Chapter 71: Cut to black

Chapter 71: Chapter 71: Cut to black

The narrow tunnel offered a kind of shelter.

It was not safe. Nothing in the Gate was safe anymore. But the walls pressed close on either side, and the ceiling was low enough that nothing large could come at them from above, and for the first time in an hour nobody was running.

They stopped where the passage bent, and Skyler lowered Cassius carefully against the stone.

Reeve crouched at the mouth of the bend and pulled the flat device from his belt again. The needle trembled, swung left, swung right, and finally hung at an angle that made no sense.

He tapped the casing twice. The numbers flickered and went dark, then lit again with different ones.

"I believe we can still reach the entrance," he said. "We are far enough west that the interference is lighter.

If we follow the outer passages and avoid any further confrontation, we should come around to the eastern side within an hour."

"That is a lot of ifs," Skyler said.

"It is the only plan I have."

"What do the readings say?"

"Nothing useful that’s for sure." He slid the device back onto his belt. "It is close to dead."

Nobody spoke after that.

Jason sat down against the far wall, apart from the group, and closed his eyes.

He did not try to cultivate. Even without the Gate’s strange mana pressing on him, he would have known better than to attempt it here.

Instead he circulated the Heretical God Law in its quietest form, a thin, slow thread of essence moving through his channels in a measured loop.

It steadied his breathing. It slowed his heartbeat. It cleared the noise out of his head.

But something was wrong with his Core.

It was working harder than it should. Every time he drew in a breath of the Gate’s thick air, he felt the mana push against him, too dense and too erratic, as if it were trying to force its own rhythm onto his.

He had to hold the circulation steady against it, the way a man holds a door shut in a storm.

’It’s interfering with my cultivation. If I tried to push for a breakthrough in here, it might just tear me apart.’

He kept the loop slow and small, and he listened.

Beneath the quiet, he could feel the Gate pulsing.

It was faint, a rippling surge in the surrounding mana that rolled through the stone and faded.

He had noticed it first in the chamber, when the pillars had cracked. Now he counted the gaps between the pulses.

Forty seconds. Thirty-five.

He kept counting.

Thirty.

The pulses were coming faster.

’It’s accelerating.’

His eyes snapped open.

"Reeve," he said. "The mana surges are getting closer together. I can feel them.

They were close to forty seconds apart a few minutes ago, and now they are barely thirty."

Reeve frowned. "How can you tell?"

"I’ve been counting."

For a moment Reeve looked as if he would say more. Then a sound reached them from the far end of the tunnel.

It was a dry, heavy scrape, like something large dragging itself along the stone.

Everyone went still.

"Everybody ready your weapons," Reeve said quietly. "Now."

---

The monster came out of the dark slowly, as thorough it knew they had nowhere to go.

It was easily twice the size of anything they had faced. Its body was covered in thick, overlapping plates of dull gray armor, and each of its four limbs ended in a blunt, heavy claw that left furrows in the rock.

A visible haze clung to its legs, a dense, shimmering distortion of mana that made the air around it ripple.

It had no eyes that Jason could see. It simply turned its flat, armored head toward the group, and its jaws opened.

"Positions," Reeve said. "Wen, stay with Cassius. Skyler, find a gap in that thing’s armour. Cassius, stay down."

"I am not staying down," Cassius said, and he hauled himself up on one leg, his blade shaking in his hand.

"Cassius."

"I can still fight."

Reeve did not argue. He stepped forward and slammed his shield against the stone.

"Hey!" he roared, and a ripple of force rolled out of him, a deep, ringing note that struck the monster like a slap. "Over here, you ugly brute!"

The creature’s head swung toward him.

It charged.

Reeve braced behind the shield as the monster hit him. The impact drove him back a full yard, his boots tearing grooves in the floor, but he held.

Skyler’s arrow whistled in and struck the beast’s flank. It bounced off the plate with a sharp ping.

Jason rushed in from the left, the spear low, and drove it at the join between two plates. The point skidded off, and the shock rattled up his arms.

’Solid.’

Cassius came in from the right, dragging his bad leg, and brought his blade down in a wind-wrapped arc. It carved a thin line across the armor and nothing more.

The monster whipped its tail around.

It was a blunt, heavy thing, and Jason barely got the spear shaft up in time. The blow threw him sideways into the wall, and the breath left his lungs in a rush.

"Back!" Reeve shouted. "Pull back!"

The team scrambled away. The monster turned in the narrow space, its claws raking the stone, and a cold understanding settled in Jason’s stomach.

’We can’t even hurt it.’

Cassius did not pull back.

He had seen a gap, a half second as the creature turned, with its left side exposed.

He lunged at it on his bad leg, his blade aimed at the soft join behind the foreleg.

He was too slow.

The monster’s claw came around faster than Jason’s eye could follow. It caught Cassius across the chest and flung him against the wall like a rag. He slid to the floor and lay still.

"Cassius!" Skyler cried.

He coughed and rolled onto his side. He was conscious, but his breath was ragged, and his blade lay out of reach.

He was out of the fight.

Jason’s mind went cold and quick.

’Two fighters in the front. One injured. One healer who cannot heal. An archer whose arrows bounce off.’

If they kept trading blows, they would lose.

He had the power to end this, and he knew it. Crimson Thunder would punch through that armor.

But Reeve was watching. Skyler was watching. Cassius was lying on the floor with his eyes half open. If he released his true strength, every question he had been avoiding would come due at once.

And with how suspicious Reeve had been, he wasn’t willing to reveal the true extent of his strength just yet.

’Think. Jason. Think.’

He studied the creature.

Its armor was thickest across the chest and shoulders. But the plates at the joints were thinner, split by narrow gaps where the limbs bent. And when it attacked, it favored its right side, leaning its weight onto it as it turned.

He turned to Reeve. "Pull it toward the narrow part of the tunnel!"

Reeve glanced at him once. Something moved behind his eyes, a hard, quick understanding. He nodded.

He began to retreat.

He did it carefully, a step at a time, the shield between him and the beast, pulling its attention with every movement.

The monster followed, its claws scraping, and the tunnel narrowed around it. Its shoulders brushed the walls. Its right side scraped stone.

Jason moved up on its left, into the dark where it could not see him, and settled his grip on the spear.

’Now.’

The monster lunged at Reeve.

Jason thrust.

The point slid into the joint of the left foreleg, where the plates parted, and sank deep. He put a thread of fire into it, a thin, hot spark, nothing more. The creature let out a howl, and its leg buckled.

It did not fall.

"Reeve!" Jason shouted.

Reeve’s shield came down on the beast’s head like a hammer.

The monster spun toward him, and Skyler’s arrow punched into the gap Jason had opened. It shrieked. Reeve hit it again from the opposite side, and Jason drove the spear deeper into the joint, twisting.

The creature went down on one knee.

Then Reeve brought his shield down on its skull a third time, and the monster collapsed.

Silence.

The mana haze around its limbs flickered and faded into nothing.

---

For a long time nobody moved.

Then Skyler lowered her bow with shaking hands and went straight to Cassius. Wen was already kneeling beside him, her face drawn and gray, her hands pressed to his ribs.

"He is bruised," Wen said. "Two ribs cracked, maybe. His leg is worse than before."

Jason was tired.

He leaned against the wall and felt his Core ache. The strike had cost him more than he had planned, far more than a single thrust should have.

It was something about the Gate. Everything he did here took more out of him than it should’ve and he could feel the strain in his channels, a deep, bright pain like a pulled muscle.

He was close to breaking through to the Late Stage. He could feel it clearer than ever.

But he could not force it here. If he tried, the Gate’s mana would tear his Core apart.

’I need to recover. I cannot afford another fight like that.’

He pushed himself upright and looked around.

Cassius could barely stand, Wen was basically empty, Skyler’s quiver was nearly empty and Reeve’s device was dead, leaving the way forward unclear.

Reeve stood over the monster’s corpse, staring down at it. He had said nothing since the fight ended.

"Has any of you ever seen a creature like that in a D-Rank Gate?" Jason asked.

Nobody answered.

Reeve did not answer either, not at first. He kept looking down at the armored body, his jaw tight.

"No," he said finally.

Jason watched him.

"Then what exactly did you bring us here to investigate?"

Reeve turned his head away.

It was a small movement, but it told Jason more than any answer could have.

"I..." Reeve began.

The tunnel shook.

It was a deep, violent tremor, rolling through the stone from somewhere far beneath them. Dust rained from the ceiling. The walls groaned, and a thin crack raced across the floor between Jason’s boots.

"Move!" Skyler shouted.

The tremor faded.

In the silence that followed, a soft chime sounded from Reeve’s belt.

Jason looked down.

The device was glowing. The cracked screen flared bright, and for one brief instant the numbers on its face climbed to a level so high that Jason’s stomach dropped.

It was far beyond anything the Association’s readings could have predicted.

Then the screen flickered, and went black