Chapter 243: Burden (II)
The starlight vanished as abruptly as it had appeared.
Hide's consciousness, which had been dragged apart from his body and had traveled through dimensions returned back to his body. The familiar stench of burning sulfur, melted tar, and damp ash instantly rushed into his nostrils, replacing the sterile void of the Greater Realm. The cold wind howling between the shattered high-rises whipped his silver hair across his forehead.
He thought he had fallen down, but he still stood where he was, with the sweet in his hand.
Beside him, Gideon Vance was still slowly moving with his massive warhammer, his dented chestplate rising and falling in deep breaths. The people around were where they had been, nothing had changed and no one had noticed anything.
Only a fraction of a second had passed in the physical world. This was the power of the beings in greater realm.
Hide stood still, his ocean-blue eyes staring blankly at the pulverized pavement. The weight of what he had just witnessed—the cosmic war between three celestial houses, the truth of his father Roshhide, the murder on Hubin, and the stolen authority wielded by Rosh—sat like a mountain of lead inside his chest.
"Hide?" Gideon's deep, gravelly voice broke through the haze. The giant turned his head, his brow furrowing slightly beneath a layer of black dust. "You alright? You went stiff for a second."
Hide pulled his gaze up, forcing his facial muscles into a calm, unreadable mask. "I'm fine. Just caught my breath."
Nathan Cross turned back to look at them and offered a faint, sympathetic nod, clearly assuming the young warrior was simply processing the trauma of the two-week siege. "You've done more than your share today," Nathan said hoarsely, pulling a secure tactical radio from his belt.
"Yellow Horizon command just patched through a priority dispatch from Varisus. The clearance operation in Sector 9 is officially designated as complete. Transport is arriving at the perimeter rally point. You two have been ordered to report back to your home continent immediately."
Gideon let out a long, rumbling sigh of relief, though his eyes remained somber as he looked around at the ruined plaza. "Home, huh? If you can even call it that these days."
"At least, it still has that name." Hide added.
Neither of them cheered. There was nothing to celebrate.
Within thirty minutes, an armored military convoy transported them to the temporary airstrip on the outskirts of the Western Continent. As the heavy transport plane took off into the smog-choked sky, Gideon slumped into the passenger seat, snoring heavily within minutes of takeoff.
Hide sat alone by the small window, staring down at the burning city grids shrinking into the dark horizon. He didn't speak or think anything. There was nothing to. And he had decided what he was going to do.
He told no one.
Not Gideon or any of his team mates and friends, and not the high command awaiting their debriefing. How could he? If he told humanity that their entire war was merely a harvesting ritual orchestrated by primordial entities named Odo and Mord, mass hysteria would swallow what little order remained, the syndicates would descend into cannibalistic panic.
"Truth does not bring salvation, just more secrets and miseries," Maddox had once told him.
The old fox had been right all along.
When they touched down at the central airfield in Varisus, the atmosphere was thick with tense, bureaucratic paranoia. High-ranking military delegates and corporate liaisons whisked them into a high-security conference room for a mandatory operational debrief.
Seated at the long metal table under flickering fluorescent lights, the second and third commander of the National Exterminator Agency grilled them on the combat data of the B-Rank Calamity Lord. Gideon answered most of the questions, his boisterous voice recounting the brutal clashes in the streets. Hide provided only short, mechanical, one-word replies.
"Operator Volter," one of the commanders, a sharp-faced man with grey temples, pressed, leaning forward over his tablet. "Yellow Horizon's preliminary telemetry notes an abnormal surge of dark mana in the plaza during the final strike. Did the entity display any mutations before death?"
Hide stared at the director with a pair of chilling, lifeless blue eyes. "No. It died like any other beast."
The commander held Hide's gaze for several seconds, unsettled by the complete absence of emotion in the teenager's face, before clearing his throat and signing off on the mission completion log.
Once the dismissal order was stamped, Hide did not join Gideon and the other returning exterminators for their recovery trip. He slipped through the side exits, pulling the hood of his jacket over his silver hair, and vanished into the dreary streets of Area 5.
Another month passed in a relentless, blood-drenched blur.
The Dark Era of Mankind deepened its claws into the planet. The dimensional ruptures did not slow down; they multiplied with terrifying frequency. Loop gates destabilized into active dungeon breaks across all five continental landmasses, forcing exterminators onto an endless, rotating frontline.
Hide practically lived inside the gates.
Day in and day out, his weapons cleaved through legions of armored chitin, acidic beasts, and feral monstrosities. He fought until his clothes were torn to rags, until his muscles burned, and until his skin was drenched in black ichor.
He used to help others by buying high grade armors and weapons from the System shop and he was soon seen as someone who carries hope and mercy.
Yet, as the days turned into weeks, those around him began to notice the unnerving change in him.
Hide had always been quiet, but now he was an island of isolation. When Gideon tried to pull him into strategy lunches, Hide would quietly excuse himself with a flat line. When Sora found him on the training grounds and tried to hand him a warm drink, asking gently about how he was holding up, Hide would take the cup, offer a brief, distant nod, and walk away before a real conversation could form.
"He looks like he's depressed and doesn't want to talk to anyone," Evelyn had whispered in the team meeting one evening after hide had left, her eyes tight with worry as they watched Hide walk into the night alone.
Rol had only scratched his beard with a heavy frown. "The kid's slipping away. He fights like he doesn't care if he comes back."
"Maybe... maybe it's because of the major." Sora suggested and the environment sank to stillness.
They didn't know that every single swing of Hide's blades carried a desperate, secondary objective.
'Some humans are also working with the higher beings,' the Doom Overseer had warned him.
During every single raid, in every compromised Area, Hide hunted for shadows. He looked for any trace of the insidious serpent god hiding beneath humanity's leadership. But the conspirators were ghosts, burying their trails beneath the chaos of the war.
The only constant in Hide's fractured routine was his weekly visit to the Area 5 Advanced Medical Center.
Every Sunday evening, when the hospital corridors were quiet and the visiting hours were long past, Hide would scan his clearance card and walk down the sterile, white hallway.
He stopped at Room 708.
Inside, the room was dimly lit, filled only with the soft, rhythmic beeping of life-support monitors and the faint hum of a stabilization machines.
Lying in the center of the bed was Major Claire.
The once-fierce S-Rank Exterminator looked heartbreakingly fragile. Her golden-blonde hair was unbound, spread across the crisp white pillows like spilled sunlight. Her eyes remained closed in a deep, unyielding coma, her chest rising and falling in shallow breaths. Her mana core had survived the brutal attack and the subsequent catastrophic overload, stabilizing over the months under intensive medical treatment, but her consciousness remained entirely locked away. The doctors had no answers; they could only monitor the stagnation.
Hide walked silently to the small table beside her bed.
In a clear glass vase sat a bundle of wilted, drooping white lilies he had brought the week before. Hide pulled them out and discarded them into the bin, replacing them with a fresh, vibrant bouquet of snow-bells he had bought on the lower avenue.
He pulled up a metal stool and sat down beside the bed.
For twenty minutes, he didn't say a single word. He just sat there in the silence, staring at her pale, still face.
"Do you not want to make jokes on me?" Hide spoke softly, his voice barely louder than a whisper, rough with exhaustion. "Or maybe lecture me about why Commander Maddox was right? Actually, he was right."
Claire did not stir. The steady beep of the heart monitor was the only reply.
Hide looked down at his hands. They did not get rough or injured. The system did not let them. "I don't know how much time is left. But before this is over... I'll make sure there's a world left for you to wake up to."
He reached out, gently pulling the white blanket over her shoulders, then turned and walked out into the cold night.
It was past two in the morning when Hide finally returned to his sparse, unfurnished apartment in the outer district.
The room was dark. He didn't bother turning on the lights, he stripped off his blood-soaked shirt, exposing a torso laced with hardened muscle fibers, the jagged scar across his abdomen, and the faint, luminescent violet channels pulsing beneath his pale skin.
He didn't sleep. He couldn't.
Dropping to the cold floorboards, Hide began the rigid, mechanical execution of his daily routine.
Eighty-eight... eighty-nine... ninety...
His muscles did not even register this much now, sweat dripping from his chin onto the floor, and he pushed past his last record everytime without breaking rhythm.
Two hundred seventy-four... two hundred seventy five.
After he was done with all the tasks the crisp, chime of the system echoed directly inside his skull.
[Daily Quest: 100 Push-ups Completed]
[Daily Quest: 100 Straight Punches Completed]
[Daily Quest: 100 Kicks Completed]
[Daily Quest: Static Lift (100 kg) Completed]
[Daily Quest: 10 km Run Completed]
[All Daily Quests have been completed.]
[Rewards granted: +1 Free Attribute Point, 1 × Recovery Potion]
[Rewards stored in Inventory.]
Hide pushed himself off the floor, leaning his back against the wall as he caught his breath, running a tired hand through his damp silver hair. The room was dead silent, save for the hum of the city's distant sirens that never stopped nowadays.
He took a slow, deep breath, his ocean-blue eyes hardening in the dark.
'Class State.' He commanded internally, summoning his system.