SSS-Ranked Trash Hero: I Was Scammed Into Being Summoned-Chapter 70: Regaining consciousness

The first thing Hiroshi felt was the heat.

It wasn’t his heat. It was the radiant, pressurized warmth of the three heroes as they began their transformation into Avatars. From deep within the suffocating layers of the void, Hiroshi’s consciousness, which had been reduced to a flickering ember, began to spark.

He was a prisoner in his own skull.

When the three heroes started their chant, the sheer volume of divine mana acting on the room served as a smelling salt to his drowned mind. For hours, or maybe it was only minutes, time didn’t exist in the darkness, he had been a passenger.

He had watched through the "Vertical Slit" of his own eyes as if looking through a narrow, distorted window. He had felt the "Monster" persona take over, a cold, calculating machine made of shadow and hunger.

He felt the Kenji’s first strike, it was just a projectile to be redirected. To the human Hiroshi, it was an agonizing scream of light that burned his retinas.

Stop it, he had tried to whisper. But he had no control over his tongue. He was just a ghost floating in a sea of black oil.

As the fight escalated into the cinematic clash of gods, the internal pressure grew. When Aria’s absolute-zero ice encased him, Hiroshi felt the sensation of his blood turning into shards of glass. It was a physical violation. He felt his bones resetting, his skin hardening into that jagged shadow-armor. Every time the "Monster" used a skill, it was like a hot needle being driven into Hiroshi’s brain.

The power wasn’t free. It was being squeezed out of his soul.

Then came the "Soleth’s Gavel."

When Marcus brought down that sphere of golden sun, Hiroshi’s consciousness was nearly extinguished. The heat was absolute. He felt his physical human form being charred to ash inside the shell of the void. In that moment of near-death, the "Monster" had surged, opening a rift in reality to survive.

That rift was the turning point.

As the "Monster" stepped through the crack in space, Hiroshi felt the void-armor solidify into the skeletal nightmare form. This wasn’t just a costume. He felt his spine elongate, the vertebrae popping and stretching until he was seven feet tall. He felt the six insect-legs erupt from his shoulder blades. The pain was so sharp it was crystalline. It was the pain of a man being broken on a rack and then put back together wrong.

But the pain gave him a foothold. It was a sensory input he could finally grab onto.

I am still here, Hiroshi thought. The thought was a small, cold point of light in the center of the dark storm.

He watched through the mask as the "Monster" began the systematic slaughter of the remaining knights. He felt the souls of the knights being pulled into his chest. It didn’t feel like power to him; it felt like a heavy, greasy sludge filling his stomach. He could hear their final thoughts, fear, duty, the faces of their families, and they were being digested by the void.

Stop it! he screamed internally.

The Monster ignored him. It moved with a jarring, insect-like efficiency. It was a biological computer programmed to eliminate threats.

Then came the brutalization of the heroes.

When the Monster snapped Kenji’s blade and sent him crashing through the stone walls, Hiroshi felt a wave of nausea so intense it nearly caused the void-shell to buckle. He had known these people. They were his only friends in this world. They were the ones who had betrayed him, yes, but seeing Kenji’s body broken and discarded like a piece of trash, still breathing but shattered, was a special kind of torture.

Next was Aria. The Monster didn’t kill her; it tried to corrupt her. Hiroshi felt the liquid mana of the goddess Aqualis being forcibly bound by those oily leeches. It felt cold, colder than the ice that had trapped him earlier. It was a frozen, dead weight that settled in his marrow as he watched Aria collapse into a catatonic state, her skin turning grey under the pressure of the void.

With every blow, the Monster grew stronger, but its grip on the steering wheel loosened just a fraction. The influx of human souls and divine mana was chaotic. It was too much data, too much raw energy for the machine to process perfectly.

Hiroshi saw his opening.

He began to fight for the nervous system. He didn’t try to take back the whole body; he knew he wasn’t strong enough. Instead, he focused on the smallest things. A finger. An eyelid. A single breath.

As the Monster turned toward Marcus, the last standing god, Hiroshi funneled every ounce of his remaining willpower into his right arm.

The Monster raised the void-blade.

The arm moved. The five-foot blade of absolute darkness hissed through the air, aimed with surgical precision at Marcus’s forehead.

No, Hiroshi said.

It wasn’t a shout. It was a mountain of iron being dropped onto a moving gear.

The void-blade slowed. The Monster’s internal logic stuttered.

The arm began to shake. Hiroshi could feel the void trying to force the limb forward. It felt like trying to hold back a freight train with his bare hands. The runic tattoos on his skin flared a violent, angry purple, burning his flesh as the two wills clashed.

I said... NO!

The void-blade stopped an inch from Marcus’s skin.

Hiroshi felt the feedback immediately. It was like being hit by a lightning bolt from the inside out. His human heart, which had been dormant, gave a violent, slamming thud against his ribs. Blood, real, red, human blood, sprayed from the slit in his mask, coating the void-blade and Marcus’s face.

The "Monster" roared, the thousand discordant voices screaming in protest, but Hiroshi had the bit between his teeth.

He forced the six legs to lock. He forced the skeletal frame to go rigid. He was a statue of obsidian and agony.

Outside, the crater was silent. The falling debris of the palace hung in the air, caught in the stagnant gravity of the standoff. Marcus looked up, his blinded eyes wide with confusion, feeling the hot spray of blood on his skin. Behind him, under the rubble, the faint, labored heartbeats of Kenji and Aria still echoed in Hiroshi’s heightened senses.

They are still alive. I haven’t crossed that line yet.

Inside, Hiroshi was drowning again, but this time, he was holding the surface. He looked out through the vertical slit. He saw the ruined Marcus at his feet. He saw the devastation he, the thing he had become, had wrought.. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

The purple light in the mask flickered. One moment it was the dead, sterile glow of the void. The next, it was the frantic, shifting violet of a human eye.

Get out, Hiroshi told the monster. It’s my body.

The void-blade began to dissolve into black smoke, but the effort was tearing Hiroshi apart. He could feel his organs failing. The vacuum of the void was trying to fill the space where his humanity was fighting back.

His right hand, the one holding the blade, slowly began to lower. The fingers, tipped with void-needles, curled into a trembling, human fist.

"Run," Hiroshi gasped.

The voice wasn’t a thousand echoes. It was his own. It was cracked, wet with blood, and barely audible over the hum of the cooling crater, but it was his.

Marcus didn’t move. He couldn’t. He was too broken.

Hiroshi’s body gave a violent lurch to the left. The Monster was regaining its footing, fighting back against the intrusion. The skeletal legs began to twitch, trying to reposition for another strike. The runic tattoos bled more light, sensing the weakness in the host.

Hiroshi felt his control slipping. The darkness was like a tide, and he was a man made of sand.

Just a few more seconds, he begged himself. Just don’t let it finish them.

He threw his entire weight, his soul, his memories, his very name, into the stalemate.

The void-blade flared one last time, a jagged spike of energy reaching out for Marcus’s throat.

Hiroshi screamed. Not with his voice, but with his mind.

The skeletal arm froze mid-strike. The void-blade hung in the air, its tip an inch from Marcus’s throat, humming with a frequency that threatened to shatter the last of Hiroshi’s sanity.

The "Monster" pushed. Hiroshi pushed back.

Neither moved.

Outside, the crater was silent. The debris of the palace hung suspended. Marcus knelt in the dirt below him, broken and blinded, feeling the cold radiation of the void-blade against his skin without understanding why the killing stroke hadn’t come.