Chapter 42: Let the hunt begin

The monsters were the size of large wolves, but their bodies were hideous amalgams of plant and flesh. Their hides were composed of dark, woody bark fused with patches of coarse, matted grey fur. Sharp, jagged thorns three inches long protruded from their spines and shoulders. Their eyes glowed with a dull, sickly yellow light, and green, acidic saliva dripped from their exposed, needle-like teeth onto the concrete.

The four hounds fanned out, their clawed feet scratching against the slick concrete as they began to circle the party.

"Priya, take the left!" Holt barked, drawing his longsword and raising a heavy steel shield. "Fen, flank right! Carriers, get back!"

Priya didn’t answer. She dropped to one knee, pulled an arrow from her quiver, nocked it, and drew the composite bow string to her ear in one smooth, mechanical motion.

The arrow whistled through the damp air, striking the lead Bramble Hound directly in the shoulder. The dark, woody hide deflected part of the impact, but the steel tip bit deep into the creature’s chest. The hound let out a high-pitched, wooden yelp, dark green sap and red blood spurting from the wound.

"Die, you ugly dog!" Fen yelled, leaping forward. He lunged at the second hound, his two daggers spinning in a rapid, crisscrossing pattern.

The dagger blades struck the hound’s flank, sparks flying as steel bit into bark. The monster snapped its jaws back, missing Fen’s arm by inches, its jagged teeth slamming together with a loud snap. Fen ducked under the counter-attack, driving his right dagger straight into the joint of the hound’s front leg. The monster howled, collapsing onto one knee as green blood poured over Fen’s boots.

Holt charged the largest hound in the center. He roared, slamming his heavy steel shield directly into the monster’s snout. The impact rattled through the hall, knocking the hound backward onto its side. Holt raised his longsword with both hands, driving the blade downward with heavy, crushing force.

The sword bit deep into the hound’s spine, crunching through wood and bone. The monster thrashed violently, its hind legs kicking out in wild spasms before going completely limp on the wet moss.

"One down!" Holt grunted, pulling his bloody blade free with a wet suction sound.

Rain pulled Peter back a step by the sleeve, positioning himself half in front of him without making a show of it. He kept his eyes moving, the way he’d trained himself to during Tenski’s drills, not locked on the loudest fight but sweeping the edges, the gaps, the places nobody else was watching.

That was how he caught something.

While Holt, Fen, and Priya were fully engaged with the three main hounds, the fourth Bramble Hound, smaller, faster, and completely uninjured, did not join the frontal attack.

It slipped silently around the base of a massive, vine-covered concrete pillar, its yellow eyes locked onto the back of the group.

It bypassed Holt. It bypassed Priya.

It saw Peter.

Peter turned his head just as the monster cleared the pillar. His eyes dilated in absolute terror. He froze completely, his boots glued to the slick moss floor, his breath catching in his throat so hard he couldn’t even scream. The canvas backpack slipped from his limp fingers, hitting the ground with a soft thud.

The Bramble Hound lowered its head, its woody shoulder muscles bunching up like compressed springs. Acidic green spit dripped from its jaws onto the concrete.

It lunged.

The monster flew through the air, its three-inch thorns bristling, its jagged teeth aimed straight for Peter’s exposed neck. The distance was less than twelve feet. Peter squeezed his eyes shut, raising his arms in a useless, instinctual attempt to shield his face.

Rain didn’t hesitate.

’Flash Step.’

[Flash Step: Zero Drag activated]

[Mana: 14 -> 11]

The world snapped.

The damp air, the sound of dripping water, the green lighting, everything stretched into a single, disorienting blur of light and motion. Rain didn’t feel his feet touch the floor. In a fraction of a second faster than the human eye could process, he vanished from his spot five feet behind Peter and reappeared directly in the hound’s path, close enough to feel the heat of its breath before his balance even settled.

His stomach lurched, a sharp, weightless drop, like the floor had disappeared out from under him for half a second and come back too fast. His mind stayed clear through it, sharper than the rest of him could keep up with.

He didn’t have a sword. He didn’t have armor.

But he had Strength 21, and half a second to use it.

As the Bramble Hound reached the peak of its leap, Rain planted his back foot onto the wet concrete, shifted his hips, and brought his right fist around in a brutal, tight arc. He put his entire weight, his core rotation, and his increased strength into the blow.

Rain’s bare fist struck the Bramble Hound directly under its lower jaw.

The force of the impact sounded like a heavy wooden beam splitting under a hydraulic press. The monster’s jaw shattered instantly, woody splinters and dark green blood exploding into the air. The hound’s trajectory was halted mid-flight; its head snapped back violently, and its entire forty-pound body was launched sideways, crashing into a bank of dense thorn bushes off to the side, well outside the main line of sight from the center of the hall.

[Target Eliminated: Bramble Hound (D-Rank)]

[Experience Gained: +18]

[Experience: 18 / 900]

Rain stood there for half a second, his right hand dripping with thick, dark green sap. He didn’t look at the dead monster longer than he had to. He looked inward instead, his mind running through his numbers with cold, precise calculation.

’Three uses left,’ Rain thought, tracking his Mana pool down to exactly 11 out of 14. ’Three steps before I’m completely dry.’

He crouched fast, wiping his knuckles on a torn scrap of moss before Peter even finished opening his eyes, and by the time Peter looked up, Rain was simply standing beside him again, a step closer than before, nothing about his posture suggesting he’d moved at all.

Peter opened his eyes to an empty twelve feet of air where the hound should have been. He turned his head, confused, and found the monster crumpled in the thorn bushes off to the side, its neck bent at a wrong angle, unmoving.

"What," Peter said, his voice thin. He looked at Rain. "What just happened? Where did it go?"

"It’s dead," Rain said quietly, keeping his voice low, pitched just for Peter. "Are you hurt?"

"I don’t, I didn’t even see it move," Peter whispered, his hands shaking as he stared at the dead hound. "Rain, it was right there. It was right on top of me."

"You’re fine," Rain said, steadying him with a hand on his shoulder, angled so his back mostly blocked the view from the main hall. "Breathe."

Across the sorting hall, Holt straightened up from the corpse of the third hound, his sword dripping. He glanced back toward the carriers out of habit more than concern, expecting to see them huddled uselessly where he’d left them.

They were exactly where he’d left them. Nothing about the scene told him anything had happened at all.

Priya, however, had been mid-draw on her next arrow when the motion caught the very edge of her vision, a flicker near the pillar, gone before she could turn her head fully. By the time she looked, there was nothing there but Rain crouched beside Peter, and something dead in the bushes that hadn’t been dead a second ago. She frowned, lowering her bow half an inch, her eyes narrowing on the distance between where the hound had been and where it now lay.

"Fen," she said, low, "did that thing just get thrown ten feet on its own?"

"What?" Fen didn’t even look up, busy wiping green blood off his dagger. "It ran into the bushes and died. Things do that."

Priya didn’t answer. She kept her eyes on Rain and Peter a moment longer than the situation called for, filing the flicker away without a clear enough picture to say anything more about it.

Peter, meanwhile, was still staring at Rain like he’d never actually seen him before.

"Rain," Peter said, his words stumbling over each other in sheer, unadulterated shock, quiet enough that it stayed between the two of them. "What kind of F-rank are you?"

"A lucky one," Rain said simply, picking the dropped backpack up off the ground and pressing it back into Peter’s hands. "Come on. Stay close."

"Move up," Holt called out, wiping his blade clean on a scrap of moss before sheathing it. "We’re behind schedule. Fen, harvest the kills. Carriers, get the bags moving."

Rain crouched beside the nearest dead Bramble Hound, working the small bone plate at its shoulder free with his fingers, cracking it open along a seam that had already split from Holt’s sword.

[Item Harvested: Low-Grade D-Rank monster Core (Bramble Hound)]

[Estimated Value: 45 Credits]

’Forty-five,’ Rain thought, dropping the small, dark green crystal into the canvas backpack slung over his shoulder. ’Four of these and you’d almost cover a night’s rent somewhere decent.’ He didn’t linger on the thought. He moved to the next carcass, and the next, working quickly while Fen and Priya did the same on the other side of the hall, nobody bothering to call out the value after the first one.

They pushed deeper into the structure, past the wrecked sorting hall and into a long, narrow processing corridor lined with rusted steel conveyor frames, half-swallowed by the same thick, unnatural vegetation that had taken over everything else. The grinding sound grew louder with every step, closer to a wet, tearing rhythm now, like something dragging itself slowly across broken concrete.

"Stop," Holt said, raising a closed fist.

The corridor opened ahead into what had once been the facility’s central processing room, a wide, open space with a collapsed roof letting in pale green light from above. In the center of the room, half-buried in a tangle of thick, root-like growths that had fused directly into the concrete floor, something enormous shifted.

[Target Identified: Rootmaw]

[Rank: D-Rank]

[Type: monster / Flora-Hybrid]

[Attributes: Stationary, Root Entanglement, Ambush Predator]

[Threat Level: High]

Rain’s eyes moved over the creature slowly. It didn’t have legs, not in any sense he recognized. Its body was a swollen, bark-skinned mass rooted directly into the floor, thick tendrils spreading out in every direction beneath the moss like the legs of something that had given up walking a long time ago. A wide, circular maw sat at its center, ringed with layered wooden teeth, opening and closing in a slow, grinding rhythm that matched the sound they’d been hearing for the last ten minutes.

"Rootmaw," Priya said quietly, lowering into a crouch beside Holt. "Don’t walk within twenty feet of it. It can’t chase you, but it doesn’t need to."

"Carriers," Holt said, not turning around. "You stay right here. You do not move past this line." He drove the tip of his sword into the concrete to mark it. "If one of those tendrils gets a wrap on your ankle, we are not stopping the run to cut you loose."

Peter’s hand found the strap of his backpack and gripped it tight.

Rain looked past Holt’s shoulder at the thing rooted in the center of the room, at the slow, patient way it turned its wide maw toward the sound of their voices without moving anything else, and felt something settle low and cold in his stomach.

’It’s not going anywhere,’ Rain thought. ’Which means whatever’s in this room, we’re the ones who have to go to it.’