[Hero Summoning (Active) - Lvl 1: The first time you wish to use this skill, a magic circle will appear in your mind. All you need to do is draw the magic circle in a suitable environment and let a drop of blood fall on it to activate it. The more of the Energy required for the skill you provide yourself, the higher the level of the hero you summon. In the opposite case, the hero you summon will consume their own stat points to generate the Energy needed for the summoning. How many summons you can perform at once, and how many heroes can maintain their summoned status at the same time, may vary, but both are directly tied to your Soul stat.]
Elena read the whole description from start to finish a few times. Then she realized that, from sheer excitement, she had forgotten to keep her heart beating. She fainted and smacked her head against the stall door.
Luckily, the lock on the stall door had broken a long time ago, so Elena's unconscious body tumbled out and landed somewhere very noticeable in the women's restroom.
The women touching up their makeup took one look at the scene and ran out of the restroom screaming, "Someone's dead! Help!"
Meanwhile, Elena's mother, Ms. Rosalind, had gotten her tears under control and was frantically looking for her daughter.
She turned a corner and saw her. A few level-headed men had carried Elena out of the restroom, propped her up against a wall in one of the inner corridors, and were trying to wake her up.
Rosalind immediately ran over, asking what had happened, and found out the whole story.
One of the healer teams on standby at the stadium, just in case, heard about the incident and came over. After checking on Elena, the healer said she had only fainted from shock.
Once people heard that Elena had only fainted from shock, their gossip slowly started drifting toward her Awakening. Rosalind scooped her daughter up and got out of there.
...
S City was one of the giant megacities that people had rushed to build together after the apocalypse.
Once the countries came together in the middle of the apocalypse, one of the first things they did was merge their settlements.
The apocalypse had begun 103 years ago, in 2026, when a virtual reality game merged with reality. Over the years, it had hit the world's population hard.
The global human population had dropped to around one billion, and most of those people lived in a handful of giant megacities led by powerful Awakeners.
S City was a mid-sized city.
The people who could afford to live here were mostly middle class.
At the lower end of that range were people like Rosalind, who had awakened a rare Life Profession. Or people like Fiora's mother and father, who had both awakened Life Professions and worked hard.
Near S City's outer walls stood rows of buildings, each ten floors tall. In one of them, Ms. Rosalind wearily opened the door to her home and stepped inside with her daughter on her back.
The woman's brown hair was tied up in a loose bun. A few strands had slipped free of it, which only made her look more tired. They ran down past her neck and fell onto the large mounds her cream-colored cardigan couldn't cover.
Elena, who had woken up a while ago but kept pretending to be unconscious out of embarrassment, couldn't take it anymore. She whispered to her mother that she was awake.
The moment Rosalind set her daughter down, she hugged her and kept comforting her for several minutes.
She told her that in the future, they could make a living drawing manhwa together.
Even if Elena hadn't awakened a Life Profession for it, she could still get by as an assistant artist.
Elena wanted to tell her mother the details of the ability she had awakened and put her mind at ease, but she couldn't find the chance. In the end, she said, "I need to go to the bathroom," and locked herself in her room.
The shrinking of the human race had maybe one upside. Even a woman like Rosalind, somewhere between lower and middle class, could afford a five-bedroom home without much trouble.
In the apocalypse world, rent was almost free, and technology and art had gotten pretty cheap. What was really expensive was food. And even that wasn't too hard to manage for the two of them.
The first thing that caught the eye in Elena's room was the posters. Half-naked male characters from shojo manhwa covered every wall of the room, which was filled with pink furniture.
After that came the extremely cute dolls that filled every corner of the room.
As soon as Elena walked into her room, she called out to the system and accessed the status window bound to her soul again.
This time, she didn't hesitate. She went straight to imagining using her first skill.
Then, trusting her years of drawing experience, she quickly redrew the magic circle that had appeared in her mind onto the rug with a highlighter.
Elena was just about to start the summoning by shifting the entire cost onto the other side when a possibility crossed her mind.
Did this skill called Hero Summoning really summon heroes?
Like, superhero type stuff?
In Elena's mind, a man in a bat costume appeared, standing in front of her and glaring at her with terrifying eyes. She quickly shook her head to get rid of the thought.
Once she stopped shaking her head, her eyes landed on a figure from a shojo manhwa. A half-naked emperor with eight-pack abs that were nowhere near realistic, and a half-naked vizier kissing his neck.
A possibility suddenly came alive in her mind, and blood started trickling from Elena's nose.
The drop of blood slowly slid off the tip of Elena's small nose and fell onto the edge of the magic circle. Then the whole room began to glow with a white light.