Chapter 1: Betrayal and a System Reboot
The stench of burning flesh filled his lungs. The agonizing pain of a magic blade piercing his heart still tore at his chest.
"I'm sorry, Elias, but there aren't enough resources for all of us. Your sacrifice for our guild will not be forgotten." Those were the last words he heard from the Guild Leader he had trusted, right before they left him bound in front of the Dragon of Ruin to die.
Elias gasped violently and his eyes snapped open. He expected to breathe in ash and blood, but instead, his lungs filled with the rich scent of roasted coffee beans.
He looked around in pure shock. He wasn't in the dragon's lair. He was sitting in a quiet cafe. Soft jazz played in the background, and university students were laughing at the nearby tables.
He looked down at his hands. They were smooth, completely free of the gruesome scars he had earned over a decade of brutal combat. With trembling fingers, he pulled his phone from his pocket and stared at the glowing screen:
[Wednesday, April 15, 2019]
His pupils shrank. "I returned? I regressed ten years into the past? To the exact day it all began!"
Before he could even process the shock, the ground shuddered violently, knocking coffee mugs off the tables. The clear blue sky outside the window instantly warped into a sickly, blood-red hue. Deafening sirens began to wail across the city, followed by the terrifying sound of space tearing open right above the plaza across the street.
The first 'Gate' had opened.
Screams erupted. People scrambled in absolute terror as hideous, green-skinned monsters wielding wooden clubs—Orcs—leaped out of the portal and began smashing into cars.
Everyone was running for their lives. Everyone except one person.
Elias stood up calmly. There wasn't a single ounce of fear in his eyes; only the cold, dead gaze of a man who had lived in hell for ten years. He kicked a nearby cafe table, cleanly breaking off one of the sharp wooden legs, and picked it up.
"In my past life, I was kind and naive, and my reward was a knife in the back," Elias whispered to himself. He walked against the tide of fleeing civilians, heading straight toward a massive Orc that was about to swing its club at a fallen girl.
The monster roared and lunged at him.
With the ingrained reflexes of a veteran S-rank fighter, Elias ducked smoothly under the clumsy swing. Without wasting a millisecond, he drove the jagged wooden table leg upward, burying it deep into the Orc's thick neck.
A fountain of black blood sprayed across the pavement, and the massive beast collapsed dead in a single second.
In that exact moment, a cold, mechanical voice rang inside his head, and a translucent blue screen materialized before his eyes:
[Global System Alert!] [You have slain a creature from another dimension. Initiating the Awakening System...] [Error... Player possesses memories that do not match the current timeline.] [Compensating for timeline anomaly. Granting Unique Hidden Class...]
> Status Window <
Name: Elias
Level: 1
Class: Absolute Necromancer
Active Skill: [Shadow Extraction - Level 1]
Elias looked down at the dead Orc. Dark, blue-black smoke was slowly seeping out of the corpse, swirling and shifting as if trying to form the shape of a shadowy beast.
A final, red-tinted message flashed before his eyes: [A soul has been detected. Would you like to extract the shadow? (Yes / No)]
Elias let out a low, dark chuckle. A predatory smile spread across his face as he spoke his very first command as the monarch of death:
"Arise."