Chapter 473: Super Alpha

He filed this. The seal system was going to be genuinely useful.

"That was different," Theron said, walking up.

"Seal system. Formal soul-script. The book I bought yesterday teaches it."

"You wrote a symbol, not a word."

"Compact character. Same underlying mechanic, imposing meaning on the realm, but the character is standardized, so the cost is lower. The trade is that I can only produce the specific effect the seal is designed for. But for standard uses, it’s much cheaper than writing the full word."

"So you can use more of them."

"I can use many more of them. Roughly four times as many, in a day, as I could use words for the same effect."

Kael, cleaning his knife on the shell of one of the dead crabs, said: "That’s a significant upgrade."

"It is."

"You’ll teach us the theory?"

"When I finish the book. And when I have time to explain it properly. Yes."

"Good."

They butchered the crabs and moved on.

The seals worked in every combination Bruce tried through the morning.

He used stop on lead beasts to disrupt cluster coordination. He used bind, the second seal he had memorized, on individual targets to lock their limbs for perhaps three seconds each, giving Kael or Theron a clean strike window. He used quiet, the third seal, on the environment ahead of them at one point, to muffle the sound of their approach into a chamber where the roller’s grinding sound could be heard.

Quiet was interesting. It was the first seal Bruce had used on the environment rather than a beast. The manual had described this application, seals could work on space itself, not just objects, and Bruce had been curious to test it. He drew the seal in the air ahead of them, committed it, and pushed it toward the chamber’s mouth. The seal traveled and settled into the air across the chamber’s entrance.

The grinding sound from inside dropped in volume by perhaps half.

Not fully silenced. Muffled. The seal had reduced the amount of sound that could pass through the space it occupied, creating a sound-shadow that let the three of them approach without alerting whatever was inside.

They stalked the chamber in the reduced sound. The roller was a large ordinary one, not an alpha, just a substantial regular, and it was working on the corpse of a shell-crab it had killed. Bruce, Kael, and Theron came around the mouth of the chamber before the roller noticed them, and the fight that followed was short.

Bruce dispelled the quiet seal after the fight. Sound returned to normal.

"That is going to be very useful," Kael said. His voice was carrying its full volume again, which surprised him briefly before he adjusted.

"Yes."

"Can you make one big enough to cover a room?"

"Not yet. Not at E-rank. The seal’s coverage scales with the energy I put in. To make one that covers a full chamber would cost significantly more. But for the kind of small-space stealth we just did, it’s very manageable."

Theron, who had been thinking about the seal’s implications, said: "Bruce, could you write hear on someone? Make them hear things they wouldn’t otherwise hear?"

Bruce paused.

"That’s an interesting question."

"I’m asking because, if the seals can work on space and on objects, they can probably work on souls too. Which means at some rank, you might be able to write seals on people."

"That is exactly what advanced soul-script does. According to the manual. There is a whole section I haven’t read yet on self-seals and target-seals, seals that are inscribed on a soul, either the writer’s own or another’s, with lasting effects. Enhancement seals for the writer. Restraint seals for a target. The manual says that inscribing a seal on another soul is significantly more difficult than committing one in the air. But it can be done."

"That is a very powerful set of possibilities."

"It is."

"Bruce." Theron looked at him carefully. "When you write a seal on a soul, is that reversible?"

"The manual has not told me yet. I’ll read further tonight."

"Please do."

Bruce noted Theron’s tone. The young man was thinking about him, thinking about the ethics of what his own party leader was learning to do. Bruce respected the concern.

"I will be careful with what I write on people," he said. "I promise you that. Nothing without their explicit consent, unless it’s a hostile situation. Even then, I will consider the target’s autonomy before I write."

Theron nodded slowly. "Thank you."

"Tax clerks make good ethical checks on people with dangerous talents. Please keep doing that."

Theron smiled, slightly.

They kept hunting.

The alpha did not appear in the interior chambers.

They cleared five more clusters and three more roller packs, working steadily, and by the middle of the afternoon they had reached the fifth chamber past the fourth split, deeper into the level-one interior than they had ever been. The chamber was larger than any of the previous ones. The stone here was slightly darker, the veins of light in the floor-cracks a deeper amber. The air had a heavier stillness.

Bruce stopped at the mouth of the chamber and listened.

He listened for a long time.

The sound of the chamber was different from the shallower chambers. There was no clicking. No grinding. Just a slow deep breath-like sound, so quiet that Bruce would have missed it if he had not been actively listening. It was coming from somewhere far in, from the back of the chamber, where the light was dimmest.

He sent a thin ink-thread around the mouth of the chamber and let his perception follow it.

The impression that came back was strange.

Not a cluster. Not a pack. A single very large presence. Larger than the alpha roller they had killed three days ago. Not moving. Not aggressive. Just there, resting, breathing slowly, filling the back of the chamber with its stillness.

Bruce pulled the thread back.

"There’s something big in there," he said quietly. "One thing. Not a cluster. Bigger than the two-core alpha."

"An alpha of the alphas?" Kael asked.

"Possibly. The guard said the alphas that hunt beyond the fifth chamber are bigger than the one we took. This might be one."

"Do we take it?"

Bruce thought.

He weighed his current reserves, he had used the seals liberally today, and while the seals were efficient, they were not free. He was at perhaps sixty percent of his morning’s reserves. Kael was at seventy-five percent, his fire-lance work had been careful. Theron was at eighty percent, the scythe had been cutting cleanly, and the essence-pull the E-rank version of the scythe was doing had actually kept his reserves higher than a standard rank-up would have given him.

If they engaged a genuine super-alpha at these reserves, they would probably need to spend heavily, and the fight would be close. Not impossible, they were three E-rank hunters with strong talents and good coordination. But close.

He weighed the alternative.

If they walked away now, they had done a solid E-rank day of hunting, restored their essence balance, and gained a working understanding of the soul-script seals. That was a good day. But they would not have the alpha kill, which meant the day’s take would be significantly smaller than the previous days when they had found alphas.

Also, and this was the piece that decided it, they had the meeting with Caelen tomorrow. Bruce wanted to walk into that meeting with as much resource as he could reasonably accumulate. Not because he expected to need to spend points at the meeting, but because he wanted the psychological reserve of knowing he had money in his pocket if it turned out he needed it for anything the meeting produced.

An alpha kill today would give him roughly six hundred additional points. That was meaningful.

He looked at Kael. He looked at Theron.

"We take it," he said. "But carefully. Same plan as the two-core alpha. Bruce writes the constraints, Kael strikes the openings, Theron takes the exposed points with the scythe. If it starts to go badly, we retreat. The chamber’s mouth is our fallback. We do not fight in the back where we can be cornered."

"Understood," Kael said.

"Understood," Theron said.

Bruce nodded. He committed. He led them into the chamber.

The super-alpha was, when they saw it, larger than the two-core alpha of three days ago.

Twice the mass, perhaps. The spine-blades were longer, as long as Bruce’s whole arm, curved and dark. The body was denser, the shell-plates more layered. Its eye-sockets were not just orange but a deep gold, almost white at the center of each glow. The whole creature had the presence of something that had lived a long time in this chamber and was more than a beast, it was a veteran, a soul-realm predator that had accumulated essence for years without being killed.

It saw them.

It rose slowly to its feet, not with the aggressive fast reaction of a normal roller, but with the slow patient rising of a creature that had time. It regarded the three of them with what Bruce could only read as consideration. Was this worth its effort? Were these three hunters a threat, or a meal?