I woke standing before the path.
For a moment, I thought the dungeon had released me again.
Then the dream came.
---
I was back there.
My old world.
My favorite game.
The one that had rotted into a pay-to-win battlefield.
The timer was ticking down.
One round left.
My squad was gone.
Disconnected. Quit. Broken.
Only one player remained on the field.
Me.
They had rifles. Shields. Drones. Boosters bought with money.
I had none of that.
What stood against them wasn't a squad.
It was a hunter.
I stopped hiding.
Even through a screen, even through artificial systems, they felt it—the pressure. The scars of countless battles. Skill forged not by upgrades, but by repetition, loss, and refusal to kneel.
Bullets screamed.
I cut through their shield.
Dropped the rusher.
Silenced the rifler.
Crippled the tanker.
Outplayed the supporter.
They won in the end.
Not by skill.
By numbers.
But they were tense. Shaken.
They admitted it—not with words, but with silence.
Victory isn't always fair.
But that fight reminded me why I had never truly lost.
Why my swordsmanship existed.
Why my name had endured.
The Hunter.
"I am the hunter."
The scream echoed—
And reality answered.
---
The dungeon reformed.
This time, I didn't prepare defenses.
I didn't retreat.
I used the technique I had unlocked through pain, death, and burnout.
The fire ignited.
I called it Flame of Glory once.
But its true name surfaced now.
Flame of Despair.
Pure black fire.
Not heat.
Not light.
A flame that fed on exhaustion.
On despair.
On environmental mana and the user's own collapse.
Even light couldn't escape it.
The Doom Bringer froze.
Shock crossed his face.
His thoughts spilled out unconsciously.
These flames…
No—impossible.
That heir is dead.
If this exists, reality itself is flawed.
He struck.
His domain surged.
The flames absorbed it.
Not resisted.
Consumed.
Regenerative mana vanished on contact.
Domain structures eroded.
Authority decayed.
I moved.
Every attack he threw—I saw before it existed.
Every punch—I countered.
Every strike—I cut.
He regenerated so fast it felt as if I'd never touched him.
But I knew.
The fire was eating the very mana that allowed regeneration.
Then the system responded.
For the first time—
I activated my domain.
Incomplete.
Seventy percent unstable.
Mana supplied forcibly by the system.
Yet it manifested.
The dungeon shattered.
We stood in a valley.
Endless.
Every beast I had killed was crucified there—impaled on massive wooden nails driven into the earth. Corpses bound by chains. Blood soaked into the soil, layer upon layer, as if the ground itself remembered them.
A domain built from memory.
From slaughter.
From refusal to forget.
His power collapsed.
Stripped of domain reinforcement, what remained was a weakling.
The same being that had killed me a thousand times.
Now crawling.
He fled on all fours—hands and feet tearing through blood-soaked soil. He didn't even have time to stand.
When he finally did—
A beam of light formed.
I cut his neck.
My body collapsed a second later.
These weren't basic spells.
And the way I learned them wasn't basic either.
He died.
I won.
If this was only the eleventh path—
What monsters waited in the remaining three?
I laughed.
Not from joy.
From disbelief.
I had forged a domain like this.
A horrifying one.
And it was mine.