Chapter 224: First Disaster
The rooftop stayed silent.
Kai looked at the Candidate. "So."
"What exactly are we trying to stop?"
The Candidate studied him for a long moment. Instead of answering, he raised one hand slowly, fingers coming together.
Snap.
The sound was quiet. Reality broke apart anyway.
The stars dissolved first. Then the moon, then the clouds, then the buildings and streets beneath them. The lights of Mythal stretched into thousands of glowing particles before vanishing entirely. Even gravity faded out from under him.
Kai’s hand went instinctively for Thunderbreaker.
Nothing. The weapon wasn’t there. The rooftop wasn’t there.
For a brief moment, there was nothing at all. No sound. No direction. No weight to his own body.
Then blue.
An endless blue world unfolded around him, no sky, no ground, no horizon, only light stretching in every direction forever.
Kai steadied himself against nothing. "This isn’t the Archive."
The Candidate shook his head. "No." He walked forward across the blue space as though solid ground existed beneath his feet. "The Archive stores knowledge."
He glanced around them. "This stores memory."
Kai followed quietly.
...
Ripples spread across the blue as they walked, and each one bloomed into another civilization entirely. Cities rose and fell in the space of a breath. Different races. Different architecture. Different clothing, different technology. Some resembled kingdoms carved from stone. Others floated entire districts above the clouds. Some built downward into the earth instead of up.
Every single one had the same thing running through it.
Dungeons.
"They all followed the same path," the Candidate said quietly.
Kai watched hundreds of these worlds rise and fall around him. "The first gates."
"The awakening."
"Growth."
"Expansion."
"Civilization adapts."
One world dissolved. Another rose in its place. Then another, the cycle repeating with a rhythm that felt almost gentle, almost peaceful, until Kai noticed what sat underneath it.
"They all became stronger."
The Candidate nodded. "They had to."
Another civilization bloomed.
"They all celebrated."
Another.
"They all believed they’d won."
Kai’s expression hardened. "And they were wrong."
The Candidate didn’t answer right away. When he did, it wasn’t what Kai expected.
"I’m not certain why."
Kai looked at him sharply. "What?"
The Candidate kept walking. "I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know who created it. I don’t even know if it comes from the System at all."
Kai stopped. "You... don’t know?"
The Candidate shook his head slowly, then finally turned to face him. "No. I only know that every civilization changed after more than one hundred B-Rank Dungeons had been cleared."
Silence.
Kai’s eyes widened. "...One hundred?"
The number landed harder than it should have. Mythal had already started clearing B-Rank territory, and the count was rising every week.
The Candidate saw the realization settle in. "Yes."
"And that’s why time matters."
...
The blue world shifted again, and this time only one civilization remained, the projection expanding until it surrounded them completely. Kai no longer felt like he was watching history from outside it.
He felt like he was standing inside it.
Gigantic cities stretched across the horizon in every direction. Massive Hunter academies rose out of the landscape like small mountains. Guild headquarters larger than castles. Flying transports crossing the sky in slow formation. Legendary beasts fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with hunters like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
Kai watched hunters return from another cleared B-Rank Dungeon. Crowds surged forward, cheering. Children waved flags twice their own size. Resources poured back into the cities in an endless stream. Technology advanced. Training methods sharpened. Another dungeon fell.
Another celebration.
The projection sped forward through the count. Forty-seventh. Sixty-third. Seventy-fifth. Ninetieth. Ninety-eighth. Ninety-ninth.
Every victory made them stronger. Their confidence swelled with each one. Entire generations were born and raised believing nothing could ever stop them.
Kai said quietly, "They’re winning."
The Candidate watched the celebration unfold with something heavier in his eyes than Kai had seen from him before.
"So did they."
...
The projection slowed. Everything went quiet.
One final B-Rank Dungeon appeared. Hunters gathered at its entrance. Crowds celebrated behind the barricades. Someone raised a flag high overhead.
Another routine victory, everyone assumed.
Then something changed.
The familiar blue glow around the gate began fading. Not quickly. Slowly, almost naturally, like a sunset no one had noticed starting.
Blue.
Purple.
Dark crimson.
Then blood-red, pulsing like something with a heartbeat.
The surrounding air twisted, wrong in a way Kai felt in his own chest even though none of this was real anymore, even though it had happened to people who’d been dust for longer than he could imagine.
Hunters closest to the gate froze mid-step. One clutched his own head, fingers digging in hard enough to draw blood. Another began laughing, high and wrong. Someone started screaming without any wound Kai could see.
Weapons turned on allies. Families scattered, shoving past each other to get clear. The celebration collapsed into chaos within seconds.
Kai watched one hunter drive a blade through his closest friend without a flicker of hesitation in his face. Watched another slam his own head against the stone ground, again, again, again, until he stopped moving entirely.
"Disaster Dungeons," the Candidate said quietly.
Kai couldn’t look away. "They all become like this?"
The crimson glow spread outward across the land beyond the gate. Flowers withered where the light touched them. Animals fled in every direction. The sky itself darkened at midday, like something enormous had blotted out the sun without bothering to move closer.
"So..." Kai said. "You cleared it."
The Candidate’s expression hardened. "We tried."
...
The memory shifted, and the greatest hunters of that entire civilization assembled at the gate. Thousands of them, every single one stronger than anyone Kai had personally ever stood beside. Legendary equipment gleaming under the darkened sky. Ancient dragons bound in service, guardian beasts the size of buildings, entire military divisions arrayed in formation behind them.
The mood was hopeful. Confident, even here.
One commander smiled at the assembled ranks. "We’ve cleared ninety-nine."
"This one will be no different."
They entered together. The crimson gate sealed shut behind the last of them.
Time passed.
Hours. Nothing.
Days. Nothing.
Weeks. Still nothing.
Families gathered outside the gate, waiting in silence that stretched longer than anyone could bear. Entire cities held their breath together.
Finally the gate opened.
Only one hunter walked out. Missing an arm. Armor shattered beyond recognition. Eyes completely empty, staring at nothing in particular.
He collapsed before he’d taken ten steps.
People rushed toward him. He grabbed the nearest one by the collar, repeating the same sentence over and over, voice cracking further with each pass.
"It saw us."
Again.
"It saw us."
Again.
"It saw us."
Then, finally, "They’re all dead."
His mind broke completely somewhere in the middle of the fourth repetition, words dissolving into sounds that weren’t words at all anymore.
Kai watched expedition after expedition march through that same gate. Thousands. Then tens of thousands.
None of them succeeded.
Eventually the memory stopped showing anyone entering at all.
Only bodies leaving.
...
The crimson dungeon began to shake. Mountains surrounding it split apart at the seams, the earth trembling hard enough that Kai felt it even standing outside the memory itself.
At first he mistook the darkness rising from the gate for smoke.
Then the darkness moved.
It rose. Higher. Higher. Higher, past any scale Kai’s mind wanted to accept, until the projection itself seemed to strain trying to contain it. He couldn’t see the full shape of it, only fragments breaking through the frame at a time. A claw longer than a street. A wing that blotted out an entire mountain range. A single eye larger than the buildings collapsing beneath it.
The creature released a roar, and the blue world around them vibrated with the force of it.
Kai stepped back on instinct, heart pounding, breath catching hard in his chest.
"W-What... is that?"
For the first time since stepping into this place, the Candidate’s expression cracked. Not sadness this time.
Fear. Real, unguarded fear.
"The Beast of Calamity."
Silence stretched a moment longer than it should have.
Then, quieter, like the name itself cost something to say out loud, "Tiamat."
Kai couldn’t stop staring at the fragments still visible through the smoke. The creature didn’t feel alive to him, not in any way he understood the word.
It felt inevitable. Like an earthquake. Like an ocean. Like death itself given a shape too large to look at directly.
...
The projection shifted again, the darkness peeling back all at once. For a moment Kai thought the memory had finally ended.
Then someone began walking out through the settling smoke.
A woman. Blue hair falling to her waist, streaked through with crimson like rivers of blood running through water. Golden eyes, ancient and utterly without warmth. Neither smiling nor angry.
Simply watching.
Four enormous dragons circled the sky above her. One wreathed in endless churning storms. One wrapped in oceans that somehow floated weightless through open air. One burning with fire the color of black and crimson mixed together. One crackling with lightning the same deep red as blood.
She raised one hand, unhurried.
The dragons answered. The sky split open above the ruined city. Typhoons descended in walls of water that swallowed entire districts whole. Lightning tore mountains apart at the root. Black fire rolled across forests and left nothing behind but ash.
Cities collapsed one after another. Hunters launched attack after desperate attack, thousands of them, tens of thousands.
None of them ever reached her. Every dragon’s attack reshaped the landscape itself before a single blade came close.
Kai heard screaming, all of it layered together until it stopped sounding like individual voices at all. Children. Families. Hunters who’d survived ninety-nine dungeons only to die here, in the hundredth, against something that hadn’t even needed to move to kill them.
The destruction wasn’t aimed at armies.
It was consuming the civilization itself, root and branch.
"This," the Candidate said quietly, "was the First Disaster."
The woman finally turned her head.
For one impossible moment, Kai felt her golden eyes find his, across a memory that had happened countless years before either of them had ever existed.
His entire body locked in place.
The memory shattered around him like glass.