"Alright," he said. "Let's see what this thing actually wants."Another window appeared between them, simple and clean against the glowing void.
「Start? Yes / No」
Jisoo reached out and pressed Yes without hesitating.
The response was imdiate.
「Trial: Safe Zone
Difficulty: Easy」
"Amazing," Jisoo said flatly, reading it with the satisfied expression of soone whose math had just co out correct. "Easy difficulty for a safe zone qualification. That's actually kind of insulting how straightforward that—"
"Don't," Si Hon said.
"I'm just saying—"
"Bro… Do not jinx it."
She opened her mouth. Then the window glitched.
Not a small flicker— a full, ugly stutter, the letters jumping and fragnting like sothing had grabbed the system from the inside and shaken it.
Cracks split outward from the edges of the window, thin white lines spreading through the void around them like glass deciding to break slowly. The trial window spasd once, twice, and then went still.
A new one replaced it.
[Warning]
Regressor Detected.
It sat there for exactly one second.
[Warning]
Unknown Variable Detected.
Another second.
[Calculating...]
[Calculating...]
[Calculating...]
The words repeated, patient and chanical, running through whatever the system was doing in the background. The cracks in the void spread a little further.
Then, finally—
[Difficulty Adjustnt Complete.]
Si Hon stared at it.
Then stared down at the white void beneath his feet. Then exhaled through his nose with the long, flat energy of soone who was not surprised, not exactly, but was deeply and specifically disappointed. "I hate you," he muttered loudly.
"Oops," Jisoo said, and almost sounded like she ant it.
「Rules that aren't supposed to be here has now appeared.」
[Rules]
「Rule 1. Participants may leave the trial area. ← May never leave anymore unless completion.
Rule 2. Participants must protect the Core. ← Core is now gone. There is nothing to protect. Must hide instead.
Rule 3. If the Core is destroyed, the trial imdiately fails. ← Deleted.
Rule 4. If all participants die, the trial imdiately fails. ← You will reset to the beginning.
Rule 5. Outside assistance is prohibited.
Rule 6. The trial will continue until the Success Condition is fulfilled.」
They read it in silence.
Si Hon got to Rule 4 and stayed there for a mont longer than the others.
"Reset to the beginning," he said.
"Yep," Jisoo said.
"Inside the trial."
"Yep."
"So we're just doing this until we win."
"That's what Rule 6 says."
"Fuck, if only we could regressed back to the gate!"
"Oh co on, don't be a pussy, this will probably be fun or not, it'll hurt too probably."
Si Hon looked at her. She looked back at him with the expression of soone who had already done ntal math on all of this and arrived sowhere between resigned and genuinely curious about how bad it was going to get. Then she shrugged, which was sohow the most Jisoo response possible.
"Aghhhhh,,, I hate you…"
Before either of them could say anything else— the void broke.
The white light beneath their feet fractured outward all at once like sothing had struck it from below, and through the cracks ca colour, texture, sound— and then the whole thing shattered and fell away and a new world arrived.
They were standing in the middle of a city.
Not the city they'd just co from— or maybe it was, stripped down to sothing older, sothing that had been left alone long enough to start becoming sothing else entirely.
The streets were still there, the buildings still stood, but nature had moved back in with the patient, unhurried confidence of sothing that had been waiting for the right mont.
Tall grass pushed up through cracked pavent in dense patches, reaching head height in so places, hip height in others, swaying slightly in air that had no wind to explain it.
IVY and thick stemd vines climbed the faces of buildings all the way up to the higher floors, threading through broken windows and wrapping around rusted railings, pulling the structures slowly back toward the ground.
Trees had taken root in places trees had no business being— growing out from the gaps between buildings, leaning across narrow alleyways, their canopies pressing against walls and spreading overhead like a second ceiling made of dark leaves and branches that blocked out whatever sky existed above them.
And the sounds. Howling sowhere in the distance, low and layered, not one thing but several things, the kind of sound that bounced between buildings and made direction impossible to determine.
THEN—
Sothing moved in the tall grass two blocks ahead— a shift, a rustle, then stillness. Above them, on the upper floors of a building to the left, sothing large moved between two window openings and disappeared before either of them could look directly at it.
The air slled like wet earth and iron and sothing older underneath both of those.
Si Hon stood in the middle of it and looked at the grass growing through the road beneath his feet, and the vines swallowing the building to his right, and the dark spaces between structures where the overgrowth had grown dense enough to swallow the light entirely.
Then he looked at Jisoo.
"This should've been easy difficulty…" he said.
Jisoo looked around at all of it with the slow, thodical sweep of soone taking inventory. Her jaw was set. Her eyes were moving fast. "It was," she said. "Before."
Si Hon pressed both hands on his face. "Aghhhhhh!!! I hate you."
The howling ca again, closer this ti, rolling between the buildings in a low wave that seed to co from everywere at once and settle into silence just as quickly.
Neither of them moved yet.
***
Chp 192.5
Summary:
After adopting a mysterious little girl he found hiding inside a dumpster, Si Hon's life imdiately went off the rails when a hybrid dragon wolf monster dragged him through a portal and threw him into the First Floor of the Tower, a frozen region known as Snowfall Mountain. Sohow, he managed to establish a Safe Zone in the middle of that deadly landscape and soon t Hana, a powerful emotionless child whose existence seed far more important than she appeared. During an monster(munches) encounter, Si Hon died protecting her, only for Hana to casually reverse ti and bring him back, earning him the bizarre title of "Dad".
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