Chapter 94: End Of Mythical
The gate came apart behind him as he walked through it.
Not the standard collapse of a cleared dungeon, stone cracking from structural failure, and the gate’s energy dispersing upward in the familiar blue column.
The Divine Maze gate shattered outward, white fragments spinning into the air, and the light behind it was not blue but a flat, pure white that lasted for three seconds and then was gone, the gate and all its light erased as cleanly as the city inside had been. Kai paused before then saw the other lights for the sealed gates were fading.
He looked back once at the space where the gate had been. Nothing remained but a normal street.
He turned forward and kept walking.
...
The crowd had been there for hours.
No footage had come out of the Divine Maze.
Kai didn’t bring any recording device or try to livestream it. No system updates had reached anyone waiting outside. It became even worse when an hour after Kai had gone in, the gate didn’t open.
But then, when the gate shattered, nobody moved.
The white light faded. The dust and white fragments settled. A silence spread through the crowd. This one was different from waiting.
Then the dust shifted.
A silhouette appeared in it, walking forward, coming out of the dissipating light at a pace that was not urgent and not slow.
The figure resolved as the dust parted around it. Blood on the armor. Blood on the jacket beneath it. The Fractured Blade rested over one shoulder. A white mantle moving slightly behind, the material catching the city’s afternoon light.
He walked like he was taking a stroll through the park.
The crowd stared.
Nobody spoke for a full three seconds
Then someone near the front said, very quietly, "It’s him."
The person beside them said, "He actually did it."
A third voice, barely above a whisper: "Alone."
Every phone in the crowd came up simultaneously. Not pointed at the gate or at the sky or at the ranking boards. Pointed at Kai.
The livestreams that had been running for hours with nothing to show suddenly had the image they had been waiting for. The image went everywhere at the same moment, carried by every stream and broadcast that was still running in Mythal. And by every person in the crowd who had been holding a phone for the last three hours.
Nobody had been cheering yet. Then the ranking board above the main district was updated.
[Official City Rankings: Updated.]
[Rank 1]
[Kai Rosefield.]
[Class: Null.]
[Level: 52.]
[Dungeon Clears: 32.]
For a second, nobody screamed or moved. They all just stared.
Rank One.
The position that had only been held by Epic Class hunters! With the recent one being Raze, the strongest hunter. It now belonged to Kai Rosefield, a person with no class.
The crowd erupted.
All at once, the way pressure builds behind a door, and then the door opens. Some people were screaming, and some were grabbing the strangers beside them. Someone near the back of the crowd started crying and could not have said why.
Thousands of phones rose into the air at once. For a second, it looked like the city was holding up stars. The chanting started somewhere in the middle and spread outward in both directions until the whole district was saying his name.
Kai stopped walking.
The ranking board hung above the crowd.
Beyond it stretched the skyline of Mythal. No blue lights in it anymore, or Mythical gate structures bending the light in the wrong direction.
Just the noisy but intact city.
For weeks, every view of the city had included a blue light that illuminated the sky. It was a warning or said to be a countdown by many. But overall, it was a problem that needed to be solved by hunters.
And now it was solved, leaving only Mythal. Just the way it was before the system illuminated the remaining C-Rank dungeons.
He had almost forgotten what that looked like.
He exhaled slowly.
...
In the hospital room on the third floor, Raze was watching a livestream on his phone when the gate collapsed on the screen. He watched Kai walk out of the dust. He watched the crowd’s reaction and the ranking board update.
He was quiet for a long moment.
The nurse who had been checking his chart looked at his expression and said, "Apparently, he managed it."
Raze said, "He actually did it?"
"Apparently."
Raze laughed, one who was filled with joy and relief at another person’s victory. It was something he hadn’t felt in a long while. He put the phone down, looked at the ceiling, and kept laughing for a moment.
"Of course he did," Raze shook his head.
Then laughed again because somehow he wasn’t surprised at all.
...
Lily was holding her phone in both hands when the ranking updated.
She looked at Rank 1.
Then at the replay and then at Rank One again. For once, Lily Blue had no notes.
"I guess I should expect that jump?" Lily shook her head with a chuckle before leaning back onto her bed.
She continues looking at the footage of Kai walking out alone. She was quiet long enough that Elden, who was in the chair beside her bed with his own tablet, looked up.
"You knew he would clear it?" he said.
"I suspected," she said. "He always seemed like an exception to the rules."
"I can’t disagree," Elden says softly.
Lily laughed; it was similar to the laugh that had appeared in the plaza outside Hollow Sky. She looked at the ceiling for a moment.
"We need to hurry up and get better, so we can continue growing," she said.
She thought about Hollow Sky and Kai moving through the gravity-current collapse in ways her mind couldn’t account for. At that moment, she had understood that he was not finding answers faster than she.
He was acting before the answer existed.
"You don’t want to be left behind?" Elden asked.
"Of course, not." Lily clenched her fist and said. "This world may be crappy... But it gives the most interesting equations. I want to see it all."
Elden’s smile grew as he nodded in agreement.
Lily smiled at the footage once more and kept watching.
...
Mira saw the news from her hospital bed and threw both fists into the air.
Her body told her immediately why that was a mistake, and she gasped in pain. But then she let out a nervous chuckle as she lowered both arms carefully.
"Still worth it," she said to nobody.
The city was too.
She looked at the footage and saw Kai walking out of the dust. She thought about how she had to carry the team out of the Abyssal Clock tower. And the moment she had realized that getting everyone home was the goal, and not getting everyone home perfectly.
She looked at the ranking board.
Then she said, very clearly, "Yes, he deserved it" to the empty room, and meant it completely.
...
Leo was on the couch watching the livestream when the gate collapsed.
He sat forward and then forward more. Then he was standing without having decided to stand, watching the silhouette resolve in the dust on the screen, watching his brother walk out of it with the Fractured Blade over his shoulder and the white mantle behind him and the blood on his armor that meant it had been real, and he had gone through it anyway.
The ranking board has been updated.
Leo looked at it.
Then he turned and ran to the hallway. "MINA!"
Mina appeared from the kitchen, already looking at her phone. "I know," she said.
"Did you see the ranking?"
"I know."
"He’s rank one."
"Leo, I know."
Leo grabbed his phone and called Hana. The moment she picked up, he said, "My brother solo cleared Divine Maze."
A pause followed as Hana processed his words.
Then Hana screamed. Not a polite surprised sound. An actual scream, the kind that communicated complete emotional overwhelm. "HE SOLO CLEARED IT?! DAMN IT, LEO! YOUR BROTHER IS SO AWESOME!"
Leo was laughing. "Told you."
"I HAVE TO MEET HIM! Leo, I need to meet him. Is that possible? Can you make that happen?"
"Yeah," Leo said, and he was grinning. "I think it’s time."
He looked at Mina when he hung up. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, reading through a stream of messages on her phone with an expression that was equal parts proud and exhausted.
"How many?" Leo said.
"I stopped counting," Mina said. She looked at the livestream still running on the television. Kai on screen, the crowd around him, the ranking board visible behind everything. She watched for a moment.
Then she smiled, quiet and warm, the smile she had been carrying since the day the debt hit zero and had been carrying every day since.
"Great," she said. "Now he’s famous again."
...
The hospital room was quiet.
Sunlight came through the window at the angle that meant it was late afternoon. The monitor beside the bed ran its soft updates. The flowers on the windowsill had been replaced twice since she went under.
The eyes opened.
She blinked before glancing around at the ceiling first. Then the window. Then the empty chair beside the bed. Before finally looking at the notifications on her phone.
She read the first one.
Then the second.
Then she sat up, slowly, and read the full story. The Divine Maze dungeon was cleared by the new Rank 1, and it was done, solo.
The footage of Kai walking out of the collapsed gate alone with the Fractured Blade over his shoulder and blood on his jacket. She watched the clip once and then put the phone down and looked out the window at the city.
The celebration was visible even from here. She could see the crowd movement in the distant districts, the way the streets were full and moving. She could hear it faintly through the glass, cheering for a city that was no longer afraid.
She stretched one arm, winced, accepted the information her shoulder was providing, and looked back at the window.
"A bit slower than expected," she said, but then her smile grew. "I bet you showed off at the end."
Sera stared at where the Divine Maze gate used to be. "Nice work, partner."
...
In the emergency command room, Mayor Ko watched the final gate confirmation on the main screen. The footage of Kai walking out. The ranking update. The city’s reaction spread district by district as the news moved outward.
He looked at the screen for a long moment.
Everyone in the room had been awake for the better part of two days. The people at the monitoring stations were still staring in shock, disbelief, and awe.
Mayor Ko sat down.
He had not sat in the command room chair since the first Mythical gate appeared. He sat now and looked at the screen and let the weight of several weeks settle into the chair with him.
Mayor Ko looked around the room, and for the first time in weeks, nobody was waiting for bad news.
"Someone get me coffee," he said.
The room laughed; everyone had been holding back for so long, and now they could release it all.
...
Kai stopped in the middle of the street while the crowd cheered around him.
He blinked before trembling and feeling his body yelling at him. He inwardly chuckled as he felt tired, and his body wasn’t making it easy to push through it. In truth, he hadn’t rested at all; he did two Mythical gates back to back, one stab wound, and pushed himself in both dungeons.
His body was listing everything it owed. He stopped because the city was loud in a way it had not been loud since before the announcement. This wasn’t like the other celebrations and this one was real.
This was different.
The crowd was chanting his name, and it was the loudest he had ever heard his own name said by people he had never met, and after a moment, he understood that they were not just chanting his name.
They were celebrating the fact that the city existed to chant anything at all.
He thought about Mina saying don’t die and Leo saying go clear it and Sera’s empty chair and the flowers on the windowsill. He thought about the alternates. All four of them. Higher levels, better equipment, and cleaner paths through everything that had been difficult.
He looked at the city in front of him and he sighed, the city really was beautiful.
A little kid sitting on someone’s shoulders pointed at Kai and yelled. "THAT’S HIM!"
Like myths were real.
The chanting got louder. For the first time since the System arrived, nobody was looking at the sky.
Kai smiled.
Then he started walking again.
