Chapter 60: Horde Mode Gambler’s Delay

The ground cracked. The shockwave blew dust into the air. Helen Croft screamed from her cover.

"THAT’S A RANK 5 CALAMITY BOSS! EVERYONE FALL BACK!"

Alvian did not fall back.

He looked up at the giant monster coming out of the portal.

The Obsidian Colossus pulled its full body out of the Rift. It was a thirty-meter giant made of dense energy crystal. It had six glowing eyes and fists as big as trucks. Its strong aura cracked the stone floor and knocked the remaining students to the ground.

Alvian set his feet in the grey goo and watched the giant stand tall.

’Come on then.’

The Obsidian Colossus stood in the courtyard like a monument to the end of the world.

Thirty meters of compressed dimensional crystal. Six eyes burning with prismatic light. Fists the size of cargo trucks hanging at its sides. It hadn’t moved yet. It was scanning the courtyard with slow, mechanical sweeps, processing, learning, getting ready.

But the Rift behind it was still open. And it was still spitting out beasts.

Rank 3 Voidcrawlers poured around the Colossus’s legs like water around a boulder. Rank 4 Phase-Stalkers flickered into existence in clusters of five and ten. Rift-Hounds bounded through in packs of twenty, their spatial fur rippling as they hit real air for the first time.

The Colossus wasn’t attacking. Not yet. It was still waking up.

Alvian didn’t wait for it to finish.

’If I fight the boss now, the horde will swarm me from behind. Clear the trash first. Build the pool. Then spin and hit the boss with everything.’

[Gambler’s Delay: ACTIVE]

[Pool: 0 base EXP]

[Accumulating kills. Release command: "Spin."]

He waded into the thickest concentration of beasts.

Hundreds of dimensional creatures filled the courtyard. More entered every second. The noise was overwhelming. Their legs clicked, their jaws shrieked, and their shifting bodies hummed as they displaced the air.

Alvian walked into the center of it.

The beasts hit him from every direction. A Rift-Hound lunged for his throat. Its teeth met his Clearwater Coating and dissolved. The creature yelped, stumbled back with half its jaw missing, and died when Alvian’s sword removed its head.

[Kill: Rank 3 Rift-Hound. Base EXP: 25. Pooled. Pool: 25.]

A Voidcrawler tried to phase its mandible through his chest. The mandible entered his Coating field and simply stopped existing. The creature shrieked, confused, watching its primary weapon evaporate into grey dust.

Alvian cut it in half without looking.

[Kill: Rank 3 Voidcrawler. Base EXP: 30. Pooled. Pool: 55.]

He didn’t count. He didn’t need to. The System counted for him.

Swing. Five Voidcrawlers bisected. The acid on the Severing Sword Aura crescent melted their phased carapaces into slurry before the halves hit the ground.

WHOOSH. WHOOSH.

Two more swings. Two more crescents. Twenty more kills. The grey slurry on the courtyard floor was getting deeper. It squelched under his boots.

[Kill batch: 20 kills. Base EXP: 600. Pooled. Pool: 655.]

His Essence was draining. Each Severing Sword Aura crescent cost eight Essence with the Clearwater Coating synergy. He had 88 Essence when he started.

[Essence: 88 → 80 → 72 → 64.]

The beasts didn’t stop. They kept coming. The Rift pulsed, and another wave of thirty creatures poured through. Voidcrawlers, Rift-Hounds, Phase-Stalkers. They didn’t attack each other. They didn’t compete for territory. They moved with a shared purpose, a single directive.

Kill everything native to this dimension.

’They’re not random,’ Alvian thought as he carved through another pack. ’They’re coordinated. Directed. Something on the other side is sending them with a purpose.’

A Phase-Stalker tried to ambush him from behind. Its phased leg passed through his Coating and dissolved to the knee. It collapsed, screeching, and Alvian ended it with a downward stab through its skull.

[Essence: 64 → 56 → 48 → 40.]

The courtyard was changing. The manicured lawns had become a swamp of grey dissolution byproduct. Stone pathways were pitted and cracked from acid residue. The decorative fountains were filled with slurry instead of water.

And the bodies. Thousands of them. Or rather, thousands of pieces of them. Dissolution didn’t leave corpses. It left components. Mineral dust. Organic sludge.

Helen Croft watched from behind a collapsed pillar. She had dragged herself there when the Colossus emerged, her rib wound bleeding freely. Her war-hammer lay beside her, too heavy to lift. She watched a sixteen-year-old E-Rank student walk through an army of dimensional horrors like a man mowing his lawn.

"Who are you," she whispered. She had asked herself that question before. She kept not getting an answer.

Darius Magnus watched from inside the main building’s broken doorway. His magma barriers had saved dozens of students in the tunnels. His hands were burned from sustained Talent use. His chest bandages were soaked with fresh blood from reopened wounds.

He watched Alvian clear the courtyard and felt something break inside him that had nothing to do with his injuries.

Everything Darius had built his identity on was a lie. Talent rank determined worth. A-Rank meant superior. E-Rank meant trash. That was the order of the world. His father had taught him that. The Academy had reinforced it. Every noble in Vaeloria believed it.

And an E-Rank was dissolving an army with a cracked sword.

[Kill count: 500. Pool: 15,000 base EXP.]

[Essence: 40 → 32.]

Five hundred kills. The courtyard was half clear. Beasts still poured through the Rift, but the rate was slowing. The Colossus behind them was fully oriented now. Its six eyes tracked Alvian’s movement across the slaughterfield with growing attention.

’Not yet. Keep farming. Every kill adds to the pool. The bigger the pool, the bigger the payoff.’

He kept walking. Kept swinging. The sword in his hand hummed with each Severing Sword Aura activation. The blue veins in the steel pulsed brighter with every swing, as if the weapon itself was feeding on the violence.

Clearwater Palm for the close ones. A touch to the carapace, a burst of acid, a dissolved core. Quick, efficient, brutal. No wasted movement.

Severing Sword Aura for the groups. Wide arcs that bisected dozens at once. The silver crescents carried dissolution energy that didn’t just cut but melted. Wounds widened. Shells softened. Creatures that survived the initial cut died seconds later as the acid reached their organs.

[Essence: 32 → 24 → 18.]