfamiliar and desperate, but Kyle did not tremble with anxiety.
Instead, the trait Iron Man brought him a cold sense of peace.
Antonio's survival skills in the extreme situation moments ago, and the veteran's clear-headed judgment in entrusting Kyle with his back without betraying him.
Kyle acknowledged that Antonio was the only companion he could trust, at least for the time being, and a useful ally in this madness of a hell.
There was no need to remain bound to the past.
All that mattered was surviving and growing stronger. Until he could perfectly sever the head of the immense transcendent entity that had thrown him into this hell—Greed—and reign as the apex predator of this continent without end.
That alone became Kyle's one clear and singular purpose for living in this hell.
Relying on the cold grip of the steel sword, Kyle slowly closed his eyes.
His first night on an unfamiliar continent that he would have to write anew deepened alongside the cries of beasts.