Danmachi: The Focalors Familia — Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Noah

In the extreme north of the continent, where glacial winds howled ceaselessly throughout the year, lay Dragon Valley—one of the three great Secret Realms of the world. Legends claimed that a single roar from the wyrms within could tear the sky asunder, and their breath possessed the absolute zero required to freeze reality itself.

Yet, a mere hundred miles outside this perilous frozen wasteland, a small, unassuming village sat tucked away, almost entirely forgotten by the rest of the world.

The afternoon sun filtered through a sparse canopy of clouds, casting a rare, gentle warmth over the earth. At the village entrance stood a massive, ancient tree, its lush branches weaving a mosaic of mottled shadows across the grass.

Beneath that shade lay a young boy with snow-white hair and striking blue eyes. A single stem of sweetgrass dangled lazily from his lips. He squinted up at the leaves, looking utterly bored out of his mind.

“It’s been eight years.”

The boy muttered the words to the empty air, his gaze fixed on a translucent blue panel hovering right in front of his face. On the screen, a loading bar crawled forward at an agonizingly slow pace, the progress practically indistinguishable from yesterday.

“Tell me, System, are you actually capable of anything?” he asked dryly. “You aren’t just some defective junk cobbled together from spare parts, are you?”

The boy’s name was Noah.

To him, this world was a paradox of the familiar and the bizarre. Eight years ago, he had been struggling to survive in a completely different reality. As a miserable corporate slave, forced to work overtime deep into the night, his life had ended abruptly on his commute home. He had encountered a speeding truck. Despite his best efforts to dodge, he couldn’t outmaneuver tons of steel, and the truck’s legendary kill count increased by one.

Then came the transmigration. He awoke in this strange new world, completely rejuvenated. His adult body had regressed to that of a toddler, barely a year or two old, and even his hair and eye color had drastically changed.

Naturally, he had arrived with the standard-issue perk of any transmigrator: a cheat.

It was a system titled [Intertwined Fate]. According to its vague description, once fully charged, it could summon characters, weapons, and even abilities from his memories.

Unfortunately, this System was notoriously unreliable.

Over the past eight years, it had only successfully activated a single time—right at the very beginning. Thanks to some unknown critical error, it had unceremoniously hurled his first summoned character into a completely different era and location. Based on the System’s fragmented feedback, the poor soul had been tossed into the distant past, born directly into the Heavenly Realm.

‘Heavenly Realm…’ Noah chewed on those two words, a dry, bitter smile tugging at his lips.

He knew exactly what that implied.

This was a world where bored deities descended from the heavens to the Lower Realm, seeking entertainment by living among mortals and forming factions known as Familias.

It was the exact stage of an anime he had watched in his previous life: Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?

The reason he was so absolutely certain of this fact was the very person who had plucked him from the freezing wilderness eight years ago.

His consciousness had been a fading blur at the time, but he vividly remembered the sensation of a pair of cool, elegant hands lifting his tiny body. He had struggled to open his eyes, catching a glimpse of a breathtakingly beautiful, yet terrifyingly cold face. Silver hair had fluttered in the biting wind. Her eyes had remained tightly closed, as if she were utterly disgusted by the mere prospect of looking at the world around her.

She wore an complex, pitch-black gothic dress, exuding an aura of nobility so overwhelming it felt impossible for her to be a mere mortal.

Her name was Alfia.

Eight years was more than enough time for Noah to align his memories with his current reality. Whether it was the existence of Orario—the center of the world that all Adventurers yearned for—or the towering, thousand-meter rock wall looming in the distance that isolated Dragon Valley, everything proved his theory.

Alfia was the exact same monster of talent he remembered. A core executive of the Hera Familia, boasting a staggering Level 7 rank, known to the world by her alias, Silence.

Add in the presence of a hearty, boisterous uncle in the village who spent his days polishing a massive greatsword—a man named Zard—and Noah had completely given up on denying his situation.

He was truly living in Orario’s world. A place brimming with lethal danger, yet overflowing with boundless opportunity.

His lazy afternoon under the shade came to a swift end.

Noah spat out the grass stem, its end chewed completely white, and pushed himself up from the ground. He casually dusted the dirt and grass clippings off his pants. The sunlight filtered through the gaps in the leaves, dancing across his shoulders with a comfortable warmth.

“Time to head back,” he murmured, his voice carrying a domestic familiarity he barely even registered. “If I don’t get dinner started, that woman is going to lose her temper again.”

Alfia’s temper was colder and infinitely harder than the ancient ice buried in the deepest chasms of Dragon Valley.

She never once showed mercy just because Noah was a child. When those seemingly slender, delicate hands swung his way, they carried a terrifying, explosive kinetic force. Every single slap felt like it was going to shatter his bones into dust.

Yet, Noah had to admit the results were highly effective. Through her repeated, brutal “discipline,” he had learned how to read her shoulders, how to dodge, and how to spot the microscopic flaws in her strikes through a haze of excruciating pain.

Nowadays, the other children in the village—even the beast-kin kids renowned for their innate physical strength—were absolutely no match for him, even if they swarmed him all at once.

But he wasn’t a masochist. Given the choice to eat a meal in peace, who would willingly volunteer for a beating?

Sometimes, especially in the dead of night when his muscles ached too fiercely to allow sleep, a dark flame of unwillingness burned in his chest. He would clench his fists in the dark, making a silent vow.

‘Just you wait, Alfia. When I grow up… when I finally become an Adventurer, I’m going to defeat you and pin you to the ground.’

His greatest ambition was to stand before her as an equal, to crush her defenses squarely in combat. He desperately wanted to see a crack in her composure—to witness genuine shock and astonishment shatter that perpetual, ice-cold mask.

She was his savior. She was the one who had raised him. The weight of that kindness was as heavy as a mountain, but this burning desire to challenge her was a prairie fire, growing hotter and fiercer with every passing day.

Unfortunately, reality was a bucket of freezing water.

“It’s this damned System again…” Noah sighed, swiping his hand through the blue projection.

He seemed to be bound by some overarching cosmic rule, rendering him completely unable to accept any god’s Falna.

The Falna was the signature power system of this world, the primary catalyst for mortals to transcend their limits. Gods from the Lower Realm would use a drop of their own divine blood as a medium, inscribing sacred hieroglyphs onto a mortal’s back to forcibly awaken their dormant potential.

Only those who received a Falna could officially become Adventurers, accumulating experience points through life-and-death slaughter with monsters, leveling up, and ascending to heights ordinary humans could barely comprehend.

Having survived eight years of Alfia’s hellish training, Noah’s physical baseline had long since eclipsed that of a normal human. His raw talent was more than enough to make any deity’s eyes light up with predatory interest.

Over the past few years, several wandering gods passing through the village had taken a keen liking to him. They had showered him with praise, declaring him a natural-born Adventurer.

But without fail, the moment they brushed their fingers against his bare back to inscribe the Falna, the divine blood would bead up and roll off like water on a lotus leaf. It refused to penetrate his skin.

His body possessed an invisible, absolute barrier that actively rejected the most fundamental law of this world.

After consecutive failures, those gods could only shake their heads and leave in bitter disappointment. Eventually, Noah became known as the local anomaly—the freak who couldn’t accept a Falna. The deities stopped bothering him altogether.

He highly suspected this was the fault of his half-dead [Intertwined Fate] System monopolizing his soul.

Perhaps, only when that agonizingly slow loading bar finally reached one hundred percent, would he get the chance to step onto the path he had always dreamed of.