The being studied him for a long moment, its single eye taking in every detail of a sixteen year old boy standing frozen on a battlefield built for gods, and then it laughed.
It was not a cruel laugh, though it carried enough weight behind it to make Hoju’s knees want to buckle regardless.
“What a wonderful thing,” it said, shaking its head slowly, the motion pulling a fresh line of black blood from the wound at its shoulder.
“A level one ant, wandering into a star domain.
Come closer, boy.
Let me see you properly.”
Hoju’s legs carried him three unsteady steps forward before some last scrap of self preservation caught up with the rest of him.
“Please,” he said, his voice cracking halfway through the word.
“Please spare my life.
I didn’t mean to be here.
I don’t even know where here is.”
The being’s laugh deepened, rolling out across the silent battlefield.
“You understand, then, that I could end you where you stand, even in this condition.
Half a body and I could still snuff out something as small as you without noticing the effort.”
Hoju nodded, throat too tight to answer aloud.
“Then why hesitate,” the being said, and there was something almost gentle buried underneath the terrible weight of its voice.
“Come closer.”
Hoju obeyed, sliding carefully down into the crater where the being lay, his eyes fixed on the ground rather than risk meeting that single unblinking gaze directly.
“Gogohut,” the being said, and for a moment Hoju did not understand the word was a name at all rather than some command he was meant to follow.
“That is what I am called.
Or was, for longer than your entire species has kept written records.”
Hoju looked up, startled, and bowed low enough that his forehead nearly touched the scorched stone.
“My name is Hoju, my lord.”
Gogohut waved one of his remaining hands, a dismissive, almost tired gesture.
“No need for formalities.
I am going to die soon regardless of what title you use for me.”
“Is there,” Hoju started, then stopped, unsure how to finish a question that had no good answer waiting on the other side of it.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No,” Gogohut said simply, without cruelty, only fact.
Then, after a pause, his eye narrowed slightly with something that might have been curiosity.
“How did a boy your level end up standing in the middle of a star domain?”
So Hoju told him.
All of it.
Teria, the mountain, the Ashfang, Doran’s death, ten years of a village deciding exactly what to blame him for, Fresha and the household that had taken her and quietly turned her against him, the awakening that had made him a laughingstock in front of the entire village, and finally, the kick that had sent him stumbling into a dungeon he never asked to enter.
Gogohut listened without interrupting, and by the time Hoju finished, something had shifted in the single eye watching him, an expression that Hoju, even as exhausted and terrified as he was, recognized easily enough.
Pity.
Not the kind the village gave him, thin and self congratulating. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Something heavier than that.
“I see,” Gogohut said quietly.
Then, slowly, he raised one of his remaining hands and pointed toward the curved blade still resting in his grip.
“I am going to give you a gift, boy.
Because I like you.”
Hoju blinked.
“A gift?”
“I am level one million,” Gogohut said, watching the number land on Hoju’s face without any visible reaction at all, because the number was simply too large for Hoju’s mind to process as anything real.
“My experience alone, if released, is worth more than this entire world has produced in a thousand years combined.
If you kill me, boy, that experience becomes yours.”
“I don’t understand,” Hoju said, shaking his head.
“My max level cap is two.
I couldn’t even hold that much if I wanted to.”
“I know,” Gogohut said, and something in his tone made it clear he had already seen far more than Hoju realized.
“I can see your skill.
Input.”
Hoju’s stomach dropped.
“That’s not a skill.
It has no description.
It does nothing.”
Gogohut laughed again, softer this time, edged with something that sounded almost like grief.
“It does nothing to you, because you cannot yet read what it says.
I can, because I am what your world calls a star, one of the beings that helped shape it into what it is now.
I had a comrade once who carried that same skill.” His eye dimmed slightly.
“He met a tragic end.
I would rather yours end differently, if I have any say in the matter left to me.”
“What does it actually do,” Hoju asked, leaning forward despite every instinct still telling him to keep his distance.
“Input allows its user to create skills for themselves, once the right conditions have been met through the user’s own effort,” Gogohut said.
“No one else in this world can teach you a skill directly, boy.
Skills are earned, not given, no matter what level or lineage a person carries.
But your gift is different.
It converts experience into something called input points, and those points can be spent to raise any skill you create to its highest possible proficiency, far faster than any ordinary warrior could manage through practice alone.”
Hoju stared at him, uncomprehending in the specific way that comes from being told something so far outside the boundaries of everything you previously believed possible that your mind simply refuses to accept it on the first pass.
“So,” Gogohut said, shifting slightly against the broken stone, his voice steady despite the wound that was clearly, slowly, ending his life with every passing minute.
“If I gave you this experience, right now, what would you use the power for?”
Hoju did not need to think about his answer.
It rose out of him before he had time to second guess it, the way only the truest things ever do.
“And my sister.”
Gogohut’s laugh this time was warmer, less weighted.
“A fine answer.
But tell me, boy, once you have that strength, what will you use it for beyond the two of you?”
Again, Hoju did not hesitate.
“To protect the weak,” he said.
“And the people no one else bothers to protect.”
Gogohut went quiet for a long moment, studying him with an intensity that made Hoju want to look away and made him hold the gaze anyway, some new and unfamiliar spine straightening inside him for what felt like the first time in his life.
“You have passed,” Gogohut said finally.
“I will teach you how to grow strong, Hoju of Teria.”
What followed, Gogohut spoke low and close, words meant for Hoju alone, instructions carried on a voice already beginning to fade at the edges.
The battlefield around them held its silence, the burning stars drifted on overhead indifferent to everything happening beneath them, and when Gogohut finally finished speaking, he drew back, his single eye heavy with something between exhaustion and peace.
“Now,” he said.
“Kill me, boy.
The other stars will come to recover what remains of me soon enough, and I would rather you take what is owed before they arrive and complicate matters neither of us wants complicated.”
Hoju’s hands had already begun to shake.
“We only just met,” he said, voice thinner than he wanted it to be.
“This feels like too much.
Too good.
I don’t understand why you would give this to a stranger.”
“Does it matter why,” Gogohut asked, not unkindly.
“I want to know the dragon’s name,” Hoju said instead, surprising himself with how steady the words came out despite everything shaking underneath them.
“I want to avenge you someday.”
Gogohut’s expression shifted, the tired warmth replaced for a moment by something sharper, more serious.
“That is bold talk, boy,” he said.
“The one you speak of is called Deatharo.
The Black Star.
One of the strongest of us that remain.
He sits above level one million, closer to two.”
“I don’t care,” Hoju said, and meant it with a conviction that surprised even himself.
“I’ll do it regardless.
I promise you that.”
Something wet gathered at the edge of Gogohut’s single eye, catching the burning light of the stars overhead as it finally fell.
“Be happy, my friend,” he said softly.
Then his remaining hand moved, faster than Hoju could track even braced for it, closing over Hoju’s own fingers and guiding them, guiding the curved blade still gripped between them, forward and up in a motion neither of them fully controlled alone.
Hoju felt the blade meet resistance at Gogohut’s throat and felt Gogohut’s grip tighten over his own hand, pressing the motion through to its end with a strength that belonged entirely to the dying star and none of it to the boy he had chosen to leave it all behind for.
Gogohut’s body began to dissolve the instant the blade completed its work, breaking apart into countless fragments of soft purple light that drifted upward from where his body had been, and every single fragment turned, in the same breath, and poured directly into Hoju’s chest.
The world went white.