She laughed again — a sound like distant thunder rolling across a jade sea — and it startled something loose inside me. When the echo faded she leaned closer, her enormous face filling the void until the stars in her eyes looked like lanterns.
"Oh, sorry, little one," she said, amusement softening the words. "It's just… you are not like him."
"Like who?" I managed. My voice scraped from somewhere at the edge of my throat.
She folded one colossal arm beneath her chin and rested her cheek against it, looking down at me with a melancholy that made the whole air ache. "The first. The first transmigrator we brought here. The one your folk call the First Hero."
My mind scrambled for facts and folktales. The First Hero—stories of a man who rose with the ancients, who led humanity in the first great struggle against the Voidspawn. A hero, a legend… and now, somehow, a name she used like a memory.
"He was a transmigrator too?" I whispered.
She nodded, and the motion made the void ripple. "Yes. He fought. He bled. He became a story."But Her eyes grew far away, as if watching ghosts only she could see. "Tell me, Mr. Hero—will you keep fighting? No matter the odds? For your friends? For your people?"
The question landed with the force of a hammer. There was no shame in refusing. There would have been no dishonor in walking away. But something in me—something jagged and angry and stubborn—answered before thought had a chance to form.
"Yes," I said. The word left me smaller than the feeling it held. "I'll fight. I'll keep fighting."
She smiled then, something like approval in the curve of that enormous mouth. For the first time the expression felt almost human, and something in my chest unclenched. I might have even blushed—an absurd, mortal heat that burned my cheeks for a heartbeat.
"I wish you luck, Mr. Hero," she murmured. Then, with the slow gravity of someone offering a benediction, she reached down. Her fingertip was the size of a boulder, but when she touched my forehead it felt like a cool coin pressing gently into skin.
"I have no power of my own," she said. "I am only a shell. But take this small portion of what remains of me. I pray you become the hero you imagine." Her fingertip glowed. Energy trickled from her like a stream, warm and ancient, and poured into me.
Warmth flooded my chest. A jewel — small and red as if a drop of sunset had condensed on my skin — pushed through the center of my brow. I tasted metal and old rain. Blue scales rippled over my arms and shoulders, replacing whatever pale shimmer had been there before; they felt like armor and memory at once. Strength hummed under my skin, clear and bright and terrible.
Her face clouded. Her smile faltered. "But… I pray you never become what he became." The words were an ache in the space where her whisper touched my heart.
Pain like cold iron stabbed at my ribs. I tried to speak, to ask what happened to him, to demand more than hints and riddles, but the void was thinning — her outline blurring at the edges.
"You will not see me again," she said, answering the question I had not formed aloud. "This is all that remains to give." She sounded almost apologetic, and I hated that I could not press her for more.
"Why?" I managed. "Why leave —why —"
She lifted one titanic shoulder in a small, sad shrug. "Because I am by the end of my thread. I have tried what I could to save your kind . Save this world, little one." Her voice broke like a bell. "Please. Do not end as he did."
Her form thinned like fog at dawn. The snakes in her hair coiled one last time, their red eyes meeting mine with something that might have been hope. The warmth in my chest stuttered, and then the sensation of the jewel, the blue scales, the newfound surge of power washed through me like tidewater being pulled back and then thrown forward.
Tears caught in my eyes suddenly — not only for the colossal being dwindling before me but for all the weight of history I had only just begun to understand. I swallowed hard. "Thank you," I said, voice small and raw. "I won't let you down."
She smiled once, and the smile was a thing of ruins and stars. "Be careful, Mr. Hero." Her final whisper scraped across me like wind through leaves, and then she was gone — dissolved into a million motes of light that fell away, until the void was empty again.
Silence filled the white space; then a small system tone chimed, very distant and clinical in that vastness.
Viper — Peak Form Acquired.
I could feel the words like a seal closing. The jewel on my forehead pulsed once, and the scales along my arms settled into place — not merely decoration, but a living armor that thrummed with an old and hungry intelligence. Power lay in each fiber of my body now, but it was not iron certainty. It was a debt and a promise.
The void shrank. The white peeled back like a curtain, and the world rushed in — sound, light, the screams of distance. I was back in the real world.