The Retired Hero is an Extra

If she tried challenging the limitations, it would totally not be worth the expense.

Just as she tried to call back her manifested form, the frozen time shattered.

The peace and quiet from the temporal powers broke, and it wasn\'t something just its white-flame form could take on.

Shards of frozen time whizzed around, each one a glinting blade of light, surrounding the manifestation that dared mess it up.

The air crackled as time accelerated around the white-flame form, distorting and blurring the space frenziedly.

If it had been a real living being instead of a mere manifestation, it might have aged by decades in mere seconds.

If the rate of time acceleration remained the same, it could have easily taken much more than just a few seconds—maybe minutes, hours, or even days—but it wasn\'t fixed.

"Ugh," her grunt resounded in the area as her form vanished from Jash\'s sight.

Unfortunately, he couldn\'t understand anything that happened after he slammed the dungeon boss against the wall.

\'Just where did it come from? Why did the dungeon feel like it broke apart? And the boss was killed? Then, the energy—what am I? Just what the heck happened here?\'

Jash had a plethora of questions he wanted to ask, alas, no one was there to clear his doubts.

He stood there with a stunned look on his face, perplexed by the strange events as things got unnecessarily more complicated than he hoped for.

To his dismay, he didn\'t have time to care about anything else as the dungeon walls didn\'t exist anymore.

Finally, the frozen time seemed to have caught up to him as his body started convulsing.

Jash writhed on the ground, muscles twitching uncontrollably as the overwhelming temporal force tore him from the inside out.

It wasn\'t a force that he, or anyone else on his planet for that matter, was supposed to be exposed to.

—Cough!

Blood spewed from his mouth with each agonized cough, his vision blurring as he tried to make sense of his surroundings.

Though he couldn\'t see properly, he squinted through his hazy vision, barely making out that the creepy monsters were dead.

\'I... am... alive...\' he thought to himself, unable to speak as blood kept dripping from his mouth and nose.

His throat felt raw with each breath feeling like a laborious task.

His body was so fatigued from bearing the burden that all it wanted was to rest, and he too wholeheartedly agreed, wanting to sleep.

\'I... can\'t...\' he told himself, barely able to form thoughts in his drowsy state.

Despite the pain, his body wanted to shut his consciousness, wanting to recover as he remained unconscious.

No matter how hard he tried, he found it too hard to keep his eyes open, let alone move from his position.

\'This... is not... the... time...\' he reaffirmed his will and tried to use mana to alleviate his pain, but it backfired.

The calm mana inside his body became unrestrained, but its low quantity saved him from the problem of messed-up meridians.

Fortunately, all hope was not lost.

As time ticked by, it also started returning to normal around the dungeon.

It allowed him an advantage over the collapsing dungeon before it got eroded and exploded, ending his life.

Thankfully, his body too stopped convulsing, leaving him with muscle cramps and pains to deal with.

\'Dealing with them is much better than dealing with all the unknowns here,\' he thought to himself as he clenched his teeth.

He wasn\'t going to lose his life over such a stupid thing, so he gritted his teeth and crawled on the ground, moving toward the reward room.

That was the only place that remained unharmed during the entire process, as if nothing could affect it.

Every inch of the ground Jash dragged himself across worsened his condition, but he couldn\'t give up now, could he?

A certain memory popped into his head, recalling the events that happened earlier.

Surprisingly, his determination only flared up as he closed his eyes, focusing entirely on moving forward.

\'I can\'t die!\' He exclaimed inwardly, his reasons unknown.

He didn\'t know but his closed eyes prevented him from seeing the strange events all around him.

The mana inside the dungeon was chaotic, trying to erode everything, and it did so at a slow pace.

The area encompassed by the dungeon was shortening every second and Jash remained clueless about the approaching death.

It wasn\'t the same as getting killed, it was akin to having your entire self eroded by an unknown energy from beyond the dungeon.

For the sake of it, one could refer to it as spatial powers or the void, but Jash knew better than to have such preconceived notions.

That\'s why he didn\'t hesitate to move despite his condition, wanting to leave as quickly as possible.

Of course, if he fainted or slept, he would be dead.

\'Come on! Come on! Come on!\' He motivated himself as he felt he was close to the reward room.

\'Damn this armor!\' Jash cursed his heavy armor, which, despite being life-saving, was a burden he couldn\'t get rid of.

Since his mana wasn\'t really following his commands, he couldn\'t even use his storage ring, so he couldn\'t even take it off.

His armor had chipped in quite a few areas with multiple burn marks across its surface, but that wasn\'t a problem for an armor of this rank.

With some mana, it would recover to its peak state.

Also, it allowed him to keep the pair of daggers with him, not leaving them behind like the sword he lost.

—Clang!

In the end, his determination paid off as his hand collided against the door of the reward room.

"Finally...!" Jash muttered, but it felt like speaking after decades.

It was difficult for him, but he kept crawling across the muddy floor and opened the door with his leading hand.

The so-called rewards room\'s gate was open yet it seemed way too far, but in the next instant he was suddenly teleported.

Unable to resist, he found himself in a strange room with golden-brown tiles with strange patterns all around.

He couldn\'t make out anything about his surroundings, but instead of making him panic, it calmed him down.

"It\'s the reward room," he mumbled with a sigh of relief.

Jash could recognize the weird room at first glance as they all looked the same, with a small area and a few steps before an Altar.

For some reason, he could walk on the steps of the Altar and as he reached the highest step, he saw a necklace on top of a stone slab.

Without any hesitation or worrying over traps, Jash snatched it with his trembling hands.

Just as his fingers closed around it, the world around him twisted and blurred, randomly teleporting him out of the reward room.

The entire experience with Reward Rooms was always strange, irrespective of the hunter\'s or dungeon\'s level.

No one could emulate the reason for the strange teleportations with the reward room, even if it looks like a door instead of a portal.

\'It has nothing to do with me,\' thought Jash as he found himself back on the ground with the necklace in hand.

His body didn\'t seem to have moved at all and the overwhelming pain and drowsiness returned to him.

Not wanting to leave it to luck, he put the necklace over his armor, around his neck, as the dungeon would probably close soon.

Since that was the case with Dungeon Defects that resulted in anomalies.

With both taken care of—boss defeated and reward retrieved—such dungeons would soon disappear.

This prompted Jash to leave as soon as possible or he would be trapped inside this dungeon forever as it would disappear from their world.

Alas, he didn\'t know that his situation would be far worse than that.

\'So close,\' Jash thought, looking at the exit portal of blue color behind the open doors of the reward room.

However, he failed to notice the dungeon closing in, as the air crackled with tension.

He didn\'t know yet but each inch he dragged his body across was a desperate race against the encroaching dungeon.

It would soon close forever, sealing with it anything that remained inside until time immemorial.

Luckily, Jash was just too close to the exit portal that it made no sense for him to miss it even if he wanted to.

"Finally," he muttered as his hand touched the portal and he felt the disorienting effect take over his senses.

For a second, a weird sensation enveloped him, making him feel strange all over yet it had a different effect for him.

\'So warm,\' he thought, as that was his true experience at the moment, and it made him comfortable.

He didn\'t realize but he was on the verge of going unconscious within the span of half a second.

That\'s why he fainted right after teleporting out, unable to keep his eyes open for a second longer.