I Became the Simp Character I Roasted Online-Chapter 56: The Boss?

Revan’s eyes fluttered open, his heavy lids parting slowly as if waking from a deep, paralyzing slumber.

He found himself lying on his back in the slurry, staring up at a white sky that offered nothing.

Driven by instinct, he immediately tried to sit up.

The abrupt motion sent a dull, grinding protest through his ribs, but the pain was quieter than before.

"W-what’s going on?"

Reflexively, his right hand went to his head, pressing against his temple.

The world was spinning.

His thoughts were fragmented, scattered like shards of a mirror he was trying to reassemble while half-conscious.

"Wait... wait wait wait." His fingers dug into his scalp.

"Just now... something flowed into my body. Something insane. It felt like getting struck by lightning from the inside... God, it was so painful I must have blacked out."

He whipped his head around.

The polished stone floor that had been under his boots moments ago was gone, replaced by the same waterlogged slurry he’d been trudging through all night.

The dome of fog, the circular clearing, the floating artifact, and of course, the little boy—all of it had vanished as if none of it had ever existed.

"Fuck... am I dreaming?" he rasped.

But the strange sensation clinging to his left hand immediately shut that thought down.

Something was different.

The arm that had been dead weight since the body slam in the fog, the arm he’d been dragging around like a piece of wet rope for the past hour, was resting against the mud with a weight that felt... supported. Structured.

As if someone had slipped a brace around his forearm while he was unconscious, something rigid enough to hold the bones in place and dense enough to give the muscles something to push against.

He lifted his left hand, caked in thick mud.

The gauntlet was still there.

Black metal encasing his forearm from wrist to fingertip, the articulated joints flexing smoothly as his fingers curled and uncurled.

He could feel the grooves on its surface pressing against his skin, aligned perfectly with the dead channels underneath.

And through those grooves, something cold was flowing.

Filling the pathways that his own Aura had burned out.

His left arm was working. Without him channeling a single drop of Aura into it.

Revan frowned. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

’Does this thing have some kind of healing mechanism?’

He shook his head slowly.

’No. That’s not it.’

The channels were still dead. He could feel that much.

The internal pathways that carried Aura through his forearm hadn’t repaired themselves.

They were just as collapsed, just as burned out as they’d been before the whiteout. What the gauntlet was doing wasn’t healing. It was bypassing.

Running its own energy through the dead channels like a river being diverted through an abandoned canal. The canal was still broken. The water just didn’t care.

Revan could feel the artifact. Every person who wore one could, whether mage or warrior.

It was the most fundamental sign that a bond had formed.

When a person bonded with an artifact, they didn’t perceive it as an object.

They perceived it as an extension of themselves. A second pulse. A presence layered on top of their own, resonating with their mana signature the way two tuning forks vibrated in sympathy when struck at the same frequency.

This happened because artifacts weren’t dead objects.

They couldn’t be.

Every artifact was crystallized mana, and mana was existence. Mana was life.

Whether born from a Territorial Phenomenon over centuries of compression or forged by a magician’s own hands, the fundamental truth was the same: an artifact contained a piece of someone’s existence.

A Phenomenon poured its residual mana into the land over hundreds of years until the energy solidified into form.

A magician did the same thing in a fraction of the time, but the cost was proportional. To create an artifact, a magician didn’t channel mana. They sacrificed it. Permanently.

A piece of their life force, carved out of their own existence and sealed into metal or stone or glass, never to return.

The artifact didn’t just carry mana. It carried the creator’s years. Their vitality. Their remaining time on this earth.

’Even the kingdom’s legal code classifies artifacts as equivalent to living entities,’ Revan murmured under his breath. ’They can’t be owned. Only bonded. And a bonded artifact has the same legal protections as a sentient creature.’

Revan let out a long sigh.

"Damn... now I’m getting nostalgic for my Shadow Storage."

He flexed his right hand out of habit, the muscle memory of reaching into that pocket dimension still hardwired into his fingers.

"How long has it been since I last used that thing? Feels like a lifetime ago."

[The Shadow Storage.] One of the few genuinely useful things he’d acquired in fifteen years of servitude under Sylvia.

The kind of artifact that made every other warrior jealous the moment they found out he had one.

’Just from the feel of it, this is a top-tier item. It’s safe to assume this is an S-rank artifact.’

"Tsk." Revan clicked his tongue lazily at the thought.

Nothing in this world was free.

This world charged interest on everything.

"Come on, Revan. Be positive. The Shadow Storage’s cost was mild."

He told himself, trying to force some optimism into the bleak situation.

For an artifact as incredibly useful as the Shadow Storage, the price to use it was absurdly cheap. It only required a small, continuous trickle of mana from his body.

A thin, constant drain on his reserves that he barely even noticed when he was healthy.

However, when he wasn’t healthy—when his mana ran low or his body was damaged—that drain manifested as a sickening nausea. A churning stomach. Sometimes vomiting, if he pushed it too hard.

Unpleasant, but entirely manageable.

The artifact’s sheer utility outweighed the side effects by such a massive margin that complaining about a little nausea felt like complaining about the price of breathing.

"So. What’s your price, huh?" he muttered to the strange object attached to his hand.

His mind was still weighing possibilities when the air in front of him detonated.

BWOOOM.

The shockwave hit him before the sound did.

A wall of displaced atmosphere that slammed into his face and chest and threw his hair backward, the force so sudden and so close that his eardrums popped and his vision shook.

Revan’s body reacted before his brain. He was on his feet, sword up, weight low, the gauntlet pulsing cold against his skin.

’What—’

The fog around him was different.

He hadn’t noticed. Somewhere between waking up in the mud and staring at the gauntlet and rambling, the landscape had shifted.

The rain was gone. The slurry under his boots was harder, drier. The fog was thicker, pressing in from every side with a density that made the previous hours feel like a light mist by comparison.

’Is my fate really screwing with me again?!’ he thought, resigned.

Too late to think about it.

Because through the fog, barely twenty meters ahead, something was standing.

Tall. Much taller than any human had a right to be.

A silhouette that the fog clung to rather than concealed, as if the white was drawn to it, wrapping around its frame like cloth around a statue.

Revan squinted.

His one functional ear was ringing from the shockwave. His eyes, bloodshot and half-blind from mud and exhaustion, strained against the white.

The silhouette moved. One step forward.

The ground shuddered under its weight.

The sheer pressure of its movement sent the fog peeling back.

The silhouette was gone, replaced by a clarity that was terrifying to behold.

A creature clad in black armor, its entire surface engulfed in dark flames that licked and crawled across every plate and joint like a living fire that had fused itself to the metal.

The flames gave off no heat, no smoke. They just burned, endlessly, consuming the faint light around them and giving nothing back.

’I don’t know how many more times I have to face creatures far stronger than me. People say that fighting those above your level makes you stronger or gives you experience? that’s a load of bullshit. You don’t get stronger; you just end up with PTSD and goddamn scars.’

The figure took another step. The fog retreated further.

A sword hung from its right hand. Long. Straight.

The blade was the same burning black as the armor, wreathed in that same lightless fire, and it dragged through the earth as the figure walked, carving a smoking furrow in the ground without apparent effort.

A pair of violet eyes peered out.

Through the narrow slit of a helm that looked like it had been forged from a single piece of darkness, two points of light stared at Revan.

The figure stopped. Fifteen meters away.

As if signaling Revan to get ready.

Revan’s grip on his sword tightened until his knuckles went white.

"Hahaha... Alright, I get it. So, you’re the boss here, huh?"

Revan forced a smile onto his face.

"See that, buddy? Let’s hope you’re worth it. Show me what you’ve got."