Chapter 4 Chapter four

Chapter four

"Welcome to our world, Hero."

The words hung in the cool night air. Ethan turned them over in his mind, testing their weight.

‘Hero’.

He almost laughed. The last person who had looked at him and seen anything remotely heroic was himself, and even that had been a long time ago, standing in front of a cracked mirror in a one-room house that smelled like damp concrete and broken ambition.

"Where exactly is your world?" he asked carefully.

The wizard stepped forward, separating himself from the group. Up close, he was older than Ethan had initially estimated. Deep lines carved across his face told stories of decades lived under difficult skies. Yet his eyes were sharp and alert — the kind that missed nothing.

"You stand in the Kingdom of Valdris," the old man said, his voice measured and deliberate, as though each word was being weighed before release. "In the continent of Eryndal. I am Aldric — Royal Court Mage and Head of the Sacred Summoning Order." He gestured toward the man in the purple robe beside him. "And this is His Majesty, King Caelion the Third, sovereign ruler of Valdris."

The king stepped forward and gave a single, composed nod. He was perhaps fifty, with the kind of posture that suggested he had never once slouched in his life. His sharp blue eyes studied Ethan the way a general studies unfamiliar terrain — searching for both weakness and potential.

"We are grateful you answered the summoning," King Caelion said. His voice was deep and unhurried. "The kingdom is in desperate need."

"I didn't exactly answer anything," Ethan replied honestly. "I didn't choose to come here."

A murmur rippled through the crowd of knights and robed figures. A few of the armored men exchanged glances. Ethan caught the shift in their expressions — skepticism sharpening into something closer to contempt.

Aldric raised one weathered hand and the murmuring stopped instantly.

"No summoned hero ever chooses," the old mage said simply, as if this were a fact as settled as the rotation of the earth. "The spell reaches across dimensions and selects the one whose bloodline and circumstances align with the kingdom's need. You were not chosen by accident, young man."

Ethan filed that away quietly. 'Bloodline.' The same word the robotic voice had used back in the preparation space. It kept surfacing like something refusing to stay submerged.

"What exactly do you need me to do?" he asked.

King Caelion clasped his hands behind his back and turned slightly, gazing toward the dark treeline that bordered the clearing on three sides. When he spoke again, some of the composed authority in his voice had thinned, revealing something rawer underneath.

"Three weeks ago, the Dungeon of Malgrath awakened."

He let the words settle before continuing.

"For two hundred years, the dungeon lay dormant beneath the Ashfen Mountains to the north. Our ancestors sealed it after the First Purge — a war that nearly destroyed this kingdom entirely. We believed the seal permanent." He paused. "We were wrong."

Aldric continued where the king left off, stepping closer to Ethan with his staff tapping rhythmically against the ground.

"The dungeon's awakening has already begun sending creatures outward. Shadow wolves, bone crawlers, lesser wraiths. Our knights have contained them so far, but the disturbances grow stronger with each passing night. If the dungeon reaches full awakening, what emerges will be beyond anything our military can withstand."

"So you need someone to go inside and shut it down," Ethan said.

"We need someone to reach the dungeon's core and destroy the corrupted soul stone anchoring its power," Aldric confirmed. "Our own mages and warriors cannot enter. The dungeon's barrier repels anyone born of this world. It was designed that way." He fixed Ethan with those sharp, unblinking eyes. "But someone summoned from another dimension carries no such restriction."

The silence that followed was complete. Even the insects seemed to have paused.

Ethan looked at the king, then at the old mage, then at the dozens of armored figures standing in the moonlit clearing. He looked at the dark treeline and, beyond it somewhere, imagined mountains hiding something ancient and hungry beneath their roots.

He thought about the robotic voice. 'Death in these dimensions is permanent.'

He thought about Victor's boot connecting with his ribs. About sleeping on a foam mattress on a bare floor. About Marcus and Malik, who called him scholar and laughed with genuine warmth and believed, without any real evidence, that he was going somewhere.

He thought about the sword now sitting in his inventory and the strange rush of knowledge that had flooded through him when he selected it — techniques and instincts that felt borrowed from someone far more capable, yet somehow already natural.

'I will survive. No matter what.'

"How far are the Ashfen Mountains?" he asked.

King Caelion blinked. It was the first time his composure cracked even slightly. He had clearly expected more resistance — more fear, more disbelief.

"Four days' ride north," the king answered.

"And you'll provide supplies? A guide at least as far as the base?"

"Everything you require," Aldric said, and something in the old mage's expression shifted — not quite a smile, but the shadow of one. "Tonight you will rest within the palace walls, eat well, and be fully briefed on everything we know about the dungeon's layout and the creatures already confirmed inside."

Ethan nodded once.

"Then we start there."