The dungeon was quiet. In one particular place, a bluish light emitted by crystals on the ceiling was shimmering on a pair of transparent wings. With its thin legs holding onto cracks in a wall, a [Snakefly Lvl. 3] was keeping a watch over a tunnel. Snakeflies were different from ants: each had some individuality. When an ambiance of magic in the tunnel slightly changed this giant insect chose differently from what another snakefly might. It took off and buzzed slowly on its way to the anomaly.

Soon, a wonderful scene opened before the large compound eyes. A group of its species dead foes was scattered across the rocks losing their mana purposelessly. The snakefly screeched and threw itself into a cloud of energy, greedy drinking the energy for its evolution with every inch of its body, every segment of its wings. An ovipositor opened and closed in desire and the snakefly looked around following the primal instinct, seeking to reproduce itself among lots of potential incubators.

Finally, the snakefly found it, not-dead-yet foe. Unfamiliar, surprisingly big and scarcely short on limbs, but foe nonetheless. Wounded, paralyzed? The giant insect closed the distance. Not too close though, awaiting the rapid evolution...

The snakefly's body glowed with dim green light and started to grow. Soon... soon it will leave a strong offspring... The last thoughts of the snakefly might be something like this as well.

Alice jumped, faster than ever, a sword shined gloriously for a moment before hacking the monster into two halves.

[+400 XP +160 BP]

Alice snorted, more angry than scared and suppressed a gagging impulse from the images in her imagination after having looked at the snakefly's ovipositor aiming at her. Again. The girl closed her eyes, feeling residual pain and fatigue from her recent level-up and remembered the last system plate:

[Snakefly Lvl. 3->4]

So this is how it works for the monsters. Or just for this dungeon? The short girl wasn't sure. At the very list, she hadn't been enjoying any incoming XP in the past few excruciating minutes, which was clearly a good sign for her ??? class in the status window. Nothing close to that snakefly very visibly having siphoned magic energy for itself. It could have probably evolved once or twice more.

Naturally, Alice was worried now. The monsters in the dungeon were growing muscles with every passing hour. They could probably consume a little from the air even without killing each other, right? The girl nodded to herself and decided to assume so. Like there was no concerns left from the great ants battle...

Finding herself unconsciously opening the system log and thinking too much, Alice stopped. Right. There was something much more important to her. The girl made her way back into the tunnels while gathering her ammunition.

At the dungeon's entrance, surprisingly, her lamp was still lying on the ground. The ants had tipped over but not damaged it. Alice just wiped the dust off and kindled the fuse.

Soon, the girl was a little anticipating when she dived in the dark.

System message!

You are leaving Emerald Caves (Dungeon Lvl. 0-16)

It is increasing after all! Alice noticed the maximum level of the dungeon went up by one immediately and felt uneasy. Not because of something she had been expecting to see, but because of a smell. Very heavy sour smell. Draught pushed it in her nostrils and the girl grimaced as she crawled through the hole in the wall.

Alice crawled out and stood up. Dizziness hit her in the head right away. The magic in the air was gone. Or at least, she couldn't sense it anymore, had no means to know for sure. The girl walked through the cramped, rocky passage. already missing nice illumination from the dungeon. The ground too, it was uneven, bumpy, not at all easy on her feet.

The smell was getting stronger. Breathing with her mouth, Alice pointed her spear forward to be safe, the lamp's dancing fire blinked on the blade. Fifty meters passed slowly...

Alice stopped. Yellow blood was stinking to the point it started to tingle her eyes. Oozing out from broken carapaces, it was covering the ground and the walls. The black bodies were laid down and on each other chaotically, numbered between a dozen and two.

Twisted legs, fractured heads, broken antennas, the ants died a messy death. The short girl felt her stomach revolting because of the smell or the sight. System didn't send her status messages so no life remained in these monsters.

If it was me at level zero... I would be dead meat.

How much luck a person could waste in one day? Alice shuddered. But if it were me there right now... With a fair amount of disgust, the girl stepped right on a fairly big ant. Not like she had much choice. Level one Stealth skill had its limitations: the corpse crunched nastily and the girl stopped and focused.

Here it was, an invisible tide pushed her back, softly like a memory of morning breeze. Energy unlike any other, the magic was being summoned in the portal cavern. A tiny share of it must have been coming from the dungeon, Alice realized, which had provoked system's 12-hours shutdown.

"I am not a monster." She stated confidently and loudly. "I am a human." Alice then followed the 'what if' line of thought and added: "A person."

A few words managed to stir the other side and disrupt the flow of magic, but the girl didn't move, only waited patiently.

"...shou...uself." An answer finally came, all but both inaudible and illegible.

"Okay. Right." Alice felt incredibly nervous but it didn't make her discard her wits: "There are monsters all around, you know?.. Fuck, you do, ehm. I am armed. I won't attack you first, but I will be ready for everything, okay?"

"...ine..."

Now she could exhale with relief. Alice was so not ready to deal with magic that in fact she also dropped her shoulders and closed her eyes for a moment.

Excited as she was, the girl passed to the entrance unhurriedly and with enough noise.

The portal was inside the cave. Only the scenery had changed.

Two dead centipedes were also inside, though in different positions and not as Alice left them.

A person was there.

Alice's mind firstly registered feminine figure in a tight blue robe. So it was her. Of course, she was taller and more curved. Most girls were. The stranger was young, a teen. She was leaning against a wall and pointing her left hand right at Alice.

The short girl didn't point her spear back, no. She prepared to dodge and meanwhile gazed at the stranger's hand in wonder. The air around it was swirling and glowing slightly, coloring white skin in pale blue. No brainer, a dangerous spell that killed all these ants with some sort of a bludgeoning force.

"I..." the young girl started haggardly, "mot..."

Light in her hand disappeared. Her eyes briefly showed whites before she dropped down along the wall and sprawled across the floor powerlessly. Alice watched motionlessly, stupefied for a few seconds until she snapped out of it and rushed over. No-no-no, fuck, don't you die on me now. She reached down to turn the unconscious girl up. Her body was soft as if not having any bones and not heavy at all. There was no resistance or any reaction to speak of when Alice checked her breathing, took her pulse – both weak, but steady. Then the short girl calmed a little to look closer.

The co-victim of system-tailored disaster was a pure white girl. She had long straight hair of the brightest blonde color Alice ever saw. Natural beauty, she thought with contradicting feelings of fascination and jealousy and then frowned. There was blood under the small pointed nose and on the thin yet somehow plumpy lips of the sleeping beauty. Her narrow face was too pale. Alice touched smooth skin with some shyness, moved fingers up, opening the right eye. It was emerald green, extremely catchy. It was also circled with burst blood vessels.

Alice looked around more frantically than she would normally be. The girl new basics of the first aid, how to bandage a cut or do mouth-to-mouth – and no matter how thrilling the last idea was, the right one it was not.

Oh? Isn't that..? Her eyes caught glass vials on the floor. Three pieces she saw immediately, and there were two more after a second glance. All empty. A deductive chain of reasonings instantly formed in Alice's head. Her hand dug into a pocket of her jacket and brought to dim light a Lesser Antitoxin potion.

Neutralizes potion abuse... No wonder she could grind so many ants. Mana potions are cheat. Not like Alice was envious or anything. But to be sure, she continued to observe. In a few minutes, the sleeping beauty was breathing sporadically with erratic heartbeats and the lips turning blue. The assured in the diagnoses girl finally nodded and fed her with the antitoxin.

With some pity Alice left the beauty to rest on the hard ground. Now only to wait... There was nothing for her to do after all. She had checked the blonde's robe for other system elixirs – empty. Had summoned the shop just in case – not working.

Foreseeing lots of dirty work, Alice begrudgingly stood up. Then she suddenly remembered something and stopped to muse for a moment.

"Ah." Glancing down at the pretty face in revelation, the girl smirked. "You are not alone."

Feeling accomplishment and giddiness from the lingering horrid stench Alice turned away cooly and for the first time gazed at the portal.

...

...what the. actual. "FUCK!"

Time passed and soon citizens of Greystone City learned they were not alone in their tragedy.

Megalopolises. Towns. Farms. Small communities. Mountain villages. Ocean liners. Lost tribes. In the country and beyond.

Disappearing people wasn't an attack on the nation, no. A natural disaster of a black spawn kind, more likely. Relative numbers were small, just a fraction of a percent. Millions of people – either genocide of statistic, depending on point of view.

Earth had changed at that moment. Unbeknown to humans yet, Earth had changed.

It swept over the world.

What had been lost long.

Forgotten and erased.

To the Earth's core and to the farthest stars.

What was dead, remained unliving.

Who was sleeping, saw new dreams,

Lingering through heartless time...

A woman had once decided that she was a witch. History was in her family just that: history. Old books, old legends. The woman lacked guidance and care when she needed them. Once she believed in the old books nothing could change that. Insane most would say and would be right – the woman was certainly beyond their definition of sanity.

Then certain things had happened. Strange things. The woman spoke with ghosts and learned their secrets, cured diseases with her strange, kinky rituals. Coincidences most would say and would be right. Nothing the woman had done went beyond common reasons. But she had gathered some momentarily lost souls around herself, or maybe simple doubters in common reasons.

Time passed and the woman turned into an old woman with long white hair and dignified looks. A young mother had come to her, mother with a baby boy so sick modern medicine had given him only ten years of life. A young mother desperate enough to seek a witch.

The old woman was asked to heal that time, fortunately since she never shied away from curses. She believed being a witch, after all. Not good, not bad. The old woman agreed, gathered her grasses, a tongue of a frog, blood of a virgin and who knows what else. She drew symbols of power, placed the baby inside, fed him with a witchcraft potion.

And the boy got cured, right before the witch and the mother.

The mother was crying happily, hugging her son.

The witch was looking at the sky with a strange smile and fires in her old saw-this-all eyes. Laughing silently.

She felt young again.

A fishing ship was cutting into waves of the Atlantic ocean, a shore of Iceland just two hundreds of meters behind the starboard. The captain intended to circle the island from the north-east, having picked a routine route. The weather was sunny and almost cloudless, in one word nice, and so the sailors' mood. No one on board had their relatives missing. The world's problems hardly mattered to working men who had to feed their families.

The ocean's turmoil and rocking water, therefore, caught them completely unprepared. It came suddenly, without howls of wind and torrents of rain, smashed into the port board, tilted the ship hard. Only years of experience saved the team from losing anyone to hostile depths.

Among hasty commands, swearings came up in abundance. The sailors were more surprised than scared and the ship scooped enough water to keep them occupied. The turmoil didn't end there either, although not as strong anymore as at first, it was still trowing the ship up and down.

That they didn't notice at first was nothing strange.

That they didn't believe their eyes when they did notice.

The ocean was running away from the shores of Iceland, exposing rocks and sands that hadn't breathed the air for thousands of years. Shells were covering the naked bottom of the ocean, shells and occasional unlucky fish. The lowest tide of them all? Such a thought was an obvious one until one sailor didn't scream "The island is rising up!" and indeed it was so.

Not only up. It was moving, visually turning around before the sailors' very eyes while their ship was escaping from the ocean floor with its fastest speed.

Not many were obvious to the world's changes in the past days.

A bearded mountain climber exhaled cold rarefied air and glanced ahead. Myticas, the highest peak of Olympus, was waiting for him to overcome the last two, maybe three hundreds of meters. In good weather, the mountain was friendly even to tourists who lacked special training, but he wasn't one of them.

The man had lost his wife just a month ago. Faithless as he was, there was no deep meaning in him choosing mountain Olympus. Yet still, this ascent was his spiritual, even if not a little goalless journey in a sense so he had chosen no easy path.

The man continued to climb up dully. A meter after a meter, one steady step followed by another.

The breeze pushed into his back. The climber ignored, but the wind got stronger fast and he frowned. The direction felt wrong. Upwards? And then, abruptly, the scenery altered entirely.

There was light.

Golden and lofty.

The peak disappeared in it; the man froze, overwhelmed. No, not just overwhelmed. The light had weight, hardness. It stopped all movements without any pressure, gently yet irresistible like a mother's embrace. The light eclipsed Myticas, shined onto surrounding lands.

The ground shifted and the climber subconsciously lowered his eyes. A staircase unnoticeably appeared, built from myriads of marble tiles. The light purged all shadows and dust. Far ahead, behind the brilliant but not blinding golden curtains, he distantly saw pure white outlines.

Walls of a temple? Palace? Or even town? No matter how hard he looked, the man couldn't discern anything and felt desperate. Somehow, he knew: what he was seeing was going to change everything. His life or even...

A soft sigh entered his ears and the man vanished.

Spoiler: Status! Alice Sung-Hyun Branson Age: 16 Classes Level Race: Human/??? Hunter (common) 3 Exp: 8,600/14,000 ??? (???) 3 Skill Points: 6 ... ... Battle Points: 2,763 ... ... Attributes Strength: 6.5

Mind: 9.0

Endurance: 6.7

Will: 8.9

Dexterity: 9.1

Perception: 9.4

Agility: 7.8

Wits: 9.1 Absolute Body Control Lvl: – Like a magical undead being, you are lacking muscle memories and have to control your body at all times. You can completely avoid unnecessary movements; your Perception reaction bypasses instincts. Hunt Lvl: 1 (2) Hide from sights, track your prey and take it down. This skill provides a specific hunting experience for all your 'Hunter' templates-related skills. Bow Lvl: 2 (3) Nock an arrow, aim, and shoot. Three months of training with a bow. Spear Lvl: 3 (4) Choose your stance and pierce your enemy. Nine months of training with a spear. Observation (Nature) Lvl: 3 (MAX) As a child of nature, you can discern signs of life and behavior patterns in a complex landscape. Stealth (Nature) Lvl: 1 (1) Basic ability to conceal oneself in a complex landscape. Butchering (Animals) Lvl: 1 (1) A child of nature is capable of providing herself with provisions.