F-Rank Awakening: My System Turns Trash Skills To SSS-RANK

Chapter 24: Mana Core

Rain didn’t wait for it to recover.

’Flash step...’

[Flash Step: Zero Drag Activated,’

The world collapsed. Rain vanished from the side of the gallery and reappeared instantly right beneath the Widow’s bloated belly, his boots slamming into the rock floor.

He reached down, grabbed Dane’s fallen red-hilted sword from the mud with both hands, and drove the full three feet of steel straight up into the soft, pulsating junction where the creature’s chest met its lower abdomen.

STAB.

He drove it in with all fifteen points of his Strength, shoving his weight upward until the crossguard hit the soft, wet underbelly. The blade sank deep, wedged solid between two ridges of bone, too deep to pull back out in the half-second he had left.

The Widow let out an agonizing, high-pitched screech that made Rain’s ears bleed. It thrashed wildly, its six legs flailing in every direction as the sword ground deeper into the wound with every convulsion, its heavy body slamming sideways and catching Rain across the chest before he could get clear.

BOOM.

[HP: 41/100]

[Damage Taken: 32]]

The impact blew Rain sideways across the chamber floor. He skidded twenty feet through the red dust, his body tumbling over loose rocks until he slammed hard against the base of a thick basalt pillar.

CRACK.

A sickening, wet snapping sound echoed from his lower right leg. Sharp, white-hot agony exploded up his hip, taking his breath away instantly in a ragged, silent gasp.

He looked down through blurred, tear-filled vision. His right shank was bent backward at a grotesque, unnatural forty-five-degree angle, the broken bone visible as a sharp, white ridge beneath his torn trousers.

"Arhhhh!!!" Rain screamed out in agony, biting his lower lip and grasping his thighs in pure unfiltered pain.

’I can’t stand,’ Rain thought, his mind racing through the haze of violent, screaming pain. ’My leg is snapped. Even if I have three Mana points left, I can’t Flash Step without a solid leg to absorb the launch recoil. I’m fucked.’

Ten yards away, the Bone Widow was still thrashing, still screaming, Dane’s sword buried to the pommel in its underbelly, black fluid spraying in heavy, thick jets over the floor as the creature spun in erratic, agonized circles, slamming its claws blindly against the walls and floor, completely unable to focus on Nyra or Rain.

Nyra lay hyperventilating behind a fallen rock, her arm bleeding, her face pale as chalk as she watched the giant spider tear its own wounds wider in its frenzy.

Footsteps echoed from the dark tunnel entrance.

Slow, steady, unhurried footsteps.

Warrick walked back into the wide gallery. He held a small, leather-bound canvas sack under his left arm, his heavy coat dusted with gray rock powder.

Rain, leaning his back against the cold basalt pillar, clutched his broken leg with trembling, bloody hands saw him come and a massive surge of desperate, overwhelming relief flooded his chest.

"WARRICK!" Rain yelled, his voice raw, hoarse, and cracking with pain. "OVER HERE! HELP US, PLEASE!"

Warrick stopped ten feet away. He looked at Dane’s split body lying near the boulders. He looked at Toby pinned to the ledge wall. He looked at Nyra shivering behind her rock, and then his eyes settled on Rain’s bent, broken leg, and on the Bone Widow still shrieking and thrashing at the center of the room.

He didn’t move toward them.

"What," Rain stammered, his mind spinning as the relief turned into a cold, sickening confusion, "what are you waiting for? It’s stuck! Kill it! Punch it, do your thing, it’s right there!"

Warrick looked at the thrashing spider. He shook his head slowly, taking a small step back toward the exit.

"Can’t," Warrick said, his voice quiet and flat. "I’m heading out."

Rain’s eyes widened in sheer, disbelieving horror. The confusion curdled instantly into a roaring flame of pure rage.

"YOU CAN’T LEAVE US HERE!" Rain screamed, his voice echoing off the vaulted cavern ceiling. "YOU CAN’T JUST WALK AWAY!"

He dug his elbows into the stone floor, trying to drag his body forward, but the broken leg dragged behind him like a sack of wet gravel, sending a fresh wave of blinding agony through his spine.

"Nyra’s alive!" Rain shouted, pointing a shaking, bloody hand toward the rocks. "She can still walk! Take her! Just her! I’ll figure it out, just get her out of here!"

Warrick looked at Nyra. Nyra stared back at him, her lips trembling, unable to speak a single word.

"She’d slow me down," Warrick said. "Whole lower tunnel’s coming apart behind me. I carry anyone, I don’t make the gate in time."

He unbuckled the top strap of the canvas sack under his arm, opening the flap just enough for Rain to see inside.

A brilliant, violet light spilled out from the opening. It wasn’t like the dull red of the rift crystals or the light of a beast core. It was a dense, liquid orb of pure, radiant energy that made the air around Warrick’s hands shine so bright and it left off a strange energy.

"What is that," Rain rasped, his voice dropping into a ragged whisper.

"Mana core," Warrick said, looking down at the violet light. "Rare as hell. Nobody logs a find like this."

He pulled the flap shut, dimming the light.

"My guild found it," he went on, his voice tired, plain, nothing prepared about the way it came out. "You know how Rift Chasers work. They log a rift, slap a rank on it, move to the next one. They’re not paid to go deep. They’re paid to move fast. Most of them clear a threshold, take a reading, and call it done."

He shifted the sack under his arm.

"My guild doesn’t trust that. Standard policy, before we ever put a rift up for contract, we run our own scan. Deeper than what the Chasers bother with. That’s how we caught this. Sitting in the deep pocket, past where any surface survey would’ve reached." He looked down at the sack. "They kept it quiet. Started lining up a real team to come pull it clean. Heard it was supposed to be A-ranks. The good stuff."

The ground gave a low shudder underfoot, dust sifting down between them. Warrick glanced up at the ceiling, then back at Rain, unbothered, like he’d expected it.

"That’s this," he said, tapping the sack where the mana core was inside. "The tremble you feel right now, it’s not the tunnel caving from wear and tear," he said watching Rain as he remained in agonizing pain.

"This thing you’re looking at right now is worth more than thirty C-rank boss cores put together. Maybe more. A crystal like this doesn’t just sit in a rift, it holds the rift together. Most rifts, you kill the boss, the tear closes up nice and quiet because the boss was the biggest thing anchoring the mana in place therefore keeping the rift active. Because of this mana core, this rift’s different. The core’s the anchor here. Boss was just something that grew fat off the runoff."

He nodded toward the canvas sack under his arm.

"Pull the anchor, the whole structure loses what’s holding it shut. Rift like this doesn’t close gentle when that happens. It comes down."

He looked down at his own hands for a second then stared at Rain who was in anguish. "Don’t look at me like I’m the monster," he said glancing off to look at the Bone widow still thrashing.

"I’ve been C-rank eleven years," he said. "I carry higher rank gear just like you. Clear their trash, just like you and at the end, take my small percentage cut while some kid with an S-rank crest walks off with half a million for standing in the back doing nothing. My name wasn’t going on that roster of A ranked hunters that would come and raid this rift. I’d probably get a bonus for logging where it was, maybe. Five hundred credits. That’s it."

He patted the sack once.

"Something like this changes everything for a guy like me. I wasn’t waiting in line for it."

"You hired us," Rain said, his teeth grinding so hard his jaw throbbed, "just to die."

"I hired cheap bodies to clear the front so I didn’t burn myself out before I got here," Warrick said. "It was supposed to be a normal C-rank job. I didn’t know the core was pushing the boss this high. Thought it was a regular nest. You can’t see mutation like that from a scan up top."

He looked past Rain, at the Bone Widow still screaming and thrashing against the far wall, sword buried to the hilt in its gut, and something in his face flickered, not quite guilt, closer to a man watching a bill come due that he already knew he couldn’t pay.

"That thing’s not gonna stop before the ceiling comes down," Warrick said. "Whether it lives or dies past that point, don’t matter much anymore."

He looked at Rain one more time.

"I’m sorry, kid," he said, quiet. "I mean that."

He turned and started walking into the dark, narrow exit tunnel.

"NO!" Rain screamed after him, spit flying from his mouth as his voice cracked and tore raw. "GET BACK HERE! GET BACK HERE, YOU COWARD! YOU DID THIS! YOU DID ALL OF THIS!"

Warrick didn’t stop.

"COME BACK!" Rain’s voice broke into something closer to a sob, still furious, still screaming, his fist slamming against the stone floor hard enough to split the skin over his knuckles. "DANE’S DEAD! TOBY’S DEAD! MAREN’S FUCKING DEAD! AND YOU’RE JUST WALKING AWAY? COME BACK HERE AND FACE IT, YOU SPINELESS PIECE OF SHIT!"

His footsteps faded fast into the silence of the cavern, unhurried, unbroken by a single backward glance.

Rain sat against the basalt pillar, his chest heaving, his hands covered in blood and dark yellow goo.

He turned his head slowly back toward the center of the gallery.

The Bone Widow was still thrashing, its screams dropping into a lower, ragged wheeze, Dane’s sword still buried in its gut, black fluid pooling wide across the stone beneath it.

The ground continued to shudder.

A low, violent, grinding vibration moved through the solid basalt beneath Rain’s hip. Dust and heavy, fist-sized chunks of rock began to sift down from the vaulted ceiling in a steady, gray curtain. The pulsing red veins in the walls flickered wildly, their light sputtering out one by one as the rift’s internal structure began to tear itself apart.

Nyra lay unmoving by her boulder, her breath shallow and weak.

Rain looked down at his broken right leg, bent at an impossible angle against the dark floor.

’I can’t die in here,’ Rain thought, his eyes fixing on the crumbling exit archway.