[System Message: You have died. Initiating Emergency Regression Protocol.]
The words flashed once in the blissful, silent darkness. Then, they were gone.
Kenji's eyes snapped open.
He was not in the blood-red void. He was not on a field of cracked obsidian. The agonized shriek of a thousand monsters was gone. In its place, there was only a profound, gentle quiet.
He was staring at a ceiling. A white, plaster ceiling with a faint, familiar water stain near the corner, one that he'd always thought looked a little like a misshapen rabbit. He felt… fabric. Something soft and worn beneath his back, a gentle weight covering his body. A pillow, lumpy and familiar, was cradling his head.
A light, impossibly warm and bright, streamed through a window to his left. It was sunlight. Not the cold, distant light of a fake sun in the Spire, but real, golden, buttery sunlight. It illuminated a lazy swirl of dust motes dancing in the air, each one a tiny, glittering star.
His eyes tracked the beam of light to the wall. Taped there, its corners peeling slightly, was a poster for Devilskys. It depicted the game's final boss, a demon king wreathed in shadow, a foe he had once considered the ultimate challenge. It looked like a child's drawing now.
With a surge of power that was utterly reflexive, he shot up into a sitting position. The bedsprings creaked in protest. His heart, a dormant, rhythmic machine for so long, suddenly hammered against his ribs with a wild, frantic energy he hadn't felt since he was a boy. It wasn't the cold thrum of battle rage. It was fear. It was hope. It was confusion.
He was in his room. His old room.
His gaze swept across the space, drinking in every detail. His computer sat on its cheap particle-board desk, the monitor dark, both covered in a thin, uniform layer of dust. His collection of mecha action figures stood silent on their shelf, their heroic poses softened by the same grey blanket of time. Nothing had been moved. It was a perfect, untouched snapshot of the life he had left behind.
His eyes landed on the windowsill. Next to a small, withered succulent sat a single white candle in a simple glass holder. It was unlit, the wick still clean. A knot formed in his throat. His mother. She must have put it there. A small vigil for her missing son, a quiet prayer in a room she couldn't bear to change.
How long had he been gone? For him, it had been a lifetime. An entire, grueling existence. But here? The dust suggested time, but not an eternity.
Then, a scent wafted up from downstairs.
It cut through his confusion like a warm knife. It wasn't the smell of ozone, or blood, or alien decay. It was miso soup, the salty, savory steam of fermented soybeans. It was the smell of pan-fried fish, rich and slightly oily. It was the smell of home. It was the smell of his mother's cooking on a Saturday morning.
The lead-lined box in the back of his mind, the one where he had locked away every good and gentle memory to survive the crushing despair of the Spire, did not just open. It shattered into a million pieces.
The memories didn't trickle back; they slammed into him with the force of a physical blow. The sound of his mother humming a forgotten tune as she stood at the stove. The clatter of chopsticks on ceramic bowls. The sight of his sister, Yui, sitting at the table, her hair messy as she complained about a school project. The warmth of the kitchen, the taste of perfectly cooked rice, the feeling of safety, of belonging.
Feelings he had systematically purged from his soul for centuries flooded back all at once. The sheer, overwhelming force of it was more devastating than any dragon's breath or demon's curse.
A sound tore itself from his throat. It was not a word or a cry of pain. It was a raw, guttural sob, an ugly, broken noise pulled from the deepest part of his soul. It was the sound of a dam breaking after holding back an ocean of grief for three hundred years. Tears, hot and real, streamed down his face, and he didn't understand what they were for a moment. He hadn't cried since he was a child. He buried his face in his hands, his powerful shoulders shaking with the force of his weeping. The pain of what he had lost and the tidal wave of relief at its return were indistinguishable.
He cried for the boy he had been, for the man he had become, and for the impossible bridge between the two. He cried until his throat was raw and his eyes burned, expelling centuries of frozen, silent anguish into the soft fabric of his old bedsheets.
Slowly, the storm inside him subsided, leaving a profound, aching emptiness. He lifted his head, his breath catching in shuddering hitches. He felt hollowed out, but clean. The numbness that had been his constant companion was gone, replaced by a raw, painful sensitivity.
He needed to see. He needed to know what he was.
He pushed himself off the bed. His movements were too fluid, too silent. He felt a disconnect between the immense power coiled in his limbs and the familiar, small space of his room. He crossed to the full-length mirror hanging on his closet door, his bare feet silent on the dusty wooden floor. For a long moment, he just stared at the floor, afraid of what he would see. He had only seen his reflection in pools of black ichor or fragments of shattered crystal for longer than human history. He had forgotten his own face.
Taking a deep, shaky breath, he lifted his head.
The man in the mirror was both a stranger and himself. The face was his—the same dark eyes, the same shape of his nose and mouth. But it wasn't the face of a nineteen-year-old. A year had passed on Earth, and he had aged with it. This was the face of a twenty-year-old, but the look in his eyes was ancient. The youthful spark was gone, replaced by a calm, bottomless weariness that didn't belong there. It was the face of a survivor, not a student.
His body was the most shocking change. The lanky, skinny-fat gamer he'd been was gone completely. He was bare-chested, wearing only the simple grey trousers he'd manifested back with. His shoulders were broad, his chest and abdomen corded with thick, dense muscle forged not in a gym, but by endless, life-or-death combat. His body was a testament to his stats, a living sculpture of nearly two thousand points in both Strength and Vitality.
And then there were the scars.
They covered his torso and arms like a pale, silvery roadmap of his long, brutal life. A thin, jagged line ran across his collarbone, the memento of a rogue's ambush on Floor 142. A puckered, circular scar over his heart was where a golem's spike had impaled him on Floor 311. Faint, crisscrossing lines on his forearms were from parrying the claws of a creature he could no longer name. They were not angry, red wounds, but old, faded trophies of a war no one else would ever understand. When he subconsciously channeled the faintest trace of his power, they seemed to shimmer, glowing with a faint, internal light before fading again.
He reached up and touched the face in the mirror. The skin was real. The man staring back, this young, powerful, broken thing, was him. Kenji Tanaka. The Spire had been real. All of it.
Downstairs, he heard a chair scrape against the floor.
"Yui, did you finish your history essay?" It was his mother's voice. It was exactly as he remembered, yet richer, more real than any memory.
"Almost, Mom! I just need to write the conclusion. It's so boring." Yui's voice. It was higher than he remembered, a little more mature, but still held that same bright, complaining tone.
His family. They were here. They were alive.
A desperate, primal need surged through him. He had to see them. He had to protect them. The original purpose, buried under centuries of dust and despair, roared back to life, clearer and more powerful than ever before.
He turned from the mirror and went to his closet. He pulled out a familiar black t-shirt with the logo of some forgotten rock band. He tried to pull it on. It was laughably small. The sleeves constricted his biceps, and the fabric strained tightly across his chest and back, threatening to tear. He was a giant trying to fit into a child's clothes.
He rummaged through his drawers, a strange sense of panic rising. Finally, he found an old pair of grey sweatpants and a loose, oversized hoodie he used to practically swim in. The sweatpants fit, barely. He pulled the hoodie over his head, the soft fleece a comforting sensation against his scarred skin. He pulled the hood up, not out of any tactical need to hide, but as an instinctual desire to conceal the stranger he had become.
He stood at his bedroom door, his hand on the cool metal of the knob. This was it. The final boss fight of his old life, the tutorial level of his new one. He was terrified. What would he say? 'Sorry I was gone, Mom, I was killing monsters in another dimension for three hundred years'? How could they possibly understand the chasm that now separated him from them?
He could hear them talking, their voices a soft, gentle murmur. The sound of a normal life. A life he had fought and bled and died to return to.
Taking a breath that did nothing to calm the storm in his chest, Kenji Tanaka, the Berserker Lord of the Spire, turned the knob and stepped out of his room.