LightReader

Chapter 4 - The Hunger Below

The soil still writhed beneath Kael's boots.

He stood at the cellar's mouth, breathing the poison-stained air of a freshly silenced dungeon. Lysette said something behind him—sharp, urgent—but her voice was barely audible. Not over the sound.

The sound beneath the world.

It wasn't quite a voice. It didn't use words, not exactly. It chewed on them. Laughed through their bones.

"You smell like her."

Kael blinked once, then twice. A HUD message flickered across his vision like a warning scrawled in blood.

[ALERT: Tracking Active]

Dungeon Sovereign: "The Hunger Below"

Interest Level: Sustained.

Coordinates Established: [???]

[Do you accept the pursuit? Y/N]

He should've clicked No.

Should've walked away, turned his back, gone silent like every good ghost learns to do.

But instead…

Kael whispered, "Yes."

The world bled.

The moment the word left his lips, the ground cracked like scorched parchment. The cellar's entrance collapsed inward, and the sky above warped into a black, twisting spiral—like a whirlpool made of rust and regret.

Lysette screamed his name—reaching out as the very concept of location shattered—but Kael had already vanished.

[NEW LOCATION: UNKNOWN]

[CLASS: Sovereign Dungeon]

[DESIGNATION: The Hunger Below]

There was no HUD map. No compass. No light.

Only breath.

Not his.

Something else.

The dungeon floor pulsed like flesh, and the ceiling above him dripped black tar that steamed into phantom shapes. Each step Kael took echoed five times back, but not in sequence.

"You came. Alone. Again."

Kael drew his sword. The runes had dimmed. No longer red—now sickly green.

He focused his breathing.

[Skill Ready: Blade Burial]

[Cooldown: Overridden. Skill is now "Eaten."]

"…What?"

The system was failing.

Then he saw it.

At the center of the hollow: a spiraled pit, deep as sin. The walls around it were carved with names—thousands—every inch of space engraved by unseen claws.

Kael stepped closer. His hand brushed one name.

Lira Vorrin.

"No—"

"She screamed without a throat, Kael. You remember."

The pit pulsed.

And then—it rose.

A figure. Towering, malformed. A humanoid made from hundreds of corpses, stitched with barbed wire and crowned with an iron halo. A mouth at the center of its chest gnawed on Kael's name, letter by letter, as it breathed.

"The Reaper who feeds us fear."

"The last child of silence."

"Our favorite scream."

Kael leapt back, swinging in an arc.

[Skill: Severing Line]

(Error: Denied. Skill unrecognized. Reformatting…)

The blade didn't connect.

The monster didn't dodge.

The dungeon rejected the attack.

Kael landed, hard, and blood filled his mouth.

"Here… there is no steel. Only memory."

And the Sovereign attacked.

The first blow was not a strike—it was a thought.

Kael's knees buckled as he saw Lira again—not in death, but alive. Smiling. Whispering how she'd waited for him. That if he stayed here long enough, he'd never have to forget her.

"Stay, Kael," she whispered. "You don't have to be strong here. Just… scream with me."

He gritted his teeth and drove his own hand into his thigh, snapping the hallucination.

[Mental Fortitude Check: Passed]

"Not this time."

The monster roared.

Its scream turned the dungeon inside out.

Walls became hands. The ceiling rained broken glass shaped like prayers. Kael rolled, slid, and stabbed upward into the thing's belly-mouth.

[System Glitch: Reinstating Core Trait: Reaper Instinct]

Skill Recovered: [Grave Warden's Bite]

(Cooldown: ???)

Kael's blade bit.

Not into flesh—but into identity.

The monster howled.

The runes reactivated—red, then gold—searing symbols of judgment.

"UNFORGIVEN."

The mouth on its chest cracked. Blood gushed. Voices poured out.

Thousands. Hundreds of thousands.

All of them his.

All of them remembering.

Kael fell to one knee. The Sovereign staggered.

A moment.

Just one.

And he took it.

Kael stabbed again. This time through the center of its chest—into the voice—the origin—the hunger.

The Sovereign shrieked. The dungeon crumpled inward. Gravity buckled.

[Critical Strike Delivered]

[Dungeon Core Shattered – Phase 1]

[You Have Angered a Sovereign.]

[Exit Denied. Reward Pending.]

Kael was thrown back, crashing through a glass wall of nothing.

The darkness swallowed everything again.

[Somewhere Else]

He awoke, ribs broken, lip split, his sword now fused with a piece of Sovereign crystal. It pulsed, weakly, like a heart transplant from a god of pain.

Kael Vorrin was changed.

He had wounded a Sovereign Dungeon.

And now it wanted him more than ever.

[SYSTEM UPDATE:]

Marked by: "The Hunger Below"

Reaper Bonus Acquired: "Echo of the Sovereign"

Effect: Your voice carries weight in all lower dungeons. Some may recognize you. Some may obey. Others… will starve for your soul.

Somewhere above, Lysette Alvaro opened her journal to find it already recording:

"He went in alone. Again."

"He came back wrong. Again."

"And now… something's following."

More Chapters