Chapter 6: Survivor

Chapter 6: Chapter 6: Survivor

The cathedral was coming apart by the time Elias reached the nave.

Gates didn’t outlive their bosses. Everyone knew that. Once the core died, the dungeon started folding in on itself, and you had minutes, sometimes less, to get out before you folded with it. Pillars groaned. Barnacles rained from the dark. The underwater candles were going out row by row, as if someone were walking down the aisle pinching wicks.

He ran, if you could call it that. It was more like falling forward and catching himself, over and over, his left arm clamped against his ribs. The water dragged at his knees. Behind him, the apse caved in with a sound like a ship’s hull splitting.

The gate was a tear of grey daylight at the top of the entrance steps, and it was shrinking.

He threw himself through it.

Cold air. Gravel. Sky. He hit the rail yard on his hands and knees, and behind him the gate let out a long breath, folded down to a line, and vanished.

Then the lights hit him.

Floodlights on tripods. Red and blue strobes on Association SUVs. And beyond the yellow tape, a wall of phones and cameras, a news van with its mast raised, and a dozen reporters all shouting at once.

"Somebody came out!"

"Is that a hunter? Is that—"

"Medic!"

Hands were on him before he could stand. An Association field medic in a grey vest swept a scanner wand over his chest. "Three ribs fractured, two cracked, second-degree burns on the left flank. Moderate mana exposure." She stared at him. "Kid, you walked out on this?"

"Crawled," Elias said.

A field officer crouched beside her with a tablet. He was in his forties, with tired eyes and a lanyard that read OFFICER DUNN. "Name and rank."

"Elias Pierce. E-rank. Porter."

Dunn’s eyebrows rose. "The Ironfang porter? We had you listed as a fatality." He tapped the tablet. "The guild reported an irregular. Said the boss room sealed with a porter trapped inside. How are you alive?"

Here it was.

Elias had thought about it all the way up the nave. Every true answer ended somewhere bad: in a white room, in a registry, in a guild contract with someone’s hand around his throat. And in a very short conversation with Garrick Holt.

"I hid," he said. "Behind the pillars. It chased me for a while. Then it just... stopped. Fell apart."

He waited for Dunn to call him a liar.

Dunn nodded slowly and typed. "Irregulars burn out sometimes. Too much mana for the gate to hold, so the boss destabilizes and the core cracks." He shook his head. "You’re one lucky porter, Pierce."

The medic snorted. "Lucky doesn’t cover it."

No one asked another question. No one looked at him twice. An E-rank porter surviving by hiding was a miracle. An E-rank porter surviving any other way wasn’t even a possibility.

For once in his life, being underestimated was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

They were wrapping his ribs when he heard Garrick’s voice.

It came from across the lot, where the black Ironfang SUVs sat in a row under the floodlights. The guild master stood in front of the news van with his hands folded and his head bowed, cameras pressed close. His skin was flesh again. He looked tired, grave, and very sincere.

"—more than a porter," Garrick was saying. "Elias Pierce was part of the Ironfang family. When that irregular turned on us, he volunteered to hold the door so my wounded could get out. That’s the kind of young man he was. That kind of courage—"

A reporter at the edge of the crowd turned around. Then another. Then one camera swung, and then all of them did, lenses sliding past Garrick’s shoulder to the ambulance where Elias sat with a foil blanket around his shoulders.

Garrick followed their eyes.

For one second, his face did nothing at all. It went perfectly, completely blank, the way stone is blank.

Then it moved. His eyebrows rose. His mouth fell open. His hand went to his chest. "My God," Garrick said, loud enough for every microphone. "He’s alive. It’s a miracle."

He didn’t come over. He didn’t need to. He held Elias’s gaze across fifty meters of gravel and floodlight, and Elias understood exactly what that look was asking. What did you see? What will you say? What are you going to cost me?

Elias looked back and said nothing. He let his face stay tired and dazed and grateful. Porters were good at that.

Then something hit him from the side.

"You—" Dex had his arms around him, foil blanket and all, squeezing, and Elias’s ribs lit up like fireworks. "You idiot, you absolute—"

"Ribs," Elias wheezed. "Ribs, ribs—"

"Sorry! Sorry." Dex let go and held him at arm’s length instead. His jaw was swollen purple where Vance had hit him, and his eyes were red. "I tried. I tried to get back to you. I swear I—"

"I saw." Elias caught his wrist. "Dex. I saw."

Dex’s mouth worked. Then he laughed, shaky and wet. "What happened in there?"

"I hid."

Dex looked at him for a long moment. Too long. Dex had known him for three years, and he was an idiot about many things, but he had never been an idiot about Elias.

"Sure," Dex said finally. "Okay. You hid."

His apartment was a third-floor walk-up on Larch Street with a kitchen the size of a closet and a radiator that worked on alternate Thursdays. It took him ten minutes to climb the stairs. He sat down on his bed, still in the scorched jacket, and didn’t move for a long time.

His phone buzzed. Mira.

did you come back with all your fingers

He looked at his hand and typed back: All ten. Minor scratches.

liar. the news says ironfang had an irregular.

Of course it did. I’m fine. I hid. Go to sleep.

A pause. Then: did you get a haircut

He laughed, which hurt, and put the phone face-down.

Then he took the core out of his pocket and set it on the table beside the three pink envelopes. It glowed faintly in the dark room, green-gold, the crack through its center catching the light.

He’d seen strange windows twice today: once when he was dying, and once when Aveline vanished. His own status, though, he’d opened a thousand times since he awakened at nineteen, and it had never once changed.

E-rank Assassin. One combat skill, Quick Step, which made him fast enough to run away and not much else. One passive, Keen Observation, which the Association’s scanners didn’t even bother to log. Nobody hired an assassin who couldn’t kill anything, so he carried bags.

"Status," he said to the empty room.

It opened, and it wasn’t the window he knew.

[ STATUS ]

Name: Elias Pierce

Age: 22

Title: Irregular Slayer

Rank: E

Level: 2 | EXP: 35 / 250

Class: Assassin [E-Rank] | Threshold Summoner [HIDDEN]

HP: 54 / 160 (Injured: fractured ribs, burns)

MP: 12 / 60

STA: 31 / 150

STR: 10 | AGI: 11 | VIT: 12

INT: 14 | PER: 24 | WIL: 21

Unallocated points: 5

— SKILLS —

Threshold Summoning (Active, Unique)

Call a being at the moment of its death in another reality. Slots: 1 / 1. Next slot at Level 5.

Threshold Sanctum (Unique)

A personal dimension for bound summons. Channel: 5 sec. Fragments: 0.

Covenant (Passive, Unique)

Gain a weakened echo of each bound summon’s Origin Skill. Echoes: Oathbearer (dormant).

Keen Observation (Passive, Lv. 7)

Patterns, weak points, and tells are easier to notice.

Quick Step (Passive, F)

Agility +50%.

— BOUND SUMMONS —

[1] Dame Aveline Rosier | Paladin, Lv. 2

Origin Skill: Oathbearer

State: Resting (Threshold Sanctum)

— TITLES —

Irregular Slayer: Defeated an irregular boss two or more grades above your rank. +10% damage vs. irregulars.

He read it three times. Then he read the word hidden a fourth time, slowly, and understood why the medic’s scanner had seen nothing but the same E-rank Assassin it had always seen, now with broken ribs.

He thought about what would happen if he told someone.

The Association would want him first: tests, interviews, a white room with a mirrored wall. The big guilds would come next, with contracts as thick as phone books and smiles that never reached their eyes. And somewhere in the middle of all that, Garrick Holt would learn that the porter he’d left to die had walked out of the boss room carrying its core. Garrick had already shown exactly what he would do to protect himself.

And Mira was lying in a hospital bed that Elias could barely pay for, with nobody else in the world to stand between her and anything.

He thought about the grey plain. The stone hall. A tall woman in a scorched doorway, looking back at him.

You will not die while I stand.

Elias closed the window. The room went dark except for the core’s faint glow.

He would tell no one. Not the Association. Not the guilds. Not Mira. Not even Dex.

Not yet.