Ch. 002: Welcome to the Closest Place to Hell (1)
"Bastards."
The void shattered like glass.
Scarlet fragments hung in the air — dazzling, jagged, each one catching the light at a different angle. Countless reflections of Dssal stared back from the shards. Every one of them raised a weapon against itself.
Suicide.
Cold sweat slid down his spine as he recognised himself in each reflection.
"…The fuck?"
Some stabbed. Others hung. His expression hardened — but the reflections only smiled back, warped and patient, as though welcoming him to every possible fate that had ever been prepared for him. As though they had been waiting.
On cue, a system panel materialised with clean indifference.
[Welcome, Participant 001.]
[Pantheon Ascension Grounds — Tier Zero.]
[Good luck… though it wouldn't matter anyway.]
Dssal's heart lurched.
He had actually entered Pantheon.
Everything crashed down on him at once, and the reflections spoke in a chorus that had no right to know his voice this well.
"Give up."
"You are better off dead."
He stood in the space between sanity and its opposite — teetering — but.
Be it by fate, at the precise peak of his panic—
"Uh… hey?"
A voice. Coquettish. Came cutting cleanly through the noise like a knife through gauze.
Dssal blinked.
The shards. The bloody doppelgängers. Gone — all of it — nothing but hallucinations, scrubbed away by the mundane intrusion.
Reality settled in their place.
Before him stretched a seemingly infinite grassland beneath a red sun.
His eyes widened involuntarily. The ground beneath his feet was dark and rust-coloured, soil that looked like it had absorbed something it couldn't give back — the famous blood-coloured plains of Lily, Blood Field.
Still unsettling. But not the nightmare of a moment ago.
He exhaled slowly.
It was Pantheon.
However it against every expectation, appeared beautiful — a stark and almost offensive contrast to what this place would become after its impending massacre.
The environment was rich, air carrying a faint charge somewhere. Positive energy, almost aggressively so, as though the land itself decided against what was coming.
In the far distance, figures moved — non-player characters, background filler, existing only to populate a world and make it feel inhabited until it wasn't needed anymore.
Rather than terrifying, the plain seemed inviting. Unlike most dungeons, which announced their nature in their atmosphere — damp, dark, hostile — Blood Field wore something else entirely. Calm. Pastoral, almost.
Still panting, Dssal began to sort through what he was looking at.
Wearing victorian style clothing a handful of Slave Stage Arcane Bearers at best — first level. Cannon fodder, every one of them.
"How's my gear? Ain't it clean?"
Stiff dialogue coming somewhere yet nowhere in the crowd. Several people laughed. They chatted carefreely, as if this weren't the doorstep of slaughter.
"The illusion of safety. The calm before the storm," Dssal muttered the game's mantra solemnly.
"Helloooo!!"
However, Dssal was getting too far ahead of himself. At that moment, the voice from before screamed at him.
Dssal unconsciously turned toward it.
And once again, this world surprised him.
What met his eyes was more striking than any person he remembered appreciating back on Earth. An attractive woman in heels — petite, black lipstick, dark-blue bangs swept across her forehead, a figure that turned heads without apparent effort. She was smiling at him yes him warmly.
In the context of Lily's society, she was what game regulars called a purebred.
'Hmph. Seems useful enough.'
Just — not particularly pure, beneath it. Dssal wasn't inexperienced enough to miss what her expression giving her away, she hadn't even bothered to fully conceal it.
After all, she chose to smile at Dssal, among all others, literally she'd approached the thinnest-looking stranger in the vicinity for comfort whose body language moments ago had been, by any honest assessment, beyond pathetic.
This world had realism. He wasn't the main character who would be noticed just for existing .
Either she was here to mock him, or she was looking for someone she could manage.
She licked her lips.
Dssal flinched at her gaze anyway — a faint warmth moving through his chest, the embarrassingly familiar kind. Dopamine. Attraction.
'Huh? Why am I...'
The moment after she spoke, the reason became clear.
"Ho... you've caught Isolde's eye, I'll admit."
Her lips curled welcoming, contradicting her previously unreserved behavior.
//First Command//
A spell. Subtle, threaded through her words like a dye through water. He felt it settling — and recognised it for what it was a beat too late to have avoided the initial hit, but early enough to matter.
'How arrogant.'
Not overwhelming though, which if anything, was more insulting — she'd calibrated it for someone she expected to catch easily rather than resist at all.
Dssal said nothing.
Instead he began walking away — a slow, deliberate withdrawal — placing distance between himself and the radius of her influence.
Her smile twitched.
'Huh—it didn't work.'
Sure enough, with distance, his pulse settled. The warmth withdrew. His expression — which had briefly softened in ways he'd rather not catalogue — reasserted itself into something considerably colder and more his own.
He was disillusioned by her beauty at first, but he wasn't a pushover, even he prided himself as someone who'd exploited pushovers..
'This arrogant bitch.'
What would have happened if he hadn't caught it? If he'd just stood there, softening, while she reeled him in by degrees?
He bit his tongue and kept walking.
The cool breeze came off the plain in long, even strokes — unhurried, indifferent to whatever had just happened — and peeled his irritation back, layer by layer.
Before long he was almost grateful for it.
He had worked in theatre before in game development.
Hence acting had given him something that turned out to be more durable than he'd expected: a working model of how people responded to pressure, and how those constructions gave way under the right kind of pressure.
Isolde's approach had been technically competent. He could acknowledge that without being required to be angry about it.
Even Dssal found it a pity he couldn't afford to continue playing politics with her.
As in his view, the first rule of profitable politics was to gain allies before making enemies—and responding to her now would definitely have been the latter.
She reminded him of his workplace particularly its toxicity
Dssal slowed after about twenty metres. Till he stopped to gaze around the middle distance for a moment.
Berating her would be useless, he reminded himself.
Morality wouldn't function here. He too had to be prepared to use people as she'd attempted.
His survival, in a way, depended on the support of those around him—at least at the early stages.
"Hey!"
However, the voice returned.
Dssal never in his years would he had expected her to follow.
Didn't he just ignore her blatantly.
Step. Step.
From her footsteps she was a couple of metres behind, matching his pace. "Hey — you! I was still talking, you know!"
Dssal lifted his foot. But set it down.
She still didn't get it. However it seemed even better for him.
Somewhat lazily, he turned back.
"Alright."
Maybe an opportunity.
After all. She couldn't charm him without him realizing this was a 'beginner' dungeon after all. And he needed information regardless.
Dssal would eventually need to extract it from someone. It might as well be someone he'd already mapped out.
Where exactly in Lily's timeline had he landed?
Such knowledge would determine his next move: whether the "meat shields" he needed were still alive and usable.
He smirked slightly at the thought. He couldn't help it.
But she caught it. Blinking in confusion. It was unexpected even though she maintained her expression well it left her momentarily speechless— enough that, with horror, she'd forgotten what she intended to say.
"Tell me what you know — or what you think you know — about this place."
But Dssal inadvertently saved her from the pause speaking first only what he wanted to hear.
'That's right.'
To escape embarrassment or stuttering, she didn't mind his commanding tone and answered.
"The name's Isolde. No surname." A brief pause. "I'm an orphan."
'Why am I doing this?'
However she wasn't completely lead on.
She glanced at him once, sideways and careful, but continued.
Her subconscious noting one thing.
Dssal was somewhat different.
She flicked her hair.
"Well… our famous gate. Common knowledge says it's beginner-tier, but I wouldn't necessarily buy that. From my sources, I've come to think it's higher. Maybe yellow-coloured."
She raised her hand doing all sorts of gestures to keep his attention.
Dssal's lip twitched. But his expression stayed blank.
"And?"
Thus she elaborated, watching him closely enough to imply she catalogued him with the attention he was giving her, though for different purposes.
He noticed that too.
'This bitch, it's almost like she's a lawyer from the great Earth—'
Dssal compared her capabilities with those standards, but he shouldn't have.
In Pantheon, "Earth" was nothing but a random pseudo-reality.
Even maybe worse as no one had access to the Arcane there, if regarding it at most it would be served as a Slave stage dungeon.
And the same way many from Isolde's world saw Pantheon: from the outside it was classified as white-Slave stage—the weakest kind. Harmless. Disposable. A training ground.
Full-on bullshit.
Even Isolde's slightly more accurate judgment of it being yellow was dead wrong.
This was actually void-colored—a legendary gate that entrapped every other, disguised as the lowest stage.
Evidently, the deeper the hue of a dungeon's Aether, the more dangerous its Arcane core: purple, black, abyssal, void. Each darker step was a gulf.
Yet there was the exception Pantheon.
It even broke other rules Void Gates weren't supposed to appear in beginner zones.
However Dssal didn't pay mind to it.
Instead to her.
Physically, Isolde kept talking, probably mistaking his silence for patience. But she at least gave some useful information.
They were currently on the 24th day of the 12th season of the year 11,126—which, in realities terms, was December 24, 2026. The game always began on Christmas.
Dssal had arrived two or three hours early.
Sadly, he couldn't get more from her. Everything else she said was either false—or later to be proven otherwise.
"Many say these Grounds are a heavenly testing field—for we potential Arcane Bearers to fight monsters and devils together. Even nobles usually call it 'the closest place to Heaven,' since never in history did a dungeon with a similar stage exist. However, their information is usually slightly off—which makes me think it's not so simple… probably yellow-colored. Not that it matters to me—I've survived much worse."
Isolde concluded with a smug look, hinting for Dssal to request her help right then.
'What do you think? Ready to grovel now?'
If it was yellow, she'd just shown that she had come prepared.
"Remember I'm only telling you this since you piqued my interest, by the way let me ask, how do you see my communication skills?"
Smiling coyly, she gave him a slight nudge.
Dssal shrugged in response.
"It's higher than yellow. Be alert if you don't want to die without knowing how you died."
He walked away snobbishly, pushing through the crowd and suddenly leaving her in dismay.
Dssal managed to give his final warning while hiding the fear in his heart.
It was his last show of human compassion… before he had to turn toward the abyss.
Mercy was a luxury for those who weren't keeping count of deaths. He would even kill newborns to survive.
That was his resolve.
However to ensure that survival, he needed to find someone particular—within this crowd—before their trial began.
'My golden NPC.'
The meat shield (person) was Kahrdan Purge Reinhardt.
A master mercenary.
In the original gameplay, Kahrdan was a King Stage Bearer (level 5) from the fallen Reinhardt household, with an average-tier potential of Heroic.
The potential hero was sent to this supposedly newbie white-colored dungeon to scout for hidden talents in the rough. However, since poaching was illegal—especially when nobles were involved—Kahrdan was deceived by his elders with the excuse he was here primarily to monitor the gate in case of unforeseen circumstances. Along the way, he could help them poach, since he wasn't getting paid for it.
Unfortunately for him, the worst happened.
And again, due to his damned upright personality, he gave his life in battle here to help save a whopping 308 people—out of the 300,000 who were destined to die here according to the plot.
"Too bad they all later perished, though," Dssal muttered deprecatingly as he made his way toward the most congested area to find Kahrdan. "Not like I care."
He had other targets he could go for, but considering strength, Kahrdan would be the best damage sponge.
However—just as he thought he saw Kahrdan, a melodic voice rang through the space.
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HOW TO USE A WORLD'S APOCALYPSE
(END OF CHAPTER TWO)