The jagged, wheezing laughter echoing across the endless plain suddenly choked to a halt.
Lucien's fingers, slick with his own blood from clawing at the indestructible mountain, dug into the dirt. The fractured pieces of his mind, scattered across a million years of absolute isolation, ground together with a violent spark of lucidity. The sheer absurdity of his endless suffering suddenly outweighed the madness.
He slowly raised his head, staring into the soul-piercing darkness.
"What the fuck is going on?" he rasped. His voice sounded alien to his own ears—dry, cracked, and completely devoid of the stoicism he once held so tightly.
Before the echo of his curse could fade, the universe finally answered.
The impenetrable darkness directly in front of him tore open. A beam of light, so absolute and blindingly pure that it felt like a physical blow, slammed into the barren earth. Lucien shielded his eyes, his pupils screaming after an eternity of gloom.
From the center of the pillar of light, a figure stepped forward. It was a man, or at least the rough shape of one. He was a perfect, featureless white silhouette, devoid of eyes, a mouth, or clothing. He radiated a casual, laid-back aura that violently clashed with the oppressive dread of the void.
The silhouette stretched its arms above its head, letting out a synthetic, yawning sound, before looking down at Lucien's broken, bloody form.
"Yo, Kid," the faceless man said, his voice echoing with an infuriatingly playful bounce. He rubbed the back of his featureless head. "Man... I totally forgot I threw you in here."
Lucien simply stared, his brain struggling to process the entity in front of him.
"Look, don't get mad," the silhouette continued, waving a glowing white hand dismissively. "This right here? It's just a record of myself I left behind... What, two days ago? Let me check the timestamps." The man paused, tapping an invisible watch on his wrist. "Ah. Yikes. Right. Time dilation. It's been a million years for you, hasn't it?"
Lucien's breath hitched. A million years. A million years of madness, of clawing at the walls of reality, of losing the memory of his own mother's face.
"My bad," the silhouette chuckled, a sound entirely devoid of actual guilt. "See, a million of your years ago, I got incredibly bored looking over this place. Welcome to the Grayverse, by the way. Anyway, I decided I was going to take a nap. But before I did, I figured I should probably pick a successor. I grabbed you, tossed you in the lobby, and then just... went to sleep. Completely forgot to leave the tutorial on. Whoops."
The entity walked closer, crouching down so its blank, glowing face was level with Lucien's hollow, bloodshot eyes. The playful demeanor shifted, just slightly, the air around them growing heavy.
"Now that you're awake—barely—I should probably tell you how to survive this place. But first, let's burst that little bubble of yours."
The silhouette leaned in.
"You were told you were special back in your world, weren't you? A genius. A prodigy. Let me give you the hard truth, Kid. You are the most painfully, agonizingly ordinary human being in existence. There is no supreme bloodline running through your veins. No cosmic destiny written in the stars. Your Essence? Garbage. Your soul? Completely average."
The words struck Lucien like physical blows. Everything he had built his pride upon, the very foundation of his identity, was being dismantled by a glowing anomaly who couldn't even remember putting him in hell.
"But," the silhouette said, holding up a single, glowing finger. "You are my successor for a reason. You have three undeniable features. Three things that absolutely any normal human back on your dirt-ball planet could achieve if they actually set their minds to it. The funny thing is, none of them ever have. They're too lazy. You, however, took mortal traits and pushed them to the absolute extreme."
The silhouette stood up, its voice resonating through the entirety of the Grayverse.
"One: Observation."
"Two: Calculation."
"Three: Application."
The faceless man crossed his arms, looking down at the broken mortal at his feet.
"Observation. Calculation. Application. That is how a painfully ordinary human survives the Grayverse. Now get up, Kid. The nap is over."
"You have got to be fucking kidding me."
The words scraped out of Lucien's throat, raw and trembling. He stared at the glowing silhouette, his chest heaving as the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of his existence crashed down on him.
He had lost his mind in this void. He had dragged his fingernails across indestructible stone until the bones showed, over and over again, trapped in an endless cycle of instant regeneration and perpetual agony. He had spent eons pacing a dead, sterile realm, slowly descending into a rabid, pathetic animal state. He had begged the infinite silence for a reason. Most agonizing of all, he had allowed the memories of his mother—the only warmth he ever knew—to rot away into nothingness.
He had suffered all of that, lost everything that made him human, and endured a million years of solitary confinement.
Because someone took a nap.
A primal, suffocating rage clawed its way up his throat. It intertwined with a grief so profound it threatened to completely shatter whatever fragile pieces of his sanity had just stitched themselves back together. His blood boiled. The urge to scream, to tear this glowing, faceless entity to absolute shreds, consumed every fiber of his being. He dug his heels into the dirt, prepared to launch himself at the pillar of light, regardless of how useless the attack might be.
Before Lucien could even force his battered muscles to move, the silhouette waved a glowing, dismissive hand.
"As a recording, I can't interact with you," the white figure chimed, completely immune to the murderous, heartbreaking aura radiating from the broken boy at his feet. "But I'm pretty sure you're fuming right now. Well, kid, don't feel disheartened. I've already told you your core traits. If you know how to apply them, you can certainly leave this place."
Lucien froze, his teeth grinding together so hard he tasted fresh copper. The entity was already moving on. The blinding light surrounding the figure began to pulse and shift, signaling the end of the message.
The silhouette turned away, gazing up into the oppressive darkness of the Grayverse.
"As for what you'll call me," the entity said. The playful bounce vanished from his voice, replaced by a sudden, world-shaking authority that forced the very space around them to vibrate. "Just call me The King Of Freedom."