Endless Falling.
Nozomi had always imagined death would be instantaneous. A moment of pain, perhaps, then nothing. A mercy.
Instead, she plummeted through absolute darkness. Wind screamed past her ears, her body tumbling end over end in a nauseating spiral. Her broken ribs ground against each other with every rotation, sending fresh waves of agony through her chest. Blood sprayed from her mouth, whipped away by the wind before she could even see it.
She tried to scream. The air was torn from her lungs.
She tried to pray. No god answered.
She tried to cast a spell, anything to slow her descent, but the mana would not respond. Shock had locked her channels, and even if they had been open, what could a Level 25 cleric do against gravity and terminal velocity?
The fall stretched on. Seconds became minutes. Minutes became an eternity. The darkness was so complete that Nozomi could not tell if her eyes were open or closed. Disorientation set in, her sense of up and down dissolving until she existed only as pain and motion, a broken body hurtling toward inevitable annihilation.
Yui.
The thought of her sister pierced through the chaos. Yui, waiting in their apartment, wrapped in her blanket, believing the lie that her older sister would return safely. Yui, who had maybe two years left if someone was there to pay for her treatment. Yui, who would die alone, confused, wondering why Nozomi had broken her promise.
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
Rage flickered through the despair. Rage at Daichi and his casual cruelty. Rage at Akane's mockery. Rage at Kenji's grin. Rage at a system that valued her so little that her murder was just an economic calculation. Rage at the Guild that created these conditions. Rage at the Advent that had shattered the world and made monsters of humanity.
Rage at herself for being so weak, so trusting, so fundamentally disposable.
I don't want to die.
The thought crystallized with sudden, diamond-sharp clarity. She didn't want to die. Didn't deserve to die. Hadn't done anything to deserve this except have the misfortune of being born without exceptional talent. She had worked hard. She had saved lives. She had sacrificed everything to keep her sister alive, and this was her reward? To be used as bait and discarded like garbage?
No.
Mana surged through her channels. Not the gentle, controlled flow of healing magic, but something wild and desperate. Her mind reached for the first spell she could grasp: Teleport. A basic utility skill that every cleric learned for emergency escapes. It had a maximum range of thirty meters and required careful calibration to avoid materializing inside solid objects.
Nozomi poured everything she had into it anyway.
The spell activated.
Reality lurched. Space folded, twisted, buckled under the weight of mana vastly exceeding the spell's designed capacity. Nozomi felt herself torn apart and reassembled, her molecules scattered and gathered, her existence smeared across dimensions that weren't meant to intersect.
She screamed. The scream had no sound.
Then she was falling again—but different now. Faster. The wind had become a solid thing, a hammer driving against her body. The darkness took on texture, became visible as layers of shadow rushing past. She saw things in the depths. Enormous shapes that moved with ponderous grace, eyes that glowed with sickly light, architecture that defied geometry.
She saw the bottom.
It rose to meet her with terrible finality: a vast expanse of stone littered with the detritus of failure. Bones. Armor. Weapons. The accumulated remains of everyone who had ever fallen into the Abyssal Dungeon's depths. Tens of thousands of deaths, their final moments frozen in twisted metal and shattered bone.
Nozomi hit the ground.
But instead of the instant obliteration she expected, her body simply stopped. No impact. No pain. One moment she was falling at terminal velocity. The next, she was lying on cold stone, completely still, her momentum stolen as if it had never existed.
Magic. Protective enchantment. Something about this place had caught her.
She lay there for what might have been seconds or hours, unable to move, barely able to think. Every breath was a labor. Every heartbeat felt like her last. Blood pooled beneath her, warm and spreading.
Get up.
The command came from somewhere deep inside, some part of her that refused to surrender even now.
Get up, you worthless excuse for a delver. Get up and survive.
Nozomi's fingers twitched. Then her hand. Then her arm. She rolled onto her side, gasping as fresh agony erupted from her ribs. Her vision swam, dark spots blooming at the edges. She vomited blood onto the stone, the taste making her gag.
But she was alive.
Impossibly, inexplicably, she was alive.
The chamber she had fallen into was massive. A natural cavern expanded by deliberate construction. The walls were the same light-absorbing black as the rest of the dungeon, but here they were carved with symbols that hurt to look at directly. Geometric patterns that seemed to shift when viewed peripherally. Languages that predated humanity. The bones she had seen from above were real: piles of human remains mixed with monster corpses, all picked clean and arranged in disturbingly deliberate patterns.
At the center of the chamber, elevated on a dais of polished obsidian, rested an altar.
It was carved from a single piece of crimson stone, blood-red and translucent, with veins of gold running through it like capillaries. The surface was stained with something dark that might have been old blood or might have been the stone's natural coloration. Upon the altar lay a book.
No—not a book. A grimoire.
It was bound in something that looked disturbingly like human skin, tanned and stretched and decorated with gold leaf. Chains of pure light wrapped around it, sealing it closed. Even sealed, Nozomi could feel the power radiating from it—a thrumming presence that made her teeth ache and her broken ribs sing with sympathetic vibration.
Get up.
She didn't know why. Didn't know what she hoped to accomplish. But Nozomi dragged herself across the bone-littered floor, her broken body leaving a trail of blood. Each movement was agony. Each inch felt like miles.
It took forever.
Eventually, somehow, she reached the altar. Used it to pull herself upright. Stood swaying before the grimoire, her vision tunneling, consciousness threatening to abandon her.
She reached out with a trembling hand and touched the cover.
The chains of light shattered.
The grimoire opened.
Pages turned themselves, stopping on a spread covered in text that predated language. Symbols and sigils bypassed her eyes entirely and carved themselves directly into her brain. Understanding came not through reading but through absorption. Knowledge flooded her consciousness: spells of unimaginable power, rituals that could reshape reality, incantations that predated the Advent by millennia.
And a name.
The Witch of Miracles.
"No," Nozomi whispered. "This isn't... I can't..."
The symbols continued their assault, burning themselves into her synapses. She tried to close her eyes, but the knowledge came anyway. Tried to pull her hand away, but her fingers would not respond. The grimoire had her now, and it was not letting go.
Pain erupted behind her eyes—white-hot and absolute. Nozomi screamed, the sound raw and animal. Her legs gave out. She collapsed forward, sprawling across the altar, her blood mixing with the stains already present.
"Why did they hate me so much?" The words tumbled out, half sob, half shriek. "What did I do? I just wanted to help people. I just wanted to save my sister. Why wasn't that enough?"
The grimoire pulsed with crimson light.
"Why did I even live?" Nozomi's voice cracked, years of suppressed emotion finally breaking through. "I'm nobody. Nothing. Twenty-five levels in seven years. I'm weak. Worthless. I can't save anyone. I can't even save myself."
The light intensified, spreading from the grimoire to encompass the entire altar.
"Yui..." The name was barely audible. "I promised you I'd come back. I promised. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
She was crying now—great, heaving sobs that made her broken ribs scream but which she could not stop. All the fear, all the pain, all the desperate hope that had kept her going for so long came pouring out. She cried for her parents, dead in the Advent's first wave. She cried for her sister, dying slowly of an incurable disease. She cried for herself, for the girl who had worked so hard and received only cruelty as payment.
She cried until she had nothing left.
Then, in the silence that followed, something moved.
The darkness at the edges of the chamber shifted. Coalesced. Took shape.
A spider emerged from the shadows.
But calling it a spider was like calling a tsunami a wave. Technically accurate but wholly inadequate to convey the reality. The creature was massive, its body the size of a car, its legs spanning twenty feet. Its carapace was glossy black with veins of crimson that pulsed with each movement. Eight eyes clustered on its face, each one reflecting the crimson light of the altar in miniature. Fangs the length of swords dripped with venom that hissed where it struck stone.
[SCARLET TIP SPIDER - LEVEL 75]
[WARNING: EXTREME THREAT DETECTED]
[RECOMMENDATION: FLEE IMMEDIATELY]
The system notification appeared in Nozomi's vision, but she barely registered it. Her broken mind struggled to process what she was seeing, to comprehend the impossibility of a Level 75 monster existing on what should have been floor forty or fifty at most.
Nozomi's body arced backward, suspended in the frozen moment. Her mouth opened in a scream that had no sound. Veins ignited with light, crimson and gold intertwined, racing through her like wildfire. Her broken ribs knitted themselves together. Her impaled shoulder sealed shut. The spider's leg phased through her as if she had become incorporeal. Even the droplets of blood hovering in the air reversed course and flowed back into her body as time rewound in her immediate vicinity.
But the physical healing was nothing compared to what was happening to her soul.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
[WARNING: EXTERNAL ENTITY DETECTED]
[WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED CLASS MODIFICATION IN PROGRESS]
[WARNING: USER TEMPLATE CORRUPTION DETECTED]
[ERROR: UNABLE TO TERMINATE PROCESS]
[ERROR: ADMINISTRATIVE OVERRIDE DETECTED]
[ERROR: ERROR: ERROR:]
The system, humanity's greatest achievement since the Advent, shattered like glass against the Witch's power. Nozomi watched as her status screen fragmented, reformed, and transformed into something alien.
"You were a cleric," the Witch whispered, her voice echoing through dimensions. "A healer. A support class designed to keep others alive while being disposable. How beautifully tragic. How perfectly human. But I am not human, little flame, and I do not traffic in tragedy. I deal in miracles."
The light intensified. Nozomi felt her class ripped out from her roots. The gentle magics of healing and blessing were torn away. In their place grew something darker, something that tasted of starlight and void, creation and destruction intertwined.
[SYSTEM REBOOT COMPLETE]
[NEW CLASS DETECTED]
[ANALYZING...]
[CLASSIFICATION: UNIQUE - ABYSSAL WITCH]
[WARNING: UNREGISTERED CLASS TYPE]
[WARNING: POWER READINGS EXCEED STANDARD PARAMETERS]
"There," the Witch said with satisfaction. "Much better. The system protests. It always does. Narrow little minds designed it to control power. But you and I, little flame, we are neither controlled nor categorized."
She pulled her thumb away, and Nozomi collapsed to the ground as time resumed. But she was no longer broken. Her body thrummed with energy. Her mind expanded to calculations and possibilities she'd never dreamed of. She could feel mana, not as a gentle stream, but as a raging ocean waiting to be commanded.
The spider, frozen mid-attack, jerked back to life. Its eight eyes focused on Nozomi. Something had changed. Uncertainty. Fear.
"Ah yes, my pet has noticed," the Witch said, standing beside the altar as if she had always been there. "You smell different now, don't you? Not prey. Not predator. Something else entirely. Something wrong."
The spider clicked its mandibles and began to retreat.
"No," Nozomi said, her voice layered and harmonious. "You don't get to leave. You were going to eat me. The least you can do is stay for my awakening."
The spider froze again. This time, it was Nozomi's power, not the Witch's, that held it. The girl who had been Level 25 moments ago had pinned a Level 75 monster in place with sheer will.
"Excellent!" The Witch clapped. "You're adapting quickly. Most new witches take hours to understand their power. But most new witches aren't fueled by righteous fury."
Translucent screens appeared around them, not system notifications but something older, beyond the Guild's technology.
"Now, let's properly outfit you for your rebirth. You'll need armor, a weapon, and a spell to announce yourself to this world that tried to kill you."
The first screen showed armor: Celestial Aegis. Even the static image shimmered with power.
"Crafted from the scales of a star-serpent and woven with threads from the edge of reality," the Witch said. "It will turn aside anything short of a god. Lightweight as silk, stronger than dragon bone. It reshapes itself to your will. Quite fashionable."
The armor materialized over her tattered cleric robes. Black as the void between stars, with veins of gold and crimson pulsing in time with her heartbeat. Pauldrons rose like half-unfurled wings. Gauntlets moved like liquid.
She felt invincible.
"Next," the Witch continued, "a weapon. You carried a staff as a healer. How quaint. But witches deal in implements of power."
Nightbane appeared in her hand. Six feet of black wood carved with shifting runes. At its crown, a crystal contained a miniature galaxy. Power sang through the staff. It hungered to cast devastation.
"And finally, a spell. Your first true magic as an Abyssal Witch. Something the world will remember. Something to remind them you are no longer a healer."
The third screen revealed a spell notation so complex it made her nose bleed. The name etched itself into her mind: Longinus.
"A spell of absolute penetration," the Witch explained. "It ignores armor, bypasses defenses, tears through magical protection. There is no defense. Only the spear, its target, and the inevitable conclusion."
Nozomi felt it nested inside her, a viper waiting to strike.
"The cost," she asked, her new voice layered, echoing strangely. "What price?"
"Each miracle exacts a cost. Health, memories, humanity, your soul itself. The greater the impossibility, the greater the cost. You may rewrite your story, but the pen is dipped in your essence."
"My sister," Nozomi said. "Will I save her?"
"That depends on how cleverly you use this power. Mana Wasting Syndrome is a corruption of the soul. It cannot be healed conventionally. You are no longer conventional." The Witch began to fade. "Your story is yours to write."
"Why help me?" Nozomi called.
"I gain amusement. The joy of watching narrow worlds expand into chaos. You were nothing. Now you are potential incarnate. Will you save the world or damn it? That is your choice."
Then the Witch was gone.
Nozomi stood in Celestial Aegis, gripping Nightbane, facing a Level 75 spider frozen by residual magic. Time resumed. The spider scrambled backward, terrified.
Good.
She raised Nightbane. Mana flooded her channels—not a trickle, but a torrent. The crystal ignited, painting the cavern gold and crimson.
She had never cast an offensive spell in her life. Clerics did not. But Nozomi was no longer a cleric.
"Longinus," she whispered.