The guest quarters of the Frontierra Cathedral were disgustingly opulent. Silk curtains draped over massive arched windows, and the furniture was carved from fragrant, polished white wood. It was a room meant for kings, but currently, it held six bewildered high school students.
Shiori Asano stood near the window, her soft dark hair falling over her shoulders. She reached up, instinctively tucking a strand behind her ear, revealing the striking lavender underlayer. She stared at the five people in the room with her.
Or rather, she stared at the strangers who claimed to be her classmates.
"This is insane," a girl with crackling, electric-blue hair and piercing yellow eyes muttered, pacing the plush carpet.
"I know, right? I feel so... light," another girl replied. Her hair was a pale, shimmering silver-green, practically floating around her head as if caught in a permanent breeze.
"Hold on, hold on," one of the boys said, stepping forward. He had short, spiky silver hair and playful grey eyes. "Let's pause for a second. The System interface is blurring out everyone's names. It just says [Target Name: Hidden]. Who actually are you two?"
The girl with the blue hair crossed her arms, her new, sharp features scowling. "It's me, Nanase-kun. Yua. And this is Mei. Did the Goddess's blessing fry your brain along with your hair?"
The three boys stared in stunned silence. Yua and Mei were two of the most popular, definitively cute girls in Class 1-A. They were part of the Vanguard clique. Now, they looked like elemental spirits wrapped in human skin. The Goddess’s blessing hadn't just given them magic; it had violently rewritten their DNA to match their affinities.
"It's the elemental shift," Shiori said quietly, her voice cutting through the confusion. "The System tailored your physical bodies to house your new magical output. But..." She looked down at her own hands. "For some reason, I didn't change at all."
"Neither did I," a quiet voice chimed in.
Shiori turned to look at Yoshi Imagawa. Like her, his appearance remained exactly as it was on Earth: messy cyan hair and soft, drooping blue eyes. He looked entirely out of place next to the other boys.
"If our [Hidden] skills are naturally Rank B or higher, we can't trust anything we see on the surface," Shiori continued, her analytical mind taking over. She remembered Kyouya Kusanagi in the back of the classroom. She remembered how quickly his brain processed the impossible. If he were here, he would establish control. She had to do the same. "To survive this, we need absolute trust. I'll start. I am going to be the leader of this group, and I'll prove I have nothing to hide."
Shiori opened her System interface and deliberately bypassed her privacy settings, projecting her true status window into the air for the other five to see.
[STATUS]
Name: Shiori Asano
Rank: B | Level: 129
HP: 2500 | SP: 1000 | MP: 5000
INT: B
Skills: - [Dark Magic] (Level B)
[Hidden] (Level A)
Ultimate Skill: [Event Horizon] (Level S)
The boys gasped. Yua’s eyes widened.
"Level S?" Yua breathed. "A Supreme tier skill?"
"Event Horizon," Shiori explained, her voice steady. "It allows me to compress dark magic to create a localized black hole, absorbing the existence of anything caught in its gravitational pull. However... my System warns that it is entirely ineffective against opponents with a higher Level than mine."
Deep down, her heart ached. A black hole. The very last thing she had heard on Earth was Kyouya effortlessly reciting the Schwarzschild radius to calculate the escape velocity of a black hole. Her magic was literally manifested from her lingering thoughts of him.
Taking Shiori's lead, the others projected their screens.
The boy with deep green hair mixed with black streaks stepped up. "Kazura Haruma," he introduced himself, his blue eyes serious. "I'm Level 115."
His ultimate skill was [Phantasmagoria Ink] (Level S), allowing anything he drew in the air with his mana to come alive, though it shared Shiori's restriction against higher-leveled foes. His sub-skills were terrifying: Wind Magic (A), Flying (B), Vacuum Shredder (B), and Void Barrier (B).
The silver-haired boy grinned, scratching the back of his head. "Shota Nanase. Level 118. Nice to meet you guys again."
His ultimate was [Glacial Eternity] (Level S), a massive area-of-effect magic that could instantly freeze an entire battlefield down to absolute zero. His arsenal included Water Magic (B), Ice Magic (A), and Crystalline Avalanche (A).
Finally, the unchanged cyan-haired boy, Yoshi Imagawa, projected his screen. "Level 110."
His ultimate was brutal: [Grand Seal - Tartarus] (Level S). His skills backed it up with pure destruction: Fire Magic (A), Lava (B), and Heat Resistance (B).
They were all Rank B. They were all walking natural disasters.
"Listen to me," Shiori said, turning off her projection. Her dark eyes swept over the group. "I am going to be honest with you. I don't care about the Goddess Kamiya. I don't care about the King of Frontierra, and I don't care about saving this world."
The room fell dead silent.
"We were kidnapped," Shiori stated coldly. "The only thing I care about is finding the rest of our classmates. I want to find Hiroto's group. I want to find Tatsuya. And I want to find... anyone else who might be out there. But to do that, we need resources, and we need freedom of movement. Will you help me?"
Kazura and Shota exchanged a look before nodding firmly. Yoshi offered a quiet thumbs-up. Yua and Mei smiled.
"We're with you, Asano-san," Yua said.
Before they could plan their next move, the heavy oak doors of the guest room creaked open. The beautiful Saintess from the cathedral stepped inside, accompanied by two heavily armored paladins.
"Holy Heroes," the Saintess said, bowing deeply, a serene smile on her face. "The preparations are complete. His Majesty, the King of Frontierra, humbly requests an audience with his saviors."
Shiori adjusted her collar, her face smoothing into a flawless, polite mask. "Of course. Lead the way."
Location: The Outland - Floor 100
In the suffocating darkness of the abyss, there was no silk, no white wood, and no bowing Saintesses. There was only the smell of copper, ozone, and rotting meat.
Kyouya Kusanagi lay slumped against the jagged wall of the tiny rock crevice, his breath coming in ragged, shallow wheezes. The makeshift tourniquet made from his school jacket was soaked through with blood. The stump of his left arm throbbed with a sickening, rhythmic agony that synced perfectly with his fading heartbeat.
His [INT: ∞] was a curse. It didn't just make him smart; it acted as a passive, hyper-advanced radar, forcing his brain to process the microscopic details of his own dying body.
Heart rate: 140 BPM. Body temperature: 39.5°C. Infection spreading at 4% per minute. He was starving. The human body requires massive amounts of caloric energy to survive severe trauma and blood loss. He hadn't finished his convenience store bread before the summoning. His stomach cramped so violently he almost gagged.
[SYSTEM ALERT: Biomass detected. Distance: 4 meters.]
Through the haze of fever and pain, Kyouya's glowing violet eyes scanned the gloom outside his crevice. His passive intelligence fed the data directly into his visual cortex.
There, lying in the dirt, was a corpse.
It was a Rank B monster—something that looked like a cross between a dire wolf and a scaled reptilian crawler. It had been brutally torn in half by a larger apex predator, its lower torso missing entirely. What was left was a mangled mess of dark purple muscle, shattered ribs, and congealing black blood.
Eat it, his System practically whispered. Or you die in forty-seven minutes.
Kyouya let out a weak, raspy scoff. "You've got to be kidding me..."
He was a human being. A high school student from modern Japan. Eating raw, infected monster meat from the floor of a dungeon was biologically repulsive.
But as his vision swam, the image of Goddess Kamiya’s arrogant, mocking face flashed in his mind. Go die in the dark, useless anomaly.
"Not as bad... as her," Kyouya hissed through his teeth.
Using his only remaining hand, he dragged his broken, feverish body out of the crevice. Every inch he crawled sent a wave of blinding white agony through his severed arm. He pulled himself through the dirt, his fingernails breaking against the stone, until he collapsed next to the rotting carcass.
The smell was atrocious—like sulfur mixed with spoiled milk and raw sewage.
Kyouya didn't let himself think. He couldn't afford to hesitate. He dug his right hand into the exposed ribs of the creature, tearing a chunk of the raw, purple muscle free. It was cold and slimy.
He shoved it into his mouth and bit down.
The taste was indescribable. It was a vile, metallic bitterness that instantly triggered his gag reflex. His stomach violently rejected it, bile rising in his throat.
Swallow it! he commanded his own body, his infinite intelligence overriding his human instincts. He clamped his hand over his mouth, choking back the vomit, and forced the raw, rubbery meat down his throat.
He lay in the dirt, coughing, tears streaming down his face as the horrible substance hit his empty stomach.
[Consuming Rank B Biomass... Processing DNA...]
[Anomaly Detected in Host's digestive tract. Adapting...]
[Skill Acquired: Transformation (Level C)]
Description: Allows the host to transform into a consumed lower-level monster, acquiring its full status and traits.
Kyouya’s eyes widened slightly. A way out. A way to fight back. If he could turn into a monster, he could regenerate. He could survive.
But his [INT: ∞] instantly ran the probability algorithms.
Warning. Host is Level 1. Biomass is Rank B. The psychological and physical strain of assuming a monstrous form with current stats carries a 98.7% probability of permanent genetic overwrite. Returning to human form will be nearly impossible.
He would lose his humanity. He would become a beast of the abyss.
Suddenly, a massive spike of pain shot up his left shoulder. He screamed, clutching his stump. The veins traveling up his neck were turning black. Sepsis. The necrotic bacteria from the spider's scythe and the dirty floor was rapidly invading his bloodstream. His fever spiked dangerously high.
[HP: 2/10. Critical Organ Failure Imminent.]
[Time to death: 4 minutes.]
He had no time to think. He had no time to mourn the human life he was about to throw away. He wanted revenge. He wanted to climb the pantheon and drag Kamiya down by her golden hair. And to do that, he had to live.
"System..." Kyouya gasped, his violet eyes burning with absolute, terrifying resolve as the darkness closed in. "Activate... Transformation."
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