Hide sighed deeply, a heavy, bitter exhaustion settling in his bones. He pulled his gaze away from the family and continued walking down the empty street.

The fear those parents felt was natural. It was logical. It was the exact same fear that had dominated Hide’s entire life before the system crashed into his reality. Which made the alternative absolutely incomprehensible to him.

Even living in a world this fragile, there were people who actively chose not to awaken, even when they were explicitly given the chance.

By federal law, every citizen was required to attend the Awakening Assessment Authority at the age of sixteen and from that point they were given three chances to awaken until they turned eighteen.

But the actual process of swallowing the Life Stone was technically voluntary. You had the option to sign a waiver and decline the awakening process entirely.

The thought made Hide let out a dry, humorless laugh. It was a hilarious, tragic irony. On one side of the city, there were people like him—desperate kids who would bleed, beg, and break themselves, refusing to give up even after failing their first or second chances.

They craved the power to survive.

And on the other side, there were people who looked at the power to defend themselves and simply said ’no’. They believed that staying a mundane, fragile human was somehow morally superior, or safer.

His mother had been one of them.

Hide’s jaw tightened. He hadn’t known that detail until his meeting with Commander Maddox. He had always assumed his mother was simply unawakened by natural consequence.

But Maddox, had revealed the truth: Erin Volter had been offered the Life Stone during her tenure as a top-tier researcher. And she had formally declined it.

Hide easily found the reason for that, or at least, he assumed he knew why.

He remembered the late nights in their cramped apartment, the smell of food she made, and the soft, earnest tone of his mother’s voice as she helped him with his homework. She had always been far too empathetic.

"They aren’t just mindless killing machines, Hide," her voice echoed in his memory, soft and dangerously naive. "They are what they are because of some consequences we do not know and they can not escape. If we could just understand them... if we could just give them a chance, I truly believe they wouldn’t want to eat us."

Hide’s boots ground against the pavement. His breathing hitched, the dark mana in his core violently flaring in response to the memory.

He had always wanted to tell her she was wrong. He had wanted to shake her and scream that she was very, very wrong. They weren’t misunderstood victims

They were monsters. Brutal, remorseless abominations that slaughtered for the sheer joy of it.

But by the time Hide had grown old enough to fully articulate that thought, to argue against her boundless empathy, she was already dead. Torn to absolute shreds by the very ’displaced entities’ she had pitied.

"Dammit," Hide hissed, the memory of her blood-slicked body flashing violently behind his eyes.

A sudden, overwhelming wave of grief and furious anger crashed through him. Without thinking, without suppressing his enhanced stats, Hide swung his right arm and punched the thick trunk of a massive oak tree lining the sidewalk.

BOOM!

The impact sounded like a detonating artillery shell. Hide’s bare knuckles, backed by black scales and superhuman strength, punched completely through the solid wood.

The shockwave of the blow shattered the structural integrity of the tree, blowing a massive hole straight through the center of the trunk.

A heavy rain of splintered bark and dried autumn leaves cascaded down from the canopy, showering the dim street in a chaotic flurry of debris.

Hide stood there, his fist still buried wrist-deep in the pulverized wood. He closed his eyes, his chest heaving as the physical exertion helped vent the suffocating pressure in his mind.

He blinked a couple of times, taking in a long, deep breath of the cool night air, slowly forcing his heart rate to steady and his anger to subside.

He pulled his arm back, his knuckles completely unbothered by the wood, and dusted the splinters off his sleeve.

Only then did he notice the sound of ragged, terrified hyperventilating.

Hide slowly turned his head. Sitting on the pavement just a few feet away, pressed desperately against the opposite side of the ruined tree trunk, was a man.

He looked like a late-night office worker, wearing a cheap suit and clutching a briefcase to his chest like a shield.

The man was staring at Hide with wide, bloodshot eyes, his entire body shivering so violently his teeth were audibly chattering.

He looked at the massive, smoking hole punched through the solid oak tree, and then up at the white-haired teenager who had just done it with a bare fist.

Hide blinked, slightly taken aback by the sheer level of terror radiating from the mundane civilian. ’What is there to be so afraid of?’ Hide thought, genuinely confused. He was just blowing off some steam.

Realizing he was probably coming across as a deranged villain, Hide decided to de-escalate the situation. He tried to offer the terrified man a polite, reassuring smile.

Unfortunately, Hide had spent the last few weeks killing beasts and doing nothing else. His face had long since forgotten how to accommodate a normal, friendly expression.

The smile that stretched across his face was a sharp, unhinged, predatory grin, his bright blue eyes practically glowing in the shadows of the drone light that had hovered above them.

The man let out a strangled, high-pitched squeak. He scrambled backward crab-walking across the concrete, before finally finding his footing, dropping his briefcase entirely, and sprinting down the street as if the devil himself were chasing him.

Hide stood there, alone on the pavement, scratching the back of his head in profound confusion. He watched the man disappear around the corner.

Had he done something wrong? He knew he didn’t look particularly approachable when he smiled, but surely it wasn’t that bad.

"Well... fuck that," Hide muttered to himself, turning back toward his apartment.

"You scared him out of his life... now he will go and kill himself out of sheer paranoia. Congratulations, you just killed him."

Hide froze and narrowed his eyes as he looked back, from where the voice had come.