CHAPTER 136: CHAPTER 136 - 4TH LEVEL

Lucien stepped into... somewhere else.

He turned in a slow circle. His eyes turned wide and... he froze.

This wasn’t like any floor of the Lootwell Dungeon.

’Is this still Lootwell Dungeon?’ The thought came unbidden.

No stone corridors. No castle walls like the gargoyle dungeon.

Only a vast expanse that defied description.

It felt like standing inside a shattered mirror. Jagged fragments floated in the air. Each one glinted with impossible depth.

And in every shard... They contain images.

Not simple murals but living scenes as though reality itself had been sliced and trapped in glass.

Wars raged inside those pieces. Unknown landscapes bled with fire. Soldiers clashed with towering monsters.

The very ground beneath him was cracked and treacherous. There are plates of stone hanging over nothing. One misstep and he might tumble through a shard into some other realm entirely.

Lucien’s heart pounded. Each fragment tugged at his senses, drawing him closer. When he stared too long, the pull became almost physical like gravity that wanted to swallow him whole.

He stepped back and the sound of his own footfall rang out far too loud like an echo that didn’t belong to him.

A shiver crawled up his spine.

No. He shouldn’t stay here.

Yet something deep inside whispered that he must.

SKYWALK.

Lucien lifted from the ground rather than risk another step.

He began to walk through the air, skirting the fractured terrain. Shards of reality drifted past. Each one was humming with that same magnetic pull.

He refused to look too closely. He didn’t want to know what happened if they drew him in.

The silence was unnerving. Not a single creature stirred.

Then... He saw them.

Far ahead, two shapes broke the emptiness.

Slimes.

They lay perfectly still as though guarding this broken world.

Lucien scanned the endless expanse. Nothing else.

No boss door. No path forward. Only those two.

"Great," he muttered. "How am I supposed to farm drops with just two monsters?"

As if in answer, the slimes quivered faintly. They had noticed him. Yet they didn’t move. They didn’t attack. They just sat there, watching him.

Lucien narrowed his eyes and cast INSPECT.

The results chilled him.

Life Slime

Death Slime

"...Fuck."

The names alone made his pulse spike.

The Life Slime glowed a lush green. It swirled with delicate vines and leaf-like patterns as if the heart of a world tree pulsed inside its gelatinous form.

Its counterpart was pure shadow. The Death Slime was black as pitch, streaked with drifting fragments of what looks like bone that turned slowly in the dark.

"Great... one looks like instant regeneration, the other instant death....?" Lucien muttered.

He hovered above them waiting for the first sign of hostility. But nothing came.

No killing intent. No sudden movement. Only silence.

’Enough waiting.’

Lucien inhaled then launched forward in a sharp Glide Dash. His sword shimmered into his grip as he raised it high.

The two slimes didn’t flinch.

They didn’t even try to dodge him.

It was as though a human presence meant nothing.

"Fine," he whispered.

He swung.

Slash.

Steel cut clean through their bodies.

The slimes split apart and collapsed. The system chime of victory rang in his ears. And the drops glittered in the ground before it was auto-collected.

Lucien blinked. "What?! That’s it? With names like that, I expected a fight."

Disappointment tugged at him. This was supposed to be a challenge. Instead, it felt like a joke.

And then... the joke turned cruel.

A ripple passed across the broken world.

The two corpses quivered.

Then impossibly... they knit themselves back together in a flash.

They rose, perfect and unscarred as if death had never touched them.

Lucien’s breath hitched.

"Shit... what is this? The system confirmed their deaths. Don’t tell me... they’re immortal?"

Life and death meant nothing to these things. They simply refused to stay dead.

That was when the air shifted.

A threat.

Lucien’s instincts screamed. He shot backward, trying to put distance between them.

He kicked back... but too late.

The two slimes convulsed as they began to channel something far more dangerous than a physical strike. Black and white energies coiled around them like twin storms, swirling tighter until they lashed out as one.

Lucien dodged... almost. Shards of fractured reality flashed around him. Murals flashed at the edge of his vision, pulling his focus for a fraction of a second.

That hesitation was his undoing.

The twin magics struck.

The black energy clawed deep, gripping something beyond flesh. It dragged something within him.

The white energy slammed into his body. It hurled him down and it wrapped tight like a cocoon that pinned him in place.

Lucien’s eyes widened in horror as his soul was ripped free. It hurled toward a waiting mural.

The murals flared.

The world tilted.

His body remained behind. But Lucien’s spirit was wrenched into the glowing fragment.

He had died.

•••

Huff... huff...

Lucien’s breaths tore through his chest. Each inhale was a rasp of fire. He pressed his trembling hand to his ribs, bracing for the stab of a wound that wasn’t there.

But there was nothing. Only the suffocating weight of armor strapped to a body that wasn’t his.

He froze.

His fingers brushed hardened muscle. The rough grip of calloused hands wrapped around a sword slick with sweat.

"This... isn’t me."

Smoke clawed at his throat. Flames devoured the horizon. The reek of iron choked the air.

Blood. There’s too much blood around.

Beneath him, the earth shuddered to the rhythm of a thousand boots and monstrous claws.

"Quit staring! To the front, now!"

The command cracked like a whip. His legs were driven not by his will but by the instincts buried in the body he wore.

Memory. Habit. The life of another dragging him into the maelstrom.

He plunged into the storm.

Blades screamed against each other. Shields shattered. Men cried out as monsters bellowed in the chaos. Monsters howled like torn skies.

Lucien’s mind spun, desperate to anchor itself.

’Lootwell... I was in Lootwell. Was that a dream? A lie my mind told me to escape this war?’

The question dissolved with every strike.

His hands moved with a veteran’s certainty.

Sword thrust. Shield raised. A beast shrieked and fell.

Hesitation meant death.

Days bled into nights. Nights into years. Time eroded, worn smooth by blood and exhaustion.

Comrades died one after another. Their faces faded into a haze of screams and silence. He fought with fury and with desperation... until the reasons for fighting no longer mattered.

Orders came and he obeyed.

A brother-in-arms stumbled and Lucien saved him without thought.

He swung his blade until his arms trembled... until monsters lay broken in heaps at his feet.

Somewhere in that endless slaughter, Lucien ceased to exist.

Only the soldier remained.

He forgot his name. His past was erased in his mind.

He had become nothing but war itself. A blade. A shield. A hollow man carved by survival.

Until the day the monsters were no longer the only enemy.

Men turned on men. Betrayal split the lines.

And in the chaos, Lucien... who had once been someone else... fell.

No voice called his name when he died.

Not even he remembered who he was.

•••

Huff... huff...

Lucien staggered. He clutched his chest as the glow faded. The white energy cocoon dissolved into nothing, leaving him gasping in silence. His breaths came harsh and uneven... like a drowning man breaking through to air.

"What... just happened?" His voice trembled. "It felt too real. What were those things?"

The haze in his mind began to lift and the memories slammed back.

The endless years of war. The comrades whose faces blurred into a haze of death screams.

Saving them, losing them. Fighting until there was nothing left. And then... The betrayal, the final cut, the moment his borrowed life ended.

Lucien’s eyes widened. His body shook. He could still feel the weight of a soldier’s sword in his grip. He can still taste the grit of blood and ash on his tongue.

He had lived that life. Bled. Fought. And died within it.

Slowly, his gaze rose to the nearest shard of floating glass.

The mural glowed faintly and there it was... The soldier.

A young man captured in stone with blade in his hand. He was standing defiant against impossible monsters.

Lucien’s throat tightened and the tears came freely. He didn’t bother to hide them.

"Damn it... I really hate cliffhangers," he muttered. "What happened to that world... after I died?"

He searched the mural as if the stone might whisper an answer.

"Are these... histories?" His voice dropped to a whisper. "If they are then I have to know. I need to know."

His vision blurred. Not with tears but with a focus honed to a razor edge. He stared so hard it felt as if he could burn meaning out of the stone itself.

Squelch!

The sound snapped him back.

Two familiar shapes bounced into view. The slimes. The very ones who caused the anomaly.

Their gelatinous bodies shimmered in the dim light almost... beckoning.

Lucien wiped his face dry and drew a steady breath. Instinct sharpened his senses. He knew what their presence meant.

Without hesitation, he raised his blade and cut them down.

Their forms collapsed in a spray of glistening drops... Only for them to re-form instantly. Whole and unmarked.

A pulse of dread thudded in his chest.

Black and white energy coiled in their cores, surging outward once more.

The white light wrapped around his body. The black clutched at his soul.

Lucien had just enough time to curse before the world tilted.

The mural ahead flared open.

Darkness swallowed him.

And once again, he was hurled into a new story. Another life entirely, waiting to be lived and lost.