Weak Class of Anti-Hero
Chapter 37: The Void Within

Chapter 37: The Void Within

A wave of pure knowledge washed over my mind.

The dagger. It wasn’t a weapon. It wasn’t a power.

It was a key.

A key that opened the final door. The door to the fifth layer of the soul my father had spoken of. The Meta layer.

I understood.

Xylos’s clones were upon me, their hands outstretched to annihilate me.

I closed my eyes. I ignored the chaos outside. I dove deep within myself.

Deeper than the physical body.

Deeper than the spiritual body.

Deeper than the astral body.

Deeper even than my soul core.

I found a door. A black door, sealed by chains of shadow.

And I used the key.

My dagger melted in my hand, becoming a part of my being. And it shattered the chains.

The door opened.

And what lay on the other side surged into the world.

It wasn’t an explosion of power. It wasn’t a blinding light.

It was an absence.

An absolute void.

A concept so pure and so primordial that it existed even before the creation of the universe.

The Nothingness.

I opened my eyes.

My body was the same. But my eyes... my eyes were no longer human. They were two points of darkness that absorbed light.

Xylos’s clones stopped dead. Their assault froze. Pure, existential terror filled their faces.

They were no longer looking at a mortal.

They were looking at their antithesis. Their end.

"You are numberless," I said, and my voice was no longer my own. It was the sound of silence at the end of time.

"But even infinity, when faced with Nothingness..."

I raised my hand.

"...is just zero."

I didn’t need to attack.

I just... willed it.

I willed for them to no longer exist.

And they ceased to exist.

Xylos’s clones didn’t scream. They didn’t turn to dust.

They just... vanished. Erased from reality, like an error in the universe’s code that had been deleted. In a fraction of a second, the clearing was empty.

Only the original Xylos remained. The first one.

He was on his knees, trembling, staring at the spot where his doubles had stood.

"[What... what are you?]" he stammered, his divine voice broken by absolute terror.

I approached him, slowly. Each step was silent, leaving no print on the ground.

"I am the end of your story," I said.

I placed my hand on his forehead.

There was no flash. No sound.

I just absorbed everything he was. His knowledge. His memories. His powers. His very existence.

He disappeared. Nothing of him was left.

I closed my eyes, assimilating the flood of information. I saw their world. The Abyss. I saw their Great Consciousness, a galaxy of fused souls. I saw the thousands of worlds they had already devoured.

And I saw their plan for Earth.

The breach closed on its own, the source of its power having vanished.

Silence returned to the dead land.

The power within me calmed, returning behind the black door. My eyes went back to normal.

I was just Kang Ji-Hoon again.

But I knew. I knew what I had become.

The ultimate weapon against the Abyss.

And their greatest nightmare.

I looked at the sky.

The fight was over.

But the war... the war had just begun.

I sat on the ground, completely drained. The power of the Nothingness had gone back to sleep, leaving me with an exhaustion so deep it touched my soul.

The landscape around me slowly began to regain its colors, the influence of the breach having disappeared.

Suddenly, I heard a deafening sound.

A kind of electric blue portal opened in the sky, and a figure shot out of it like a cannonball, landing in the middle of the clearing in a crater of earth and rock.

The figure stood up. It was my father.

He was wearing black combat armor and looked ready for a world war.

"JI-HOON!" he yelled, his gaze sweeping the area, searching for the monster. "DON’T MOVE! I SENSED XYLOS’S SIGNATURE! I’LL HANDLE IT!"

He was in a combat stance, his S-rank Aura exploding around him, ready to unleash hell.

I looked at him, sitting on the ground, covered in dust.

I raised a tired hand.

"It’s okay," I said. "No need."

He stopped short, finally looking at me. He saw the empty clearing. No monster. No breach. Just me.

"What?" he asked, completely lost. "But... where is it? What happened?"

I shrugged.

"I ate it."

My father stood there, dumbfounded, his S-rank hero aura flickering with confusion. He had rushed in to save the world and found his son sitting in the middle of the scene, looking like it was all taken care of.

The situation was so absurd that I let out a small, tired laugh.

Maybe there was still a bit of humor left in this world, after all.

My father approached, his expression shifting from confusion to deep concern.

"You... ate it?" he repeated, as if unsure he had heard correctly. "Ji-Hoon, what exactly did you do?"

I stood up, swaying a little. The exhaustion was still there, but something else was bubbling just beneath the surface.

When I absorbed Xylos, I didn’t just take his knowledge. I took everything. His physiology. His powers. And worse... his mentality.

A part of the Great Consciousness was inside me now.

"I’m fine," I said, but my voice sounded distant, layered.

Delicate gills appeared on my neck for a split second before vanishing. My pupils turned into bottomless black pits, then returned to normal.

My father saw these changes. He took a step back, his hand tightening.

"His essence... it’s inside you," he whispered, horrified. "It’s trying to consume you from within."

I looked at my hands. They seemed normal. But I could feel it. The hunger.

Not a physical hunger. A hunger for assimilation. A primal urge to absorb everything, to make everything a part of me. The desire to bring "order" and "unity" to the chaos of individuality.

It was an after-effect. A terrifying side effect of my new power.

I looked at my father. And for a second, I didn’t see him as my father.

I saw him as a separate consciousness. A disorder to be corrected. An anomaly to be absorbed.

I had to use all my willpower to push that thought, that impulse, away.

I clenched my fists, trembling.

"I... I can control it," I said, more to convince myself than to reassure him.

But deep inside, a small, cold voice that wasn’t mine whispered:

"For now."

My father saw the struggle in my eyes. Fear was replaced by iron determination.

"No," he said, his voice leaving no room for argument. "We don’t leave something like this to chance."

He grabbed me by the shoulder. "We’re going home. Not to the academy. To my headquarters. I have specialists who can help you contain this. To separate your essence from his."

I didn’t protest. I was too tired to fight. And a part of me was scared. Scared of what I might become if left alone with this hunger.

He activated his portal again, that electric blue tear in reality.

We stepped through it.

We didn’t reappear in Seoul. We were in a high-tech, underground base, filled with scientists and soldiers in armor. This was the secret organization’s headquarters.

As soon as we arrived, I was taken away. Not to a cell. But to a white, sterile room that looked like an advanced medical lab.

I was put through a series of tests. Aura scans. Soul analyses. Psychological evaluations.

My father stayed with me the whole time.

After hours, an elderly scientist came to us, holding a data tablet.

"It’s... fascinating," she said, with a mixture of horror and scientific curiosity. "The Creator’s essence isn’t fighting him. It has merged with his soul core. At the most fundamental level."

She looked at my father. "We can’t separate them. It’s impossible. Attempting to do so would kill him."

A silence fell over the room.

"So, what do we do?" my father asked.

The scientist looked at me. "For now, his mind is dominant. His human will is stronger. But... the Creator’s essence is like an ocean. His will is like a dam. If the dam breaks, even for a moment... the ocean will overwhelm everything."

She paused.

"He is a ticking time bomb. The most powerful and dangerous one the world has ever known."

I stayed in that base for several days. They watched me, analyzed me, tried to understand what I had become.

The hunger was always there. A dull, constant craving in the background of my thoughts. I had to fight against it every second. It was a silent, exhausting, internal battle.

My father barely left my side. He wasn’t training me anymore. He was talking to me. He told me stories from his past. Stories about my mother when they were young. Stories of his own struggles, his own doubts.

He was trying to strengthen my humanity. To remind me who I was.

On the third day, the academy director came. He spoke privately with my father and the organization’s leaders.

Then, he came to see me, alone.

"You saved the country, Ji-Hoon," he said. "The world will never know, but we do."

"Great," I replied sarcastically.

He ignored my tone. "We have a decision to make about you. Some here believe you are too dangerous to be left free. They want to ’contain’ you. Indefinitely."

My blood ran cold. Contain me. Lock me up. Forever.

"But your father and I disagree," he continued. "We believe the best way to control a power isn’t to lock it away. It’s to give it a purpose."

He looked me straight in the eye. "The essence of Xylos is a part of you. It wants to assimilate. To correct the disorder. To bring unity." 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

"So what?"

"So, give it a target," the director said. "Don’t fight the hunger. Direct it. There are other threats in this world. Other breaches. Other monsters. Criminal organizations that use power for evil."

He gave a small smile.

"Become this world’s apex predator. Assimilate the chaos. Hunt the monsters. Use their own nature against them."

"Turn your curse into a weapon."