The pain was a living entity. It had teeth, and it was gnawing at the very source code of my existence. The power of the Lineage Orb wasn't just flowing into me; it was overwriting me, deleting the person I was and replacing him with a torrent of rage, memory, and ancient, forgotten power. I was drowning in the digital ghost of a dead hero.
Then, a voice.
It wasn't a sound. It was a thought, ancient and weary, that echoed not in my ears, but in the deepest recesses of my consciousness. It was the voice of the orb. The voice of the Founder whose essence I was consuming.
…Do you truly seek this path?… the voice resonated, calm and sorrowful amidst the storm of my agony. …To accept this power is to accept the curse. To become a monster to fight a monster. You will be forever marked, your data corrupted, your soul tethered to a history of rage and ruin… Is this what you desire?…
My body convulsed on the ground, the black data-veins spreading across my skin, a visible mark of the corruption the voice spoke of. Every rational part of my mind, the small, terrified fragment of Kael that still existed, screamed no. It screamed that this was madness, that I was throwing away my own identity for a moment of fleeting revenge.
But then, an image burned its way through the pain. Silas. Standing with his arms wide, a silent shield. The perfect, clean hole where his life had been. The quiet, final fall to the obsidian ground.
My rage, which had been a chaotic fire, now coalesced into a single, sharp point of ice-cold resolve.
"I don't care," I thought, my own voice a defiant roar against the ancient, sorrowful whisper in my head.
…You will be lost…
"I don't care!" I screamed into the abyss of my own mind. "Corrupted? Marked? Fine! Let me be a monster! Let me be a ghost! Let me be anything, as long as it gives me the power to tear that thing apart! I don't care about the consequences! I don't care about what I'll become! All I want is to kill the thing that killed my friend!"
There was a long, final pause. A moment of profound, ancient sadness seemed to pass through me.
…So be it… the voice whispered, and then it was gone, absorbed into the roaring inferno of my own will.
The pain vanished. Not slowly, not fading away, but simply ceasing, as if a switch had been flipped. The agonizing fire was replaced by a vast, deep, and impossibly powerful reservoir of energy that settled into my bones. The Lineage Orb in my hand, which had been burning with a furious red light, crumbled into a fine, grey dust that was scattered by a wind only I could feel.
And then, a notification.
It was different from the usual blue, holographic text of the Eternal SoulS system. This one was a stark, silver script, shimmering in the air before my eyes with a solemn, ancient authority.
[Lineage Orb (High Orc Founder - Helias Rogue) has been fully consumed.]
[Forced Synchronization with user data is complete.]
[Warning: User data integrity has dropped to 34%. Significant corruption detected.]
[New Skill Tree Unlocked: Echo of the Founder - Helias Rogue (Earth Elementalist)]
The silver text faded, leaving me on my knees in the silent basin. The black, jagged lines that had covered my skin receded, sinking beneath the surface, but I could still feel them there, a permanent stain on my soul.
I slowly, deliberately, pushed myself to my feet. The world felt different. Sharper. I could feel the solid, stable data of the obsidian ground beneath me, a deep, resonant hum that was now as familiar as my own heartbeat. The air no longer felt empty; it was filled with trillions of tiny, dormant particles of earth and stone, just waiting for a command.
The grief was still there, a hard, cold knot in my chest where Silas's memory resided. But the helpless rage was gone. It had been replaced by something far colder, far more dangerous: purpose. There was no fear left in me. No doubt. No hesitation. There was only the target, and the absolute, unwavering certainty of what I had to do.
I looked at my hands. They were steady. I looked down at my maguns, which I had dropped in my agony. They felt… insufficient. Toys. With a thought, the two pistols floated up from the ground and into my hands. With another, they began to shift, the metal groaning and reshaping. The two separate weapons fused together, the barrels elongating, the grips combining, until I held a single, massive, and utterly menacing weapon. It was a magun cannon, its design brutal and functional, humming with a power it had never possessed before.
My gaze lifted, locking onto the Fallen Founder. It stood across the basin, its featureless faceplate fixed on me, as if sensing the profound, fundamental change that had just occurred.
From the edge of the basin, the three women could only watch in stunned, horrified silence. They had seen everything. They had seen me scream in agony, seen the black corruption spread across my skin, seen the Lineage Orb turn to dust in my hand. They didn't know the details of the voice in my head or the silver-scripted notifications, but they understood the core, terrifying truth.
"Kael…" Erina whispered, her voice a mixture of awe and raw fear. She took a half-step forward, her hand outstretched, but then stopped, as if an invisible wall had sprung up between us.
Miyuri stood beside her, her crystalline slate forgotten in her hands. Her analytical mind, which could process the most complex data-flows, was struggling to comprehend the scene before her. "His data-signature… it's completely changed," she stammered. "It's… it's layered. Corrupted. But the power output… it's off the scale."
But it was Elara who saw the deepest truth. Her violet eyes, which could see the very code of the world, were wide with a terrible, sorrowful understanding. "He didn't just use the orb," she said, her voice barely audible. "He broke it. He forced a full synchronization. He sacrificed a part of his own data, his own being, to absorb the Founder's echo completely." She looked at the new, cold stillness in my eyes. "That isn't just Kael anymore."
They were right to be afraid. The person they knew—the confused, glitched player who was in over his head—was gone. He had been burned away in a pyre of his own making. The being that now stood in his place was something else. Something harder. Something colder. Something born of grief and forged in rage.
I raised the magun cannon, its weight feeling natural and right in my hands. The ground around my feet began to tremble, small pebbles and shards of obsidian lifting into the air, caught in the orbit of my newfound power.
I looked at the Fallen Founder, the silver knight, the hero's ghost that had taken my friend. And for the first time since I had laid eyes on it, I felt no fear. Only a vast, empty, and chillingly calm hatred.
"My turn," I said, and my voice was a low, rumbling echo of grinding stone.