I waited until the park was empty.

  The streetlamp flickered once, then steadied. The city hummed softly in the distance. No eyes on me. No reason to rush.

  I stepped away from the bench and lifted my hand.

  Mana answered immediately.

  I traced a simple pattern in the air, nothing flashy, nothing aggressive. Space folded with a quiet shudder, like fabric being pulled aside. A door of faint light formed in front of me, its edges unstable, wavering like heat haze.

  No one noticed.

  They never did.

  I stepped through.

  The air changed instantly.

  Heavier. Sharper. The scent of stone and old magic replaced asphalt and rain. When the door sealed behind me, the city’s noise vanished completely.

  I sank onto a bench, letting my shoulders slump. The echoes of past DOOM activations still pressed against me, aches in my chest, dull burns under my skin, a faint haze in my vision. DOOM always demanded a toll, not just on the body, but on the mind.

  Each time I had used it, I had pushed myself to the edge. Muscles screamed. Blood had threatened to betray me. And my mind… fractured, memory slipping through my fingers like water. Names, faces, even myself. Sometimes, I couldn’t remember my own.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  That was why Akari always worried. She knew the truth I sometimes forgot: who I was, what I had become, and how far the spell could push me before it broke me entirely.

  DOOM wasn’t just magic. It was a weaving of reality and my own emotions, rage, frustration, despair, for as I know, threads only I knew it could use. Not all of them came from anger or hate. The balance was delicate, the cost unpredictable.

  And that was why no one else could replicate it. They couldn’t provide the same threads. They couldn’t survive the toll. They couldn’t be me.

  I leaned back against the bench, elbows resting on my knees, staring at the faint shimmer of crystal lamps across the park. Magic wasn’t rare here.

  That was the first thing outsiders never understood.

  In this world, magic followed rules. Clear ones. Mana flowed through established paths. Elements obeyed affinities. Fire burned, ice froze, lightning struck.

  Everything had a category, a limit, a cost that could be calculated.

  Power was studied, ranked, controlled.

  Predictable.

  I flexed my fingers slowly. That was normal magic. The kind anyone with training and talent could use.

  DOOM wasn’t like that.

  It had no element, no affinity, no lineage. I hadn’t discovered it in a grimoire or inherited it from some ancient bloodline.

  I had forced it into existence.

  DOOM didn’t draw mana from a single source. It pulled from everything at once, space, force, intent. It didn’t burn, freeze, or strike.

  It overwrote.

  Every activation carved into me, demanding blood and pain in return. My nerves screamed, my vision blurred. And if I pushed too far…

  It could kill me.

  To anyone else, I was unremarkable. Mana reserves barely above average. No specialization. No talent worth noting.

  A nobody.

  That was the part that mattered.

  DOOM didn’t care about talent or rank. It functioned on absence, on the lack of everything others relied on, and that absence was mine alone.

  Ren’s words flickered briefly in my mind: You’re bad at hiding when you overthink things.

  I exhaled slowly, leaning back against the cold stone. For now, I’d stay in the shadows.

  A nobody with nothing special.

  And the flaw I had turned into a weapon remained mine, quiet, latent, and waiting.