Chapter: CHAPTER 12 PART 2The young woman dropped heavily onto the edge of the bed. The cheap mattress sagged under her weight. She pulled her knees up against her chest and wrapped her thin arms around them tightly."You do not understand," she said with a quiet and broken voice, staring at the scorched black circle on the carpet. "I want it to burn. I want all of it to burn.""What exactly do you want to burn?" Derek asked with a steady but cautious tone, keeping the lighter firmly behind his back."Everything," she whispered with a hollow and empty expression. "This room. This place. Every single thing that reminds me of him."Derek looked at the torn book on the floor. He looked at the scattered clothes and the empty bottles. He understood now. This was not just a drunk woman playing with fire. This was a woman who had been destroyed by someone and had decided to let the wreckage burn.He had seen that look before. He had felt that exact same emptiness inside his own chest just a few hours ago."What is yo
Last Updated: 2026-09-15
Chapter: CHAPTER 12 PART 1Derek crossed the parking lot in five fast strides. He pressed his palm flat against the door of room number six. The wood was warm but not yet hot. The fire was still small. He had time.He stepped back and drove his heavy boot into the door right beside the lock. The cheap frame cracked on the first kick and the door swung wide open. Thick gray smoke poured out into the cool evening air.Derek dropped low and moved inside. The room was dim and messy. Empty glass bottles covered the small table. Clothes were scattered across the stained carpet. A small fire was burning in the center of the floor. Somebody had piled towels and crumpled newspaper on the carpet and set them on fire. The flames were still low but spreading steadily toward the wooden bed frame.A young woman sat cross legged on the floor about two feet from the fire. She wore a wrinkled white shirt and faded jeans. Her dark hair hung loose and tangled around her face. She held a cheap plastic lighter in her right hand and
Last Updated: 2026-09-14
Chapter: CHAPTER 11 PART 2Derek put his phone back into his pocket and kept walking. The sun was getting lower in the sky and the air had turned cool against his face. His injured leg ached with every step, but the pain felt distant now, like it belonged to somebody else.Monday morning. The courthouse. The divorce. He would be there. He would sign whatever needed to be signed. And then it would be over.For the first time in weeks, the heavy weight on his chest felt a little bit lighter. Not because he was happy. There was nothing happy about watching a marriage end. But there was something almost peaceful about knowing the divorce was finally moving forward instead of hanging over his head like a threat. He had spent three years trying to breathe life into something that Erin had never wanted to keep alive in the first place. He was tired of performing rescue operations on a relationship that did not want to be saved.He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his worn leather wallet. He opened it slowly
Last Updated: 2026-09-13
Chapter: CHAPTER 11 PART 1Derek looked at Erin standing there in the bright parking lot with her arms crossed and her chin raised high. She was waiting for him to crumble. She was waiting for the fear and the begging and the desperate negotiation that had always come before whenever she pushed him toward the edge. That was the pattern of their entire marriage. Erin would threaten, and Derek would bend."Monday morning," Derek repeated with a completely calm and steady voice, nodding once. "The courthouse. I will be there."He said it without a single second of hesitation. No shaking voice. No heavy pause. No last look of longing or regret. He just agreed to end their marriage the same way a man agrees to a meeting time at work. Simple. Final. Done.Then he picked up his duffel bag, turned around, and walked away from her without looking back once.Erin stood completely frozen in the parking lot. Her mouth was slightly open. Her prepared arguments died silently on her tongue. She had expected resistance. She ha
Last Updated: 2026-09-12
Chapter: CHAPTER 10 PART 2Derek looked at his wife standing there in the bright parking lot. He felt absolutely nothing. No anger. No sadness. No longing. Just a flat and total emptiness where all of those heavy emotions used to live. "Hello, Erin," Derek greeted with a very calm and neutral voice, adjusting the duffel bag on his shoulder. "Save the pleasantries, Derek," Erin cut in with a tight and controlled tone, taking a step closer to him. "You disappeared into that wildfire for over a week. You did not answer a single one of my messages. Do you have any idea what I went through?" "You went through my text messages," Derek replied quietly, looking at her with a perfectly still face. "That is what you went through." "I drove all the way to Los Vangees to find you," Erin stated with a stiff posture, lifting her chin slightly as if presenting evidence of her devotion. "I went to that horrible camp. I walked through that terrible morgue area looking at dead bodies to see if one of them was you." "I know,"
Last Updated: 2026-09-11
Chapter: CHAPTER 10 PART 1The convoy rolled into the city just before noon. The six hour drive back from Los Vangees had been mostly silent inside Engine Forty Two. Brett slept in the rear seat with his heavy jacket folded under his head. The other two crew members talked quietly about cold beer and warm beds. Derek said nothing the entire way. He just watched the road ahead with tired and empty eyes.When the trucks finally turned onto familiar streets, the atmosphere inside the cab changed completely. The men sat up straighter. They checked their phones. They smiled at the bright screen messages from wives and children who were already waiting at the station.Brett woke up and stretched his arms with a loud yawn. He looked out the window and recognized the neighborhood immediately."We are about ten minutes out," Brett announced with a relieved and happy voice. "My wife said she is bringing the kids to the station. She made a whole pot of chili.""My girl sent me forty seven text messages since yesterday," o
Last Updated: 2026-09-10
The Bullied Manager is now the Great Mage
Three years ago, Jason Ward was nothing.
A weak, ridiculed dungeon manager. A nobody everyone looked down on.
When a catastrophic gate rift threatened countless lives, he made a choice that changed everything. He sacrificed himself to save the legendary S-Rank mage, Aria Reeves, and vanished into the collapsing rift.
The world declared him dead.
But death was only the beginning.
After surviving three years in a world where magic had evolved beyond imagination, Jason returns stronger than anyone could have dreamed. Yet the world he comes back to is not the one he left behind.
Aria Reeves, once hailed as the Great Mage of Stars, has lost everything. Her power is gone. Her career is over. Abandoned by the guild she gave her life to, she spends her days hiding from the world that once worshipped her.
When Jason appears at her doorstep carrying impossible knowledge and a way to restore her magic, he offers her something no one else can—
A second chance.
As forgotten heroes rise, corrupt guilds tremble, and hidden truths about the rifts begin to surface, Jason and Aria must fight their way back to the top.
Because the man everyone bullied is no longer weak.
And the Great Mage is about to reclaim what was stolen from her.
Together, they will shake the world.
Read
Chapter: CHAPTER 86 PART 2The attack was savage and formless. Shim Chun-hoo abandoned technique entirely, swinging his bare fists in wild arcs fueled by corrupted demonic energy that bled off his body in dark, unstable waves. Each blow carried enough force to crater pavement, but none of them landed.Jason blocked the first strike with his open palm. The second he deflected with the back of his forearm. The third he sidestepped entirely, letting Shim Chun-hoo's momentum carry him past.He didn't counterattack. Not once. His movements were minimal, almost lazy, the calm, efficient dodging of someone who could end the fight in a single motion but had chosen not to.Vivie watched from the edge, her hands still ready, dark energy flickering at her fingertips. She could see what Jason was doing. He wasn't fighting Shim Chun-hoo. He was containing him. Absorbing the rage and the desperation without feeding it, letting the man exhaust himself against a wall that wouldn't break.Shim Chun-hoo threw a haymaker that mis
Last Updated: 2026-09-15
Chapter: CHAPTER 86 PART 1Vivie stood at the edge of the wreckage, her arms crossed, her eyes fixed on the two figures in the middle of the ruined street. Jason hadn't moved. Shim Chun-hoo hadn't moved. The sword lay on the ground between them like a line neither one intended to cross.She had heard every word.I'm dying. And I can feel every second of it.The statement itself wasn't what unsettled her. She had watched people die before. In her previous life as Vivian Cross, death had been a professional constant, something that happened around her with the regularity of weather. Hunters died. Civilians died. Monsters died. The math of their world was built on subtraction.But there was something in the way Shim Chun-hoo had said it that reached deeper than the words themselves. The specific horror of feeling your own body consume itself from the inside. The awareness that every breath was borrowed from a countdown you couldn't see. The knowledge that whatever you had been was being replaced, cell by cell, by
Last Updated: 2026-09-14
Chapter: CHAPTER 85 PART 2Shim Chun-hoo recognized him.Not the way a person recognizes a face from a photograph or a news broadcast. This was deeper. Cellular. The demonic power inside his collapsing body reacted to Jason's presence the way a compass needle reacts to north, swinging toward him with a pull that bypassed thought entirely.Jason felt it too. The air between them thickened. The ambient noise of the street faded into something distant and irrelevant. Shim Chun-hoo's aura was bleeding outward in ragged pulses, a mix of corrupted demonic energy and the remnants of whatever human mana he had been before the transformation. But underneath both layers, Jason sensed something else. Something that responded to his own energy with a resonance that made his skin prickle.The same signature. The same ancient, impossible source. The artifact that Seth had planted inside Shim Chun-hoo and the power that lived inside Jason's own body shared a common origin, and both of them could feel it.Shim Chun-hoo's lips
Last Updated: 2026-09-13
Chapter: CHAPTER 85 PART 1Vivie didn't wait for Shim Chun-hoo to recover.The moment her kick sent him crashing through the parked car, she pressed forward, closing the distance before the dust settled. Her right hand came up and dark energy coiled around her fingers like living smoke, forming into chains that shot outward and wrapped themselves around Shim Chun-hoo's arms and torso as he staggered to his feet.The chains pulled tight. Shadowy links bit into his blackened skin and pinned his arms against his sides. For one second, two seconds, he was held in place, his body locked rigid against the crumpled car door.The onlookers who hadn't fled were pressed against storefronts and crouched behind vehicles, watching in stunned silence. A girl who looked no older than twelve had just kicked a monster across a city street and was now holding him in place with magic that pulsed with a color nobody in the crowd had ever seen before.Vivie planted her feet and threw a punch directly into Shim Chun-hoo's chest.The
Last Updated: 2026-09-12
Chapter: CHAPTER 84 PART 2Lorenzo Ferro was not having a good month.Since the incident at the Awakener Crime Investigation Division where Jason Ward had dismantled his pride in front of an entire room, his reputation within Stella Rossa had taken a hit. Other hunters whispered behind his back. His team leader had quietly removed him from a high profile dungeon assignment and replaced him with a younger, less controversial B rank. Even Nico Bruni, his closest ally, had started keeping a careful distance in public settings.All of it could be traced back to one person. Sophie Quinn. The girl who had stumbled out of nowhere, swung a sword on a television show, and been handed a rank she didn't deserve.At least that was how Lorenzo saw it. And tonight, walking through the Bronx on a routine evening patrol with Nico, his resentment was burning hotter than usual."Look at this," Lorenzo said, gesturing at a billboard above a convenience store. Sophie's face stared down at them from a USBC promotional poster, her e
Last Updated: 2026-09-11
Chapter: CHAPTER 84 PART 1Bear Mountain was an hour north of the city, and by the time Jason parked the car at the trailhead, the sun had already dropped below the treeline. Vivie hopped out before the engine died, her nose turned slightly upward like an animal testing the wind."He was here," she said immediately. "The traces are faint but they're layered. He stayed for at least a few hours."Jason followed her up the trail without speaking. The forest was dense and quiet, the kind of place that swallowed sound and kept it. Vivie moved through the undergrowth with a confidence that didn't belong to her small frame, her feet finding solid ground by instinct, her eyes tracking something invisible to Jason.She stopped at a clearing about half a kilometer from the trailhead. The ground was scuffed and uneven, the dirt disturbed in patterns that suggested someone had been sitting, standing, and pacing in the same small area repeatedly."Here," Vivie said. She crouched and pressed her palm flat against the dirt. H
Last Updated: 2026-09-10
