Chapter 55: Darkness

Chapter 55: Chapter 55: Darkness

*Friday morning*

For most prisoners, one morning underground was indistinguishable from the last. For Liora, the past few weeks had finally given them some shape.

She woke before the scheduled meal, same as always, and sat on the edge of her bed staring blankly at the wall for a few seconds before she remembered.

A smile crossed her face, and she got up fast, hair still a mess despite trying to fix it, nearly tripping over the edge of her own blanket, catching herself against the wall and glancing around like someone might have seen.

Nobody had. She let out a relieved breath.

She’d always been like this. Timid and a little clumsy.

She’d never been particularly good with people, and there was probably a reason for that. She’d never really had a family to learn it from.

---

Liora had been four when her world ended, during a rift-clearance operation that spiraled into complete catastrophe.

The rift stayed open three hours past its projected threshold, and a tide of low-tier trench-crawlers spilled into the residential district before the Association could react.

Her parents were unawakened, ordinary office workers. When the air outside turned black and the sirens began their erratic wail, they knew within seconds that their second-floor apartment was nothing more than matchwood against what was tearing down the street.

There was no time to pack, no time to run.

​In a panic, her father opened the little closet at the end of the hall, piled blankets on the floor, and tucked her in.

Liora remembered the rough wool of his sweater scratching her cheek, his arms wrapping around her with a frantic, trembling tightness.

She remembered her mother’s hands on her face: cold, shaking, smelling faintly of lavender soap and the wet press of a kiss against her forehead.

"Don’t make a sound," her mother had whispered, her voice cracking as tears cut lines through her cheeks. "No matter what happens out there, Liora. Don’t come out."

The door clicked shut. The darkness that swallowed her was absolute.

Through the narrow slat in the wood, she watched a thin stripe of the living room. She remembered the sounds that followed, first the violent splintering of the front door, the deafening, guttural hiss of beasts crossing the threshold, and her father’s desperate scream as he swung a metal kitchen chair against armored hide.

She heard furniture overturning, plates shattering, her mother’s voice crying out, and the wet, sickening crunch of claws meeting flesh and bone.

She had jammed both fists into her mouth, biting her knuckles until they bled to keep from screaming, hot tears soaking into her collar as the floorboards vibrated beneath her knees.

Then, the violent thrashing slowed.

A heavy, dragging sound passed within inches of the closet door, accompanied by the foul, sulfurous stench of monster breath.

And then, silence.

A suffocating, empty quiet broken only by the crackle of distant fires and the steady drip of fluid onto the hallway floorboards.

She stayed wedged in that closet for sixteen hours. She didn’t sleep; she barely breathed, terrified that the slightest rustle of a blanket would bring the claws back.

By the time the Association’s clean-up vanguard broke through the ruined hallway, their boots crunching over debris and blood-slick tile, the entire block had been reduced to a smoking graveyard.

A flashlight beam caught the closet slats, and an armored hand pried the door open.

Her parents were carried out in black tactical body bags, their faces covered, while Liora was hauled out into the blinding gray dawn, wrapped in an emergency blanket.

She didn’t remember the ambulance ride.

She didn’t remember the sterile Association processing depot, the endless signatures on transfer papers, or the long drive out of the sector.

She only remembered waking up in a drafty dormitory smelling of bleach and cold stew, surrounded by forty other silent children with hollow, staring eyes.

Over the years, the sharper edges of her childhood faded. She forgot the sound of her father’s laugh. She forgot the shape of her mother’s smile.

All that remained was the phantom scent of lavender, the suffocating terror of a locked wooden door, and the cold reality of growing up without ever knowing what it felt like to be loved.

---

The orphanage became her whole world, and it was there she met the first person who ever really mattered to her: Elise, only a few months older, who acted like her protector from the start.

When Liora dropped something, Elise picked it up. When she froze around strangers, Elise spoke for her. When she was alone, Elise pulled her into whatever game the other kids were playing, and that was how Liora found the thing that would end up saving her sanity years later.

She didn’t understand games at first. Then she got obsessed. The two of them spent hours trading an old donated handheld back and forth, Elise teaching her everything, until Liora got better and eventually the two of them were beating every other kid in the building.

It was just the two of them for a long time, no other orphans close enough in age to really count as more than roommates.

Liora and Elise ate together, studied together, and mostly kept to themselves until they awakened at fifteen, within weeks of each other.

The Association couldn’t identify Liora’s affinity.

They tested her over and over, no elemental signature, no identifiable attribute, nothing that matched anything on record.

Her mana proficiency was strong regardless; her body got noticeably stronger whenever she circulated it, faster, tougher, more enduring.

Eventually someone gave her the simplest available answer: maybe she just didn’t have an elemental affinity at all. Some awakened only ever got basic reinforcement, and that wasn’t unheard of.

She accepted it and didn’t think about it much.

She had Elise. She had her games.

The rest of them came later, once she and Elise entered the Hero Academy together. That was where the group actually formed, eighteen more students who fell in around them over the years, drawn together through shared classes and training exercises until the crowd of them became inseparable, eating together, studying together, training together, turning into something like a family without either of them planning it.

They trained together, laughed together, fought together for years, and when graduation finally came, fifteen of them decided to make it official and formed a proper raiding team, Elise at the head of it: five B-ranks, ten C-ranks, clearing gates together, sometimes struggling, sometimes coming home covered in monster blood and laughing about it anyway.

It wasn’t an extraordinary life. But it had been hers.