I Became the Simp Character I Roasted Online-Chapter 53: The Unpredictable

The question went nowhere. The fog swallowed it the same way it swallowed everything else.

Revan stood in the rain with a dead monster at his feet and no idea which direction led out of this white hell.

Revan pressed his thumb and forefinger against his chin, squeezing until the bone ached.

His eyes narrowed at the fog. The gears in his skull were grinding again.

’During the fight, I could still hear and sense living creatures from a distance. In other words, this fog and rain don’t have any strong, specific mechanics to distort my senses.’

Revan sighed.

’I remember it perfectly. I only dashed a few steps away. There is no way in hell I wouldn’t be able to hear my group fighting. Therefore, the only logical explanation right now... is that I’ve triggered the Dead Zone’s own mechanics.’

There were places in this world where the environment itself had a will.

A mechanism. A natural system that formed over centuries the way rivers carved canyons or wind shaped stone.

In Valtheris, they were documented as Territorial Phenomena, regions where the accumulated residue of ancient mana, even long-dead mana, had seeped so deeply into the earth and atmosphere that the landscape developed its own behavioral patterns.

The most common type was a labyrinth.

Not walls and corridors built by hands, but a spatial distortion woven into the land itself. The terrain would look flat and featureless, but the distances inside it didn’t obey normal rules.

Two points that appeared ten meters apart might actually be separated by a kilometer of folded space. A man could walk in a straight line for an hour and end up behind the rock he’d started from, because the ground beneath him was quietly looping without any visible seam.

Revan had read about them. Every student at the Academy had.

But reading about a phenomenon in a textbook and standing inside one were two entirely different experiences.

Every Territorial Phenomenon was unique because every landscape had its own history with mana.

In regions where the ancient wars had been fought with fire-based destruction, the residual mana crystallized into thermal loops. The air would cycle endlessly between scorching heat and freezing cold in patterns that trapped anything living inside a perpetual temperature maze.

In coastal zones where water mana had saturated the bedrock for millennia, the Phenomena manifested as tidal distortions, stretches of land that physically expanded and contracted like a breathing lung, widening during the day and compressing at night.

Revan had memorized all of it in his head, including the details of the Dead Zone.

At least, that was how it was supposed to be.

But it wasn’t.

He had assumed that the inability to channel mana here was the zone’s main mechanic. But no... there was something else at play.

Revan wiped the relentless rain from his face.

"Alright. First things first, let’s see what other mechanics this cursed place is hiding."

A forced smile tugged at Revan’s lips.

’Hmm... good thing I never skipped a single lesson, either on Earth or in this world. Because of that, I have plenty of ways to get out of here. That fight really jump-started my brain. It made me remember things I never would’ve recalled through all the panic. Thank God.’

There was a well-known problem in navigation that applied here.

In a featureless environment with no landmarks, no sun, and no compass, a human being walking in what they believed was a straight line would inevitably curve.

The body was never perfectly symmetrical. One leg always pushed slightly harder than the other, and the accumulated drift would bend the path into a slow, wide arc until you ended up right back where you started.

If this fog was acting as a labyrinth, it might not be bending space at all. It might simply be removing every correction point, letting human error do the rest.

The fix was simple.

Walk mechanically. Count steps. Alternate the leading foot to cancel the drift. Turn yourself into a compass needle and let physics carry you out in a straight line.

Revan dragged his sword through the mud, cutting a groove from the creature’s body outward as a marker. If the fog looped him back, he’d find it again and know.

Revan licked his lips. "Okay, let’s see."

Revan began to walk and counting silently in his head.

At one hundred steps, he stopped.

Crouched. Swept his hand across the ground in a wide arc, feeling for the groove he’d cut near the creature’s body.

Revan let out a heavy sigh of relief.

’Ah, fucking good. Looks like I’m not stuck in some endless spatial loop that just resets me back to the same spot every time. If that were the case, I’d honestly just lie down and let the mud have me.’

He resumed his pace, continuing the count where he’d left off.

Somewhere around the three hundredth step, the ground beneath his boots shifted. The soupy slurry that had been sucking at his soles for hours gave way to something firmer, more compact, as if the earth here hadn’t been drowning in rainwater for as long.

And the rain itself was changing too, the heavy downpour thinning into a light drizzle that misted against his face instead of hammering it.

By five hundred steps, the fog had pulled back enough to give him eight meters of visibility instead of three.

Revan blinked.

For the first time in hours, he could actually see the ground more than two paces ahead of him. The white wasn’t gone, but it had loosened its grip, thinning from a solid wall into something closer to a veil.

And through that veil, maybe fifteen meters ahead, something caught his eye that made him stop mid-stride.

The fog was different there.

The uniform white that had been pressing in from every direction for hours had split apart, peeling away to the left and right like the walls of a corridor, leaving a narrow channel of clear air stretching forward into a darkness he couldn’t see the end of.

Revan stopped walking. His brow furrowed deep enough to hurt.

"I’m willing to bet my entire salary, which I’ve never actually received, that walking into the creepy fog corridor is exactly how people die in fairy tales."

He tilted his head, studying the opening.

"The fog literally just rolled out a red carpet for me. That’s not ominous at all. Not even a little bit."

Revan glanced back at the path he had just walked, then turned to face forward again.

He grumbled under his breath.

’Not like I have another fucking choice, do I? Didn’t think so. Fine. I’m in.’

Revan stepped into the corridor.

The moment he crossed the threshold, the air changed.

The wet, freezing atmosphere of the Dead Zone fell away behind him like a curtain dropping, replaced by something drier, thinner, and strangely warm.

Or maybe it wasn’t warm at all.

Maybe his body had finally crossed some invisible line where the cold stopped registering and everything started feeling hot instead. He’d read about that somewhere. The final stage before hypothermia shut you down for good. Your brain misfired, told you the ice was a furnace, and you stopped shivering right before you died.

’Can you try to be a little fucking positive for once, Revan?’ he muttered to himself.

Revan swept his gaze left and right.

The fog on both sides was incredibly thick, pressing in on him like solid walls. The only clear path was straight ahead.

Something about this place made his skin crawl.

His body was wrecked, his Aura channels fried, and he was teetering on the edge of consciousness. But for someone who had spent his entire life surviving situations exactly like this, his guard never truly dropped.

Even half-dead, his deeply ingrained defensive instincts kept him razor-sharp.

Which was the only reason he caught it.

Swusshh.

Something moved in the fog to his left.

It moved so fast it was gone before he could even turn his head.

Revan froze.

Swusshh.

Right side this time. A rush of displaced air that brushed the torn fabric hanging from his shoulder.

’...No. No no no no. Please tell me I didn’t just walk into that thing’s nest. Please tell me I’m not standing in the middle of a predator’s den like a gift-wrapped meal that delivered itself.’

The sounds multiplied.

Circling. Orbiting him from every direction, the same swirling pattern as the creature in the fog.

Revan’s blood ran cold.

His broken body locked into a combat stance that it had no business holding, sword up, weight low, eyes darting between the fog walls.

"If there’s a whole FAMILY of those things in here, I swear to every god in every world I’ve ever lived in, I will—"

A shape materialized out of the fog directly in front of him.

Small. Barely reaching his chest. Pale. Frail. Standing so close that Revan could have headbutted it.

"HOLY—!"

Revan’s sword was already mid-swing before his eyes caught up to his reflexes.

The blade stopped an inch from the figure’s head because somewhere between his wrist and his brain.

A boy.

Maybe ten years old. Jet-black hair with long bangs that covered most of his face. So thin the fog behind him was almost visible through his frame.

The boy flinched so hard his knees buckled and he nearly collapsed into the mud.

Revan’s heart was hammering against his broken ribs hard enough to blur his vision.

He choked.

"You... you..."