The Solitary Berserker's ReturnPending

He moved on pure instinct. The conscious part of his mind was a storm of fear and uncertainty, but his body knew what to do. The muscle memory of a thousand ambushes and silent patrols took over. His bare feet, still somehow clad in the faint, shimmering tatters of his [Greaves of the Endless March], made no sound on the familiar wooden stairs. Each step was perfectly placed, his weight distributed with an unnatural grace. The creak he always expected from the third step from the bottom never came. His movements were fluid, silent, predatory. It was the way he moved in the Spire, but here, in the quiet safety of his own home, it felt deeply wrong.

He reached the bottom of the stairs and paused in the hallway, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. The kitchen was just ahead. The smell of miso and fish was stronger now, a warm, comforting anchor in his turbulent sea of emotions.

He saw her first. Her back was to him as she stood at the stove, gently stirring a pot of soup. His mother, Emi. She looked older than he remembered. There were more streaks of grey in her dark hair, and her shoulders seemed to carry a new, heavier weight. The faded floral apron she wore was the same one she'd had for years. It was her. She was real. Not a memory, not a ghost, but a warm, living person just a few feet away.

The sight broke through his paralysis. He had to say something. He opened his mouth, but his throat felt tight, unused to forming words of love and familiarity.

"Mom," he said.

The word came out as a rough, rusty croak. It was a sound scraped from a throat more accustomed to battle cries and silence. It was too quiet, yet it cut through the gentle simmering of the kitchen like a thunderclap.

Emi Tanaka froze. The ladle in her hand, which had been gracefully stirring, clattered against the side of the pot. Her entire body went rigid. For a long, agonizing moment, she didn't move. Then, she turned, slowly, as if afraid of what she might see.

Her eyes, tired and etched with a grief he was only now beginning to understand, fell upon him. They widened in disbelief, then in shock. She saw the tall, broad-shouldered young man standing in the shadows of the hallway. She saw the familiar dark hair and the shape of his face, but he was bigger, harder. He was a ghost in the morning sun, older and younger all at once.

Tears instantly welled in her eyes, spilling down her cheeks without a sound.

"Kenji…?" she breathed. Her voice was a trembling whisper, fragile and full of disbelief. It was a name spoken more in hope than in certainty. "My boy… you came back."

The last three words shattered the remaining ice around his heart. She wasn't angry. She wasn't afraid. She was just… relieved.

She rushed to him, crossing the small kitchen in two quick steps. She didn't hesitate. She threw her arms around his waist, burying her face in the soft fabric of his hoodie, and hugged him with a desperate, clinging strength.

Kenji went completely rigid. His body, a fortress of tense muscle conditioned by centuries of solitude and violence, did not know how to react to gentle contact. The only times he had been touched were by the claws, fangs, and blades of his enemies. His hands hovered uselessly in the air, his mind screaming conflicting signals. Hold her. Protect her. Don't crush her.

He could feel her sobbing against his chest, her small frame shaking with the force of her relief. He awkwardly, hesitantly, brought his hands up and patted her on the back. His touch was stiff, clumsy. He was consciously reining in his myth-tier strength, terrified that a simple comforting gesture might break her fragile bones.

He could feel the warmth of her body through his hoodie, the frantic, joyful beat of her heart against his ribs. He smelled the faint, familiar scent of her shampoo. In that single, simple embrace, he felt a profound and undeniable truth. This was real. This warmth, this love, this desperate hug—it was more real, more solid and meaningful than any victory, any level-up, any legendary item he had ever acquired in the Spire. That entire lifetime of struggle felt like a dream, and this moment was the only thing that had ever truly happened.

The small kitchen table felt like a stage, and Kenji was an actor who had forgotten all his lines. His mother, Emi, placed a bowl of rice and a plate of perfectly cooked pan-fried fish in front of him. She moved with a forced, cheerful energy, a fragile brightness that couldn't quite conceal the tremor in her hands or the tears that still clung to her eyelashes.

"Eat, Kenji, eat. You're so thin," she said, her voice thick with emotion.

He looked down at his own body, the thick, corded muscle straining the seams of his old hoodie. He wasn't thin. He was a fortress of flesh and bone. But he understood. She wasn't seeing the man he was; she was seeing the ghost of the boy she had lost. He picked up the chopsticks. They felt delicate and flimsy in his hand, like twigs. He had to consciously command his fingers to hold them gently, to not splinter them into dust.

He brought a piece of fish to his lips. The taste—salty, savory, slightly sweet from the mirin—was so overwhelming, so real, that his senses reeled. For centuries, his only sustenance had been bland, system-generated rations or the charred, tasteless meat of monsters. This was food made with love. It was a flavor from a different lifetime. He chewed slowly, methodically, trying to process the sensation.

Emi watched his every move, her heart in her eyes. "Where were you, Kenji? The police… they couldn't find anything. You were just… gone."

He swallowed. What could he possibly say? I was in a tower. I climbed for a very long time. The words sounded insane even in his own head. Before he could formulate an answer, the sound of the front door opening saved him.

Click. The gentle thud of the door closing. The scuff of shoes being kicked off in the genkan.

"I'm home!" a voice called out.

It was Yui. The sound of her voice, so close and clear, sent another tremor through him. He braced himself.

She walked into the kitchen, pulling a textbook from her school bag. "Mom, I swear, Mr. Ito is trying to kill us with this new calculus…" Her words died in her throat. She stopped dead in the doorway, her eyes locking onto the stranger sitting at their table. Her school bag, emblazoned with a cute anime cat, slipped from her shoulder and hit the wooden floor with a heavy thud.

Her face went through a rapid series of emotions. First, shock. Her jaw went slack, her eyes wide with utter disbelief. Then, recognition flickered. The face was older, harder, but it was him.

"Kenji?" she whispered, the name a fragile puff of air.

His mother started to cry again, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin. "He's back, Yui. He just… he just came home."

But Yui's reaction was different from their mother's. The initial shock quickly morphed into something else. Her eyes, sharper and more perceptive than Emi's, narrowed. She wasn't just looking at her long-lost brother. She was scanning him. She saw the unnatural, predatory stillness in his posture. She felt the faint, suppressed pressure in the air around him, a quiet hum of immense power that his [Cloak of the Lonely Night] couldn't entirely conceal from someone who knew what to look for. Her face, which had been flushed with surprise, slowly drained of all color. She looked pale, almost frightened.

"You…" she started, her voice barely a whisper. She took a half-step back. "You were in there the whole time?"

Kenji looked at her, his head tilted in confusion. How could she know? The Spire was a solo instance. He simply nodded once, a short, sharp dip of his chin. The simple gesture seemed to confirm her worst fears.

It was Emi who explained, her voice hushed and full of a pain Kenji didn't understand. "The day you vanished, Kenji… Yui did too. For a day. The doctors said it was a fugue state, some kind of mass hysteria… but we knew." She looked at her daughter, a deep sadness in her eyes. "Yui… she went, too. She chose to participate."

The world, which had just started to re-form around Kenji, tilted on its axis. He stared at his sister. His little sister, who he had fought and bled and suffered for, the innocent girl he had to protect. She had been in there too? The entire purpose of his three-hundred-year ordeal suddenly felt like a bitter joke.

Yui met his gaze, and for the first time, he saw not a child, but a fellow veteran. A shared, terrible understanding passed between them in that silent look. She understood the truth behind his eyes, and he understood the source of the fear in hers.

A bitter, humorless laugh escaped her lips. "I only lasted a day," she said, pulling out a chair and slumping into it, her energy completely gone. She ran a hand through her hair, her eyes distant. "One Earth day. The time dilation… it was only a month and a half inside for me. I died to a Hobgoblin chieftain on Floor 2. It put its spear right through my stomach."

She shuddered at the memory. "I came back a Level 5 'Scout'. Pathetic, right? I thought I had it rough. I had nightmares for weeks." She looked at him again, her eyes wide with a terrifying new respect. "A whole year. You were in there for a whole year. That's… that's almost three hundred years inside."

Kenji remained silent. The numbers were correct. The math was simple. But hearing it said aloud, seeing the dawning horror on his sister's face as she comprehended even a fraction of his reality, was profoundly unsettling.

Yui seemed to realize he knew nothing. The ghost had returned, but he hadn't seen the world he'd returned to. She took a deep breath, her demeanor shifting. The scared teenager vanished, replaced by someone more serious, more hardened. She was giving him a briefing. She was giving him the new tutorial.

"You don't know, do you?" she said, her voice low and urgent. "Everything changed. A week after The Calling, it started. They call it the Cataclysm."

She pointed out the kitchen window, towards the city skyline. "Rifts tore open in the sky. Big, ugly purple cracks in reality. And things started coming out."

Kenji's blood ran cold. "What things?" he asked, his voice still a low rasp.

"Monsters," Yui said, her voice flat. "Goblins, Orcs, Minotaurs. The same things that were in the Spire. They started pouring out. They call the rifts 'Dungeons' now. Sometimes, a Dungeon becomes unstable, and you get a 'Dungeon Break'. That's when a tidal wave of monsters erupts all at once. The park down by the river? That's a low-level Goblin Dungeon now. It's fenced off with electrified wire."

He listened, his expression an unreadable mask, but inside, his world was beginning to crack.

"The government tried to fight them," Yui continued, her voice laced with cynicism. "The JSDF, the police… they were slaughtered. Bullets, missiles… they barely scratch the tougher ones. The entire country fell apart in a month. Tokyo is a ruin, controlled by monster nests. The old government doesn't exist anymore."

So the world he knew, the society he had left, was gone. The foundation of his memories was sand.

"Then the Returners started showing up," she said, her eyes fixed on him. "People like me. People who died in the Spire and came back with our levels and skills. We were the only ones who could fight the monsters. We became humanity's only hope."

She leaned forward, her hands clasped on the table. "The strongest Returners, the ones who survived the longest, they formed organizations. Guilds. They're the new governments. They control the safe zones, the fortified cities. They clear the Dungeons, they protect the 'Unawakened'—the 98% who refused The Calling—and they run everything. They're the new kings of the world."

Kenji processed this. A new feudalism, built on the power earned in the Spire. It made a cold, logical sense.

"The most powerful people," Yui said, her voice dropping to an awed whisper, "are the 'First Wave' Returners. The ones who came back in the first couple of months. They're legends. They're treated like gods."

She paused, as if for dramatic effect. "The Guild Master of 'Trinity', the strongest Guild in Japan, is a man named Kaito Jin. He's considered the strongest person alive, humanity's savior. He lasted sixty days on Earth time." She did the quick, familiar math in her head. "Almost fifty years inside the Spire. Everyone says he's a monster. A true genius."

She looked at Kenji, her eyes filled with a mixture of awe and pity. "He's Level 122."

The number hung in the air between them. Level 122. Humanity's savior. A god amongst men. The pinnacle of power in this new, broken world.

Kenji sat in his chair, the taste of his mother's cooking turning to ash in his mouth. He looked at his sister, who saw Level 5 as a trauma and Level 122 as an unreachable summit. He thought of his own status window, a document of his life that would shatter her entire understanding of reality.

Level 786.

The home he had pictured in his darkest, most hopeful moments in the Spire—a peaceful, normal world where his only concern was finding a job and taking care of his family—did not exist. It had been replaced by a low-level copy of the hell he had just escaped. The monsters were here. The system was here. The grind was here.

He hadn't escaped the prison. The prison had just gotten bigger. It had swallowed his entire world.

A profound, soul-crushing irony washed over him. He had spent three centuries fighting to get home, only to arrive and find that home was gone. It had never existed.

He was a ghost who had come back to haunt a graveyard.

The rest of the day passed in a surreal haze. The three of them sat at the kitchen table for hours, the half-eaten meal forgotten. Yui, with their mother chiming in with tearful additions, painted a grim picture of the new world. She explained the ranking system for Dungeons, from F-rank to S-rank. She described the different types of Guilds, from the massive, nation-like mega-Guilds like Trinity, to the smaller, often predatory local Guilds that acted more like protection rackets.

She told him how Returners were registered with the Guild Authority, their levels and skills monitored. Low-level Returners like her were often pressured into joining Guilds on unfavorable contracts, serving as little more than cannon fodder for clearing low-rank Dungeons. She had resisted so far, wanting to finish her education, but the pressure was always there. Their mother confessed, her voice barely a whisper, that a huge portion of her salary as a nurse went towards "protection fees" paid to a local Guild called the Iron Fangs, just for the 'privilege' of living in a relatively safe, walled-off sector of the city.

The initial shock on Yui's face had long since faded, replaced by a deep, empathetic sorrow. Once the explanations were over, the full weight of her brother's return hit her. She looked at his ancient eyes, his scarred body, and finally broke down, crying for the years he had lost, for the brother who had vanished and the stranger who had returned. Kenji, still unused to being the center of such powerful emotion, simply sat there, a silent, unmoving pillar as his mother and sister wept for him, for themselves, for their broken family finally made whole again.

That night, Kenji lay in his old bed, staring at the familiar water stain on the ceiling. The sounds of the house were soft, comforting. The gentle hum of the refrigerator, the creak of the floorboards as his mother checked the locks, the muffled sound of Yui turning a page in her room down the hall. These were the sounds of peace, the sounds of home.

But the world outside those sounds was broken. His family, the people he had endured an eternity for, were not safe. They were struggling, living in fear, paying their hard-earned money to thugs with delusions of grandeur. His sister, a survivor of the Spire in her own right, was seen not as a person, but as a commodity, a low-level asset to be conscripted and used.

The profound emptiness inside him, the soul-deep weariness that had made him seek the sweet release of death on Floor 632, began to change. It was like a fallow field into which a new seed had been planted. For centuries, his objective had been simple, mindless: go up. Survive. Climb. Now, a new objective began to solidify, forged in the fierce, protective love he felt for the two women sleeping just a few feet away. It was a purpose far more tangible, far more potent, than clearing one more meaningless floor.

In the darkness of his room, he whispered, "Status."

The familiar blue screen bloomed into existence, its soft light illuminating his face. It was a comforting presence, the only true constant in his long life. He didn't just glance at it this time. He read it. He studied it.

Status Window

Name: Kenji Tanaka

Level: 786

Class: Berserker Lord

Titles: [Floor 632 Conqueror], [The Solitary One], [King of Ruin], [He Who Fights an Endless War], [Dragon Slayer (Ancient)], [Unkillable]

Stats:

STR (Strength): 1810

VIT (Vitality): 1910

AGI (Agility): 360

INT (Intelligence): 60

WIS (Wisdom): 60

Traits (Partial List):

[Berserker's Soul (Mythic)]: The lower your health, the higher your STR and AGI. Damage taken is converted into a temporary power boost. Immune to mental status effects born from fear or pain.

[Spire Hermit (Unique)]: After existing alone for over 100 years in the Spire, your presence is naturally faint. You are difficult to detect unless you wish to be.

[Limit Break (Legendary)]: Once per day, you can shatter your body's natural limiters, doubling all stats for 3 minutes. Aftermath: Extreme physical exhaustion.

Inventory

Currency:

Gold: 9,845,215,778

Weapon:

[Last Word] (Mythic Greatsword): A colossal blade of black, star-flecked metal that seems to absorb light. It has no sharp edge, dealing damage through sheer, overwhelming force and a unique soul-crushing property.

Ability 1: [Feast] - A portion of the life force of any enemy slain is absorbed by the wielder, healing wounds and restoring stamina.Ability 2: [Weight of Eons] - The blade's impact carries a crushing gravity effect, slowing and staggering enemies.Ability 3: [Finality] - Once a day, can unleash a single strike that ignores all conventional defenses.

Armor Set:

[Ashen King's Battlegear] (Mythic Set): A suit of interlocking plates that look like they're carved from petrified, ash-grey bone. It is covered in faded, runic carvings.

[Crown of the Ashen King]: Grants immunity to mental domination and illusions.[Pauldrons of the Unburdened]: Negates the weight of the user's gear.[Breastplate of the Undying Heart]: If the user takes a fatal blow, it shatters to negate the damage and provides a massive, one-time burst of healing. (Reforms after 24 hours).[Gauntlets of Sundering]: Greatly increases grip strength. Parrying an attack sends a concussive shockwave back at the attacker.[Greaves of the Endless March]: Grants infinite stamina for movement (running/walking).

Accessories:

[Cloak of the Lonely Night] (Legendary): A tattered black cloak that billows without wind. It automatically conceals the user's overwhelming aura, making him appear as a normal, unawakened human to all but the most perceptive.[Ring of the Forgotten Vow] (Unique): A simple, unadorned iron ring. It has no stats. It is the first item he ever received in the tower, a quest reward from Floor 1. He kept it as his only link to the beginning of his journey.

Consumables: (Hoarded for a "true" final boss)

[Tear of the Spire's First God] (x1): A single, crystallized teardrop. Said to grant a moment of true enlightenment, allowing the user to experience a single, perfect attack or action. One-time use.[Elixir of Infinity] (x1): A swirling, galaxy-like liquid in a flask. Permanently increases a single stat by 100 points. He never felt he was "worthy" or at a high enough level to justify using it.

Materials:

[Heart of the Spire Guardian (Floor 100)]: The still-beating, crystallized heart of the ancient dragon from Floor 100. It radiates immense power. Useless to him, but would be considered the most valuable artifact on Earth.[Eye of a Chronos Watcher (Floor 550)]: A petrified eye that seems to dilate and contract, looking at things across time. A myth-tier crafting component.[Shard of the Void (Floor 600+)] (x12): Fragments of pure nothingness dropped by high-level Void entities. Extremely volatile.[And much more]: Literally tons of monster cores, rare ores, legendary leathers, and miscellaneous creature parts are stored in his expanded inventory, a collection so vast and high-quality it could supply an entire nation's worth of top-rank crafters for a century.

He stared at the screen. The numbers. The titles. The gear still equipped on his phantom avatar, ready to be materialized at a moment's notice. This was the power he had considered a meaningless curse just yesterday. The power that had driven him to suicide.

Now, it was a tool. The ultimate tool.

The cold, dead eyes of the Berserker Lord began to gleam with a flicker of their old, analytical light. The mind of 'Kage', the #1 globally ranked player of Devilskys, a mind that had been dormant for over two hundred years, began to whir back to life. It processed the new information Yui had given him, analyzed the new 'game world', and began, for the first time in an age, to formulate a strategy.

The strongest man in the world is Level 122. A man who spent fifty years in the Spire. He was Level 786. He had spent nearly three hundred. The power gap wasn't just a gap; it was a chasm, an abyss. They were playing checkers, and he had returned with a starship.

This 'Trinity' Guild... the 'Iron Fangs'... the Guild Authority... the Dungeons... Variables. Obstacles. Potential resources. He began to slot them into a mental framework, a plan of action. His [Spire Hermit] trait and [Cloak of the Lonely Night] would allow him to move unseen, to gather information without revealing his apocalyptic power level. He was a ghost, and in this new world of loud, arrogant Returners, that was his greatest weapon.

His eyes drifted from the glowing blue screen to the door of his room, as if he could see through it to where his mother and sister slept. He heard the faint sound of Yui coughing in her sleep.

A vow, silent and absolute, formed in the core of his being. The purpose that had eluded him for centuries was now crystal clear.

This peace, he thought, his gaze hardening. This feeling, right here, in this house. This is my new final floor. This is my Floor 1000.

A flicker of a smile, the first in centuries, touched his lips. It was a cold, dangerous smile. The smile of Kage planning a server-first kill.

"And I will not let anyone clear it."