Chapter 200 200: Humanity, The hope of the universe
[You have been granted access to the castle dark]
[Ruler effect activated]
[all stats are temporarily boosted]
[arms Damage of dark element boosted]
…..
Stepping foot into the castle walls, notifications lined up infront of them and caused them to immediately become confused.
A wall of text. All at once.
Enzo blinked twice, eyes scanning the floating prompts stacking on top of each other in the air.
Leon did the same beside him, his head tilting slightly as if he could read them better from a different angle.
Neither of them had expected this the moment they crossed the threshold.
"Wow, This strength!!" Leon squeezed his palm tight, fingers curling slow into a fist, knuckles pressing white against his skin as he felt the energy pulsing through his veins like a current running directly under the surface.
It was warm.
Dense.
Like something had been poured directly into the marrow of his bones and set to simmer.
He squeezed again just to make sure he wasn't imagining it.
He wasn't.
From what they had gathered in their weeks in the forest below, the castle had been modified to help boost the power of the dark emperor's subjects.
Now standing inside the walls, Enzo understood why.
The castle itself was the weapon.
As such it gave them boosts the moment they stepped in.
[proceed into the testing chambers infront for designations]
The system sounded in their ears once more, flat and mechanical.
A low hum followed it through the corridor.
Several doors swung open at the same time, each one pulling back to reveal a white room beyond. Sterile. Quiet. Lit from no visible source. The kind of rooms that made you feel like you were being watched before you even stepped inside.
Enzo looked at Leon.
Leon looked back.
Neither of them spoke.
They nodded once and walked straight through without a wavering thought in mind.
[Welcome to class creator 1,000, the system will now scan your abilities and designate you a position in the army of the dark emperor]
—click
The doors sealed behind them with a sound that was far too final.
The room was completely empty. Just white walls and the soft hum of something mechanical buried deep in the structure around them.
Standing inside it, Enzo felt the familiar sensation begin almost immediately. That slow drift. His surroundings turning ethereal at the edges, the walls losing their hard definition, the floor beneath his feet becoming something he could feel but couldn't fully trust.
He'd felt something like this before.
Not exactly this.
But close enough that his body didn't panic.
He steadied his breathing and waited.
[Ding….
Loading stats
Name: Enzo Malvaran
Rank: Exalted(peak)
Star essence: full
Class: Shadow Hunter
Skill: Shadow step, call of the wild, night vision….]
The words appeared infront of him suspended in the white, carved from pale light.
Enzo read through them slowly. His rank. His class. His skills laid out clean and orderly like a report filed by someone who had been watching him for a long time.
He said nothing.
Then the next prompt arrived and the tone of the room shifted entirely.
[You possess strong bones and agility based abilities, your star grade is unique bending concepts. There are strong traces of divinity within you.
Error!!! Corruption found within soul
exterminate!!!]
—boom
The room turned red.
Not a slow shift. Not a gradual dimming into warning color. One second white, the next drowning in deep crimson from floor to ceiling, the sterile calm of the testing chamber collapsing into something that felt immediately hostile.
Alarms tore through the silence.
Enzo's body reacted before his mind caught up, muscles pulling tight, weight dropping slightly into his stance.
'What? Corruption? Me?'
For a brief moment he felt it pressing against the back of his neck. That tingling sensation that his body had learned to recognize as danger. A system response. Something in the infrastructure of this room locking onto him, calculating, making a decision about whether he was a threat to be dealt with.
'Tch.'
His jaw tightened.
But before that calculation could finish, before whatever this old machine was preparing could land, something cut through the red air like a blade thrown sideways.
"Fucking old artificial dumb ass!!"
The words hit the room like a slap.
Crude. Loud. Absolutely unsolicited. The kind of thing that had no business being said inside a formal imperial designation chamber and yet there they were, hanging in the crimson air without a single apology attached to them.
Enzo went very still.
The voice from which it came….
He knew that voice.
"Nibbleskin?" He raised his brows.
Silence answered him.
No reply. Nothing. Just the faint hiss of the alarms dying mid-note, strangled before they could build into anything real.
The red drained from the room like water pulling back from a shore. White returned. The sterile calm settled back into place like nothing had happened at all.
[class assigned: Vanguard]
Then Enzo's legs gave out beneath him.
He didn't fight it. There was no point. The darkness came fast and certain and it carried with it the weight of something much older than this room, older than the castle, older than whatever process had just tried and failed to exterminate him.
He went under completely.
And in the hollow space behind his closed eyes, a familiar set of words began to ring out slow and deliberate, filling the dark.
[For millions of years since the first birth of light, The countless races had fought a losing war against corruption. Cities fell, countries were destroyed and planets were laid waste. The struggle…infinite.
Until one day in the distant cosmos a race of creature rose from the dust, humans. They fought against the beasts that sought to destroy and for the first time in a long time they were winning.
Unfortunately this did not last, on the stage of varo king world, on the precipice of defeat humanity received help from the divine.]
[objective: help Victoria draken hold the emperors castle for 7 days against the sons of corruption]