Chương 99: Player's License

These words, having pierced through everything he'd been through — all the suffering, all the trials, all the sleepless nights and exhausting training — finally caught up with him, cutting into his mind with a merciless clarity that left no room for doubt or hope. Before he could even attempt to defend himself, Hector brought his palm down against the ground with a dull thud.

From that simple gesture, blue petals surged upward in a whole cloud, swirling through the air like startled birds, and the ground beneath Lloyd's feet suddenly began to melt, dissolving like wax under an open flame. He felt the earth slipping out from under his soles, felt his entire body slowly, irreversibly sinking downward, into a void that had torn open right beneath the blooming meadow.

Lloyd didn't even have time to properly grasp what was happening before he was already falling, plunging into that familiar, all-too-known white emptiness — the same one that surrounded him every time between stages of the Exam.

"I went through all of that, and I still lost?" A crooked, bitter smile rose to his lips against his will, looking far more like a grimace of pain than anything close to amusement.

"What's that saying again... Ah, right. Crossed the ocean, drowned in a puddle." Suddenly, even the void around him began to lose its familiar, even white color. Everything blurred, faded, as if some invisible hand were wiping away an already-finished painting to draw something else entirely over it. And now he was surrounded not by whiteness, but by a dense, viscous blackness, swallowing the last flickers of his consciousness. Lloyd slowly opened his eyes.

A faint light from some kind of lamp pressed weakly against him, dim and muted, hanging somewhere high above his head. His body felt strangely light, almost weightless. Propping himself up on his elbows, he found he was lying on some narrow cot, covered with a coarse but clean cloth.

Not a single scratch, not a single wound anywhere on his body — even the exhaustion that had weighed so heavily on his shoulders just moments ago seemed to have vanished entirely, as if everything he'd lived through on that meadow had truly been nothing more than a...

"Dream?" He sat up slowly, swinging his legs off the edge of the cot, and looked around, trying to steady the faint dizziness in his head. The room turned out to be enormous — a long, stretched-out hall with high vaulted ceilings painted the same faceless, sterile white as the walls, the floor, and the countless rows of identical cots stretching off into the distance, disappearing into the dim light of scattered lamps.

The air here felt strangely still, almost devoid of any scent, as though the place itself existed outside the ordinary laws Lloyd had known since childhood. There was, however, one notable difference compared to what he remembered from previous visits to halls like this. Almost every cot stood empty. Only a few still held people — or something distantly resembling them: motionless figures wrapped in white sheets, their faces hidden in the half-light.

The silence in the hall was so dense that Lloyd could clearly hear his own breathing, echoing faintly somewhere beneath the vaulted ceiling. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

"How many people must have failed here," a heavy thought crossed his mind,"and how many are still lying here right now, just coming to, without even realizing yet that it's already over." He rose slowly to his feet, feeling the smooth, almost polished floor cold beneath his bare soles, and at that very moment heard the creak of a door opening somewhere at the far end of the hall, the sound carrying unexpectedly loud through the room.

In the doorway appeared a girl he already recognized — the same one, with light, faintly curled hair pinned neatly into a strict hairstyle, and the same severe office attire that outlined her slender, well-kept figure far more candidly than any business dress code required. She walked straight toward him with a confident, measured stride, her heels clicking softly against the polished floor, the sound echoing between the rows of empty cots.

Coming closer, she stopped a couple of steps away and introduced herself, her voice even, well-rehearsed, as though she'd said these very words more than once already that day. — Greetings again. I'm truly sorry it turned out this way — you were close. But don't lose heart. The fact that you didn't make it into a good guild doesn't mean your path is over. If you keep working at it, you'll be noticed eventually — it will just take a little more time...

The girl kept talking, reciting a long-memorized, well-worn script, her intonations rising and falling in all the right places with almost mechanical precision. Lloyd listened with half an ear, feeling nothing inside but a hollow, cold emptiness, yet he was almost certain: these exact same words, word for word, delivered with that same soft, sympathetic tone, she had said to every single person who'd ever failed and woken up in this hall — perhaps even to the very first one.

"I wonder how many times a day she has to repeat this," drifted through Lloyd's mind, an almost detached, indifferent thought. At last the girl finished her prepared, polished-to-automation monologue and suddenly held something out to him — something that looked like a small card. Lloyd noted absently that her hand was sheathed in a thin, neat glove — a detail that stirred a brief flicker of confusion in him. — Here, this is your license.

Lloyd reached out to take it, and the instant his fingers made contact with the card's surface, it instantly shattered into dozens of tiny, blindingly white sparks, flaring and dissolving into the air within a fraction of a second. At once, somewhere at the edge of hearing and consciousness, the familiar, emotionless voice of the System sounded. [You have received a relic: Player's License.] Lloyd's face at that moment must have looked far more like a ghost's than a living man's — with each passing day, the list of things capable of surprising him seemed only to grow longer, never shorter. His capacity for astonishment, it seemed, had no end in sight.

"A relic? Even a regular license counts as a relic?" But then his thoughts were interrupted by a quiet, barely audible chuckle. The girl, noticing the dumbfounded, frozen expression on Lloyd's face as he stared at her, quickly raised a hand to cover herself, hiding cheeks that had flushed a bright red — visible even in the hall's dim light. — Sorry, but your reaction is really something else.

For a moment, the sternness slipped from her face, giving way to a light, almost girlish embarrassment, but within a second she composed herself again, straightening her back and restoring the businesslike dryness to her voice. — Well then, allow me to show you out. She turned, pointing with a brief, practiced gesture toward the massive door at the far end of the hall, from beneath which a thin strip of brighter, warmer light was spilling through.

Lloyd only nodded silently in response, unable to find the strength to say a word — too much had piled up on him in the last few minutes, too much still needed to be sorted out in his head somehow. And so they set off toward the exit together, walking side by side between the endless rows of empty white cots, while the silence of the great hall slowly closed in behind them, as if eager to forget, as quickly as possible, about one more young man who had failed the Exam.