The face stared at Ethan as though gazing into a mirror that refused to show the correct reflection—a mirror that stared right back with eyes of its own.
The figure stood calmly among the trees, wearing clothes far more tattered than Ethan had imagined for the heir of a powerful clan. His robe was torn in several places, his right arm wrapped in dirty cloth stiffened with old, dried blood, and his eyes—eyes exactly like the ones Ethan had seen every time he looked at his reflection in the water since waking in this forest—radiated something far wearier than anger. An old wound at the corner of his brow had yet to fully close, and the way he stood, leaning slightly to one side as though favoring an ache in his ribs, made Ethan realize that this figure had only just escaped something far worse than a long trek through the forest.
The man in the gray robe who had attacked Ethan spun around at once, staggering backward, his right hand still clutching his chest where his own chain of light had struck him. “You,” he hissed, all the calm he had shown before gone from his voice. “You should already be dead in those ruins.” His legs were still trembling, and for the first time since Ethan had encountered him, the man looked like an ordinary person gripped by fear rather than a confident hunter.
“I nearly was,” the figure with Ethan’s own face answered, his voice hoarse, as though it hadn’t been used for speaking in a long time. “But it turns out I wasn’t the one meant to be pulled back.”
His eyes shifted from the robed man to Ethan, and for the first time since emerging from behind the trees, his expression changed—not anger, as Ethan had expected, but something more complicated, a mixture of relief and dread.
[Warning: Presence of Rightful Owner Detected. Host Synchronization Dropping Drastically: 61 percent to 44 percent.]
Ethan felt something inside his chest being forcibly yanked—not physical pain, but the sensation of losing his footing, as if the part of him that had been clinging to this body had begun to detach, piece by piece.
“What’s happening to me?” Ethan asked quietly, his own voice sounding increasingly distant in his ears, as though he were listening to himself speak from the far end of a long corridor. He touched his chest, trying to feel whether something had truly gone missing, but all he found was an emptiness he struggled to explain, like a room being slowly abandoned by its occupants, one by one.
The figure—the true owner of the body Ethan had been inhabiting—stepped closer, ignoring the robed man still staggering between them. “My name is Kael,” he said, “and this body you borrowed was supposed to remain empty forever, because I deliberately discarded the System three days before you took it.” His voice trembled slightly as he said the word “deliberately,” as though the decision still weighed on him even now—something he had never truly regretted, yet had also never fully accepted.
Those words struck Ethan harder than anything that had happened since he’d opened his eyes in this unfamiliar forest. It hadn’t been a System error that had pulled him here. Someone had deliberately released this vessel, deliberately left it empty, and Ethan had unwittingly filled that emptiness.
“Why did you discard it?” Ethan asked, though part of him had already begun to suspect that the answer wouldn’t bring any comfort.
Kael opened his mouth to answer, but before a single word came out, the ground beneath the three of them trembled—not an ordinary tremor, but a rhythmic one, like the footsteps of a giant approaching from the distance, too far away to be seen but close enough to be felt.
The man in the gray robe, who had still been staggering while clutching his chest, suddenly let out a soft laugh, one full of despair rather than joy. “You two don’t understand,” he said, his voice trembling between pain and something resembling strange relief. “I’m not the only one sent to find that vessel. I was just the closest.”
[Critical Warning: Large-Scale Anomaly Detected. Source: Unknown. Distance: Approaching Rapidly.]
Kael turned quickly toward the valley below the cliff, the calm draining from his face in an instant. “That’s not possible,” he muttered, more to himself than to Ethan or the robed man. “They should still be in the capital. They shouldn’t have gotten this far already.”
Ethan followed Kael’s gaze, and what he saw made his entire body—this body that wasn’t his—freeze in a fear whose source he didn’t fully understand. There was something primal in that fear, something that felt deeper than a mere reaction to danger in plain sight, as if this body carried its own memory of whatever was approaching, a memory it had never fully shared with Ethan.
From the thin mist blanketing the valley far below, something moved—something too large to be called human, its movements too orderly to be called a wild animal. It stepped slowly toward the base of the cliff where the three of them stood, leaving behind a trail that scorched the grass along its path. The sound of its footsteps echoed like a war drum being beaten in the distance, and each time its foot touched the ground, the tremor felt closer, more real, more impossible to ignore.
And above the creature’s head, hovering like a crown that touched nothing, hung a status box identical to the ones only Ethan had been able to see—until now.
[Level: ???]