♤A Step into Darkness♤
I fell.
There was no ground beneath me, no sky above, only an endless, suffocating darkness that wrapped around my body like a second skin. It wasn't night.
Night had stars, a moon, something to hold onto. This… this was the absence of everything. A void that swallowed light and memory alike.
I tumbled weightlessly, though it felt like something heavy was dragging me down. Every second stretched into forever. I wanted to scream, to reach for something, anything, but the moment I tried, it was like my thoughts themselves unraveled. I couldn't hold on to them. Couldn't even hold on to me.
Earth. The city. The alley. The knife. The pain. They all started to drift, fading like smoke in a storm. I tried to remember my name and failed. The faces of people I once knew slipped through my fingers like sand. Everything that made me who I was just… dissolved.
But the feelings remained.
Raw, burning, restless emotions throbbed in my chest. Rage. Sadness. Fear. A longing to matter. They filled the empty space where my thoughts used to be, but there was no one to blame, no one to reach. Just the void and me.
And then something cracked.
It wasn't loud, but it split the silence like thunder. A rift opened in the distance not above me, maybe below me. I couldn't tell anymore. I felt myself being pulled toward it, faster and faster. I opened my mouth to scream, but the sound didn't matter. The void swallowed it whole.
Then I hit the ground.
Hard.
The air tore from my lungs. Pain erupted through my body like fire. My limbs refused to obey, but I forced myself to move. Gasping, I rolled onto my back and stared up at a sky that didn't make sense, fractured like shattered glass, with clouds swirling in jagged, violent patterns.
Blood-red rivers cut through the land around me. The stench of rot filled the air, thick and sickly sweet. The ground cracked beneath me, like the world had once been whole but was now broken beyond repair.
What was this place?
I coughed and dragged myself up to a sitting position, every part of me screaming. My surroundings blurred into a fever dream of dead trees, crumbling buildings, and a sky that looked like it was bleeding.
This wasn't Earth.
"Where… am I?" The words came out dry and cracked. They didn't even sound like mine.
And then I heard it, a sharp ping, mechanical and piercing.
A screen appeared in front of me, glowing faintly in the gloom. It hovered in the air like some glitch in reality, flickering as if unsure it even belonged here.
Words lit up across its surface:
[System Online: Demon King Candidate confirmed.
Welcome Kuro, to the underworld.
Objective: Claim the throne and become the next Demon King.]
[Current Stats:
Demonic Power: 0%
Strength: 5
Speed: 9
Skills: None]
Demon King…?
The words barely made sense. Hadn't I just been bleeding out in an alley, dying alone in the rain? Now I was here, in this nightmare, with a system telling me to take the throne?
It felt like a joke. A bad one. And yet… something about it felt realer than anything I'd known.
Then I heard it, a rustle. Something moved in the distance.
I froze. My breath caught in my throat as I squinted through the dim, flickering light.
A creature stepped into view. Small, about the size of a dog, but far too fast, too sharp. Its skin looked burned, cracked like charcoal, and its glowing yellow eyes locked onto me with hunger.
I didn't have time to think. I turned to run, but pain shot through my legs like fire. My knees buckled. I fell, gasping for air.
It was real. The pain was real. This place, whatever it was, was real.
I scrambled to get up again, panic flooding every nerve. The creature didn't hesitate. It was on me before I could even scream. I threw my arm up just in time, and its claws raked across my side. The scream finally tore out of me, raw and helpless.
I looked around wildly, desperate. That's when I saw it, just inches from my fingers. A jagged shard of stone.
I grabbed it. My fingers barely held onto it, shaking uncontrollably. The creature lunged again. I swung.
Too slow.
Its claws slashed across my side again, deeper this time. I yelled in pain, my vision going red at the edges.
But I didn't stop.
I drove the shard upward with everything I had, screaming as I did. It sank into the thing's throat. It gurgled, twitched and then crumbled into ash at my feet.
I collapsed to my knees, gasping. My arms were soaked in blood, my blood but I was alive.
Barely.
The screen flickered again.
[First Task Complete: Survive the Awakening Trial.
Failure to complete results in immediate disqualification.]
"Disqualification…?" I wheezed. "What the hell does that even mean?"
The words echoed in my head, sharp and cold. My whole body trembled. The pain, the blood, the fear, they weren't going away.
I looked around again, still trying to make sense of it all. This place felt like a graveyard for forgotten gods. The silence after the fight was louder than the violence itself.
The screen pulsed once more with a final message:
[Survive and become the Demon King.]
That title again.
I didn't understand it. I didn't know what this world wanted from me, or who had dragged me into it.
But one word stuck in my mind, thudding with every beat of my heart.
Survive.