SSS-Ranked Trash Hero: I Was Scammed Into Being Summoned-Chapter 62: The Shadow in the Chamber
It was not Hiroshi standing in the middle of the chamber anymore.
The shape still looked roughly like him with two arms, two legs, standing upright. His face was still clearly his. But everything else had changed into something hard to describe.
His body looked like it was made of shadow, or something that moved like shadow but still had weight to it. From the surface of it, thin black tendrils slowly drifted outward in every direction, like something was trying to grow but had not decided what shape it should take.
The only part that had not changed was his face, resting at the center of that dark mass, almost as if it had been left there by mistake.
Elias was already moving when it happened.
He didn’t stop to fully understand what he was seeing. In his experience, the moment you spent trying to figure something out was the moment your opponent used to close the distance. His instincts had already sensed the danger and moved his body before his mind could catch up.
But it didn’t matter.
Hiroshi was suddenly in front of him.
He hadn’t crossed the room or rushed forward. One moment he was far away, and the next he was there, as if the space between them had never existed.
The strike came right after.
The impact sounded like something breaking under pressure. The force smashed through Elias’s guard and sent him flying into the cracked wall. The hit was strong enough to spread new cracks across the stone in three directions.
He hit the floor hard.
But he stood up immediately.
He stood against the wall, breathing carefully while quickly checking his injuries. The results were not encouraging.
His ribs had taken most of the hit. They weren’t broken but the deep bruising made every breath painful. His left arm had gone numb when he hit the wall. Feeling was slowly coming back now, with a sharp pins-and-needles sensation that meant the nerves had only been shaken, not damaged.
He looked at Hiroshi standing in the middle of the ruined chamber.
The shadow body stood still. Thin tendrils drifted slowly around it without any clear purpose. Hiroshi’s face remained at the center, turned toward Elias, but there was no real expression on it. It was just a face looking his way, with nothing behind the eyes that Elias could recognize as thought or intent.
Elias moved first.
He had learned long ago that when you faced something you didn’t understand, you didn’t give it time to settle. Whatever stood in that chamber had already proven in the first few seconds that waiting was not an option.
He rushed in, fast and low, his steps light and silent. His presence faded as he moved, his aura pulling inward until it became hard to sense. For a brief moment his body seemed to blur, slipping through the shadows of the broken chamber like a ghost.
He came from the side, aiming for a blind spot.
The strike was not purely physical. A thin, sharp line of aura formed along his hand like an invisible blade, focused for a single killing blow, the kind of technique assassins used when they needed a fight to end in one move.
He drove the attack forward, the compressed force strong enough to tear a bear-sized body apart.
Hiroshi’s shadow body absorbed the blow.
Then the face turned toward him.
The feeling that came with that look struck Elias. It wasn’t as overwhelming as when the Ancient Dark Spirit had looked at him in this same room, not even close. But it felt related, the way a small flame is related to a much larger fire.
The same source.
A fragment of the same presence.
He pulled back faster than he had intended to pull back.
He put ten meters between himself and Hiroshi and stood there breathing through his damaged ribs and recalibrating, because what he had just learned in those two exchanges had rearranged his understanding of the situation significantly.
Hiroshi outmatched him.
Not in technique. In raw terms the thing controlling Hiroshi’s body was fighting the way something fought when it had never needed technique, when the gap between its strength and everything else’s strength was large enough that technique had simply never been a relevant variable. Every movement was direct and overwhelming and completely without the kind of intelligence that Elias could anticipate or redirect. It was a battering force wearing a humanoid shape and it hit like something that had no concept of what it meant to hit too hard.
But it was only that.
It was only strength.
There was no footwork, no reading of angles, no adjustment based on what he was doing, just a continuous forward pressure that would end him if it connected cleanly a second time but that had no sophistication behind it that he could not work with given the right conditions.
He looked at the room.
The room was destroyed, which under normal circumstances was a disadvantage, but the specific way it was destroyed gave him things to work with. The fallen torch brackets lying across the floor created uneven ground that a purely strength-based approach would not navigate around. The narrow section near the collapsed wall section on the left created a channel that limited lateral movement. The debris scattered across the center of the chamber created obstacles that broke up straight-line charges.
He started using all of it.
He pulled Hiroshi toward the narrow section by moving into it himself and then redirecting along the wall when the shadow body followed, using the channel to force a single angle and then stepping out of that angle at the last moment so the force carrying Hiroshi through it had nowhere to go but past him. He used the fallen brackets to break the rhythm of the pursuit, stepping over them in patterns he had already mapped while Hiroshi’s shadow body moved through them with the specific gracelessness.
It was working.
There was a difference and Elias was clear on what the difference was, but the uncontrolled forward pressure that had nearly ended him in the first exchange was finding less purchase now and he was landing things in the intervals, nothing that was producing visible damage but contact, information, the beginning of a rhythm he could build on.
Then he heard the footsteps.
He heard them immediately, multiple people. The World Order’s secondary measure. The people the Church of Solas had dispatched, the ones the file had mentioned as insurance that Elias had always considered unnecessary given his record.
He broke off the engagement without finishing the exchange he was in the middle of.
The shadow body tracked him across the room.
It did not follow immediately, just turned Hiroshi’s face toward where he had relocated and held there, the tendrils drifting around it in the slow aimless way they had been drifting since this started.
Elias stood against the wall with his blade still in his hand and watched the doorway and watched Hiroshi at the same time, splitting his attention the way his training had taught him to split it, and underneath the professional management of the situation he was aware of something that he was not accustomed to being aware of in the middle of a job.
He was tired.
In the specific way that came from spending several minutes dodging attacks that should not have been survivable, from the ribs that were making every breath expensive, from the sustained output of ascendant rank energy that his body would need time to recover.
He had survived the first engagement with Hiroshi’s shadow body by a margin that he was not comfortable with.
Running was not the option it looked like from the outside, because running meant turning his back on something that had covered the length of this chamber without using the space between them, and turning his back on that was not something he was willing to do while its full attention was on him.
So he stayed.
He stood against the wall managing his breathing and watching both threats and listening to the footsteps in the tunnel getting closer, and he was already thinking about what came next because what came next was the only thing worth thinking about.
The doorway at the far end of the chamber began to lighten.
Someone was coming down.
