[ONE-SHOT] S-RANK HUNTER (A WORM/SOLO LEVELING CROSSOVER FANFICTION)

Taylor expected to die.

It was not the distant, abstract expectation that came with walking past a known gang hideout at night or watching the news tally bodies after a bloody cape fight. It was here, now, in a space barely large enough to curl into.

The locker pressed against her shoulders and knees, forcing her into a crooked crouch as she thrashed uselessly. The sounds of her own movement magnified her panic until it felt like the world itself was tightening its grip on her. The air inside had grown thick and damp, fouled beyond sensibility, each breath dragging the stench deeper into her lungs, coating her tongue, making it harder and harder to pull in enough oxygen to scream.

She screamed anyway.

She screamed until her throat tore raw and the sound collapsed into hoarse, broken gasps that barely felt like they belonged to her anymore. She thrashed until her nails split and her muscles spasmed, refusing to obey. Filth clung to her skin and soaked into her clothes, burned her eyes and nose, and with every strangled breath it became harder to remember that there had ever been a world outside this cramped, suffocating darkness.

Time lost every meaning. Panic blurred into pain, pain into exhaustion, until even fear required more strength than she had left to give. Her movements slowed, first losing their desperation, then their coordination, until they were barely there at all. Her limbs remained wedged where they had fallen, pinned by her own body and the locker’s unyielding walls, and each breath came shallower than the last, her chest stuttering as her body failed to keep up with the simple act of staying alive.

She had thought—distantly, because thoughts surfaced only to slip away again just as quickly—that death would bring something more. A moment of clarity, a rush of memories or regrets, or a final thought for her dad, for the empty house, and for the way he smiled too hard whenever he pretended everything was fine.

That moment never came.

Taylor died in the dark, her body giving out quietly as her mind emptied itself, sweet unconsciousness swallowing pain and panic alike.

So waking up was wrong and made no sense.

Light pressed against her closed eyelids. Then, awareness seeped back in slowly, and she waited for the pain to follow—for her lungs to seize and for her skin to burn—but nothing happened. Her body felt heavy instead, as though it belonged to someone who had simply slept too long.

She opened her eyes.

A hospital ceiling stared back at her, clean white panels broken by softly buzzing fluorescent lights. The acrid scent of disinfectant filled her nose, replacing the rot that had filled her lungs what felt like moments earlier, and the sheets beneath her were cool against her skin. She lay still, breathing, arms resting loosely at her sides, waiting for the scene to snap back to her waste-filled locker and darkness.

It didn’t.

She lifted one unblemished hand slowly, half-expecting it to tremble or refuse to move. It obeyed without complaint.

Her heart began to race.

The locker had not been a dream. She knew that with the same certainty she knew her own name. And yet, that certainty clashed violently with the evidence before her, and with how she felt.

Pulse quickening, she turned her head, searching for an explanation, for a doctor, a nurse, anyone who could tell her how she had gone from there to here.

Instead, she found text.

A translucent rectangular box hovered at eye level, its design reminiscent of the video games she had never cared for. It did not vanish when she blinked, nor when she looked away and back again, nor when she reached out and passed her fingers through it. It remained perfectly still, as though it had always been there.

The words it displayed were simple.

Their implications were anything but.

[YOUR DAILY QUEST HAS ARRIVED.]

Will you accept?