[Global Phenomena — 00:00:00]
It began without thunder, without warning.
Every screen in the world flickered once, like a heartbeat.Traffic lights paused. Drones stalled midair. Smartphones glowed pale blue, one after another — as if some invisible hand pressed "power on" across the planet.
Then the message appeared.
[SYSTEM REBOOT COMPLETE.]
[CYCLE 2 INITIALIZATION: 0.3%]
The text vanished as quickly as it came, replaced by chaos — alarms, emergency broadcasts, rumors.
The world that thought it had moved on from nightmares…was waking up again.
[Seoul — Rooftop, Midnight]
Min Jae stood on the rooftop of an abandoned office building, staring down at the city that glimmered like a living circuit board.
The same sky. The same air.But his heart whispered otherwise.He remembered too much — faces, screams, and her.
"Evelyn," he murmured.
The Berserker mark glowed faintly beneath his shirt — dim, unstable, like it wasn't supposed to exist yet.
Then came the sound — static, almost like a radio tuning.The System voice.
[Unauthorized Entity Detected.]
[Recalibrating Temporal Sequence…]
Min Jae clenched his fist. "You again…"
A translucent panel appeared.Names flickered — Jinwoo Han, Lee Ara, Seo Mirae, and others. Each marked "Inactive."
Only one line pulsed in red:
[EVELYN PARK — DATA ERROR.]
[Classification: ANOMALY / CORRUPTED ROOT.]
[Containment Protocol Active.]
He froze."…Corrupted?"
And then the last line appeared, faintly, like a whisper trying to break through the code:
Don't look for me.
[Root Layer — Evelyn's POV]
The void around her trembled.The light of the World Tree Fragment pulsed faintly at her side, feeding her enough mana to keep breathing.
Then it happened — the shattering.
A sharp sound, like glass cracking, echoed through the silence.Her hands began to flicker. The mark on her palm — the symbol of her life skills — faded.
[Skill Removed: Master Herbalism]
[Skill Removed: Perfect Craftsmanship]
[Skill Removed: Supreme Cooking]
[Skill Removed: Universal Gardening]
One by one, her life unraveled.
Each skill she had poured years of patience into — stripped away like fabric threads pulled from a tapestry.Her body convulsed.Her fingertips, once warm with vitality, turned gray and translucent.
[Penalty: Interference with System Code.]
[Classification Adjusted: Error Code 01 — "Human Aberration."]
[Objective: Reset to Default State.]
Evelyn gasped."So that's… what you wanted."
The realization dawned heavy and cold.
The System was never built to save humanity.It was built to contain what it couldn't control.The Apocalypse wasn't a punishment — it was a maintenance cycle.
And she — Evelyn Park, First Awakener — had broken the rules by surviving too long.
[Flashback — Fragments of Memory]
"You were never supposed to exist.""Your synchronization rate exceeds human limits.""Do you understand, Evelyn Park? You are the bug in the design."
Those words — mechanical, cold — echoed from the moment she first reached beyond human limits, when she maxed every skill and defied the progression walls.
Now the price came due.
Each removed skill felt like a wound — not physical, but spiritual.She tried to reach for her garden — the one she'd built in this limbo — but the soil turned to ash in her palms.
"System…" she whispered, "you're afraid."
No response. Only static.
But the tremors around her grew stronger — a quiet rage within the code itself, reacting to her defiance.
[Warning: Entity refusing normalization.]
[Countermeasure Initiated: Memory Severance.]
She laughed, a sound of disbelief and fury."Erase me, then. But you'll never erase what I left behind."
[Seoul — The Reawakening]
Above ground, chaos was building.
Jinwoo Han's phone exploded with light — the panel reappearing across every reflective surface.His rank, once hidden, now displayed again:
[Name: Jinwoo Han]
[Rank: Global 10 | Seoul 2]
[Title: The Ghost Commander]
And beneath it:
[Global 1: ———]
[Data Not Found.]
"Still blank," he muttered.He didn't know why the emptiness hurt.Why it felt like someone should have been there.
[Gangnam — The Church of Saintess]
Lee Ara collapsed mid-sermon as the system interface forced itself into her vision.Her halo — unseen by mortals — cracked like glass.
[Title: Saintess of Dawn (Restored)]
[Cycle Memory Sync: 12%]
Her breath came ragged. "Evelyn… Park?" she whispered, not knowing why that name felt like sunlight through fog.
[Root Layer — Evelyn's Last Defense]
The countdown timer burned in her vision:
[Time Remaining: 728 Days, 13 Hours, 09 Minutes]
Her power was almost gone. Her skills stripped bare, leaving her only one thing — the Root Link, the connection to those she'd touched.
Even if the system took everything, it couldn't erase what it failed to comprehend: human emotion.Her memories. Her will.
She reached out through the cracks in the void — threads of green light spiraling outward like veins.Each thread found someone she'd once protected.Min Jae. Lee Ara. Jinwoo. Even the nameless children.
"If I can't fight the system," she whispered, "then I'll rewrite what it means to be human."
The ground trembled.The void screamed.And a single sprout bloomed beside her — faint, stubborn, defiant.
The last remnant of her Life Skill: Creation.
[Surface — End Scene]
In Seoul, a small park that had been dead soil for years suddenly burst with a single glowing flower — pale green, trembling under the moonlight.
A child pointed. "Mom, look! The flower's glowing!"
The mother smiled tiredly. "It's probably a lamp, sweetheart."
But when she looked again, the flower was gone — and a faint message flickered across every awakener's vision, too brief to screenshot, too soft to record:
[Root Signal Detected.]
[Error Entity — Evelyn Park: Active.]
[System Override Failing.]
And somewhere in the dark, the System's mechanical voice trembled for the first time.
[Containment… error… Root expanding… expanding… expanding—]
Then silence.