The light didn't erase him.
Instead, it tore him apart and spat him out somewhere else.
Cael hit stone hard enough to drive the air from his lungs. Pain exploded through his shoulder and ribs. He gasped, curled on his side, trying to remember how to breathe. Cold seeped through his clothes from the rough floor. The air tasted of dust and decay and something else. Something old and wrong.
When his vision cleared, he found himself staring at darkness.
Not the darkness of night. This was deeper, absolute. The kind of darkness that pressed against your eyes and made you wonder if you'd gone blind. Cael scrambled to his feet, hands outstretched, trying to find a wall or doorway or anything. His palms met empty air. He spun, reaching in every direction, panic rising in his throat.
This can't be happening. This can't be real.
His fingers finally found stone. Damp and cold, covered in something that felt like moss or lichen. He traced along it, searching for an opening, a door, stairs, but the wall curved away into nothing. The floor beneath his feet was uneven, carved from living rock. Rough edges bit into his shoes.
"Hello?" His voice echoed strangely, swallowed by the vast emptiness around him. "Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me?"
Nothing answered. Of course nothing answered. The goddess had thrown him away like trash. No trial. No second chance. No mercy. Just gone. Discarded the moment she realized her summoning had pulled the wrong person. A flawed hero. A mistake that needed correcting.
Ten minutes. That's how long his new life had lasted. Ten minutes of hope, of thinking he'd finally escaped the grinding nightmare of Tokyo, of believing he could be something more than an exhausted wage slave dying at his desk. Ten minutes of actual joy, real excitement, the feeling that his life might actually matter for once. Before it all came crashing down around him.
And now he was here. Wherever here was. Alone in the dark with nothing but the clothes on his back and a class that everyone feared.
A faint glow appeared in his peripheral vision. Cael spun toward it and his stomach dropped. The system interface. It flickered weakly, barely visible in the oppressive dark. The same screen that had sealed his fate in the throne room.
He focused on it anyway, desperate for any information. Anything that might tell him where he was or how to survive.
Name: Cael
Age: 18
Class: Necromancer
Rank: F
Health: 87/100
Mana: 50/50
Status: Labyrinth Level 50
Level fifty.
No. No, no, no.
His legs nearly gave out. He'd heard of labyrinths in the light novels he used to read during his commute. Multi-level dungeons filled with increasingly powerful monsters. Adventurers started at level one and worked their way down as they grew stronger. Gaining experience. Improving their skills. Building up equipment and knowledge before facing greater challenges.
Level fifty was where veteran parties went to die. S-rank adventurers with decades of experience. Teams with legendary equipment and powerful synergies. They went to level fifty and sometimes didn't come back.
And the goddess had dropped him here at rank F with no equipment, no training, no understanding of his abilities beyond their names on a screen. She'd given him the happiest moment of his entire life and then ripped it away minutes later. Then she'd ripped him away too, dumping him in a tomb to die alone in the dark where no one would ever find his body.
I don't want to die again. Please, I don't want to die again.
The thought came desperate and small. He'd already died once. Felt his life end on a Tokyo street after nineteen hours at his desk, his body too exhausted to even register the truck before it hit. He'd thought that was it, thought he was done. The end of a wasted life spent making someone else rich. But then he'd been given hope. A second chance. A new world where magic was real and he could matter. Where he could actually live instead of just existing.
It had all been a lie. A cosmic joke. Here's everything you ever wanted, now watch it get torn away.
A sound echoed through the darkness. Clicking. Like claws on stone, rhythmic and purposeful. It came from everywhere and nowhere, bouncing off unseen walls until Cael couldn't tell which direction it originated from. The echo made it impossible to judge distance.
He pressed his back against the wall and tried to steady his breathing. His whole body shook. This wasn't fair. None of this was fair. He hadn't asked to be a necromancer. Hadn't asked to be summoned at all. They'd pulled him from death, given him hope, and then punished him for being the wrong kind of hero. For being flawed. For being a mistake.
The clicking stopped.
Silence pressed down, worse than the sound had been. Cael held his breath. Sweat ran down his back despite the cold. His eyes strained against the dark, trying to see something, anything. Trying to pierce the absolute blackness that surrounded him.
Please. Please, I just want to live. I just want one chance.
He'd wasted his first life making someone else rich. Sleeping three hours a night on a good week. Eating convenience store food at his desk because leaving for lunch meant falling behind. Never traveling. Never falling in love. Never doing anything except work until his body gave out and the company replaced him without a second thought. And his reward for dying that way was five minutes of hope followed by this. Followed by being thrown into a pit to die alone.
Green light bloomed in the distance. Two points of sickly luminescence, floating at head height. They moved toward him with deliberate purpose. Not wandering. Not searching. Moving directly toward him like they'd known exactly where he was the entire time.
Eyes.
"Stay back!" Cael's voice cracked. He raised his hands like that would do anything against whatever was coming. "I'm warning you! Stay back!"
The eyes accelerated. The clicking resumed, faster now, accompanied by a wet scraping sound that made his skin crawl. Something massive rushed toward him through the dark. He could hear its breathing now. Ragged and wet. The sound of something that shouldn't be alive.
Cael ran.
He couldn't see where he was going. His hands scraped along the wall, using it as a guide while his feet stumbled over uneven ground. Behind him, the clicking grew louder. Closer. Hot breath hit the back of his neck, reeking of rot and copper and death. The creature was playing with him. It could have caught him already.
Not like this. Please, not like this.
His foot caught on something. A rock or dip in the floor. Cael went down hard, rolling across stone that tore through his clothes and skinned his palms. He tried to get up but something heavy slammed into his back, driving him flat against the rough ground.
Pain exploded through his body. Claws dug into his shoulders, punching through skin and muscle like they were paper. Cael screamed. He thrashed, trying to throw off whatever had him pinned, but it was impossibly strong. The creature above him made a sound like grinding rocks, almost like laughter. Enjoying this.
I just wanted to live. I just wanted one chance to actually live.
Hot saliva dripped onto his neck. Those green eyes filled his vision as jaws opened wide, revealing rows of teeth like broken glass. He could see them now in the creature's own luminescence. Too many teeth. Too many angles. Nothing in nature should have a mouth like that.
This was it. He'd died once in Tokyo, been given ten minutes of hope, and now he'd die again in the dark at the bottom of the world. The happiest he'd ever felt in his entire life, ripped away before he could even understand it. Before he could use it. Twenty-six years and eighteen hours. That's all he got. That's all he'd ever get.
The jaws closed around his throat.
Cael felt his flesh tear. Blood poured hot down his chest, soaking his shirt. He tried to scream but couldn't draw air. The world tilted sideways. His vision darkened at the edges, narrowing to a tunnel of fading consciousness.
It's not fair. It's not fair. It's not—
The creature released him. He heard it feeding, felt claws rake across his chest opening him further, but the pain was distant now. Fading like everything else. Like the hope. Like the brief, shining moment when he'd thought his life could mean something more than spreadsheets and quarterly reports.
His vision went dark completely.
The system interface appeared one last time, floating in the void behind his eyes.
Health: 0/100
Status: Deceased
Then even that winked out, and Cael died in the darkness at the bottom of the world, alone and unmourned, his second chance at life lasting barely longer than it took to hope for one.