The world was ending.
Or rather, a small piece of it was — Dungeon Gate Seventeen, a Grade 6 rift that had swallowed three city blocks of Valdenmere before the Hunter Guilds managed to contain it. Inside, the final chamber roared with mana so dense it had turned the air violet. Ancient stone pillars collapsed in slow motion. The floor beneath Amaron Volg's boots cracked with every step, and the heat from a nearby mana explosion had already singed the left side of his face raw.
He barely felt it.
Around him, the battle moved at a scale that made individual men look like insects. Twelve A-rank Hunters formed a perimeter along the chamber's outer ring, their combined mana barriers flickering under the assault of a Rift Sovereign — a monster that should not have existed at this depth, something the Guild analysts had called a statistical impossibility right up until it tore through their first response team.
In the center of it all, Elian Solhart fought.
He always did.
Amaron watched him from his position near the eastern pillar — half-crouched, unremarkable, a C-rank support Hunter whose only assigned task had been to monitor the mana pressure readings on the outer wall and report back if they exceeded threshold seven. They had exceeded threshold seven forty minutes ago. Amaron had filed the report. No one had responded. By then, everyone was already looking at Elian.
They always were.
— ◆ —
The Rift Sovereign screamed — a sound less heard than felt, a vibration that turned Amaron's teeth to glass and his thoughts to static. He pressed his back against the pillar and waited for the shockwave to pass. Dust rained from the ceiling. Somewhere behind him, a Hunter he didn't know the name of was shouting coordinates into a communication crystal. Somewhere ahead, Elian's mana signature blazed white-gold and impossible, the kind of power that made the air itself lean toward it.
A section of the ceiling gave way.
Not near Elian. Not near the perimeter Hunters. Near the eastern pillar, where the support staff had been stationed, where the analysts and the low-rank monitors and the people whose names didn't appear in Guild highlights were doing their invisible work.
Amaron had one second to register the sound — a low, grinding crack that was somehow worse than all the roaring — before twenty tons of stone came down.
He moved. Not fast enough. Never fast enough.
The impact was not dramatic. There was no final flash of his life. No profound last thought. The stone caught him along his right side and drove him into the ground, and the pain was extraordinary and brief, and then it was just the weight — immovable, indifferent, the way the world had always treated him.
— ◆ —
From where he lay, pinned and fading, he could still see the center of the chamber.
Elian Solhart drove his blade through the Rift Sovereign's core. The monster dissolved in a cascade of light that was genuinely beautiful, the kind of image that would appear in newspapers and Guild archives and the memories of everyone who survived this day. The surviving Hunters cheered. Someone was already crying. Someone else was already composing the report that would credit twelve names, in descending order of rank.
Amaron's name was not among them.
It never had been.
He had been in thirty-one dungeons over nine years of Hunter work. He had carried supplies, maintained barriers, filed reports, monitored equipment, and on six separate occasions quietly redirected a situation that would have gotten someone important killed — without anyone noticing the redirect. He had been background. He had been furniture. He had been the kind of person that a room full of people could look directly at and still not see.
He had told himself it was fine. That it was enough to contribute, even invisibly. That not every person needed to be Elian Solhart.
Lying under a collapsed ceiling in a chamber no one would search thoroughly because everyone who mattered had already survived, Amaron Volg decided that he had been wrong about that.
It isn't enough,
he thought, as the violet light faded and the cheering grew distant and the weight became everything.
It was never enough.
I should have been more.
Then there was nothing