[Portal Interfering With Transfer]

[Warning: Death Imminent]

[Exit Gate Corrupted]

[Death Imminent]

[Death Imminent—]

[Dea...th I...mmi—nen—t]

[Error]

[No!]

Ronan was ejected from the portal like a man spat out by something that had briefly considered digesting him. His boots hit concrete, actual, honest concrete, and immediately betrayed him. He stumbled, tripped, and slammed flat onto the ground.

"Ughh..."

Then sunlight.

Real sunlight.

The first he’d felt in over a month of perpetual darkness, and it wasn’t gentle. It stabbed through his eyes and into his skull like heated needles. His retinas screamed. His brain recoiled.

The pain was unbearable.

"F-Fuck...! Agh!"

He squeezed his eyes shut, but it didn’t help. Worse, his body felt wrong. As if someone had reached inside him and flipped every switch from godslayer to ordinary man.

[Under Direct Sunlight]

[Night’s Caress: Deactivated]

[Shadow Consume: Deactivated]

[Flesh Golem Inheritance: Deactivated]

"Goddamnit, it burns!"

Blind and reeling, Ronan bolted forward. He didn’t know where he was going, only that he needed shade, shadow, anything that wasn’t this searing, holy light. Two steps in, he crashed face-first into something immovable.

Reinforced metal.

It rang like a gong and sent him staggering backward onto the pavement.

But the impact was a blessing.

Whatever he’d struck cast enough shade to cover him, and Ronan gasped as the burning subsided. He blinked his eyes open, vision still swimming, and looked up at his accidental savior.

A shield.

Seven feet of reinforced steel, tall as a door and thick enough to laugh off a speeding truck. A hunter’s shield, without question.

"A survivor!"

"Someone actually got out!?"

The voices erupted around him all at once. Ronan squinted past the shield and took in the scene. Yellow caution tape, the kind used to cordon off sealed gates, hung in shredded ribbons across the portal’s frame. He must have torn straight through it on his way out.

Beyond the tape stood hunters. Dozens of them, all armed and armored. And behind them, more figures in tactical gear, rifles raised and trained directly on him.

"H-Hello?"

Ronan blinked, trying to make sense of the blurry shapes beyond the shield. His eyes were still adjusting, still screaming at him for the crime of existing in sunlight after weeks of darkness.

The tactical team didn’t lower their rifles.

"Identify yourself!" A voice barked from somewhere to his left. Male, sharp, and definitely military. "Name, rank, guild affiliation!"

"Ronan Night," he managed, his voice coming out rougher than he intended. "D-Rank porter. No guild."

A ripple of murmurs passed through the assembled hunters. The lowest of the low, and somehow the only one standing in front of them.

"Bullshit."

A different voice this time, female, cold.

"The Tartarus-B gate has been sealed for over a month. Every hunter who went in was declared KIA two weeks ago. There’s no way a D-Rank porter survived."

Ronan didn’t have the energy to argue. His body was still reeling from the sunlight, from the sudden loss of his skills, from the feeling of being spat out of a portal that had apparently tried to kill him on the way through.

He stayed in the shield’s shadow and focused on breathing.

And the moment a hand touched him, his body moved before his mind could catch up.

Forty-seven days in Tartarus-B had honed his instincts to a razor’s edge. Anyone who tried touching him while he was blinded would receive immediate pain. It wasn’t a choice anymore.

It was reflex.

FWOOSH!

Ronan’s vision was still a blur of searing white, but his body no longer needed sight to function. His hands found the figure by what he assumed was its head, and he drove it down toward the ground with all the force his diminished strength could muster.

CRACK!

"Agh—!"

A pained grunt escaped beneath him. That same cold female voice from before. The one who’d doubted him.

Before anyone else could react, a warm light washed over Ronan’s body. Someone, finally, had the basic decency to realize he was completely blinded and had cast a healing spell. The burning in his retinas eased, the white haze receding as his vision pieced itself back together.

He blinked, once, twice, and the world resolved into clarity.

"H-Huh?"

He was pinning someone to the concrete. A woman in a Hunter’s Association uniform, her badge clearly visible on her collar, her expression caught somewhere between shock and humiliation. Around them, dozens of hunters and tactical officers stood frozen, staring.

"Did he just pin down a B-Rank without any trouble...?"

"That thing’s a porter...?"

The whispers reached him before the realization did. B-Rank. He’d just put a B-Rank hunter on the ground without even trying, without his skills, without his inheritance. In broad daylight.

Ronan’s grip loosened immediately. "I-I’m sorry—!"

THUD!

The pommel of a sword crashed against the back of his skull.

***

Ronan woke to complete and utter darkness.

His limbs were bound, strapped down by what felt like a straitjacket, and he was seated in a cold metal chair bolted to the floor. In front of him, a wall of black windows stared back like empty eye sockets.

He knew this room.

He’d stood in the corner of it once, two years ago, hired to carry an S-Rank hunter’s belongings.

He’d watched that same hunter interrogate a man who’d killed his own party. He remembered the one-way mirror. The harsh fluorescent lights. The feeling of being watched by eyes he couldn’t see.

Now he was on the other side of the glass.

"H-Hello?"

The speakers crackled to life. "Speak. Who are you?"

"Ronan Night. Like I already said."

"What happened to the rest of the expedition?"

"They died." His voice came out flat. "I’m not sure if there are any other survivors. But my team was completely wiped out."

Silence.

The kind of silence that meant the people behind the glass were debating whether to believe him.

"How did you survive?"

"I got lucky. That’s all."

Another long pause. Then the speaker crackled again, the voice colder now.

"We’ll be keeping you here for observation. We need to verify your story. You’re the only person who’s walked out of that gate since the expedition entered. You should understand."

Keeping him here.

For observation?

After a month and a half of being stuck in a hellscape, he couldn’t even enjoy the normal world for a single day. He was just supposed to sit here, in this uncomfortable chair, for days? Weeks? Months?

Ronan didn’t want that.

[Under The Presence of Darkness]

[Night’s Caress: Activated]

[Shadow Consume: Activated]

[Flesh Golem Inheritance: Activated]

"I apologize, but I’d have to refuse."

POP! POP! POP!

KRAK! SNAP! CLANG!

Ronan destroyed the straitjacket from the inside out.