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Chapter 2 - Black Call

The silence in the chamber was deafening.

Kael stepped onto the writhing floor of screaming stone faces. Each one frozen in mid-scream, mouths wide open as if they were breathing out a warning. Or begging.

The echoes followed silently behind him.

One—the Mawrat Scavenger—twitched and sniffed at the air. The other—a ghostly Hollow Guardian—dragged its translucent bone club with a sound like glass scraping steel.

Kael raised a hand.

"Stop."

They did. Immediately.

He advanced alone.

[Core Room Proximity: 12 meters.]

[Entity Signature: Mutated Dungeon Intelligence.]

[Abyssal Influence Detected: 47.9% Corruption.]

[Advisory: This dungeon is becoming… sentient.]

That voice again. The system. Kael wasn't sure how much of it was programmed anymore. Sometimes it felt like it was adapting. Watching. Afraid.

He pulled his cloak tighter and passed through a ragged veil of skin stretched over the chamber's final threshold.

Inside, there was nothing.

No boss.

No loot chest.

Just a massive black spire rising from the floor, pulsing with veins of blood-red energy. Floating above it, writhing slowly in the air, was a heart. Enormous. Beating. Wrong.

[Unregistered Lifeform Detected: "The Carrion Womb"]

Type: Incomplete Dungeon Core Mutation

Status: Incubating. Reaction to presence: Hostile.]

The floor cracked beneath him.

The ceiling wept blood.

Then the heart pulsed violently, and the screaming faces around the room all screamed at once.

[WARNING: You are being targeted by an Apex Entity.]

[Initiating Black Call? Y/N]

Kael didn't hesitate.

"Y."

The shadows behind him split like a veil.

Black mist swirled upward into defined forms—the Mawrat Echo shrieked and dove into the ground, claws glowing red. The Hollow Guardian roared and swung its spectral club, sending a shockwave through the floor that knocked several twitching tendrils aside.

The heart writhed. The walls began birthing limbs.

Tentacles. Bone arms. Screaming jaws.

Kael leapt into the air, flipped, and buried both daggers into one of the arms mid-swing.

[Harvest Step Engaged. Target Hit: Critical + Grave Mark.]

He landed, ducked, sliced low.

The Mawrat Echo surged up from the ground and tore into a fleshy stalk.

[Echo Assist: Damage Registered. Remaining Time: 47 seconds.]

Kael's system pinged again.

[Soulcraft Surging: Temporary Echo Limit Raised +1]

[New Echo Detected: Hollow Guardian (Elite)]

[Would you like to overwrite existing summon? Y/N]

He snarled. "Do it."

The first Guardian vanished in a howl of static as a more fully-formed, armored version appeared, wielding two spiked arms and glaring with glowing sockets.

Kael pointed forward.

"Crush it."

They battled for nearly three minutes.

He ducked a burst of bile. Rolled. Slashed. Slid under a stomping limb and cleaved a tendon with Soul Cleave. Echoes howled beside him. His HUD flickered.

[WARNING: Sanity at 54%.]

[Time Limit on Black Call: 15 seconds.]

The mutated heart began to beat louder, faster.

Kael narrowed his eyes.

He bolted forward with a final Harvest Step, propelled by the blood-soaked echoes of dozens of dead adventurers, and drove both daggers into the pulsing heart.

The world exploded into black.

Seconds Later…

Kael gasped.

He was lying flat on the floor, covered in blood, panting. The echoes were gone. The spire was cracked. The heart? Split clean in half, leaking thick, black smoke.

[Boss Defeated: The Carrion Womb]

[Dungeon Collapse Imminent – Exit Timer: 90 seconds]

[Level Up – Reaper Class Now Level 8]

[New Skill Branch Available.]

[System Note: …You should not have survived that.]

He smirked, wiped blood from his mouth, and stood.

"Guess I missed the memo."

He turned and began sprinting toward the shifting hallways as the dungeon screamed in death behind him.

Fade to Black.

The gates of Hollow Deep collapsed behind him with a violent shriek. Stone shattered. Dust rolled outward like a funeral veil.

Kael stood still, blood-soaked, shoulders rising with each breath. He didn't blink. His system pinged softly in the corner of his vision.

[Dungeon Collapse Confirmed.]

[Soul Rank Evaluation: Pending.]

[New Threat Assessment Logged – "Living Dungeon Signature Detected."]

[Report submitted to Guild Command.]

He snarled at that last part. He never submitted anything.

The system had done it on its own.

That meant they'd come looking.

2 Hours Later – Guild Observation Outpost Zeta-12

"You sure he's coming this way?"

Lysette Alvarien adjusted the clasp on her silver mantle, fingers fidgeting against her staff. She was too clean. Too composed. A white-robed Lightmancer standing in a room full of soot-covered scouts and twitchy analysts.

The lead operator tapped a runeplate. "We've been tracking his system signature ever since the spike in Hollow Deep. Boss-level flux, A-Rank corruption, and—get this—an Apex Signal. That dungeon was waking up."

Lysette's expression tensed. She looked out the stone window, down at the dust trail rising in the far canyon.

"So he did it," she whispered. "He actually brought one down."

The scout next to her raised an eyebrow. "You admire him?"

"No," she said quickly. Then, softer, "But I respect anyone who walks back from something no one else survived."

Minutes Later – Trail to the Outpost

Kael saw the Guild flags fluttering in the distance and sighed.

He hated the formalities. The forced check-ins. The constant surveillance. All wrapped in a shiny lie about protecting the world from dungeon anomalies.

He walked faster.

The First Meeting

"Kael Vorrin?" Lysette called as he approached, stepping down from the watchtower.

He didn't respond. Just kept walking.

She walked beside him, undeterred. "Lysette Alvarien. Guild Special Division. Lightmancer class. I'm here to debrief you."

He stopped walking. "Didn't write a report."

"Your system did."

"Then debrief that."

He started walking again.

"You solo-cleared a dungeon rated C—reclassified to A posthumously—and destroyed a semi-sentient Apex Core. That doesn't concern you?"

Kael shrugged. "I'm alive. It's dead. Nothing else concerns me."

"…You do realize you triggered a Category 2 collapse."

Now he turned.

His eyes were cold, hollow, burned black around the edges from prolonged echo use. "Then stop assigning rookies to graves."

That silenced her for a beat.

"Do you know what kind of dungeon it was?" she asked.

He looked at her like she'd just asked what color the sky was. "It was alive."

She nodded slowly. "That's what I needed to confirm."

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