Chapter 5- My name is Valera

Chapter 5: 5- My name is Valera

The harvest house of Vane reeked of fecal matters and screams could be heard from around the block.

To a normal person, the slaughter-line was a terrifying place, massive iron tables, chains, and the unending shrieks of chained Blighted beasts.

But to Sol, walking through the rusted doors felt like a old home, he had spent a lot of time here , he knew every inch of the harvest house.

He saw the heavy, dull red heat of the chained beasts. He saw the faint, yellowish outlines of the slum workers scrubbing the blood-stained floors.

And standing on the raised iron platform overlooking the line, he saw a dense, freezing blue star.

It was a Lunar core. Level 1 (High).

It belonged to Anvil, the Overseer.

Sol didn’t bother sneaking. He walked straight down the center of the slaughter-line, his rusted cleaver hanging loosely from his grip.

His eyes, completely blind to normal light, glowed with a terrifying, contained fiery orange beneath his dark hair.

Anvil noticed him immediately. The Overseer was a massive brute of a man, clad in refined iron-wood armor. He jumped down from the platform, his heavy boots echoing over the groans of the beasts.

"Well, look what crawled out of the gutters," Anvil’s deep, mocking voice echoed through the cold air. "I thought the Somnium finally broke you. Where is that little bastard Rix? Where did he go with my meat?"

Sol stopped ten feet away. In his thermal vision, Anvil’s cold blue aura pulsed with arrogant strength.

"He’s dead," Sol said, his voice grating like ash. "Do you care?"

Anvil paused, then let out a sharp, cruel laugh. "Care? That rat stole a premium cut. It’s coming out of my quota. But seeing as you’re here, and looking half-dead anyway..."

Anvil drew a heavy, silver-plated trench knife from his belt. "I think I’ll just chain you to the table and make a juicy meal out of you to cover the loss."

Anvil took a step forward, entering Sol’s range.

Thump-THUMP.

The furnace in Sol’s chest roared. He didn’t just swing his cleaver; he channeled the violently burning energy of his stabilized core straight down his arm and into the rusted iron.

In a fraction of a second, the chipped edge of the meat cleaver glowed a blinding, superheated white-hot.

Sol lunged, swinging the blade in a brutal, horizontal arc aimed right at Anvil’s neck.

The Overseer’s eyes went wide. He was a Level 1 High Cultivator, his reflexes vastly superior to a normal human’s.

He threw his weight backward, barely dodging the lethal decapitation.

But he wasn’t fast enough to dodge it completely.

The superheated cleaver tore through the thick iron-wood armor of Anvil’s chest plate like wet paper, slicing deep into his collarbone.

There was no spray of blood. The sheer, blistering heat of the blade instantly cauterized the wound, filling the Harvest House with the sickening smell of charred flesh.

Anvil shrieked, stumbling backward and clutching his smoking chest.

"You—you’re a Cultivator?!" he screamed, absolute shock breaking his arrogant facade. "Guards! Kill him!"

From the edges of Sol’s thermal vision, four yellow-orange signatures rushed forward, gripping long iron spears.

The Harvest House guards.

Sol didn’t care. His chest was burning with an agonizing intensity.

The system’s warning flashed in the back of his mind[Excess thermal energy. Risk of internal combustion.]but the rage drowned it out.

A spear thrust forward, grazing Sol’s ribs. It tore his shirt and drew blood, but Sol didn’t even flinch.

He ignored the guards completely. He locked his glowing eyes entirely on the freezing blue star of Anvil’s core.

Sol stepped into the spear thrust, closed the distance, and brought his glowing cleaver down in a relentless frenzy of butchery.

Anvil desperately tried to parry with his silver knife, but Sol’s strikes were too heavy, too wild, and burning far too hot.

Clang. Clang. CRACK.

The superheated cleaver shattered the silver knife. Sol spun the momentum into a vicious upward thrust, driving the glowing blade directly under Anvil’s jaw and up into his skull.

The Overseer’s cold blue thermal signature violently flickered, then snuffed out entirely.

Anvil dropped to the floor, dead.

The guards froze in pure terror. This wasn’t a slum rat they were looking at, but a murderer who had just killed their overseer.

Sol ripped his cleaver free, but as he did, his legs buckled.

[CRITICAL WARNING: CORE OVERHEATING.]

[INTERNAL COMBUSTION IMMINENT.]

A wave of dizzying, agonizing heat ruptured inside Sol’s chest. It felt like his ribs were melting.

Blood poured from his nose, instantly turning to steam as it hit his lips. He was burning up from the inside.

He couldn’t fight the guards. He had to run.

Clutching his burning chest, Sol staggered backward, violently throwing a pulse of heat outward that blinded the guards’ thermal visors, and threw himself out a shattered window into the alleys.

He ran blindly through the slums, his Strobe vision flickering erratically.

Flash. Dark. Flash.

Every step felt like walking on hot coals. His skin was actively smoking in the freezing twilight air. He stumbled into a dead-end alley, his knees hitting the freezing mud. He dropped his cleaver.

His vision swam with violent red and orange warnings.

He was going to die. He had avenged his grandmother and Rix, but his defective core was going to incinerate him.

He curled inward, gasping, waiting for the final, fiery detonation.

Suddenly, the ambient temperature in the alley plunged to absolute zero.

A thick layer of white frost rapidly spread across the mud, freezing the puddles solid. Out of the darkness, a figure stepped into Sol’s flickering thermal vision.

It was a humanoid shape entirely coated in deep, freezing blue.

Cold, trembling hands reached out and violently grabbed Sol’s burning face.

The relief was instant and staggering. The freezing aura slammed into Sol’s boiling blood, violently suppressing the meltdown.

The searing agony in his chest rapidly cooled into a manageable, steady thrum.

Sol gasped, his thermal vision stabilizing.

Kneeling in the mud in front of him was the girl from the Colosseum. Her skin was deathly pale, covered in a thin layer of actual ice, and she was shivering so violently she could barely speak.

"I’ve... been looking for you," she chattered, her blue lips trembling as she absorbed his heat to keep her own heart from stopping. "I’m almost... frozen up."

Sol stared at her, his glowing eyes wide. She wasn’t just a slum kid who got lucky.

Her posture, the refined way her lunar energy moved even while broken, it didnt feel as feral as his energy flow.

"Who are you?" Sol rasped, his heat actively thawing the ice on her cheeks.

She held onto him like a lifeline, her freezing eyes locking onto his burning ones.

"My name is Valera," she whispered. "A former noble lady of the Fyrn household. And if we let go of each other, we are both going to die."