I Possess the SSS Skill: Future Sight-Chapter 17: A Temporary Lie

Happiness in the city of Elysium is nothing but a temporary lie.

A mere short-term narcotic granted to you by fate before it begins tearing you apart.

A week had passed since Awakening Day.

A week in which the Valtir mansion buzzed with life, with future plans, and with Victor’s laughter as he trained to control his E-rank Eitra.

Kyle, despite his J rank, felt a peace he had never known before.

He was sleeping in his soft bed, immersed in a warm dream where he ran with his brother across endless green fields, and Morvind watched them with his gentle smile.

But... the dream began to melt.

The green colors turned brown, then black.

The air in the dream became heavy. Sticky. So hot that his lungs began to burn from the inside.

Shhh... hissss...

A sound that did not resemble the rustling of trees.

It sounded like giant serpents slithering across a floor of scorching gravel.

Followed by a dry cracking noise, like bones shattering under immense pressure.

Kyle slowly opened his crimson eyes, his mind still swaying between sleep and wakefulness.

His room was not dark as he had left it.

Nor was it lit by moonlight.

The room was swimming in a sea of demonic illumination.

Colors that did not belong to nature; tongues of deep blue flames, laced with veins of crimson and black fire, danced like mad ghosts upon the marble walls, licking the silk curtains and turning them into ash within seconds.

Kyle’s chest tightened violently.

He drew in a deep breath to scream, but what entered his lungs was not air—it was pure death.

It was thick black smoke, saturated with the stench of toxic Eitra, a smell resembling burning sulfur, raw flesh, and chemicals.

Kyle coughed violently, nearly tearing his throat apart, and fell from the bed onto the wooden floor, which was as hot as a metal sheet on a stove.

"Fath... Vic... tor..." he tried to shout, but his voice came out as a dead rasp.

He crawled on his stomach, avoiding the thick smoke rising toward the ceiling.

The old survival instinct, the instinct of the orphanage child, awakened within him.

But this was no accident.

Ordinary fire does not emit such a terrifying hum, nor does it melt stone as if it were wax.

This was an attack. An attack using extremely high-rank Eitra.

He reached his room’s door.

The doorknob was literally melting. Wrapping his hand in a thick blanket, he forced the burning door open and stumbled into the main corridor of the mansion.

The sight that met him cast what remained of his mind into a well of terror.

His safe haven, the mansion built to be his shield, was being crushed.

The walls were cracking and bleeding blue magma.

Priceless paintings were melting, and marble statues shattered as if invisible hammers struck them.

The silence was horrifying; there were no screams of servants, no alarm sounds.

Only the roar of magical flames devouring the place alive.

Kyle ran barefoot, his feet touching the burning tiles. With every step, he felt the skin on the soles of his feet melting, blisters forming and bursting to release blood that evaporated the moment it touched the floor.

The pain tore through his nerves, but adrenaline and terror were stronger.

The edges of his nightshirt burned, heat lashed his arms and face, scorching the tips of his black hair and making his eyeballs feel as though they were boiling inside his skull.

"Father!"

He instinctively headed toward the western wing, where Morvind’s room was.

The adult. The B-rank hunter.

The only one capable of stopping this hell.

The closer he got to Morvind’s room, the more unbearable the heat became.

Waves of heat struck his face like slaps of solid fire.

The air itself seemed to tear apart, and the walls glowed a deep red, threatening to melt.

Kyle pushed open the double doors to his adoptive father’s room, expecting to find him fighting, or shouting defensive spells.

He burst in, coughing blood and smoke, his eyes streaming with tears.

The room was ablaze. The massive bed had become a mass of embers.

The wardrobe was charred and collapsed... but...

It was empty.

There was no trace of Morvind. No body, no man fighting. The room was completely devoid of any human presence.

Kyle fell to his burned knees for a moment, gasping with extreme difficulty.

In those few seconds amid hell, a painful, vile, poisonous feeling struck him. Black thoughts crawled from the deepest part of his childhood trauma to gnaw at his mind.

Did he run? the voice of the rejected orphan child whispered in his ear. Did the great hunter flee and leave us? Did he realize the attack was stronger than him, so he saved himself and left the weak J-rank boy to burn? Did he abandon me?

His heart clenched with a pain greater than his burns.

The feeling of betrayal was a knife driven into his soul.

But, with desperate willpower, he shook his head violently, driving those filthy thoughts away.

"No... it doesn’t matter!" Kyle shouted in a hoarse, broken voice, slapping his own face to wake himself from the illusion.

"What matters is that he escaped! What matters is that he’s alive! If he’s outside, then he’s safe!"

He tried to cling to that hope.

If Morvind had escaped, perhaps he had gone to get help. But... what about Victor?

Victor!

Kyle’s eyes widened with doubled terror. Victor’s room was at the end of the eastern corridor.

Kyle rose, ignoring the flayed flesh on the soles of his feet.

He ran back through the blazing corridor.

The inferno was growing more violent. The ceiling began collapsing behind him, chunks of burning concrete falling like destructive meteors.

He reached the eastern corridor.

Here, the destruction was indescribable.

It wasn’t just fire; there were signs of a violent physical attack.

Victor’s door was not merely burned—it had exploded from the inside out, wooden shards embedded into the corridor walls like grotesque daggers.

Kyle stood at the threshold, trembling, tears streaming from his eyes due to the thick smoke and unbearable heat.

He held onto the charred doorframe, gathering every ounce of courage to step inside.

He prayed to the god of the universe, silently begging to find the room empty as well.

He stepped inside.

The room was the epicenter of hell. Ground zero of the attack.

The blue smoke parted slightly due to a current of air from the shattered window.

And when the view cleared... time stopped.

Kyle’s heart stopped.

The entire universe ceased to spin.

Those black thoughts that had haunted him in Morvind’s room... how unjust they were.

How vile.

Morvind did not run. Morvind did not abandon them.

At the very first moment of the attack, Morvind realized that the closest target to danger was Victor, so he ran with his massive body toward this room to save him.

What Kyle saw in the center of the shattered floor was a masterpiece of sadism and absolute brutality, painted with the blood of those he loved.

In the middle of the room stood a massive spike. Not a natural rock, but a construct of black metallic Eitra, rough and covered with saw-like spikes, summoned from the depths of the earth with crushing force.

This jagged mass pierced through Morvind Valtir’s body.

The impalement came from the middle of his back, tearing through his spine with savage force, the blood-soaked tip emerging from his broad chest.

The old man’s massive body, which had fought dozens of battles, was suspended in the air on that demonic metal stake.

Blue and red flames still burned in his flesh, feeding on his blood and Eitra.

The sight was so grotesque it provoked instant nausea and threatened madness.

Morvind’s strong skin had charred and hardened like black coal armor, cracked and leaking boiling blood and bodily fluids that evaporated upon touching the scorching air with a disgusting hiss.

The smell of burning hair, body fat, and bone marrow was thick and suffocating.

But... Morvind did not die while retreating.

He was not pinned backward.

His suspended body was bent forward.

Despite unimaginable pain, despite a shattered spine and torn entrails, Morvind used the last fragment of his will as a father to bend, to arch his giant body like a dome—a human shield—trying to protect what lay beneath him from the explosion and flames.

Kyle’s lips trembled.

His crimson eyes widened to the point of tearing, veins bulging as if they would burst.

No... no... please no...

Kyle stepped forward mechanically, like a corpse moved by invisible strings.

The heat no longer mattered.

The pain in his melted feet vanished.

Everything faded except this horrific scene.

He looked beneath Morvind’s charred ribcage.

He looked at what the father had sacrificed his soul and every drop of blood to protect.

Beneath the hanging body, on a floor turned into molten glass, lay another body.

A much smaller one.

There was no face to recognize.

No features.

Just a mass of shrunken, roasted flesh down to the bone.

The magical explosion had been too powerful, and the heat too extreme; Morvind’s body, despite its size and strength as a B-rank hunter, had not been enough to completely block the corrosive Eitra of the attack from reaching Victor.

The small body’s limbs were twisted at unnatural angles, curled inward like a dead spider under the sun, burned and fused with the remnants of sleepwear.

The skin had completely melted away, leaving layers of charred muscle and fragile bones protruding like dead branches.

Bodily fluids had boiled and evaporated, leaving only the scent of pure death—far worse than the orphanage laboratory.

The lively boy had been reduced to a heap of organic charcoal.

But amid that horrifying black mass, there was one strand.

A very small strand that had miraculously survived the direct burn because it had been buried beneath Morvind’s charred boot, protected by the shadow of his father’s foot.

A strand of bright blond hair.

A strand that belonged to his brother... his twin in pain... his only friend—Victor.

Victor, who had been laughing just hours ago.

Victor, who dreamed of becoming the sword that would protect his brother.

Now, he was nothing but deformed remains, ash and ruined flesh beneath his father’s torn body.

Kyle collapsed onto his burned knees, blood mixing with ash beneath him.

There were no tears left in his eyes to cry.

Shock swallowed everything.

His mind, which always tried to analyze and understand, shattered like glass struck by a heavy hammer.

He stared at the blond strand stained with ash. He stared at Morvind’s face, whose features had completely melted away, leaving only a partially exposed skull, jaw open as if still screaming his final cry to protect his son.

The psychological terror he had lived in the orphanage returned a thousandfold.

The orphanage had shown him the cruelty of humans toward strangers, but this attack showed him that the universe itself delighted in slowly torturing him.

Every time he built a fortress of hope, it was crushed and smeared with the blood of those he loved.

Every time he found warmth, he was burned by it until he turned to ash.

Hatred toward himself for doubting Morvind even for a moment gnawed at his soul like corrosive acid.

Kyle placed his trembling hands on his head.

His fingers dug into his black hair so hard they nearly tore his scalp.

He shook his head back and forth in a hysterical, sick motion.

He opened his mouth. There was no oxygen—only air saturated with death and the scent of his family roasting.

A scream erupted from his throat.

It was not the scream of a frightened child, nor of a human in pain.

It was the scream of an entity being dragged alive into the depths of hell. The scream of a monster born from pure agony.

A scream that tore his vocal cords, merging with the sound of the collapsing, burning ceiling.

A scream carrying all the hatred of the universe, and all the darkness Morvind had futilely tried to keep away from him.

He kept screaming, his crimson eyes fixed on the charred remains of his family, blood flowing from his torn throat, until his vision turned completely black.

His thin body collapsed onto the burning floor beside them.

He lost consciousness as the blue flames crept closer, slowly crawling to lick the edges of his clothes—ending the dream of the Valtir family, and leaving behind a child who would know nothing in his coming life except the language of ash, blood, and mad revenge.