The world, which had been a roaring ocean of sound and fury, snapped into a sudden, sharp, and terrifying focus. The cheers of the common folk, the shocked whispers of the nobility, the grand pronouncements of the royal herald—all of it dissolved into a meaningless background hum. My universe narrowed to the single, impossible line of text glowing in my vision, a line that was tinged with the sickly, hostile red of a critical system warning.
[System User Detected!]
The words were a punch to the gut, a complete paradigm shift that shattered my understanding of my own uniqueness. I was not alone. The glitch, the anomaly that I thought was my singular, defining trait, was not unique at all. The implications were staggering, a cascade of questions that threatened to overload my mental processors. How many others were there? Where did they get their systems? Was the Duke collecting them? Was Alaric one?
And then, the rest of the notification registered, and the cosmic horror was replaced by a sharp, personal, and deeply painful ache.
[Rival Detected: Marcus von Adler - Level 31 Vengeful Knight][System Type: Corrupted (Berserker Class)]
Marcus. Of all people. The boy who had built forts with me in the woods behind my family's manor. The boy who had shared his bread with me when I was too sick to go to the dining hall. The boy whose family had been the first to turn their backs on us, the first to feast on the scraps of our fallen house. And now he stood before me, clad in the Duke's colors, his eyes burning with a hatred that was as pure and uncomplicated as our childhood friendship had once been.
"I've been waiting for this day for a long time, Lord Silverstein," he spat, the honorific tasting like poison in his mouth. "The day I finally get to put you in the dirt where you belong."
His voice, once familiar, was now a stranger's, roughened by years of military training and curdled by a bitterness so profound it was a physical presence between us.
[Analysis of Marcus's System is complete,] ARIA's voice was a cool, precise scalpel in the chaotic surgery of my thoughts. Her presence, now fully restored and more powerful than ever, was a comforting, solid bedrock. [His System is a low-tier, corrupted fragment, likely derived from a different source than my own. It is a 'Berserker' type, focused exclusively on enhancing physical combat prowess through the user's emotional state. Think of it as a poorly coded overclocking program for the body.]
A new window opened in my vision, displaying a breakdown of his abilities.
[Known Skills: 'Rage,' 'Iron Skin,' 'Unstoppable Charge.' All skills are passive or triggered by adrenaline. They grant significant, temporary boosts to STR and CON, but at a massive cost to DEX and WIS. The system actively burns his life force as fuel. It is powerful, but it is also a suicide switch. He is a glass cannon, designed to hit hard and then shatter.]
"He's burning himself out," I murmured, my words lost in the roar of the crowd.
[Precisely,] ARIA confirmed. [The Duke did not give him a gift. He gave him a weapon that is also a poison. He has armed a bitter, angry boy with a tool that will make him strong enough to be a threat, but will also ensure he does not live long enough to become one himself. It is a cruelly efficient piece of human resource management.]
The King's voice boomed from the royal box, signaling the start of the duel. "Let the combat begin!"
Marcus did not wait. He let out a guttural roar, a sound of pure, unrestrained fury. A faint, reddish aura, like heat haze, shimmered around his body. His eyes began to glow with a dull, angry light.
['Rage' skill activated,] ARIA noted calmly. [Subject's STR and CON have increased by an estimated 50%. His pain receptors are being suppressed. His higher brain functions are being inhibited. He is now, essentially, a very angry, very strong, and very stupid bull.]
He charged.
It was not the elegant, tactical advance of Sir Kaelan. It was a freight train of pure, murderous intent. The ground shook under his heavy, steel-shod boots. He held his sword not with a fencer's grace, but like a club, ready to smash, to break, to obliterate.
I stood my ground, my own sword held loosely in a defensive posture Elizabeth had drilled into me. My mind was a whirlwind, but my body felt strangely calm. The fear was there, a cold knot in my stomach, but it was a distant thing. My new, enhanced senses were taking in every detail: the way his muscles bunched in his shoulders, the slight imprecision of his footwork, the mindless fury in his eyes.
He was fast. Faster than the assassins. Faster than Sir Kaelan. The rage-fueled power surged through him, turning him into a blur of black and crimson steel. He brought his sword down in a brutal, overhead chop meant to split me in two.
I moved. My body, guided by ARIA's microsecond calculations and my own burgeoning instincts, flowed to the side. It was not a clumsy dodge; it was an efficient, economical movement. The wind from his blade whistled past my ear as it smashed into the sand where I had been standing, sending a plume of grit into the air.
He roared in frustration and swung again, a wide, horizontal slash. I ducked under it, the steel humming inches above my head. I was not a swordsman. But I was fast. My DEX of 18 made his rage-fueled attacks seem clumsy, predictable.
"Stand still and fight me, you coward!" he screamed, his face contorted in a mask of fury.
He was trying to taunt me, to draw me into a contest of strength I could not possibly win. But I wasn't fighting his fight. I was gathering data.
And as I dodged and weaved, avoiding his furious, clumsy assault, the world of the present seemed to melt away, replaced by the warm, sun-dappled memories of a time before all this. A time when the name 'Marcus' was not a threat, but a promise of adventure.
The memory was so vivid it was almost real. I was twelve years old, the original Kazuki, a frail, sickly boy wrapped in a thick blanket, sitting on the sun-warmed stone of the Silverstein manor's garden wall. My breath came in shallow, wheezing gasps.
Marcus, a boy of the same age but with a wiry, energetic strength that I deeply envied, was perched on the wall beside me, tossing an apple from hand to hand. He was the son of our head groundskeeper, and he was my only friend.
"You should have seen it, Kazu," he said, his eyes shining with excitement. "Old man Hemlock and his Silver Gryphons came through the village today. They had the head of a Wyvern strapped to their cart! A real one! Its teeth were as long as my arm!"
I coughed, a dry, rattling sound. "Did you... did you talk to them?"
"Of course I did!" he said, puffing out his chest. "I told Hemlock that one day, we were going to be adventurers too. The greatest adventurers in the kingdom. We'd be the 'Silver Gryphons' Second Company'!"
"Not... not Silver Gryphons," I managed to say between breaths. "We'd have our own guild. The... the 'Sunstone Adventurers.' Because we'd find the legendary Sunstone of Aethel and become rich and famous."
Marcus's face lit up. "The Sunstone Adventurers! I love it! You'll be the brains, with all your book-learning, and I'll be the brawn. You'll figure out the ancient riddles, and I'll fight off the monsters. We'll be unstoppable!"
He looked at me, at my pale face and thin frame, and his bravado softened. "First, we have to get you strong, though," he said, his voice gentle. He broke the apple in half with his bare hands and offered me a piece. "Here. My dad says apples make you strong."
I took the piece of apple, my fingers weak. In that moment, we were not a noble and a commoner. We were just two boys with a shared dream, a dream of escaping the lives that had been laid out for them. I was trapped in a cage of sickness and nobility. He was trapped in a cage of poverty and low birth. Together, we were going to find the key.
The memory shifted, fast-forwarding a few years. We were fifteen now. The fall of House Silverstein had begun. The manor was quieter, the staff smaller. The weight of my family's debts was a constant, suffocating pressure. My illness had worsened.
Marcus found me in the library, where I spent most of my days now. He was taller, stronger, his hands calloused from hard work. He was no longer a boy. He was a young man, and the fire in his eyes had been tempered with a new, hard edge of frustration.
"I'm leaving, Kazu," he said, his voice flat.
"Leaving?" I asked, looking up from the dusty tome I was reading. "Leaving where?"
"The capital," he said. "I've signed on with a mercenary company. A real one. They're hiring guards for caravans heading north. It's dangerous work, but the pay is good. Good enough to buy my own sword, my own armor. Good enough to start making a name for myself."
He looked at me, his eyes pleading. "Come with me," he urged. "This is our chance. We can finally do it. We can be the Sunstone Adventurers. We can leave all this..." He gestured around the dusty, decaying library. "...behind."
My heart ached with a longing so fierce it was a physical pain. To leave. To be strong. To have adventures with my friend. It was everything I had ever wanted.
But I looked down at my own trembling hands, at the thin, pale skin. I thought of the coughing fits that left me breathless for hours, of the fevers that stole my strength. I thought of my father's desperate, pleading eyes, of my duty as the last son of a dying house.
"I can't, Marcus," I whispered, the words tasting like ash in my mouth. "I'm not... I'm not strong enough. And my family... they need me here."
Marcus stared at me, his face slowly hardening. The hope in his eyes died, replaced by a cold, bitter understanding. "I see," he said, his voice devoid of all its former warmth. "Of course. Why would a high and mighty lord like you want to rough it on the road with a commoner like me? You have your books, your title. You don't need to fight for your future. It's handed to you."
"That's not it!" I protested, my voice weak. "You don't understand..."
"Oh, I understand perfectly," he sneered, his bitterness finally boiling over into a raw, ugly contempt. "I understand that our 'friendship,' our 'dream'... it was just a game to you. Something to pass the time while you were too sick to do anything else. But I'm done playing games, Lord Silverstein."
He turned and walked away, his back straight and unyielding.
"Have fun in your dusty library," he called over his shoulder, his final words a dagger to my heart. "I'm going to go live a real life."
That was the last time I had seen him. The day our friendship died. The day the seed of his hatred was planted. A seed that the Duke, I now realized, had carefully watered and cultivated for years.
The clang of steel on steel jolted me back to the present. Marcus's sword smashed against my own, the force of the blow jarring my arm to the shoulder. I stumbled back, my mind still reeling from the vividness of the memory.
"Getting tired, you pathetic worm?" Marcus snarled, pressing his attack. He was a whirlwind of furious, undisciplined strikes. He was fighting with pure, raw hatred.
And I finally understood. He wasn't just fighting me. He was fighting the ghost of the boy he thought had betrayed him. He was fighting the symbol of a system that had kept him down, that had mocked his dreams. He was fighting a lifetime of perceived slights and bitter resentments.
And I... I felt a profound, aching sadness for him.
[Host's emotional state is shifting to 'pity,'] ARIA noted. [This is a suboptimal combat emotion. I recommend 'cold, ruthless efficiency.']
Noted, I thought back. But first, let's end this.
I had all the data I needed. His attack patterns were repetitive. He always led with a right-handed power swing. He over-extended on every lunge. His rage, his greatest asset, was also his greatest weakness. It made him predictable.
It was time for the ruse.
On his next wild swing, I deliberately let my parry fail. I cried out as if in pain and let my sword fly from my hand, clattering to the sand several feet away. I stumbled backward and fell, landing hard on my back.
I lay there, helpless and disarmed, looking up at him. It was the image he had always had of me: weak, pathetic, and defeated.
A triumphant, ugly roar erupted from his throat. "It's over, Silverstein!" he screamed, his eyes blazing with red light. "This is for every time you looked down on me! For every scrap of charity my family had to take from yours! This is for everything you stole from me!"
He raised his sword high for the final, killing blow. The crowd gasped. The Duke leaned forward, his face alight with victory.
Marcus plunged his sword down.
But I was no longer there.
In the split second that he had raised his sword, I had placed my hands flat on the sand beneath me. I didn't need a loud, flashy command. I just needed a whisper.
SINK.
The sand beneath Marcus's feet did not just turn to quicksand. It turned into a hungry, grasping maw. It was a targeted, precise application of 'Terraforming.' The ground gave way in a perfect circle around his feet, pulling him down to his knees with a surprised grunt. He was trapped, immobilized in the sand.
His downward stab, meant for my heart, plunged harmlessly into the empty space beside me.
I rolled, surging to my feet in a single, fluid motion. My DEX of 18 made me a blur. Before he could even process what had happened, I had retrieved my sword and was standing over him.
The tip of my rusty blade was resting gently against the side of his neck.
The entire arena was silent. The reversal had been too fast, too sudden, too impossible.
Marcus stared up at me, his rage-filled eyes now wide with shock and disbelief. He was trapped, disarmed, and at my mercy.
"How...?" he choked out.
"You were always the better swordsman, Marcus," I said, my voice quiet but carrying in the sudden silence. "But you were never the better strategist. You let your anger blind you. You let him blind you."
I looked up at the royal box, directly at Duke Crimson. My message was clear. Your pawn has been taken.
The duel was over. I had won.
But Marcus wasn't finished.
A terrible, guttural scream ripped from his throat, a sound of pure, undiluted agony and rage. The reddish aura around him exploded, turning a deep, sickly crimson.
[WARNING! WARNING!] ARIA's voice was a frantic alarm. [Subject's system is undergoing a forced, unstable evolution! The Duke must have built in a failsafe! A final, desperate command!]
[New Skill Detected: 'Scorned Earth Detonation!'][Description: A self-destructive final attack. The user's system overloads their body with corrupted mana, turning them into a living bomb. The resulting explosion will destroy everything within a twenty-meter radius. There is no way to stop it. There is no way to survive it.]
Marcus's body began to glow, the light pulsing from beneath his armor. The ground around him began to crack and smoke. He was laughing, a horrible, broken sound.
"If I can't have my vengeance," he shrieked, his voice distorting, "then I'll take you to hell with me, Kazuki!"
The crowd screamed in terror, scrambling to get away. The Royal Guards formed a desperate shield wall in front of the royal box.
Elizabeth was on her feet, her face white as a sheet, already chanting a desperate, powerful barrier spell. But we all knew it wouldn't be enough.
This was it. A checkmate I couldn't escape. He was going to detonate, and he was going to take me, and a good portion of the arena, with him.
I was going to die. My fourth death.
And this time, I had no idea what would happen when I came back. Or if I would come back at all.
I looked at Marcus, at the childhood friend who was now a living bomb, his face a mask of tragic, suicidal triumph.
And in that final moment, I didn't feel fear. I felt a profound, aching sorrow.
I'm sorry, Marcus, I thought. I'm sorry it came to this.
The crimson light reached its peak. The world went white.
And I prepared for the end.