Chapter 22: The Rift Boss

Nyra appeared from the gloom, her daggers slick with black blood after helping Maren drive off the third Stalker. She stopped dead in her tracks, looking from the dead Stalker’s destroyed face to Rain’s bloody wrists.

"Most first-timers throw their hands up and die when their steel snaps," Nyra said quietly, her voice dropping into an uncomfortable, sharp register. "You went straight for its face like you’ve been tearing skulls open your whole life."

Rain stood up slowly, wiping his hand on the dead Stalker’s dry skin. "It was going to step on my chest. I didn’t have another option."

Before Nyra could respond, a heavy, metallic crunch echoed through the wide tunnel.

A fourth Stalker had stepped out from the ceiling shadows, larger than the others, its bone mask covered in a dark, cracked red crest. A Stalker Alpha, it was radiating a heavy, suffocating pressure that made the air shimmer with heat.

It lowered its head to charge Maren, who was struggling to lift her shield with her bruised arms.

BOOM.

Warrick stepped through the space between Maren and the Alpha in a single, blur-like stride, his right fist glowing with that brilliant, terrifying yellow energy. He drove his punch straight into the center of the Alpha’s red crest.

The bone mask was destroyed on contact. The shockwave blew the Alpha’s body forty feet backward through the air, where it slammed into a stone pillar and collapsed into a wet, motionless heap.

Warrick lowered his hand, his expression flat, as if he had just flicked a pebble out of his shoe. "Stop staring at the carcass," he said, turning back to the group. "Tie up your shoulder, Dane. The smell of that blood is going to draw the rest of the pack if we stay in this throat."

Dane pulled a strip of linen from his belt, his fingers shaking as he wrapped his bleeding shoulder. He looked at Rain, then at Maren, then down at his red-hilted sword. "That thing took out half my shoulder in one pass. Warrick’s doing this like he’s strolling through a garden."

"He’s C-rank," Maren grunted, tying her leather strap tight around her forearm. "We’re D-ranks. Rain’s an F-rank who fights like a rabid dog. Let’s just get to the boss chamber so we can claim the core and get out of this furnace."

While the others caught their breath, Rain moved through the kill site, working fast, popping cores loose from the dead Stalkers and Skitterers scattered across the mud and dropping each one into his canvas sack. He harvested the Alpha’s core last, a dense, dark crimson shard nearly the size of his fist, before turning his attention to his own broken knife.

With his trench knife gone, Rain crouched by the nearest fallen Stalker and pulled a long, narrow bone spur free from its shattered wrist joint, the same reinforced material that had turned the mask into a wall against his old blade now serving as the only weapon on hand sharp enough to matter. It wasn’t balanced for fighting, but it had a ten-inch point that wouldn’t snap the way iron had.

’Two hundred and seventeen experience,’ Rain thought, stepping back into his position behind Toby as the group resumed their march. ’That single Stalker gave sixty-five points. If the curve holds anything like it has so far, four or five more of those should be enough to hit Level 4. Maybe six or seven gets me to Level 5, if the next threshold doesn’t jump higher than I’m guessing.’

He looked at the backs of the four D-rank hunters ahead of him. They were walking with tight, exhausted strides, their eyes wide with dread every time a loose stone rattled in the dark. They wanted the corridor to end. They wanted the nightmare to stop so they could take their payout and go home to their small apartments and medical bills.

’I want ten more Stalkers to drop out of that ceiling,’ Rain thought, a dark flicker of amusement running through him. ’Twenty more Skitterers filling the mud. I know how thin my margins are. If I walk into that boss room sitting at Level 3 with a broken knife and a bruised hip, I’m one bad shockwave away from being wiped out. I need every stat point this system can feed me before I set foot on that dais. They’re praying for a clear path. I’m sitting back here wishing for twenty more gray heads to break and level up,’

They turned a long, winding corner into a massive, vaulted gallery where the red crystal veins grew as thick as tree trunks.

The air whistled.

Three Stalkers dropped from the high ceiling at once, landing in a tight triangle around the group.

"Flank!" Toby yelled, letting go of an arrow that skipped harmlessly off a Stalker’s bone mask.

One Stalker lunged straight for Toby’s throat, its long clawed hands extended like iron shears. Toby froze, his bow caught across his chest, unable to bring the wooden limb up in time to block.

Rain was already on the move.

[Flash Step: Zero Drag]

The world erased itself between one breath and the next.

Rain vanished from his spot three yards behind Toby and reappeared instantly right beside the Stalker’s left hip, his boot landing with a sharp, dry CLACK on the basalt floor. The sudden acceleration created a small vacuum of air that made Toby’s hair fly forward over his eyes.

Rain drove the bone spur straight through the side of the Stalker’s neck, right below the edge of its bone mask, using the momentum of his sudden displacement to drive the point six inches deep into its spinal column.

THWACK.

The Stalker collapsed mid-air, tumbling sideways into the mud at Toby’s feet, its legs twitching once before going flat.

[Target Eliminated: Hollowfang Stalker (C-Rank)]

[Experience Gained: +65]

[Experience: 282 / 400]

Toby fell backward onto his seat, staring up at Rain with his mouth wide open. "What... what was that? Where did you just come from?"

Nyra, who had just parried a strike from the second Stalker twenty feet away and jumped back to create space turned her head so fast her hair whipped across her face. Her eyes locked onto Rain, total disbelief replacing her usual dry suspicion.

"You were standing behind Toby," Nyra said, her voice dropping into a breathless, stunned whisper. "You were nine feet away."

Rain didn’t answer her directly. He yanked the bone spur out of the Stalker’s neck, his right leg throbbing with a dull, muscular ache from the sudden, unconditioned spatial recoil of the Flash Step.

"Focus on the front!" Rain shouted, his voice ringing harsh against the red stone walls. "There’s two more coming off the wall!"

Maren slammed her shield into the second Stalker, her face twisted in a mixture of exhaustion and cold fury. "I don’t care how he’s moving! Just kill them! Kill them so we can finish this!"

Dane swung his sword in a wild, desperate arc, cutting through the leg joints of the third Stalker as it tried to retreat into the shadows. "I’m not losing my split to these grey freaks! Put them down!"

The competitive edge had turned sharp and ugly. With Warrick’s earlier comment about the payout split hanging over them, and the sheer terror of the C-rank threats, every hunter was swinging with everything they had left, trying to land the final strikes to prove their worth on the contract.

Rain moved through the chaos, his bone spur working with cold, ruthless precision. He finished the second Stalker after Maren pinned its arm, driving the spur through its jaw joint.

[Target Eliminated: Hollowfang Stalker (C-Rank)]

[Experience Gained: +65]

[Experience: 347 / 400]

Two more Ridgeback Skitterers lunged out of a side drainage hole. Rain intercepted them both, stepping inside their lunges, using his Strength to pin one while driving his bone spur through the ribs of the other.

[Target Eliminated: Ridgeback Skitterer (D-Rank)]

[Experience Gained: +22]

[Target Eliminated: Ridgeback Skitterer (D-Rank)]

[Experience Gained: +22]

Dane and Maren cleared two more Stalkers of their own in the same stretch, the fighting too fast and too chaotic for Rain to track every kill outside his own, the tally in the corner of his vision climbing faster than he could consciously follow.

After a while he felt a warm, heavy surge of power erupted from his core, far stronger than the previous level-ups, washing through his chest like a wave of liquid iron.

[Level Up! You are now Level 4]

[4 Attribute Points Distributed]

[Experience: 9 / 500]

Rain pulled back into the shadow of a basalt pillar while Warrick cleared the remaining two Stalkers with two quick, devastating palm strikes that shattered their torsos against the stone.

The chamber fell quiet, save for the heavy, ragged gasps of the four D-rank hunters.

Rain checked his own condition first.

[HP: 73/100]

[Mana: 3/10]

The number was lower than he expected. He didn’t remember taking another hit, not directly, but between the Skitterers and the scramble through the second Stalker pack, something had clipped him he hadn’t fully registered in the moment. He’d used another flash step but it seemed his mana had regenerated between the and now by just one point which left him with three instead of two.

He filed it away and pulled up his full profile instead, curious where the new points had actually landed.

[Host Profile]

[Name: Rain]

[Level: 4]

[Experience: 9 / 500]

[Status: Awakened]

[HP: 73/100]

[Mana: 3/10]

[Strength: 15]

[Agility: 12]

[Endurance: 12]

[Intelligence: 16]

[Skill Slots: 1/1 (FUSED)]

’One point to Agility,’ Rain thought, studying the numbers carefully, ’one point to Endurance, two points to Strength. Strength is sitting at fifteen now. That’s why the bone spur went six inches into that Stalker’s neck without stopping. My body’s catching up to what the system’s handing me. Slowly. But it’s catching up.’

He closed the window and rolled his shoulder, testing the new weight in it. His body felt solid, more responsive than the frail, malnourished frame he’d carried into the rift gate hours ago, and he let himself sit with that for a moment before he had to move again.

"Look," Dane called out, his voice thin and trembling, pointing a bloody finger toward the far end of the gallery.

Fifty yards ahead, a single, smaller creature was limping across the basalt floor. It looked like a young Hollowfang Stalker, its bone mask cracked down the center, its slate-gray skin covered in old, festering scars. It was alone, moving slowly toward a narrow side archway, its movement heavy and uneven.

"It’s wounded," Dane breathed, his eyes lighting up with a sudden, desperate greed. "That’s a free C-rank core! If we tag it before it reaches the arch, Warrick has to log it to our party kill!"

"Dane, wait!" Maren called out, reaching for his strap. "We’re out of formation!"

"It’s forty credits!" Dane yelled, breaking into a staggering sprint across the polished stone floor, his red-hilted sword raised over his shoulder. "Toby, cover me!"

"Dane, don’t!" Nyra shouted, but Toby was already running after him, his bow raised, caught up in the sudden, reckless rush to secure another high-value core before the raid ended.

Maren cursed loudly, pulling her heavy tower shield back onto her arm and trotting after them. "Idiots! Absolute idiots!"

Rain didn’t run. He stepped out from behind his pillar, his eyes narrowing as he looked at the narrow side archway the wounded creature was limping toward.

The archway wasn’t a side tunnel. It was covered in deep, ancient geometric grooves that matched the dais in the Ravager chamber above. The air around the archway was visibly black, looking like a thick, stagnant fog of raw, corrupted mana pooling around the base of the stone steps.

’That isn’t a wounded runner,’ Rain thought, a cold spike of dread shooting through his chest. ’It’s dragging them. It’s moving toward a threshold.’

"Stop!" Warrick shouted, his voice cutting through the wide gallery like a cracked whip. "Dane, pull back! That’s the boss threshold!"

Dane didn’t listen. He reached the wounded creature five paces before the archway, raising his sword to bring it down on the creature’s cracked bone mask.

He never finished the swing.

A shadow, broad, flat, and completely devoid of light, crossed the black archway and was already standing five feet in front of Maren before the eye could register the space between.

Nobody heard a sword swing. Nobody heard a claw cut the air. Nobody felt so much as a shift in the stone under their feet.

Maren stopped running.

Her broad, steel tower shield, three inches of reinforced iron plate built to withstand D-rank kinetic impacts, split vertically down the middle with a dry, quiet pop.

The right half of the shield fell to the stone floor.

Maren’s upper torso slid smoothly off her waist, severing at a clean, forty-five-degree diagonal angle from her left shoulder down to her right hip. Her broad, heavy face remained completely neutral, her eyes still open, her mouth slightly parted as if she were about to call out to Dane again.

Her upper body hit the stone floor with a dull, wet thud.

A second later, a fountain of bright red blood erupted from her lower half, spraying across Dane’s face and chest in a thick, steaming curtain.

Dane fell to his knees in the blood, his red-hilted sword slipping from his numb fingers, his mouth opening in a soundless, horrified scream as he stared down at the two halves of the woman who had spent five years paying for her brother’s medical bills.

The shadow in the archway didn’t move again. It stood ten feet away, a massive, six-limbed monstrosity covered in dull black chitin that seemed to swallow the light of the red crystals, its long, razor-thin scythe arms dripping with fresh, hot blood.

Silence, total, absolute, and suffocating, fell over the red cavern floor.

’So this is a C ranked boss,’

****

**A/N:**

Hey everyone, just wanted to take a quick moment to say thank you. Genuinely. Whether you’ve been here since Chapter one or you found this story last week, the fact that you’re taking time out of your day to read something I made means more to me than I can really put into words.

This story wouldn’t be where it is without you. Every vote, every comment, every theory you drop in the comments section, it all keeps me going, especially on the days when writing feels harder than usual.

If you’re enjoying the ride so far, I’d really appreciate a vote or a power stone if you’ve got one to spare. And if you’ve ever considered sending a gift, big or small, just know it genuinely helps and is never taken for granted.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for sticking around. There’s a lot more coming.

— RetardedCulture