Chapter 301: I’ll Pay You Back

Cold stone pressed against my cheek. The ambient air smelled of damp earth, stale ozone, and the faint, bitter tang of old blood.

I slowly pushed myself up onto one hand, my brow furrowing as my eyes adjusted to the dim light. I wasn't on the shattered landing of the lecture hall, neither in Yuki's star-draped void either.

I was lying on the floor of a cavernous, ancient stone corridor. Luminescent violet moss clung to the rough-hewn walls, casting a sickly, flickering glow over the subterranean passage.

A dungeon?

My mind began to run.

How long had I been out? Days? Weeks? Months?

I sat back against the cavern wall and closed my eyes, taking a deep breath to run a full diagnostic on my body. Expecting the agonizing, bone-crushing neural backlash that usually followed my System overrides, I was surprised to find nothing. The burning headache was completely gone.

Instead, a steady, roaring furnace hummed in my chest.

My mana core had expanded dramatically, denser, clearer, and far more refined. The mana pathways throughout my nervous system felt widened and reinforced, capable of handling twice the voltage without tearing.

More than the physical upgrade, though, was the fundamental shift in how I perceived the world.

The Debugger interface was no longer just a set of floating blue windows I summoned with my mind. It felt integrated into my very consciousness. I could feel the invisible code strings running through the stone, the ambient mana currents, and the spatial coordinates of the dungeon itself. The raw architecture of the world felt malleable, closer to my fingertips than ever before.

A sleek, updated translucent overlay materialized in my field of vision:

[STATUS]

Name: Jin Raith

Age: 18

Class: Debugger

Level: 48

EXP: 0/49,900

Rank: S

MC (Mana Capacity): 600/12,300

Affinity: Dark Lightning

HP: 45,100/45,100

MP: 17,500/17,500 (7000 + 10500)

STR: 145

VIT: 145

AGI: 144

INT: 200

WIS: 200

LUK: 169

Allocation Points: 0

Skills:

-Active: Light Orb, Alchemy (Intermediate), Debug Vision, Rolling Thunder, Void Thunder, Spatial Strike [New!]

-Passive: Poison Resistance (100%), Social Engineering, Iron Will, Mana Reservoir, Combat Analysis

-Combat: Orthodox Fang (Mastered), Lightning Fang (Proficiency: Mastered)

-Administrator Mode: [Unlocked]

----

I stared at the numbers for a long moment. My stats had increased very much, and my MP pool was massive compared to where I started.

I reached to my side. Oathstorm was lying beside me on the stone. I picked up the blade, sheathing it at my waist with a familiar, comforting click.

Standing up, I brushed the dust from my doublet and looked down the long, winding tunnel. The passageway sloped downward into deeper darkness, where the scent of rotting meat grew stronger.

"Time to find a way out," I murmured, stepping into the shadow of the corridor.

I moved silently along the rough stone wall, my boots making no sound against the damp gravel. My enhanced senses picked up the faint, rhythmic scraping of claws against stone before I even rounded the bend.

Thirty yards ahead, a pack of five high-tier dungeon beasts, massive, eight-legged arachnid monstrosities covered in razor-sharp bone armor, were huddled over a fresh carcass.

In the past, taking down five high-tier beasts at once would have required careful positioning, heavy mana expenditure, and tactical maneuverability.

Now, I didn't even draw Oathstorm.

I simply raised my right hand, extending my fingers. Through my Code Intuition, five bright red structural fault lines opened up across the bodies of the beasts in my sight.

[System Command: Deploy Localized Structural Erasure.]

I snapped my fingers.

FZZZT!

There was no deafening thunderclap. Five micro-threads of pitch-black lightning flickered from my fingertips, striking the red fault lines on the monsters with terrifying precision.

The black electricity didn't just shock them, it completely unraveled their physical structure. The five massive beasts didn't even get the chance to screech. Their bone armor turned to grey dust mid-stride, their bodies collapsing into piles of harmless ash before their remains hit the floor.

I lowered my hand, looking at my palm in quiet satisfaction. Zero strain. Pure efficiency.

Before I could take another step forward, the ground beneath my feet violently shuddered.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The walls of the cavern cracked as heavy, coordinated footsteps echoed from the far end of the tunnel. The violet moss along the ceiling withered and died as a wave of thick, suffocating corrupt mana poured into the corridor.

From the shadows, dozens upon dozens of beast monsters poured into the passage, filling the width of the hall entirely.

And walking right in the center of the horde, flanked by two armored executioners, was a tall, horned demon commander. He wore obsidian plate armor wrapped in dark, cackling flames, and his burning crimson eyes locked straight onto me.

"Well, well..." the demon commander purred, his guttural voice vibrating the stone. "A lone rat wandering the lower depths. Feast on him, boys."

The horde of monsters snarled, surging forward like a black tide.

I looked at the demon, then at the horde, memories of the fallen Academy, Sira's bleeding body, and the burning sky rushing back into my mind with white-hot clarity.

My hands tightened into fists, dark lightning crackling wildly across my knuckles as my eyes burned with pitch-black static.

I gritted my teeth, a dangerous, cold smile cutting across my face.

"I will pay back your kind tenfold!"

---

The wave of beasts surged down the narrow stone passage, a roaring mass of claws, bone armor, and snapping jaws.

I didn't step back. I drew Oathstorm with a clean, metallic hissed ring.

My mana core roared to life, pushing dense, dark lightning down my arms and into the steel. The blade hummed, enveloped in a crackling, pitch-black aura that distorted the air around it.

[Active Skill: Dark Lightning — Spatial Strike!]

I swung the blade in a wide, sweeping crescent.

Instead of a single arc of lightning, ripples of black static tore through the physical fabric of the corridor. The leading wave of monsters didn't just get sliced, they were atomized mid-stride. The spatial arcs zipped through the flesh and bone of thirty beasts in a split second, reducing the vanguard to a falling shower of ash and black blood.

The remaining beasts hesitated for a fraction of a second, but I was already moving. I blurred into the middle of their ranks, Oathstorm turning into a whirling vortex of dark lightning. Every thrust severed a spinal column; every horizontal slash cleaved through heads and limbs. Within less than a minute, the entire hallway was dead silent, littered with disintegrating carcasses.

Through the settling mist of black blood, the demon commander stepped over the piles of ash.

He didn't look bothered by the massacre of his vanguard. A cruel, jagged smirk split his grey face as he unslung a massive, double-handed executioner's blade from his back. The steel flared with sickly, dark crimson flames that hissed against the damp stone floor.

"Not bad for a human rat," the demon rumbled, his crimson eyes gleaming with cold excitement. "Let's see if your flesh burns as easily."

Before his sentence even echoed off the walls, he disappeared.

CRACK!

The speed was terrifying. He reappeared directly above me, bringing the flaming executioner's sword down in a brutal, vertical cleave designed to bisect me from head to toe.

I brought Oathstorm up horizontally to parry.

BOOM!

The force of the impact felt like a falling meteor. The stone beneath my boots shattered into powder, and my knees buckled slightly under the sheer physical weight of his blow. The dark flames clinging to his blade flared outward, washing over my arms and chest.

AGH!

The corrupt heat bit straight through my leather doublet, searing the skin along my left ribs. The dark mana burned like liquid acid, making my breath hitch in pain.

"Struggling already?" the demon mocked, pressing down harder with his massive sword, his crimson flames threatening to engulf my face.

"Not even close," I gritted out.

[Code Intuition — ACTIVATE!]

The world slowed to a crawl. The demon's body turned into a structural schematic, flashing lines of red code highlighting his posture, force distribution, and mana pathways. I instantly spotted the flaw: to maintain that much raw physical output, his chest plate's mana core buffer had to vent heat every three seconds.

A tiny red fault line flickered right beneath his sternum.

[System Command: Deploy Localized Force Vector Shift!]

I didn't try to overpower his sword. I altered the friction beneath his right boot.

The demon's foot subtly slipped half an inch on the damp stone. His balance broke for a microsecond, and that was all the opening I needed.

I deflected his massive blade to the side, ducked beneath his guard, and drove the point of Oathstorm straight into the fault line beneath his sternum.

"What—?!" the demon gasped.

"This is for the Academy," I growled, flooding every drop of my dark lightning core directly into his internal pathways through the tip of my blade.

[Dark Lightning: Spatial Strike — Point Blank!]

THWACK-BOOM!

A localized sphere of black lightning exploded directly inside his chest cavity. The demon's eyes went wide with pure shock as pitch-black static tore through his organs, bursting outward from his back in a violent spray of dark energy and shattered obsidian armor.

He didn't even get to scream. The executioner's blade clattered uselessly to the stone, and the demon commander collapsed into a lifeless, smoking heap at my feet before dissolving into black dust.

I stood there for a moment, chest heaving, holding my left side where the dark flames had scorched my ribs. The wound stung like hell, but my high Vitality was already beginning to clot the blood and dull the pain.

"One down..." I muttered, wiping a smear of soot and blood from my forehead with the back of my sleeve.

I picked up Oathstorm, sheathed it at my waist, and turned toward the far end of the passage where a faint, natural light was peeking through the subterranean gloom.

I walked up the long, sloping stone incline, my boots echoing softly in the quiet tunnel. The air grew fresher, or at least, it should have. But as I drew closer to the cavern exit, the air smelled less like fresh mountain wind and more like burning copper, sulfur, and ancient rot.

I stepped out from the shadowed mouth of the dungeon cave, taking my first step into the open world after my long slumber.

And then I froze.

The breath completely caught in my throat. My hand rested limply on Oathstorm's hilt as I stared up into the open sky.

There was no blue. There were no golden rays of sunlight.

The entire sky, stretching from horizon to horizon as far as my eyes could see, was a suffocating, apocalyptic canopy of bleeding crimson and bruised violet. Massive, jagged rifts hung open in the atmosphere, tearing through the clouds like open wounds, crackling with dark, chaotic lightning.

Down below, the distant rolling hills and forests were reduced to smoldering, blackened husks, dotted with distant plumes of dark smoke rising into the blood-red air.

The world hadn't just been attacked while I was asleep.

It had already fallen into absolute ruin.