World Awakening: The Legendary Player-Chapter 131: Dread

The room was black. Like, ’can’t-see-your-own-hand’ black. And then two green eyes opened right in Nox face.

He didn’t even have time to think. He just reacted, throwing a punch with a Brutalizer-clad fist at where the eyes were. His fist hit nothing but air. The eyes were gone.

"Show yourself, you cowardly pile of bones!" Mela’s voice yelled from somewhere to his left.

A dry, rattling laugh echoed from everywhere at once. "Patience, little elf. You will all have your turn to die."

A skeleton lunged out of the darkness, its rusty sword swinging. Nox sidestepped, but another one came from his right. He blocked its attack, the clang of metal loud in the suffocating dark.

’I can’t see shit. This is a nightmare.’

He tried to use his senses, to feel the mana in the room, but it was all a chaotic mess of stale, dead energy. The Grave Lord was a high-level necromancer; he didn’t just command the undead, he commanded the very death-stuff in the air.

"Nox!" Serian’s voice was sharp with alarm, much closer than he expected. "Behind you!"

He spun, and a huge, two-handed axe swung by a skeletal champion sliced through the air, missing his head by an inch. He stumbled back, right into another skeleton that grabbed his arms from behind.

’Crap.’

"I am the master of this tomb," the Grave Lord’s voice whispered directly in his ear, even though the green eyes were nowhere to be seen. "Every shadow is my ally. Every bone, my soldier. And you, little whelp, you are merely trapped in my web."

He struggled against the skeleton’s grip, smashing its skull with a backward headbutt, but two more immediately took its place, their bony fingers digging into his arms. He was being overwhelmed.

---

"I can’t see anything!" Mela hissed, her back pressed against a stone wall. A swarm of her needles floated uselessly around her. "My needles are useless if I cannot target them."

’This is a disaster. That idiot human got us into this. I knew he was nothing but trouble.’

A clattering sound made her spin around, but it was just Serian, her sword a faint silver line in the darkness.

"Mela, we have to stay together!" Serian whispered. "He’s trying to separate us!"

"Where is the human?" Mela demanded.

"I do not know! The last I saw, he was being swarmed!"

---

Nox was on one knee, his body aching. The skeletons weren’t strong, but there were too many of them, and they were coordinated. They were herding him, boxing him in.

A heavy mace slammed into his side, and he grunted in pain, the blow rattling his ribs.

’I’m running out of stamina. And my mana is almost gone. Whatever that door did to me, I am clearly still affected’ He’d been using short Void Steps to dodge the worst of the attacks, but it was a losing battle.

He was just a pinball bouncing between bony fists and rusty blades.

He saw a flicker of green light across the room and unleashed one of his chains, a desperate shot in the dark. The chain shot out and wrapped around a pillar, he used it to yank himself out of the immediate mob, crashing into the stone column hard.

He leaned against it, panting. "Is that all you’ve got?" he yelled into the darkness, a desperate bluff.

The Grave Lord’s laugh was his only answer. "Not even close."

The floor beneath him erupted. Dozens of skeletal arms shot out of the stone, grabbing his legs, his arms, his torso. They pulled him down, pinning him to the ground under a writhing pile of bone.

"Nox!" Serian screamed his name, a sound of pure terror from somewhere in the dark.

The green eyes appeared again, floating above him as the Grave Lord glided out of the shadows. He looked down at the trapped human, a look of smug, absolute victory in his glowing sockets.

"Your power is chaotic, child. But my death is absolute."

He raised his hand, a sphere of crackling green energy forming in his palm. "Your soul will make a fine addition to my collection."

’So this is it,’ Nox thought, the cold feeling of defeat washing over him. ’Pinned down like a bug. Beaten by a Halloween decoration. Pathetic.’

Just as the Grave Lord was about to unleash the killing blow, a new screen slammed into Nox’s vision. It wasn’t the calm blue he was used to, or even the sleek black interface from his ’reboot’.

This one was blood red, and the text on it was a single, stark command.

[Insufficient. Evolve.]

His head snapped back as a pain that dwarfed everything before it shot through his entire being. It wasn’t an attack from the outside; it was a hostile takeover from within.

The black interface of his System V.2.0 flared to life, no longer a calm menu but a frantic, rewriting code.

[PRIMARY DIRECTIVE: EVOLVE.]

[All active and passive abilities deemed redundant.]

[Consuming... Void Assimilation.]

[Consuming... Void Step.]

[Consuming... Void Forging.]

[Consuming... Chains of the Abyss.]

[Consuming... Will of the Abyss.]

[Consuming... Primal Void.]

[...All abilities consumed.]

He screamed, a raw, inhuman sound as he felt every skill he had ever learned being ripped out of him, torn away like they were being deleted from his very soul.

The skeletons holding him were blasted away by a wave of pure, uncontrolled void energy that erupted from his body.

"What is this?!" the Grave Lord yelled, taking a step back as the chaotic energy filled the room.

[Reformatting core protocols.]

[Combining all consumed data into a single, optimized combat state.]

[New Paradigm Unlocked.]

Nox pushed himself to his feet, his body trembling. He felt empty, hollowed out. All his tricks, all his tools, were gone.

But then, he felt something new take their place.

It wasn’t a skill he could activate. It was a change. A fundamental shift in his very being.

"What have you done?!" the Grave Lord demanded, its confidence finally cracking as it felt the nature of Nox’s energy change.

Nox just looked down at his hands. The dark, smoky energy wasn’t just curling from his lips anymore. It was bleeding from his skin, from his eyes, a solid, physical shroud of blackness that clung to him like a second skin.

He looked up, and his eyes weren’t human anymore. They were solid black orbs, and in their center, a faint, purple star of void energy began to burn.

His bones cracked. Not breaking, but... shifting, lengthening. The Brutalizer gauntlets on his fists groaned as his hands grew, the metal straining. Dark, chitinous plates of void-forged armor began to grow directly from his skin, covering his arms and chest, sharp and angular.

The Grave Lord, for the first time, stopped laughing. A new feeling pricked at the back of its empty skull. A feeling it had not felt in centuries.

Dread.