Anti-Heroic Fantasies

Prologue

The dungeon died the way all large things die: loud and dramatic.

Hiro stood in the collapse and did not move.

He lacked the energy to. Even if he'd tried, the debris would have found him anyway, given the sheer size of the place whose ceiling had decided it was no longer interested in being a ceiling.

He took the hit without stepping back. He'd been in this world long enough that his body's actual capabilities had grown to the point where this kind of damage wouldn't budge him, let alone hurt him, no more than taking a single step would.

That was exactly why standing completely still was his best move right now.

That said, it still hurts. The way it hurts when your bank account is running near empty toward the end of the month, and some small, forgotten subscription quietly eats another slice of what little was left. Nothing he couldn't recover from, but it stung, happening at this particular moment.

He'd burned through his resources using skills.

Same for his abilities. His stats were worn down to something that could only generously be called barely functional, just enough to keep him alive and conscious, aware that despite all of it, despite the cost of nearly everything he had, he had won, which was unarguably all that mattered.

"Sir, what are you waiting for?"

"Sebastian," he said, recognizing the voice inside his head. "What... what am I... what?"

"You don't seem to be thinking straight, sir. Must be the debuffs. Let me help." A screen manifested in front of him.

[CONSUMABLES]The Sovereign Architect's Blueprint (Grade: Origin-Tier) x3The Primordial Vitriol (Grade: Cataclysmic-Tier) x1The Genesis Calcifier (Grade: Origin-Tier) x1

"I'd recommend these potions. That's all that's left. For maximum efficiency, I suggest this order," the voice explained. "Move quickly from the second to the third, then consume the first again."

Mentally and physically worn down by the ongoing debuffs, Hiro followed the Personal Interface's instructions without argument, drinking what he was told, in the order and timing he was given.

The potions, given their grade, did what they typically did for someone at his level.

They helped, partially, not enough on their own, but still better than nothing.

Then another voice spoke, female, with the tone of a secretary.

[Common Interface]Notification: The Core Chamber threshold has broken.Entities Remaining: 117Status Achieved: Vulnerable. The Dungeon Core is exposed and ready to be summoned.

The interface hadn't even finished announcing it before he was already reaching for the core, literally and figuratively. In an instant, the now-vulnerable dungeon core of Wyrmstone Chasm, willed into existence, materialized in his palm.

He had held a lot of things in this world. Some had been unarguably impressive, in value, in destructiveness, in sheer repulsiveness. But nothing so far had felt as heavy as this. Heavy in the way something feels when it marks the end of a very long effort.

"This thing cost me everything to kill," he said. His voice came out ragged, and he didn't try to smooth it over. "It better be worth everything and everyone I sacrificed. Sebastian."

"Sir?"

"My brain's not working right with all these debuffs, so let me double check. My wish rate's at 100 percent, right?"

"It is, sir."

"And my wish is?"

"A pathway home, sir," the Personal Interface confirmed, unchanged. "To the loved ones you left behind. To the day, the minute, the instant of that accident, with an unharmed body."

At those words, which summarized everything he'd been fighting for over the past several millennia, Hiro crushed the core without effort. A system prompt materialized in the collapsing dark.

[Common Interface]Congratulations, you have successfully harvested resources from an RU-wielding entity.Mode: AssimilationR.U. Harvested:Wish Granted: Pathway to Home.

"This... this is it," he said. Part question, part not quite a question at all.

"Yes, sir. This is it," Sebastian confirmed. "Your opportunity to go home."

He sat with those words for a moment. He was going home. To China. On his way to his fiancée's apartment. To everything he'd spent however many years of this world harvesting toward.

Overcome with joy and relief, his laughter rang out. Beneath it, though, stirred something older, a quiet, unresolved truth that had been growing silently through all those years, one he could no longer ignore.

He conjured the item, which despite being an item, manifested as a system prompt asking, "Would you use this Pathway to Home and leave Tutoria behind?" offering a simple choice between Yes and Not Yet, hanging in the dark of the collapsing chamber as if it expected a quick answer.

He stared at it blankly, then asked, "Sebastian."

"Yes."

He didn't know what to say to the interface, so he said nothing, until he heard Sebastian speak first. "It has been good to be around you, sir."

The hesitation he felt wasn't something he'd planned for when he began this millennia-long journey.

He'd known from the start that Sebastian wouldn't be coming with him, that had been one of the first things the interface ever made clear.

He'd made his peace with that. It turned out that peace only held up until it was actually tested.

"Are you hesitating?" Sebastian asked.

"I shouldn't be."

"You shouldn't," Sebastian agreed. "This has been your wish since the beginning. You shouldn't hesitate here. Not for me. I've done my duty as your Personal Interface. I'm content with this outcome."

Hiro, as it turned out, was not, which was why he couldn't bring himself to press the button. "I'll miss my Personal Interface," he admitted.

"There will be people to fill that void. Just as I tried to fill the void left by those very people," Sebastian said. "They may fail, like I did. But you, sir, will survive this."

"You sure?" he asked, tearing up.

"I am. You survived centuries in this world. So yes, I'm sure you can survive this," Sebastian said, cheerfully. "Also, it's illogical to be this dramatic when this might only be a short goodbye."

"You mean the apocalypse?"

"Correct. Upon the deployment of the Soul Harvest system, a Personal Interface will be assigned to assist you, as I did here. You'll have the option to configure that interface to be me again."

"That wouldn't really be you, though."

"It could be," the interface insisted.

Hiro didn't like this. "I wish I could bring you," he said. "Not just you. The Common Interface too. I'll miss her secretary voice as well, you know. I'll miss everything tied to the system. Skills, abilities, stats, all of it."

That would be a complicated wish to fulfill. You would need to hunt something at least as powerful as that dungeon core to pay for it.

"That's... true," he admitted, realizing that somehow this ridiculous option was actually on the table. Of course it was. What in this world, short of some reality-breaking exception, couldn't be wished into existence through the wishing system?

It had taken defeating the most powerful known dungeon in this world, risking everything, pouring every scrap of his accumulated power into a single wish, just to secure his own return. Bringing anything else would demand the same scale of sacrifice.

"Moreover," Sebastian continued, "the world you came from has yet to encounter RU. Our purpose is to process—"

"What happens," Hiro interrupted, something sharpening in his mind, "to this body, once my soul returns to China?"

"The body would naturally—"

"Die. Right?"

"Yes. That would be correct."

A heavy silence stretched over the ruined chamber.

"What a waste, don't you think?" Hiro said. "All those skills. Those levels. All that RU buildup. Gone."

He'd spent millennia accumulating what he had. The RU saturating this body was the product of every fight, every dungeon, every near-death experience this world had put him through. Letting it dissolve with an empty corpse felt like walking away from a full bank account and letting it expire.

"There's something you want me to understand," Sebastian said. "Something my protocol-bound mind can't quite picture."

"There is," Hiro said, a Machiavellian glint in his eyes. "What if I made that wish? What if I used it to bring you there, not just you, but the Common Interface, and all my resources too?"

"What? When I mentioned that earlier, I was only joking. This wish cannot be made. And even if it could, with what resources? Where would you find the RU to pay for it?"

"Closer than you'd think."

"Sir... you can't be thinking of that."

"I am. The answer is me. I'll use my own resources to make this wish."

He was the single RU-wielding entity he could think of whose value came close to matching the dungeon core he'd just spent to make his last wish.

If this world allowed wishes to be paid for through the investment of RU, the energy that let both monsters and humans grow stronger along the system's defined path, then in theory, those same rules had to apply to him.

"This is the perfect plan."

"This is not."

"Think about it, Sebastian. What I could achieve with my resources and my memories together, compared to what I could achieve for my world with just the memories alone."

"That's..."

"Remind me. What do they call my kind here? The ones I was summoned alongside?"

"Heroes," Sebastian said.

He almost smiled. It was a word he'd worn at a distance the entire time he'd been here, always too large for him, never quite fitting. He'd come to this world with one door in mind and had spent every moment since searching for it. He had never really been a hero of Tutoria.

"I couldn't be one for this world," he said. "Maybe I could be one for mine, with the power I have now."

Hiro looked at the Pathway prompt. The hesitation from before was gone, replaced by something that felt like purpose.

"Are you with me on this, Sebastian?"

"That is my purpose, sir," the interface said. "But also, yes."

That was the answer Hiro wanted to hear.

On that day, in the deepest floor of the guardianless, coreless SSS-ranked dungeon known as Wyrmstone Chasm, one of the two hundred and fifty-six souls summoned from another world left Tutoria.

And on that day, in that same place, the being who took form from the void the hero left behind opened his eyes.