SSS-Ranked Trash Hero: I Was Scammed Into Being Summoned-Chapter 59: [X]

The darkness inside Hiroshi was not empty.

That was the first thing the Spirit noticed when it moved through him and settled into his skin, the way water settles into the cracks of dry ground, finding every hollow and filling it.

There was something here already.

Something that sat deeper, something that had weight and shape without being physical.

The Spirit recognized what it was.

It was a soul.

Small and young and barely formed in the way that all living souls were barely formed at their beginning, but present and real and occupying the space that the Spirit had intended to consume.

The Spirit reached for it.

This was not new for it. It had done this many times across countless years in many bodies, finding the soul that lived inside a living thing and simply taking it, the way a larger fire takes a smaller one.

It reached for Hiroshi’s soul. And then it stopped.

Because the soul was not small.

From the outside it had appeared small, the way a door appears small until you open it and find that the space beyond the door has no walls. The Spirit had pressed against the surface of what it thought was a contained thing and instead found that the surface had no edges, that what it was touching extended outward in every direction without stopping.

The spirit pulled back.

The soul of Hiroshi did not react the way a soul should react when something tries to consume it. There was no fear or resistance in the way that living things resisted when they understood something was trying to end them. There was simply a vast and patient presence that sat inside him like a calm ocean.

The Spirit stayed very still. It was measuring.

It was trying to understand what it was standing inside of, what the dimensions of this thing were, whether what it was sensing was real or some distortion.

Then the vast presence noticed the Spirit.

It did not turn toward the Spirit the way a person turns toward a sound. It simply became aware, and in becoming aware it also became present in a way it had not been before, the full weight of its attention arriving from every direction at once, and the Spirit understood immediately and completely that it had made a serious mistake.

What happened next was not an attack in any way the Spirit understood attacks. Nothing struck or grabbed it. The vast presence simply moved, a slow and enormous shifting of something that had not moved in a very long time, and the Spirit felt the pressure of that movement against every part of itself simultaneously.

Half of what the Spirit was came apart in that moment.

Separated, pulled away from the other half and scattered into the surrounding dark inside Hiroshi’s body where it could not reform quickly enough to matter, and what remained of the Spirit was no longer a whole thing but a piece of a thing, a fragment that still had enough of itself left to understand what had just happened.

It ran.

There was no better word for it.

The Spirit moved out of Hiroshi the way something moves when it has stopped thinking about direction and is only thinking about distance.

It came out loud.

The stone walls of the chamber cracked outward from the force of it.

The iron brackets holding the torches broke from their mounts and the torches fell to the ground where they scattered sparks across the floor without catching anything.

Elias was thrown against the far wall hard enough to lose his feet beneath him, and the door behind him swung so hard on its hinges that it tore free from one of them and hung sideways in the frame.

The Spirit did not stop.

It moved through the stone walls of the chamber the way it had moved through Hiroshi’s skin, except without any of the care, punching through solid rock and leaving cracks spreading outward from each point of passage like lines drawn by a shaking hand.

It went through the ceiling of the tunnel above the kobold den.

It went through the packed earth above that.

It came out into the night air moving at a speed that had no patience left in it, and it swept across the ground outside the goblin village like a wind.

The structures at the edge of the settlement came apart.

Not because the Spirit chose to destroy them but because the Spirit was no longer choosing anything, just moving, and everything in its path absorbed the cost of that.

Wooden frames collapsed inward. Hides and ropes and the small constructed things that marked the edges of the goblin den scattered outward like debris thrown from an impact point and the sounds of it chased the Spirit across the open ground beyond the settlement until the sounds fell far enough behind that they stopped reaching.

The Spirit crossed open ground.

Then hills.

Then the long flat stretch of road that ran between the hills and whatever was further, and the road showed the marks of its passing in the stones that lifted out of their settled positions and then dropped again after it had gone. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

The city appeared on the horizon before the Spirit had decided it was heading toward a city.

Lights first, the way cities appeared from a distance at night, scattered points of warmth against the dark edge where ground met sky.

Then the shapes of walls.

Then towers.

The Spirit did not slow down.

It hit the outer wall of the city the way it had hit everything else since tearing itself out of Hiroshi’s body, and the stones of the wall came apart in a wide section that took the watchtower above it down with them as the debris fell outward onto the road and inward onto the buildings crowded against the inside of the wall.

Somewhere inside the city a bell began ringing.

Then more bells.

Lights moved along the streets below, torches and lanterns carried by people running toward the sound or away from it.

The Spirit moved through the city the way it had moved through the tunnels and the open ground before it, and the city recorded its passage in the buildings that cracked and the roads that fractured and the structures that came apart at the points where the Spirit passed closest to them.

It was not destruction as a choice.

It was destruction as a consequence of something that had been badly frightened and had not yet stopped moving.

By the time the last bell started ringing the Spirit was already gone, beyond the far wall of the city, leaving behind it a trail of damage that ran in a rough line from the collapsed outer wall through the interior streets and out the other side, narrow in some places and wider in others depending on how close the Spirit had come to the things it passed.

The city was not quiet after it left. The city was very loud.

And somewhere back in the kobold den beneath the hills, in a stone chamber with cracked walls and scattered torches and a broken table that still held a thin column of fading light, Hiroshi lay on the floor breathing.