Silas felt something drag a part of his soul backward through something that had no name and no shape.
"Wha..."
The word formed and dissolved as silence swallowed it.
Then memories came pouring in all at once, like someone had cracked open his skull and poured ten years worth of memories in through the top.
He saw the Nihil War, like he was there to experience the enormity of it all once again. The sky splitting open above Sector Seven. Like reality was fabric and something on the other side had gotten impatient. Through it poured creatures that had no names yet. Things that moved with ravenous hunger.
He saw himself, looking younger and thinner, wearing a jacket that hadn't been reinforced yet because reinforcement cost credits he didn't have. He was running quite pathetically for a ranker. The way a person runs when the thing behind them is faster than they are and they know it.
Silas had a mere C-Rank talent, Skill Resonance. It basically allows limited amplification of existing skills.
That word "limited" had followed him for a decade. He'd been rejected from every guild he applied for. Their verdict was he was too average and unimpressive. Some C-rank talents like him weren't worth the resources.
He survived anyway. Alone, mostly. In the gaps where the guilds didn't bother to look.
There he met his first real partner, Cael, who died in the third year when a dungeon boss evolved mid-raid and none of them were fast enough to adapt to the situation.
Yuna was also one of his partners. She was a healer who had pulled him out of a collapsed dungeon at the cost of everything she had left. She died six months later. Her talent burned out entirely. She didn't last a week after that.
He remembered himself standing over both of their graves, if you could call cracked earth and a stuck-in weapon a grave, and deciding something. "I will outlast this."
He had. He'd outlasted everything, until today.
The memories kept coming. The Gods of Sin descending, an unfortunate day for humanity. That day the sky had been fractured and the next day they were simply there, seven colossal presences that made the world go quiet in a radius of dozens of kilometers.
They were the Gods of Wrath. Greed. Envy. Lust. Pride. Sloth. Gluttony.
Seven disasters. Seven deadly sins given names and shapes.
The Gods of Virtue had come after in hopes of protecting humanity, or so we thought. They arrived faster than expected, or maybe the same speed but the damage was already done by then.
The Nihil War as a result of that wasn't a battle as anyone would think. It was just the act of a hammer striking earth and watching it finally shatter. Humanity had gotten caught in the middle of a battle of the Gods. Like they always did.
"Not… again…" The words came out from his mouth subconsciously.
The pull intensified and his mind stretched like taffy pulled too far or something that would snap if the tension got any higher. He felt the edges of himself; the memories, the anger, the long cold patience he'd built over ten years, all of it pulling apart, threatening to scatter.
"I won't... I won't die like this again."
The pull snapped finally and everything went black.