Reset After Solo Clear: Shadow Master Rebirth

After Azrael Disappeared

"It's already morning."

Raka opened his eyes, his own hoarse voice breaking the silence of the room. There were no system notifications floating before his face, no status window, and no shadow of Erebus waiting for his command. There was only the cramped room, its paint beginning to fade, and a pile of laundry in the corner that he had yet to clean up.

He sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed his eyes. His body still felt heavy despite having slept for a long time inside the capsule. The wall clock showed eleven in the morning.

"Late again," he muttered, lazily getting up and heading toward the small kitchen in the corner of the apartment.

He poured water into a glass and drank it quickly before opening the refrigerator, which contained little more than some sliced bread and eggs. It was a simple breakfast, far removed from the luxury people might imagine for a top-ranked player in a massive game.

"If they knew Azrael ate dry bread every morning, they probably wouldn't be so impressed," he muttered to himself with a bitter grin.

After cleaning himself up, he sat in a chair by the window and picked up his phone to check information from the game's community forum.

[Aurelis Online Forum, Trending: "Where Did Azrael Go?"]

Raka opened the thread, his eyes quickly scanning through the steadily growing number of comments.

"Probably a system bug," one user wrote.

"Probably banned. I heard he soloed the Floor 50 boss. Maybe they considered it an exploit," another replied.

"No way. He was way too legit to cheat," a third user argued.

Raka read through them without much expression, though there was something strange about reading news about himself as if he were someone else.

"Ever since I saw the news on the first day my account disappeared, it's still the same story even now. Too bad. You'll never find the answer," he murmured softly at the phone screen.

He scrolled farther and found an old video, a recording of Azrael breaking through a secret room on Floor 40, back before everything had become too big to control.

"No player can replace him," one of the comments beneath the video read. Hundreds of people had liked it.

Raka smiled faintly, bitterly. "Azrael is gone, at least his name is."

He was about to close the app when a name in the comment section stopped his finger.

Lumine: "I don't believe he just quit like that. Something must have happened."

Raka stared at the name for a long time.

"Amara," he murmured softly.

His chest felt slightly tight, not because he feared his identity being exposed, but because he knew Amara was still looking for him even now.

He remembered their brief conversation on the night before the reset. At the time, Amara had simply greeted him through a private chat and discussed Floor 49 strategies before they eventually parted without the slightest hint that it would be their last conversation as Azrael.

"It was just casual small talk," Raka murmured, remembering how brief their conversation had been. "I never thought it would stick with her this much."

He tried opening the old chat history from the Azrael account, hoping to read that conversation again, but all that appeared was an error message.

[Account not found. Conversation history cannot be accessed.]

"It's really gone completely," he muttered, staring at the screen for a long time.

It wasn't just his character that had been reset. Azrael's entire account had been erased from the system, taking all of its history with it.

He leaned his head against the chair, thinking about how strange his life had become. In the real world, he was just Raka, someone even his neighbors barely knew. In the game world, he was Nox, carrying on what he had once built as Azrael.

Raka stared at the ceiling.

"Six years of hard work gone just like that, and now I'm starting over."

He let out a long sigh, imagining all the reputation, rankings, and rare equipment he had painstakingly collected over the years, none of which meant anything anymore for his new character.

"There's only one thing that's strange," he continued more quietly, almost whispering to himself. "Why was I given Shadow Master? That class never appeared in any database I've ever read."

He found no answer. He simply sighed before opening the forum again, looking for a distraction from thoughts that felt too heavy for the morning.

A new thread had appeared on the main page.

[Trending: "Mysterious Player Nox Appears After Azrael's Disappearance"]

Raka clicked on it quickly, reading through the comments that were already starting to pile up.

"They say his level is still low, but he can already defeat players much stronger than him," one user wrote.

"He has some kind of shadow thing. It's really weird," another added.

Raka smiled faintly again.

"That's me too," he whispered at the blank screen.

But that smile faded when he read the next comment.

"His movements kind of remind me of Azrael. The way he uses the corners of the room to evade attacks is really distinctive."

"Now that you mention it, could they be the same person?"

"That's ridiculous. No way. Azrael is completely gone."

Raka stared at the screen for a long time, his heart beating slightly faster.

If people started connecting Nox's movement patterns to Azrael, sooner or later, his identity could be at risk.

He turned off his phone and placed it on the table, trying to calm his thoughts.

"They won't figure it out that quickly," he muttered, reassuring himself more than anyone else.

That night, he went to bed earlier than usual, his thoughts drifting back to the last rumor he had heard before logging out.

"Black Hollow," he murmured softly at the ceiling. "There's something inside that shouldn't exist."

The sentence continued to echo in his mind. For some reason, it felt connected to the reset, to Shadow Master, and to all the anomalies he had discovered without ever finding a clear explanation.

"Black Hollow, anomaly, Shadow Master, reset," he murmured quietly, arranging the words one by one as if trying to piece together an incomplete puzzle. "Everything feels connected, but I don't have any proof yet."

He closed his eyes, trying to force himself to sleep, but before his consciousness could truly fade, his phone vibrated once on the table.

Raka opened his eyes and lazily reached for the phone. Its screen lit up brightly against the darkness of the room.

A single post had appeared on the forum.

Lumine: "I know you're still there."