Dusk (BL Light Novel)

It wasn’t just Gang Jaegyung who was disappointed that the main quest had ended so ambiguously.
I was too.
Abrea had disappeared without anything being resolved, and that alone made me even more curious.
There was a strong possibility that the trailer would finally reveal what had happened.
If they still didn’t explain it in the trailer... well.
Guess I’d just have to wait for the next update.

While that soft voice tickled my ear, whispering close, the countdown ticked lower and lower until it finally hit 5.
Around then, even Gang Jaegyung fell quiet, leaning back in his seat to stare at the screen.
The numbers descended to 1, then to 0—
and smoothly transitioned into the ZeroSoft logo.
A ripple of excited murmurs swept through the arena.
As the logo faded and the screen blackened, the noise dissolved, leaving behind a thick, heavy silence.

And then, a familiar voice began to narrate calmly:
— I started thinking something was wrong the day Hoa received their baptism.
The narrator was Abrea.

— Because of the first terrorist attack orchestrated by Aideas, Hoa’s body had been severely weakened.
Their immune system was compromised; they fell sick whenever given the chance and could barely digest food.
Scene after scene flipped through, sketching out Abrea’s memories.
The carnage from the first Aideas terror attack was depicted in brutal detail—
and within that wasteland, Abrea and Hoa were shown being cared for in a ruined temple.
Both of them were dirtied with blood and dust, but while Abrea moved about healthily,
Hoa—frail and skeletal—clung to Abrea, too weak to leave their side.
The brief memories skipped forward to show Hoa recovering from illness, growing stronger,
and finally receiving their baptism at the temple.
But while Hoa knelt to accept the ceremony, Abrea’s face in the background was tight and uneasy.

— After finally regaining some strength, they rushed to be baptized... and then, suddenly,
despite their fragile health, took up a sword.
— Even though they could barely stay on their feet,
they insisted: “Since my body cannot channel divine power,
I must serve the gods with sword and shield instead.”
And so they forced their body beyond its limits.
On-screen, Abrea and Hoa were now locked in a fierce argument—neither backing down.

— They were my only remaining family.
I couldn’t lose Hoa too.
— But Hoa no longer understood my concern.
Until now, the footage had been still illustrations—
but now, life began to seep into the images.
Abrea clutched his forehead in agitation,
while Hoa stood stiffly, clearly rejecting every word.

Both of them were angry—
but where Abrea’s expression was full of fear and worry,
Hoa’s face was etched only with resentment and frustration.
— “I know you’re strong.
But if you keep pushing like this, you’ll die.”
— “If it’s for Shadiers-nim, it doesn’t matter.”

— “You don’t even think about me, do you?
I’m so worried about you I can’t even function anymore!”
— “That’s your incompetence.
If you can’t separate personal feelings from duty, what kind of commander are you?”
— “...What?”
Wow.
If I’d talked to my sister like that, she would’ve beaten me into the floor without hesitation.

— Without a doubt, Hoa had changed.
— “Better this than just sitting around praying and doing nothing.
Whatever I choose, it’s not your business.”
Spinning on their heel, Hoa stormed out of the room,
leaving Abrea behind, stunned and hollow-eyed.

Over the footage, Abrea’s voice murmured again:
— Was this truly... your own choice?
The screen cut to black.

Someone—not Abrea—shouted, “Commander!”
When the color returned, the scene had shifted to the Mirror Maze, a standard dungeon.
A new character appeared—
judging by the outfit, a priest and an assassin from the Dopa tribe.
From the way the crowd around the arena started whispering their names,
they must’ve been known NPCs.
I vaguely remembered one # Nоvеlight # of them too—
someone famous among the Dopa, but I couldn’t recall the name.
The dialogue was nothing special.
They had been investigating the Mirror Maze, just like in the main quest—
but besides the strange gusts of wind, they hadn’t found the source of the disturbance.

While they discussed it, faint noises echoed through the supposedly empty maze.
They decided to send scouts to investigate.
The screen panned upward, following the origin of the sound—
toward a pitch-black hole torn into the ceiling.
As the camera ascended,
it spun 180 degrees to match the inverted world beyond the hole.

The hallways where the mirrors faced each other,
the bottomless cliffs.
It was the same place Jaegyung and I had crossed during the Concealed Mirror Maze segment.
So the Mirror Maze and Concealed Mirror Maze were connected after all.

I found myself glancing sideways at Gang Jaegyung.
That perfectly cut profile of his was completely engrossed in the trailer,
totally unaware I was staring—
like a little kid too absorbed in cartoons to notice breakfast going cold.
After lingering on him for a moment, I turned back to the screen.
The footage drifted past the corridor where we’d fought,
past the dark room where we met Omoknuni,
and down the hallway that had been blocked during the main quest.

There—
we saw them again:
Abrea and Adam.
They were struggling to force open a massive, crumbling door.
Panting from the effort, they finally pried it apart—
revealing a tall staircase leading upward.

As always, the purple spirit hovered ahead, tracing a bright trail to guide them.
Abrea sprinted up the stairs,
reached the top,
and stepped into a place made entirely of glass—floor, walls, decorations, everything.
At the center stood a colossal door, identical to the one we’d glimpsed in the Glass Caverns—
but here, the door stood upside down atop a pedestal.
Clutching the key given by null,
Abrea approached the pedestal.

As he moved,
the key seemed to melt in his hand like heated wax—
unfolding into a winding stream of light that twisted across the floor like an electronic circuit,
connecting to the door.
A soft click echoed across the arena.
And slowly,
the massive door began to open.

Abrea inhaled sharply at the sight beyond.
Unlike Dusk’s world of scarcity,
where wars broke out over single trees or patches of grass—
the other side was lush with greenery, overflowing with life.
Forests so thick they resembled jungles.
Nothing like the barren landscapes the game had always shown us.

In the main setting, villages clustered desperately around a single tree,
and outside, the fields were little more than bare dirt and dry grass.
Atheliena, with its "return to an era of abundance" lore, was the only exception.
But this?
This was paradise.

And Abrea, who had clawed his way through the ruined world of Dusk,
stood frozen—speechless.
The only sound was the gentle rustle of the wind across leaves.
And then:

— The priests call me a heretic... but honestly,
it’s not that I deny the gods’ authority or disbelieve their existence.
— It’s just... I doubt what I was given.
Adam strode up beside Abrea and turned to face him.

— “This is the paradise we should’ve had.”
— “...”
— “And the cost of reclaiming it...
will be beyond anything you can imagine.
Learning the truth is the first sacrifice you’ll have to make.”

— It hit me, then:
the world I’d fought so hard to survive... had been constructed.
Abrea’s voice trembled, barely concealing despair.
— So then—
was the god I believed in ever real?
Or...

An image of null flashed across the screen.
— Just another puppet, like him.
The old illustrations that had framed the beginning of the trailer tore apart,
and new scenes emerged.

We saw Abrea’s parents, coughing up blood and dying from the Aideas attack.
We saw a paladin desperately trying to save Hoa, only to be refused by the priests.
We saw Abrea, falling into despair.
Then, just when all hope seemed lost,
someone approached them—a medic marked with Aideas’s insignia—
and healed Hoa.

Through blurred, tearful vision,
the figure resembled the high priest Hoa would later become after the baptism.
The footage snapped back to the present.
Abrea’s face hardened with determination as he stepped into the so-called paradise.

Blinding light engulfed the entire screen.
— …I only ever craved the truth. Not the gods.
The dazzling white slowly dimmed into darkness again,
and a new song began to play—one no one had heard before.

The camera soared over the lush forest from earlier,
revealing an endless sea of trees, thick and green, like an untouched jungle.
A scene utterly unimaginable in the resource-starved, war-torn world of Dusk.