The first thing Jaden felt was cold.
Not the sharp, natural cold of winter, but the suffocating cold of a world stripped of meaning — a cold that reached into the bones and asked why he still existed.
He opened his eyes.
A shifting fog rolled across a metal floor, swallowing the edges of his vision. Pale runes flickered along the walls, half-formed and glitching like broken code. The air smelled of iron and burnt memory.
Harrowing 0.1.
The place every hunter denied was real — the place only failures ever saw.
Jaden swallowed, tasting dust and dread. He had been dragged here again, ripped out of sleep and thrown into the same nightmare that had claimed him thirty-six times before.
His hand trembled around the hilt of his cracked blade.
Not again. Not another reset.
A faint laugh echoed from the fog.
Low.
Familiar.
Cruel.
Jaden froze as the darkness in front of him warped, condensed, and rose into a shape. Tall. Thin. Faceless at first, then slowly sculpting features that made his stomach twist.
His own.
The creature's voice cracked like broken glass.
"Why do you keep coming back?"
It stepped closer. Its skin flickered like static. Its eyes were hollow pits reflecting every moment he had ever failed.
Every missed strike.
Every humiliation.
Every time a guild dismissed him.
Every time his stats appeared lower than a trainee's.
Every time he died here.
The First Shadow smiled with his mouth.
"You can't even die correctly."
Jaden stumbled backward. His heartbeat stuttered. He wasn't ready. He never was. The Harrowing didn't give breaks, didn't offer mercy, didn't explain itself.
It only demanded suffering.
And Jaden was apparently made of that.
"Stay back," he whispered, but even he heard the fear in his voice.
The Shadow tilted its head.
Mocking.
Mirroring.
"Weakest hunter. Worthless S-rank. Mistake."
Each word punched through his ribs.
Jaden gritted his teeth.
"No… I'm not—"
"Not what?"
Its voice overlapped with his own, warped by echoes of failure.
"You think you've changed?"
Jaden swung on instinct.
His blade passed straight through the monster — not cutting it, not even touching it — as if he had swung at a memory instead of flesh.
The First Shadow chuckled.
"You're good at pretending."
Jaden stumbled again, nearly falling.
He should run. He should escape. He should—
A sudden spike of pain hit him behind the eyes.
A burning world.
A screaming infant.
Light folding inward like broken wings.
Images that didn't belong to him flashed through his mind, ripping across his consciousness before he could understand them.
He gasped.
The Shadow leaned in.
"There it is."
A whisper.
Hungry.
"The part of you you're not allowed to remember."
Jaden's knees gave out.
The air thickened.
The Harrowing pulsed like a heartbeat.
His heartbeat.
The First Shadow loomed over him, lifting a hand made of his own regrets. A blade of black flame formed there — an impossible flame, one that flickered with static like erasing ink.
The Shadow pressed the blade to Jaden's chest.
"Let's end your story early."
Jaden squeezed his eyes shut.
And then—
A sound cut through the nightmare.
Soft.
Real.
Warm.
"Jaden!"
His breath hitched.
Light pierced the fog.
A silhouette — reaching toward him from outside the Harrowing, framed by cracked reality — pushed through the darkness.
Lisa.
Her voice trembled with fear and certainty all at once.
"Jaden! Don't disappear again—!"
The First Shadow recoiled as if burned.
The black flame flickered.
Its shape destabilized.
Its confidence wavered.
"That voice…"
Something shifted inside Jaden — something deep, ancient, caged beneath layers of human weakness and forgotten divinity. A spark. A pulse. A breath that didn't belong to mortals.
Heat gathered behind his ribs.
A red ember.
A spark of something older than the Harrowing itself.
The monster stepped back.
Jaden rose.
Not strong.
Not brave.
Not chosen.
Just someone who didn't want her to cry again.
He lifted his blade — steady for the first time.
"For her," he whispered.
The ember in his chest pulsed once.
The First Shadow lunged.
Jaden met it head-on.
And the nightmare shook.