The blood hadn't dried on Crispin's knuckles.
It was still there—thick, dark, sticky. Smelled like iron, looked like betrayal. And somehow, none of it felt real.
Arlen's body was gone. Vanished into System light.
No funeral. No grave. Not even ashes.
Just... nothing.
Crispin stood alone on the obsidian cliff where the raid had turned to a massacre, where they'd all heard Arlen scream—once. Just once. A sharp, human sound. And then silence.
He kept seeing that final moment when Arlen pushed him aside, shoved a spell into Crispin's chest, and grinned like a lunatic. "Live," he'd said, like it was funny.
And Crispin did.
He lived.
And Arlen didn't.
The Guild sent a cleanup team. Virelia's media broadcast the story with a thousand twists—"Gate breach," "Heroic sacrifice," "Silver-ranked Mage saves party"—but none of them knew a fucking thing.
The truth? No one was supposed to die.
Crispin was never supposed to feel something tear loose inside his chest and not grow back.
And yet, here he was—broken, whole, stronger, emptier.
The notifications started three nights after the mission. His Echoes whispered to him while he was dreaming. Not all of them. Just one.
[You failed to resurrect: Arlen Corvus.]
[Soul-Type mismatch. Willpower override: Arlen has refused the Arise command.]
[Your command has been rejected.]
Crispin sat up in the middle of the night, sweating cold, his voice hoarse from screaming into silence.
He had tried.
He'd whispered "Arise" with the desperation of a man drowning in an ocean of grief.
But Arlen had said no.
Dead and defiant.
That was so like him.
The next day, something else happened.
He was walking through Blackridge, hoodie pulled low, face in shadows. Ghost-town eyes followed him. Some of them recognized him from news broadcasts. Some of them remembered the last raid, the blood, the body count. Some just knew he was different.
He felt it too.
A ripple in the world.
[You have acquired: Crown of the Hollow King.]
[New Title Unlocked.]
Hollow King
You rule over what should not rise. Your pain is your power.
Echoes that fall under your control will never question again.
+50% loyalty. +50% resistance to spiritual rejection.
Passive: "Throne of Echoes" unlocked.
He stopped walking.
People passed him. The wind blew. The sky darkened.
But inside him, something shifted.
The throne was no longer empty.
And maybe that terrified him more than the silence did.
---
"I didn't want this."
He whispered it aloud, leaning over the riverbank that used to be his childhood hideout.
He used to fish here.
Yara and him.
Their mother would pack stale bread, and they'd eat it like it was treasure.
Now his hands summoned shadows. His voice bent the will of the dead. And his best friend—
Crispin punched the water.
"Fuck."
---
At night, the dreams changed.
Not the usual trauma-loop of blood and gates.
This time, it was a field of ash. Thousands of soldiers knelt before him, eyes hollow, skin like paper, waiting.
Waiting for a command.
In the dream, he never spoke.
He just sat on the black throne and watched the world burn around him.
And when he woke up—
—his Echoes were kneeling at his bed.
Not standing.
Kneeling.
Silent.
Eyes glowing blue.
Even the high-tier Echo from the Obsidian Crawler bowed its massive head.
He didn't know what was happening to him.
Only that it wasn't stopping.
He returned to the Hunter's Guild the following week.
Guildmaster Rhys barely met his eyes. Guilt painted across his face like he'd seen his own sins.
"Crispin," the man said, "you weren't supposed to make it out."
Crispin said nothing.
"You know how many Hunters come back after... after that kind of Gate breach?"
Still nothing.
Rhys pushed a folder across the table. "We received a message. From the System."
That caught Crispin's attention.
"A message?"
Rhys nodded, jaw tense. "I've never seen anything like it. Look."
Inside the folder was a single sheet of paper with glowing red text—not ink, light. It burned even through the paper.
[THE KING MUST NOT RISE.]
Crispin looked up. "What king?"
"I was hoping you'd tell me."
Crispin's mouth twitched into a humorless grin. "Yeah. Me too."
---
Two days later, he got another notification.
[Gate detected: Class Unknown. Location: The Pit.]
[System Anomaly. King-Class Gate opening ahead of schedule.]
[Enter at your own peril.]
The Pit wasn't on any map.
But he knew where it was.
Because it wasn't a place.
It was a memory.
---
They used to call it the Pit when they were kids. A sunken construction site, never finished, swallowed by Blackridge's slums. Homeless people vanished there. Weird lights flickered at night. Dogs wouldn't go near it.
Crispin hadn't been there in ten years.
But as he stood on its edge now, peering into the fog-laced abyss, he realized something gut-chilling:
The Pit was breathing.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
It was alive.
Who opens a Gate in the middle of a city?
Who breathes gates into the world like they're dreams?
Unless…
Unless the Gate wasn't invading this world.
Maybe this world belonged to it all along.
---
He stepped inside.
No plan.
No backup.
No fear.
Just grief and vengeance and something new curling in his veins like divine fire.
Inside the Pit, the world was wrong.
Gravity twisted sideways. Lights moved without source. And worst of all—
—it felt familiar.
He walked for what felt like hours through a landscape of broken altars and whispering stones. The deeper he went, the louder the voices became.
Whispers in a dead language.
Until they weren't whispers.
Until they spoke his name.
"Crispin David."
He turned. Drew a blade from his Echo.
Darkness congealed in front of him.
And then—
It smiled.
"Welcome home," the thing said. "King of Echoes."