Chapter 80: More Than We Thought

Chapter 80: More Than We Thought

"...I’ve looked worse," Sky muttered, rubbing the back of his neck with a dirty hand.

"That doesn’t make this better," Chloe scoffed, her hands moving quickly and efficiently as she took her place at his injured leg and adjusted the settings on her visor. A clicking noise escaped from the device as small lenses rotated and rearranged themselves inside the frame, focusing their sights onto the torn clothing and messy wound.

A soft blue light passed over his body, flowing from his shoulder down to his knee, than his boots in a smooth, gentle wave.

"Minor structural damage to your armor. Bruising around the left leg," Chloe read off the atmospheric readouts scrolling over her visual field. She paused, her brows furrowing as the scanner delved deeper. "Some compression damage around your ribs. At least two hairline fractures. You’re bleeding internally under the dermis."

Sky raised an eyebrow at her words, genuinely surprised at how much the contraption could see.

"You can actually see all that?" "I can see much more than that," Chloe replied, pride and irritation mixing in her voice. She tapped the side of her visor twice, the blue glow intensifying. "Remember? Network Link. My ocular array doesn’t just read surface level lighting."

Sky nodded slowly.

He had almost forgotten how ridiculous Chloe’s talents were. The world was filled with people that could read a person’s physical state from a glance, and some that could detect certain magical readings. But Chloe was ridiculous in her technical expertise, and in a world that relied on instinct, she was an anomaly.

Vesper came closer, her white robes rustling against the dry grass of the hilltop as she walked. Her wooden staff tapped at the stone rhythmically, and she stopped several feet away, her grey eyes calm and uninterested as she glanced down on Sky.

"What attacked you?" she asked, getting straight to the point without any pleasantries.

"One of the Savage Beasts," Sky said, his voice tightening at the memories.

Chloe paused her work, her hands freezing in mid air.

"One?"

"An injured one," Sky elaborated, attempting to downplay the scale of the problem. "It was already trailing blood when it found me, but that didn’t make it any less aggressive."

Sky leaned against a nearby stone, allowing the cold mass to support his battered frame as he told his story.

He spoke of the ambush.

The limb that had launched from the mud with no warning, spearing through the earth like a subterranean spear.

The chase through the labyrinth, the sensation of the tight, winding passages threatening to crush him.

The makeshift bone spear he had forced into the creature’s weak spots, slowing its furious charge.

He skipped over several particularly unflattering details to preserve his reputation.

In particular, the part where he allowed the creature to grab him, using it’s claws to dig into him and pin him to the ground in order to obtain a point blank shot at the monsters core. If he mentioned this to Chloe, he would be lectured within an inch of his life. Vesper listened to it all, uninterested but attentive. She didn’t interrupt, her face remaining an unchanging mask as she gave her full and undivided attention to the battle Sky had fought.

When he finished, she asked the most obvious question, her voice adopting a razor sharp edge.

"Why didn’t you use your Blood Blade?"

Sky paused.

A tense stillness filled the hill as Chloe paused her tinkering, and Vesper simply waited. His mind raced to form a suitable explanation for his actions, one that wouldn’t make him sound like an idiot. "...I wanted to conserve energy."

Chloe stared at him.

Vesper stared at him.

Sky stared back, shifting uncomfortably under their gazes. "What?" Sky demanded defensively. Chloe slowly smiled, though her eyes betrayed any sign of amusement. "That’s a terrible excuse." "It worked," Sky insisted, crossing his arms over his chest despite the pain it sent lancing through his ribs.

"You almost got eaten," Chloe chided, her voice rising an octave. "Conserving energy doesn’t do you any good if you’re digested in the belly of a subterranean abomination!"

"But I didn’t," Sky countered quietly, setting his jaw. "I’m standing right here."

Vesper’s expression didn’t change, her cold grey eyes giving no sign of amusement or approval.

"You are reckless."

Sky shrugged, leaning heavily against the rock.

"Still alive."

"That is not the same thing as being competent," Vesper stated bluntly. "Survival by luck is merely a delay of the inevitable."

Sky sighed, rubbing his temples with his dirty fingers.

There it was again.

He had barely found them, had practically walked through the literal maze of death with a ruined leg and cracked ribs, and it seemed that crazy hope was already criticising him. He should have expected this. He rummaged inside the strange rucksack, tugging at the leathers straps to relieve the tension between them.

"Anyway, I did get something from the fight."

He withdrew the glowing shard from his pocket, the gem radiating a faint light, casting soft reflections onto the dirt of his hands and the grass of his boots. Even in the approaching twilight, the inner core of the crystal pulsed with an unsettling, brilliant light.

Chloe’s eyes widened behind her visor. "Where did you get that?" she breathed, taking a step closer. "From the Savage Beast," Sky replied, presenting the gem so they could see it better. "Right out of its chest cavity after it stopped breathing."

She took a closer inspection, her mechanical curiosity far outweighing her earlier irritation. Her visor quickly scanned the crystal, tiny blue beams of light crossing over the smooth gem. Holgraphic symbols and readouts floated around it, hovering delicately in the air between the trio.

"Interesting..." Chloe murmured, her fingers twitching as she fought the urge to touch the gem. "The density of the mana lattice inside this structure is completely off the charts."

Sky glanced at her, furrowing his brow.

"What?"

"This is a normal gem," Chloe said, her voice tinged with genuine fascination as she read the information scrolling by on her visor.

Sky nodded, his expression darkening slightly.

"I figured."

"You figured?" Chloe asked, pausing her scan to glance at him.

"I already tried using it."

Chloe glanced at him, her brows furrowing immediately in suspicion. Sky immediately added: "Before I met you two. I sat down in a quiet passage while I was wrapping my leg and tried to channel it." She nodded thoughtfully, accepting the explanation before resuming her scan of the hovering, holographic readouts.

"And nothing happened?"

"Nothing," Sky said flatly. "No draw, no flow, no absorption. It was like holding a regular piece of glass." He didn’t feel the need to try it again. It was pointless, not worth his time when he was already feeling low on physical stamina. He had already learned that his soul couldn’t absorb these crystals, no matter how much energy was stored inside them.

Chloe turned the gem slightly in her fingers, taking it from Sky’s palm to inspect the edge where it had fused with the monster’s flesh.

"Then you really are different."

Sky frowned, shifting his position with a painful grunt.

"I already knew that."

"I mean more than we thought," Chloe said quietly, her voice losing its playful edge as she analysed the reading on her visor. "It’s not just that your body rejects standard mana sources. Your soul core actively repels the raw structure of beast gems. It’s like two identical magnetic poles pushing against each other."

Vesper’s eyes shifted towards the crystal, her cold grey gaze lingering on the pulsating light inside the stone

.

"Can it be used?" she asked.

Chloe nodded, adopting her usual, clinically efficient demeanour.

"Definitely. It can still be traded, used as a crafting material, or processed for certain equipment. In fact, a crystal this pure could power an entire forge array in the upper districts for weeks."

Sky looked at the shard in her hand. He had nearly been crushed to death for it. He had dragged his broken body through miles of dark, suffocating tunnels just to secure this one victory over a monster that should have killed him. And now he couldn’t even use it himself.

"Great."

He sighed, shaking his head with a bitter half smile. "At least it isn’t completely useless."

Vesper turned away, her long white robes swaying as she gazed out over the crest of the hill into the vast, dark expanse below.

"Nothing obtained from a Savage Beast is useless," she said softly. "Only those who do not know how to apply what they have gathered."

Sky glanced at her, eyebrow raised.

"You sound like Chloe."

Vesper stopped, turning her head just enough to give him a sharp, warning glare over her shoulder.

"That wasn’t a compliment."

Sky smirked slightly, despite the pain.

"...I knew that."

For the first time since Sky had crested the hill, Chloe laughed - a light, genuine sound that cut through the heavy silence of the evening.

The atmosphere on the hilllightened slightly, the oppressive weight of the subterranean maze momentarily forgotten as the three of them stood together under the darkening sky.

But only for a moment.

Because Chloe’s visor suddenly flickered wildly, the stable blue interface turning into a frantic, strobe like red.

Her smile disappeared in an instant.

"Something’s wrong."