Light was never meant to hurt.
That was what people believed. That was what they were taught.
From the moment Gates began appearing across the world, light had been associated with safety: floodlights at the perimeter of a breach, glowing barriers raised by support Runners, the white shine of healing abilities stabilizing the wounded. Light meant order. Light meant control. Light meant survival.
Darkness was where monsters lived.
Darkness was where people died.
Aoi Kisaragi learned early that beliefs like that existed to make people comfortable, not correct.
She stood at the edge of a cordoned-off street, boots planted just behind the yellow safety line, watching a Gate pulse in the middle of the intersection. It was oval-shaped, vertical, and filled with a steady, pearlescent glow that bent the air around it. Cars had been abandoned at odd angles, doors open, alarms long dead. The smell of ozone mixed with dust and old exhaust.
It was a low-grade Gate. Everyone could tell.
Low-grade Gates were supposed to be easy. Predictable. Safe enough that even teams with an F-rank support Runner could clear them without incident.
That was why Aoi was here.
She adjusted the strap of her pack and glanced at the team ahead of her. Five people. Two front-line attackers, one mid-range specialist, one support healer, and her. The extra. The margin. The one included because regulations required a light-affinity Runner for stabilization purposes.
No one looked back at her.
They rarely did.
Aoi wasn't invisible in the literal sense. She spoke when spoken to. She followed orders. She did her job. But there was something about being consistently labeled "harmless" that made people's eyes slide past you. Like you were part of the background rather than the scene.
The leader raised a hand, signaling the final check.
"Same roles as briefed," he said. "In and out. No heroics."
His gaze passed over Aoi without stopping.
She nodded anyway.
The Gate flared as they approached, light intensifying until it swallowed the street whole. The sensation of crossing the threshold was always disorienting — pressure without weight, brightness without heat. For a fraction of a second, it felt like being pulled apart and reassembled incorrectly.
Then the world changed.
They stood inside a wide stone corridor, the walls smooth and pale, reflecting light in a way that made depth hard to judge. The ceiling was high, arching out of sight. The floor was cool beneath Aoi's boots. Everything glowed faintly, as if the dungeon itself were illuminated from within.
"Move," the leader said.
They advanced.
Aoi stayed at the rear, hands already faintly glowing as she prepared her light stabilization technique. It was basic. Simple. The kind of thing children with light affinity learned in training academies. Emit controlled illumination, reinforce visibility, ease strain on allies' perception.
Useful.
Unimpressive.
The first monsters appeared less than two minutes in.
They resembled twisted insects, long-limbed and sharp-edged, their shells refracting light into painful patterns. The front-liners engaged immediately. Steel met chitin. The mid-range Runner fired compressed energy bursts down the corridor.
Aoi focused on maintaining light consistency, smoothing out the harsh reflections that could disorient her teammates. She was good at this part. Precise. Careful. Invisible.
The fight ended quickly.
"Too easy," someone muttered.
They went deeper.
That was the second mistake.
The first was assuming low-grade meant harmless. The second was assuming patterns didn't change.
The corridor widened into a chamber, circular and open, with multiple branching paths. The glow here was stronger, almost blinding. Aoi felt a faint pressure behind her eyes, a familiar ache she had learned to ignore.
"Spread out," the leader ordered. "Clear the room."
The air shifted.
Aoi noticed it first — not because she was stronger or faster, but because light was her responsibility. The glow warped, lines bending subtly, reflections misaligning.
"Wait," she started to say.
The floor ruptured.
Creatures surged upward in a sudden wave, larger than the ones before, their bodies elongated, jointed wrong. The formation collapsed instantly. One of the front-liners was dragged down screaming. Another was thrown against the wall hard enough that Aoi heard bone break.
The healer shouted.
Orders overlapped.
Panic bloomed.
Aoi moved without thinking, increasing output, flooding the chamber with stabilizing light, trying to reduce visual distortion, trying to help them see.
It wasn't enough.
A creature broke through the chaos and lunged straight for her.
She saw it clearly — too clearly. Faceted eyes reflecting her own glow back at her, mandibles opening. She raised her hands instinctively, light flaring in a defensive burst.
The impact sent her flying.
Pain exploded along her side as she hit the stone floor. Something tore. Warmth spread beneath her uniform. Her breath left her in a sharp gasp she couldn't quite recover from.
The world tilted.
Sound became distant, muffled, like she was underwater.
She tried to move.
Her body didn't respond.
Above her, the battle continued. She saw boots rush past, heard someone shout her name — or maybe not her name. It was hard to tell.
Her vision dimmed at the edges, colors washing out, the glowing chamber fading toward white.
So this was it, she thought distantly.
Not heroic. Not dramatic. Just a mistake in positioning and a role no one bothered to protect.
She wondered, briefly, if anyone would even notice she was gone.
As that thought settled, something changed.
The light didn't fade.
It stopped.
Not dark. Not bright. Just… still.
Frozen in place, like a paused image.
Aoi blinked.
Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, slow and heavy. The pain was still there, but muted, distant, as if it belonged to someone else.
Then something appeared in front of her eyes.
It wasn't projected onto the environment. It didn't glow like the dungeon. It simply existed, layered over reality with perfect clarity.
A rectangular interface.
White text on a translucent background.
[CRITICAL FAILURE DETECTED]
Aoi stared at it, uncomprehending.
Her mind scrambled for explanations. Shock. Hallucination. Oxygen loss. Brain damage.
The interface remained.
[HOST VITALS: UNSTABLE]
[SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 2.3%]
Her breath hitched.
The text changed.
[UNIQUE COMPATIBILITY CONFIRMED]
[LUMINOUS SYSTEM INITIALIZATION AVAILABLE]
Aoi tried to speak. Her throat produced only a thin, broken sound.
The world around her felt distant now, as if separated by a thick pane of glass. She could still see movement — monsters, teammates — but none of it felt immediate.
The interface pulsed once.
[WARNING]
[SYSTEM ACTIVATION IS IRREVERSIBLE]
Another pause.
Then:
[PROCEED?]
Aoi didn't understand what any of it meant.
But she understood one thing very clearly.
If she did nothing, she would die here, bleeding out on a cold stone floor, forgotten before the Gate even closed.
Her vision blurred.
Her thoughts slowed.
She didn't say yes.
She didn't say no.
She reached for the light.
The interface vanished.
For half a second, there was nothing.
Then the pain returned — sharper than before, white-hot and precise, like needles threading through her flesh. She screamed, the sound tearing out of her raw and uncontrolled.
Light poured inward instead of outward.
It gathered, condensed, compressed into thin, surgical strands that pierced her wound, weaving through torn muscle and cracked bone. Not healing — reinforcing. Not restoring — restructuring.
She felt every second of it.
Her body arched as the light bound her together, stabilizing failure points, locking damaged systems into temporary functionality.
Her heartbeat steadied.
Her breathing normalized.
The pain dulled to a constant, manageable burn.
The interface reappeared.
[LUMINOUS SYSTEM ONLINE]
Aoi lay there, shaking, tears streaming down the sides of her face, staring at words that felt impossibly calm compared to the chaos around her.
[EMERGENCY DIRECTIVE GENERATED]
SURVIVE.
A timer appeared beneath the word.
00:59… 00:58…
The monsters were still there.
One of them turned toward her, drawn by the sudden shift in light. Its shadow stretched across the floor, elongated and sharp.
Aoi pushed herself up.
Her body moved differently now. Not stronger — more… exact. Each motion felt guided, constrained within tolerances she instinctively understood.
The creature lunged.
Another line of text appeared.
[SKILL UNLOCKED: LIGHT BINDING — BASIC CONTROL]
She raised her hand.
The light between them hardened.
Not into fire. Not into force.
Into structure.
The monster collided with an invisible plane and stopped dead, its body compressing, folding inward under perfectly distributed pressure until it collapsed into fragments that clattered across the floor.
Silence rippled outward.
The timer hit zero.
[DIRECTIVE COMPLETE]
Aoi stood alone in a pocket of stillness, the dungeon's glow resuming its warped movement around her, the battle noise rushing back in all at once.
Her teammates stared.
The healer whispered something she couldn't hear.
Aoi looked down at her hands.
Thin lines of light traced beneath her skin, fading slowly, sinking into her like veins.
She wasn't healed.
She wasn't safe.
She was operational.
The interface remained in the corner of her vision, unobtrusive, patient.
Waiting.
Aoi Kisaragi had always believed light was meant to help others see.
She was about to learn what happened when light stopped being kind — and started being absolute.