Darkness.
There was no sky.
No earth.
No wind.
No sound.
There was nothing that Luca could see, yet somehow the absence of everything felt heavier than any darkness he had ever experienced. It wasn’t the ordinary darkness of a room after the lights had been extinguished, nor was it the darkness of a moonless night where the faint outlines of the world could still be discovered by those patient enough to look.
This darkness had no depth.
It had no direction.
It had no beginning or end.
Luca couldn’t tell whether he was standing, lying down, or simply existing somewhere without a body at all.
For a long time, he did nothing.
He simply remained within it.
Then...
A thought appeared.
Am I dead?
The question seemed strangely distant.
He had expected something different.
Perhaps pain.
Perhaps fear.
Perhaps some grand sensation announcing the end of his life.
Instead...
There was nothing.
No pain.
No exhaustion.
No weight within his limbs.
No heartbeat.
No breath.
That realisation unsettled him more than the battlefield ever had.
Luca instinctively tried to breathe.
Nothing happened.
He tried moving his fingers.
There were no fingers.
He tried opening his eyes.
There were no eyes.
For the first time in his existence, Luca realised what it meant to have no body.
He wasn’t floating.
He wasn’t falling.
He wasn’t standing.
He simply existed.
A consciousness suspended within an endless absence.
So this is death.
The thought returned again.
This time, it carried a strange weight.
Luca had imagined death countless times.
As a player, he had seen his character die more times than he could remember. He had watched health bars disappear, seen defeat screens appear before him, and restarted countless battles after making mistakes.
Death had always been temporary.
A setback.
Something that could be reversed by pressing a button.
Even when he had encountered the possibility of death within this world, some part of him had always carried the unconscious certainty that he would somehow find a way around it.
But this...
This was different.
There was no interface.
No restart.
No menu.
No familiar world waiting behind a screen.
There was simply...
Nothing.
Luca remained silent for what might have been seconds or centuries.
Time had lost all meaning here.
Eventually, another thought surfaced.
I died.
There was no denying it anymore.
He remembered the battlefield.
The creature.
The final attack.
The feeling of his body becoming cold.
The sword slipping from his fingers.
The faces that had appeared before his consciousness faded.
Aurelia.
Kyle.
Aiden.
Seraphina.
Astra.
The Saintess.
His chest tightened despite the fact that he no longer possessed one.
Did they die too?
The question frightened him.
He had been so focused on surviving that final battle that he hadn’t thought about what would happen afterward.
What happened to the world?
What happened to the people he had met?
What happened to everyone he had promised to protect?
Luca’s consciousness sank deeper into the darkness.
For the first time since arriving in this world...
He felt completely powerless.
There was nothing he could fight.
Nothing he could dodge.
Nothing he could analyse.
Nothing he could control.
He couldn’t even tell whether he was moving.
He couldn’t even tell whether he still existed.
A strange emptiness began spreading through his thoughts.
Is this really all there is?
The question lingered.
After everything...
After all those battles...
After all those people...
After countless attempts to change the future...
Is this where it ends?
A faint bitterness appeared within his thoughts.
He had always believed that if he knew the future, he could change it.
That was the advantage he possessed.
The memories of countless playthroughs.
The knowledge of events that had not yet happened.
The awareness of dangers that others couldn’t see.
But perhaps...
He had misunderstood the meaning of that knowledge.
Maybe knowing the future had never meant he could control it.
Maybe every attempt to change the story had simply created another path toward the same ending.
The thought made him laugh silently.
A strange, hollow amusement.
How ironic.
He had spent so much time worrying about whether he was walking along the correct path.
And now...
There was no path left.
No future.
No choices.
No story.
Only darkness.
Yet as Luca remained within that darkness...
Something unexpected happened.
He began to remember.
Not the battlefield.
Not the pain.
But the small moments.
Aurelia leaning against his shoulder beneath the night sky.
Kyle laughing during their sparring session.
Aiden casually teasing him in the academy corridors.
Eric complaining about his exhaustion.
Seraphina scolding him while secretly worrying about him.
Astra calling him Papa through the communication crystal.
The Saintess smiling beside the lake.
The conversations.
The arguments.
The ridiculous situations.
The quiet evenings.
The moments that had never existed in the original story.
Those memories were different.
They weren’t part of a game anymore.
They were his.
For the first time, Luca understood something he had never properly acknowledged.
He hadn’t simply been changing the story.
He had been living.
Every choice had consequences.
Every person he met had become someone he cared about.
Every moment he had once considered insignificant had slowly become part of his own life.
His thoughts became quieter.
I don’t want to die.
The admission came without shame.
He didn’t want another playthrough.
He didn’t want another opportunity to optimise his decisions.
He didn’t want to return to the beginning and calculate everything again.
He simply wanted to go back.
To see them again.
To hear their voices.
To complain about another ridiculous mission.
To sit beneath the night sky.
To watch Astra grow up.
To see Aurelia achieve what she had always wanted.
To argue with Kyle.
To be scolded by Seraphina.
To speak with the Saintess.
He wanted...
To live.
The thought remained within the darkness.
And then Luca noticed something.
A faint sensation.
Almost imperceptible.
At first, he thought he had imagined it.
But it returned.
A warmth.
Tiny.
Distant.
Like the first spark of a dying flame.
Luca’s consciousness turned toward it.
For the first time since entering the darkness...
Something existed besides himself.
A faint golden glow appeared somewhere far away.
It was impossibly small compared to the endless darkness surrounding him.
Yet Luca couldn’t look away.
The golden light slowly pulsed.
Once.
Then again.
And with the second pulse...
Luca felt something he had thought he would never experience again.
A heartbeat.
His heartbeat.
His consciousness trembled.
The darkness around him began to shift.
And somewhere beyond the endless void...
Something whispered his name.
The golden light continued to pulse within the endless darkness, each faint radiance spreading through the void like ripples across an invisible sea. Luca could not understand where it came from, nor could he determine whether it was approaching him or whether he was somehow being drawn toward it, but for the first time since his death, he felt something other than emptiness.
Warmth.
It was faint at first, almost too delicate to perceive, yet it gradually became stronger with every pulse. The warmth touched his consciousness without burning it, surrounding him with a sensation that reminded him of something he could no longer clearly remember.
Life.
The thought appeared instinctively.
Is this... life?
The golden light pulsed again.
This time, the darkness trembled.
Luca felt something tugging at him, as though an invisible hand had reached into the endless void and seized whatever remained of his existence. He instinctively resisted, not because he wanted to remain within the darkness, but because he couldn’t understand what was happening.
Then the voices returned.
At first they were distant and distorted, buried beneath layers of darkness that prevented him from understanding their words.
But they became clearer.
Someone was calling him.
Not one voice.
Several.
Some were filled with fear.
Some with desperation.
Some with anger.
Some with relief.
And one...
One voice carried a warmth that Luca recognised immediately.
His consciousness trembled.
Aurelia...
Another voice followed.
"Luca!"
He tried to answer.
Nothing happened.
The golden light suddenly expanded.
The darkness around him cracked.
Not like glass.
Like a world breaking apart.
Countless golden fractures appeared across the void, spreading farther and farther until the endless darkness was covered by them. Through those cracks, Luca caught fleeting glimpses of things he could not understand.
The academy.
The forest.
The lake.
The Saintess.
Aurelia.
Astra.
Kyle.
All of them appeared for only an instant before disappearing again.
His thoughts became frantic.
Wait.
Don’t disappear.
I’m here.
He tried reaching toward them.
But he had no hands.
No body.
Nothing with which to reach.
The golden light suddenly became blinding.
Luca felt something slam into his consciousness.
Pain returned.
Real pain.
Sharp and overwhelming.
For the first time since dying, he could feel something pressing against him.
Something cold.
Something heavy.
Something physical.
His lungs suddenly burned.
His chest tightened.
His heart—
Beat.
Once.
Violently.
Then again.
A sensation of suffocation seized him as though he had been submerged beneath an ocean and suddenly thrown toward the surface.
Luca tried desperately to breathe.
His body refused.
His consciousness began slipping away again.
No.
He resisted.
Not again.
The golden light surged.
His heart hammered violently against his chest.
The darkness screamed.
A sound unlike anything Luca had ever heard tore through the void as though reality itself was rejecting him.
Then came another voice.
Closer than before.
Desperate.
Terrified.
"Luca!"
His consciousness shook.
The voice became louder.
"Luca!"
He could feel something now.
His fingers.
His arms.
His chest.
His lungs.
His entire body seemed to be returning piece by piece, each sensation accompanied by an overwhelming wave of pain.
He tried to open his eyes.
They wouldn’t move.
His breathing became frantic.
His heart hammered faster.
The voice came again.
"Luca!"
Something within him snapped.
His entire body convulsed.
The darkness shattered.
And Luca screamed—
"LUCА!"
His eyes flew open.