Chapter 80: Awake

Chapter 80: Awake

But they barely reacted.

I was certain they had heard me—my words weren’t whispers. They rang through the sterile room, sharp and raw, yet neither of them met my eyes. Instead, they shifted uneasily, their gazes wandering anywhere but toward me. It was as if the truth hanging in the air was too heavy to touch, too dangerous to acknowledge.

Then my mother’s lips trembled, and she spoke—barely above a whisper, but clear enough to shatter me completely.

"Why... why’d you have to survive?"

My world cracked apart in that instant.

The air vanished from my lungs. The steady beeping of the monitors grew deafening, like a mocking reminder that I was still alive when the people who had brought me into this world no longer wanted me here.

And that’s when it struck me—not as a guess, but as an undeniable truth clawing at my chest. They had known about this.

They weren’t horrified by Elena’s confession because it wasn’t hers alone. They were complicit.

They had approved.

Since that day, they stopped coming.

No visits. No phone calls. No warm words of comfort from parents who once claimed they loved me.

They drifted out of my life as if I had already died, leaving me to rot within the walls of that hospital—body failing, heart broken, mind collapsing under the weight of betrayal.

The world I thought I knew no longer existed.

The foundation of family, of safety, of love—it had been nothing but a thin veil, and now it was gone.

I was truly, completely alone.

And yet, after all that silence, after abandoning me without hesitation, here they were now

One morning, they walked back into my room, faces wet with tears, voices soft with sorrow. My mother reached for me, her tone dripping with grief as she said she was glad I was all right.

Glad I was fine.

But how could I believe her? How could I forget that the last words I had heard from her, spoken without hesitation, were: Why’d you have to survive?

It didn’t make sense. None of it. And yet, deep down, I knew exactly what it was.

An illusion.

The air split with a sound like tearing glass—crack. A fracture rippled through the space around me, jagged and unnatural, as though reality itself had been nothing more than a fragile shell waiting to break.

Elena was still choking, her face twisted with silent agony, while my mum and dad stood motionless, their eyes blank, their expressions hollow masks that didn’t belong to them. The sight alone made bile rise in my throat.

I clenched my fists, rage burning hotter than fear, and the words tore out of me before I could stop them.

"I’m alive! Do you hear me? I didn’t die like you wanted me to. And I won’t. I will never die—not on your terms, not in your lies!"

My voice thundered in the false world, raw and defiant, shaking as much from fury as from resolve. It wasn’t just a declaration—it was a vow.

A promise to myself that no matter what trap I was thrown into, I would endure, I would claw my way out, and I would keep living.

The fractured space gave way, splintering into a thousand shards of falsehood. The illusion collapsed all at once—the choking, the blank stares, the sterile hospital room—everything dissolving like smoke torn apart by the wind.

And then, silence.

I gasped as the ground beneath me solidified again, damp earth pressing against my knees. The weight of another world settled on my shoulders, familiar and foreign all at once. My breath hitched, my hands clawed at dirt, and when I finally lifted my head, the truth set in.

I was a goblin again.

Kneeling there, trembling, my chest still heaving from the phantom battle, I found myself staring upward—up at the vast, unblinking eye suspended above me like a judgment I could never escape.

Its gaze pressed into me with a weight that felt almost physical, heavy and suffocating, as though invisible hands were peeling back the layers of my mind, rifling through every hidden corner of my soul. My body shook under that scrutiny, and for a moment I nearly buckled. With an effort that scraped every ounce of will from me, I tore my gaze downward, my vision swimming, my head clouded in a thick grogginess that clung like fog refusing to lift.

And yet, oddly enough, despite the sheer force of that eye boring into me, I realized something—I was still resisting. The pull of its mental assault didn’t crush me the way it should have. The fear was there, yes, the weight was unbearable, but I wasn’t breaking. Something in me was holding fast.

That was when it hit me.

Ding.

[You have activated a new skill: Illusion Resistance]

[Illusion Resistance – Rank C]A passive skill that hardens your mind against mental interference. Grants resistance to illusory effects, hallucinations, and mind-altering attacks, reducing their duration and intensity. The stronger your willpower, the more effective this resistance becomes.

The words flared across my vision, crisp and undeniable, and in that instant, clarity ripped through the haze like a blade. The fog in my head scattered. My thoughts sharpened. And with that sudden burst of awareness, memory crashed back into me.

Of course. That’s right. I wasn’t in some hospital room. I wasn’t suffocating under ghosts from a past that never made sense.

I was in the forest.

I was fighting the Alpha Deer.

My head snapped toward the Alpha Deer, but I didn’t even get the chance to lower my gaze fully before the entire forest erupted in blinding light. Brilliant lances of energy tore through the night sky, each beam screaming downward with lethal precision, a storm of raw power unleashed without hesitation.

Instinct took over. I triggered [Warp], my body vanishing a fraction of a second before the beams swallowed me whole.

The ground where I had been kneeling was annihilated in an instant, torn apart by explosions of force far greater than anything it had shown before.

I reappeared on the thick branch of a tree, bark rough beneath my feet, lungs heaving like I had sprinted for miles. My heart hammered against my ribs in a furious rhythm, not just from exertion but from the sickening realization of how close I had come to being erased from existence.

And then it struck me. The reason I wasn’t dead yet.

Time inside that...