"Garbage!"
The curse echoed through the damp tunnels, bouncing off the concrete walls.
Thud!
A heavy boot slammed into the side of the massive carcass.
It was a wet, sickening sound. The sound of steel-toed leather sinking into cold, dead meat.
Lying in the filth of the sewers was a massive serpent, nearly twenty feet from snout to tail. Just a few hours ago, this creature had been a predator. It was the king of this dark, subterranean kingdom.
But now?
It was nothing more than a mound of lifeless flesh rotting in the sludge. A failure. A waste of time.
"Absolute garbage!" the burly man shouted again, his voice thick with frustration. "Look at it! I told you this wasn't a Magical Beast. It's nothing more than an overgrown sewer snake!"
He spat on the ground, his face twisted in annoyance. But although he sounded angry, there was a hidden layer of relief in his voice that he wasn't able to completely mask.
Why? Because if this monster had truly been a Magical Beast, in all likelihood, the fight would have ended very differently.
Despite having just killed the monstrous looking creature that lay between them, the three men didn't look anything like heroes from the legends.
Instead, they looked tired. They looked dirty. They looked more like men who had just finished a double shift at a construction site.
Their gear was actually pathetic—stained leather jackets and reinforced trousers picked out of bargain bins in the lower districts. Against a true Magical Beast, such 'armor' would be approximately as effective as wet paper.
"The job listing did say 'suspected magical anomaly'," the second man muttered.
He held a handgun loosely at his side, looking at the weapon with deep fatigue. He knew the truth. Everyone here knew the truth. A standard caliber bullet was useless against a true magical beast.
"Looking at its size, I thought maybe... just maybe, it had mutated enough to form a Core," he sighed, rubbing his eyes. "Even an incomplete Core would've sold for quite a bit."
A Core! That was the dream. If the beast had been a newly awakened creature—one that hadn't learned to use its powers yet—that would've been the ideal scenario.
"Stop dreaming," the third man interrupted. "You should know that not all magical beasts have cores. With those kinds of expectations, you're just setting yourselves up for disappointment."
He knelt down, unsheathing a jagged skinning knife. The blade scraped against the scales of the dead snake.
"There is no magic here. Just a big animal that got fat eating mutant rats," he said coldly. "Come on, help me skin it. The hide is tough; we might get a decent money from the tanneries if we hurry."
The three men got to work as they bickered. They talked about money. They argued about whether this job had been worth their time. Their rough voices filled the tunnel, complaining about their bad luck.
However, they were completely blind to the magical phenomenon that was taking place right before their eyes. While they complained about their life of poverty, they remained utterly oblivious to the true miracle unfolding mere inches away from them.
It was happening right now!
From the cooling corpse of the snake, a faint distortion began to rise. It wasn't smoke. It wasn't steam.
What emerged was a cluster of tiny, pale blue motes of light.
Invisible! Even under the harsh white beams of the men's helmet lights, the anomaly remained unseen. These spheres of light spun around each other in a complex, mesmerizing dance, bound together by a force that humanity's current understanding of magic or science couldn't hope to explain.
This was 'It'. Or rather, this was what remained of 'It'.
In this stripped-down form, the entity had no name. It had no memory of a past life. It didn't know where it was. It didn't even know if it was a 'he', a 'she', or an 'it'.
It was simply too weak. Its consciousness was fragile, unable to hold complex thoughts the same way a human could.
But even without memories, the entity represented something profoundly magnificent.
It drifted upward. It floated into the cold, dark void of the sewer ceiling. The damp stone approached rapidly.
Impact? No!
It passed through the solid rock as if the stone were made of mist. It felt nothing. No cold. No friction.
Intangible! Invulnerable! But with that invulnerability came a terrifying weakness. Just as the world could not touch it, it could not touch the world. It was a ghost, unmoored and drifting through the earth.
As it rose through the layers of soil and concrete, strange shapes began to manifest within its consciousness. They weren't physical objects. They were projections.
A System Screen!
[ Host Body Deceased. ]
[ Extraction Complete. ]
These strange shapes were letters. But right now, the entity couldn't understand letters. It couldn't read. But the System didn't care about that.
It forced the information directly into the entity's mind.
[ Your Existence Strengthens . ]
[ New Lifeform Proficiency Threshold Met. ]
[ Host Compatibility Updated: High-Intellect Species (Humanoid) now unlocked. ]
With a consciousness that was barely awake, the entity tried to absorb the meaning. At first, it just drew a blank. It understood nothing.
But it persisted. It pushed against the fog in its mind. And then, for a brief second—
Spark!
Something awakened. Its sense of self shone brighter than ever before. A thought formed. A real, coherent thought.
'Who... am I?''Where did I come from?''Where am I going?'
With these simple questions, it attempted to touch upon the very essence of its being.
But alas! In its current state, thinking was too expensive. Those three simple questions drained whatever little energy it had managed to gather. The letters on the screen faded back into meaningless symbols.
But despite the setback, it felt something new. Satisfaction. It had grown. It was more than it had been just a few moments ago.
However, even that satisfaction was short-lived. Extremely so.
As it continued to rise, passing through rusted pipes and concrete foundations, a new message appeared. This one didn't glow with a gentle blue light. Instead, it pulsed. It screamed.
It was a violent Red!
[ Current Lives: 3/5 ]
[ Penalty: Life Count reduced by 1 due to host death. ]
[ Regeneration of Life Count requires... ]
Penalty? Reduced lives?
The entity couldn't grasp the words, but the feelings packaged with them were conveyed to it in full force. A phantom pain. A profound sense of loss.
It instinctively understood: I am not whole. It needed to rest. It needed to recuperate.
But time was a luxury it didn't have. Because the next message brought something worse than pain. It brought Fear.
[ Warning: Soul Dissipation Imminent. ]
[ Time Remaining: 00:02:58 ]