Chapter 32: A herd, Marching towards us

Night in the BloodRider settlement was never truly silent.

Even deep within the canyon, the wasteland breathed. The wind howled through the jagged rocks like a dying beast, and the distant, guttural roars of apex predators echoed from the plains beyond the ridge. But inside Gio’s tent, the noise was internal.

He sat cross-legged on his thin mattress, the velvet-wrapped bundle resting in his lap.

Even through the thick fabric, he could feel it. The C-Rank core didn’t just radiate heat; it radiated pressure. It felt like a heavy, oily stone sitting at the bottom of a deep well, pressing against the edges of his consciousness. The "concentrated energy resonance" Torvin had warned him about wasn’t passive. It was active. It was hungry.

Every time Gio closed his eyes, he saw flashes of red. Not the red of fire, but the red of a sky choked with ash. He heard a low, rhythmic thrumming, like a heartbeat the size of a mountain.

Gio gritted his teeth and forced the image away. He couldn’t sleep. Not with that thing in his tent. Not with the raid tomorrow.

He needed to move. He needed to test the limits of what he had learned today.

Carefully, he wrapped the core tighter in the velvet and shoved it deep into his rucksack, burying it under spare clothes. The pressure lessened, but the unease remained.

He slipped out of the tent.

The camp was quiet, save for the sentries patrolling the perimeter and the dying embers of the central fire. Gio kept to the shadows, moving toward a secluded alcove near the canyon wall where the BloodRiders kept their spare lumber.

He found a flat stretch of hard-packed dirt and stopped.

’Let’s see if it holds,’ he thought.

He reached into his Bioenergy. It was full, humming at a comfortable 100/100. He visualized the Swarm Wolf bioform in his storage.

’Come.’

White light coalesced in the darkness, silent and sharp. The E-Rank Swarm Wolf materialized, its four legs planting firmly on the dirt. Its eyes glowed with a soft, white luminescence, and its fur bristled with a static charge.

It was the same construct he had used to fight the hounds, but now, Gio had a new tool.

’Radial Flow,’ Gio commanded. ’Apply to the musculature. reinforce the skeletal structure.’

The System overlay flickered in his vision, mapping the wolf’s internal biology in a grid of glowing blue lines.

[Processing...]

[Radial Distribution Pattern Active.]

[Bioenergy Cost: 2 per minute for maintenance.]

Gio pushed the energy out. Instead of the linear, wasteful shove he used to rely on, he spiraled the bioenergy through the wolf’s fibers. He felt the resistance—the chaotic, natural disorder of the construct’s form—but the spiral smoothed it out, locking the molecules into a tighter, denser alignment.

The wolf didn’t grow larger. But it changed.

The white fur seemed to harden, taking on a metallic sheen, like frost on iron. The muscles beneath didn’t just bulge; they coiled with terrifying tension. The construct let out a low growl, and the sound wasn’t the usual digital hum of a summon. It was a deep, chest-rattling vibration that shook the dust from the canyon walls.

[Optimization Successful.]

[Swarm Wolf (Reinforced) - Durability increased by 40%. Impact force increased by 25%.]

Gio exhaled, a cloud of steam escaping his lips. "Now you’re a tank."

He was about to command the wolf to run a perimeter drill when his ears twitched.

The wolf’s ears swiveled forward, locking onto a sound coming from the ridge above them.

Scritch. Scritch. Snort.

Heavy. Clumsy. Aggressive.

Gio’s hand went to his plasma handgun. "Guys..."

From the shadows of the scree slope, three shapes emerged. They weren’t the sleek, bio-engineered hounds from before. These were native creatures.

Razor-Boars.

They were the size of small cars, covered in matted, mud-caked fur and protruding plates of calcified bone. Their tusks were jagged yellow scythes that dripped with acidic saliva, and their eyes were small, beady, and filled with mindless rage.

F-Rank. Weak individually, but notoriously stubborn and hard to kill.

Usually, they avoided the settlement. But tonight, the spike of bioenergy from Gio’s reinforced summon... or perhaps the faint, leaking aura of the C-Rank core in his bag, had drawn them in like sharks to blood.

The lead boar squealed loudly and charged.

"Melody! Lloyd! Kojiro!" Gio shouted, not taking his eyes off the beasts.

He hadn’t meant to wake them, but the squad had been sleeping light ever since the vault. Before the boars could close the distance, three figures dropped from the rooftops of the nearby storage sheds.

Melody landed in a crouch, her claws extending with a sharp SNIKT. Lloyd stepped up beside her, his hands already glowing with blue light. Kojiro materialized from a puff of purple smoke, looking annoyed but ready, a bone-knife in his hand.

"What the hell?" Kojiro grunted, eyeing the boars. "Thought the clan kept the pests out."

The lead boar slammed into the Swarm Wolf.

Normally, a construct of that size would be knocked back by the impact of a F-Rank beast charging at full speed. But the reinforced wolf didn’t budge. Its paws dug into the dirt, the radial flow locking its structure into a state of absolute rigidity. The boar’s tusks scraped uselessly against the wolf’s metallic fur, sparking violently.

The beast squealed in confusion.

"Now!" Gio commanded.

The wolf lunged, its jaws clamping onto the boar’s thick neck. With a sickening crunch, it tore through the calcified bone plate as if it were wet cardboard. The boar collapsed, twitching.

The other two boars panicked, splitting up to try and flank the squad.

"Mine!" Melody shouted. She launched herself off a rock, soaring over the second boar’s back. Her claws, infused with her feline mutation, sliced through the beast’s eyes, blinding it. As it thrashed, Lloyd stepped in, slamming his palm against its side.

CRACK.

A physical force erupted from his barrier, shattering the boar’s internal organs without breaking the skin. The beast dropped instantly.

The third boar turned to flee, but Kojiro was already there. He teleported short-range, appearing directly in the beast’s path, and drove his bone-knife into its ear. The boar stumbled, and the wolf finished it with a single, efficient bite.

Silence returned to the alcove, broken only by the heavy breathing of the squad and the dissolving fade of the wolf’s form as Gio dismissed it.

"Clean," Kojiro said, wiping his knife on the grass. "Better than the last time we fought dogs."

"They were F-Rank pigs," Lloyd said, adjusting his bracelet, though his hands were still shaking slightly. "H-Hardly a challenge."

"They were drawn here," Gio said, looking up at the ridge. "Something attracted them. The energy spike from my summun reinforcement... or the core."

He patted his rucksack. The velvet bundle felt heavier now.

Before anyone could respond, a voice cut through the darkness.

"You fight well for city-dwellers..."

The squad spun around, weapons raising.

Standing at the entrance of the alcove was Kira. She wasn’t wearing her armor, just a simple tunic and trousers, but her hand rested on the hilt of her spear. Her face was pale in the moonlight, her expression grim.

Behind her, standing in the shadows of the main camp path, were Darwin and the squad’s soldiers. They had been drawn by the noise.

"Kira," Darwin said, his mechanical pupil whirring as he scanned the dead boars. "Is there a problem?"

Kira didn’t look at the dead beasts. She looked straight at Darwin, then at Gio, and finally at the assembled recruits. Her eyes were hard, but there was something else in them now. Fear.

"The boars were just the beginning," she said, her voice low and rough. "They ran from the ridge. Everything is running from the ridge."

She stepped closer, the firelight catching the sweat on her brow.

"We have a problem, Commander. A big one. My scouts just returned from the north side."

She paused, swallowing hard.

"The Steward isn’t at the outpost anymore, He’s moving. And he’s bringing a herd.."

Gio felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. "A herd... of what?"

Kira nodded, her gaze locking onto Gio’s rucksack, as if she could sense the core inside.

"Every beast within fifty miles is converging on this canyon," she whispered. "They’re marching towards us, and at the front of the column... is something that shouldn’t be here..."

She looked at Darwin, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper.

"We need to plan our move, now. Before the sun comes up."