Chapter 44: Good Luck, Chosen One

There were far fewer people in the park than there had been that morning. A few people walked their dogs beneath the lamps illuminating the paths, while an elderly man sitting on a distant bench stared at his phone.

I had returned to the same park where I ran with my angel every morning. Training for a few hours before going to sleep seemed like a good way to calm down and improve my stats at the same time.

Thanks to White Snake, I didn’t need quite as much sleep anymore.

Though sleeping was still one of my three favorite things in life...

The cool air against my face slowly eased the anger caused by my defeats against Caramel. Even so, whenever I closed my eyes, seeing the words Perfect Victory was enough to make my nerves tense all over again.

Six matches...

Twelve rounds...

I hadn’t won a single one.

"I need to stop thinking about it..."

I sat on a bench in one of the park’s quieter sections and leaned my head back. After watching the night sky through the branches for a while, I opened the System screen.

The Four-Star Mystery Card was still waiting in my inventory, purple light glowing around its edges.

I had reached one thousand followers to earn this reward. The card before me was valuable enough to make me forget all my frustration.

"System, I want to use the Four-Star Mystery Card."

A new notification appeared before my eyes.

[Use the Four-Star Mystery Card?]

[Yes / No]

I selected yes without hesitation.

The world around me instantly fell silent.

The lights from the park lamps froze, and the leaves stopped in the middle of the wind. A white glow covered my vision as my body lifted from the bench and was pulled into a weightless void.

When I opened my eyes again, I found myself in the same endless darkness I had seen during my previous card selections.

Thousands of cards in different colors and sizes floated around me. Some gave off faint light, while others shone like stars in the darkness. The symbols on their backs changed whenever I tried to study them.

There was no ground beneath my feet, yet I didn’t fall. My body drifted slowly between the cards, and no matter how far I looked, I couldn’t see the end of this strange space.

A four-star card...

I believed I would receive something valuable no matter which one I chose. Perhaps I would finally gain a genuine combat ability or obtain enough power to begin closing the gap between myself and Nexus users.

With that thought in mind, I drifted between the cards and examined as many options as possible.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t see the front of any of them.

Their backs displayed only four bright stars and complicated symbols whose meanings I couldn’t understand.

After a while, a dark gray card floating slightly apart from the others caught my attention. Purple light moved around its edges, while the symbol on its back pulsed at regular intervals like a heartbeat.

For some reason, I felt drawn toward it.

"I hope you’re something useful."

The moment I reached out and touched it, every card floating around me stopped.

The card between my fingers turned and showed me its front. At first, I saw nothing but an empty black surface.

Then blood-red letters began forming across it.

[OVERLAP]

My eyes widened.

"Wait..."

I tried to open my fingers and release the card, but my hand refused to move. The red letters grew brighter as darkness poured from the card, spreading from my wrist until it covered my entire arm.

NO!

NO!

NO!

"I DON’T WANT TO CHOOSE THIS!"

It was already too late.

The endless darkness shattered, and an invisible force threw my body backward. The cards, lights, and empty space around me collapsed into a single point before disappearing.

The next moment, I was sitting on the same bench in the park.

I dragged a sharp breath into my lungs.

Cold sweat covered my body as my fingers began trembling uncontrollably. My heart pounded as though it wanted to break through my ribs, and my breathing grew more uneven with every second.

A new System notification appeared before my eyes.

[Overlap created.]

[New Mission: Clear the Overlap]

[Reward: XXX]

[Good luck, Chosen One!]

"What have I done?!"

The words disappeared a few seconds later, but I still couldn’t move.

The world around me changed a little more with every passing second. The park lights first grew dim, then their metal poles rusted, bent, and went completely dark.

The nearby apartment buildings vanished into the darkness. In their place appeared the silhouettes of ruined stone structures surrounded by dense trees. Old houses with collapsed roofs, walls half-buried beneath the soil, and shattered windows pierced by tree roots emerged within seconds.

It looked as though a settlement abandoned long ago had been swallowed by the forest and suddenly placed before me.

The ground beneath my feet cracked, its broken pieces sinking into black soil. In its place appeared an ancient road paved with neatly cut stones. The equal gaps between them made it obvious that this wasn’t a natural formation but a road made by human hands.

A thin layer of ice rapidly spread across the stones until it covered the entire path. The road remained visible beneath the ice as it stretched deeper into the forest and split in several directions among the ruins.

The surrounding trees continued changing as well. Their leaves lost their color and fell away while the trunks lengthened and bent. Dry branches tangled together overhead, blocking most of the sky.

Some trees had grown from inside the ruins. Their thick roots had torn through stone walls and spread across the roads.

Within seconds, the temperature dropped low enough to turn my breath into white mist.

A scream rose in the distance.

It began like the voice of a human, but the longer it continued, the deeper and rougher it became until it transformed into the roar of a wild beast. The sound echoed through the forest and between the ruined buildings, making it impossible to tell where it had come from.

My shoulders began trembling.

Ever since arriving in this world, I had ignored the dangerous side of everything around me.

Until now, I had spent my time playing games, streaming, trying to flirt with the cute girls I met, and completing the System’s simple missions. Doing a few push-ups, running through the park, and fighting virtual monsters on stream had made it easy to treat everything like a game.

The System showed me missions, stats, and cards. Because of that, I had begun thinking of my new life as a game in which I was developing a character.

But having stats didn’t make me strong.

My Strength, Agility, and Endurance had increased slightly, yet they were still worthless compared to those of trained Nexus users. I had no real combat experience and didn’t possess an actual Nexus.

Worse, I didn’t even know the level of the Overlap I had created.

Would I encounter a few low-level monsters, or had I fallen into the territory of something capable of tearing me apart the moment it noticed me?

I didn’t know how to escape, how far I needed to travel, or whether anyone else had been trapped inside with me.

For the first time, I truly understood what kind of life I had fallen into.

Nexus users in this world weren’t merely celebrities who displayed their powers in public. Overlaps opened, monsters emerged from them, and unprepared people genuinely died.

The reports of missing people and destroyed regions I had read online weren’t merely numbers on a screen.

Now I was standing in the middle of the same thing.

There was no option to respawn here. If a monster killed me, I wouldn’t wake up in front of my computer, start another match, and correct my mistakes.

I buried my hands in my hair and lowered my head.

"I’m not ready for this..."