Chapter 474: Super Alpha (2)

The super alpha 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?

It decided they were a meal.

It curled, slowly, deliberately, the folding of the spine-blades and the drawing-in of the legs, into the tightest most complete curl Bruce had yet seen from a roller. The whole body became a compact sphere of layered dark spine-blades, and Bruce could see immediately that its armor was significantly more complete than the smaller alphas. There was no visible gap between plates. The curl was seamless.

It launched.

The roll was faster than the two-core alpha’s had been.

Bruce, standing his ground with the writing already forming in his fingers, wrote slow, the full word, first-principle, because the seal system had no slow-specific character in the basic vocabulary, and threw it into the path of the rolling super-alpha. The word committed and struck and imposed slow on the creature’s momentum.

The super-alpha slowed.

Not enough to stop. Not enough to make the roll safe to stand in front of. But enough to give Bruce, Kael, and Theron each an extra second to move, and an extra second in the face of a rolling super-alpha was the difference between being hit and not being hit.

Bruce, Kael, and Theron each dodged sideways in different directions. The super-alpha rolled through the space they had been standing in, hit the far wall of the chamber, and cracked the wall harder than the two-core alpha had. Stone fragments fell in a real shower. The creature bounced off and began the uncurl.

Bruce counted. One. Two. Three.

The uncurl was slower than the smaller alphas, mass took time to reorient. Six seconds, at least, of exposed vulnerability.

He wrote bind, the seal, not the word, and threw it at the creature’s emerging head.

The seal committed. The head, half-emerged from the curl, was suddenly held. The super-alpha’s neck locked in the mid-emerge position. It could not complete the uncurl. It could not retract back into the curl. It was frozen at the transition point.

The bind would hold for three seconds. Three seconds was enough.

Kael’s fire-lance struck the underside of the exposed neck, narrow, white-hot, driven straight through with the full commit of a demon whose talent was in its native fire element. The lance punched into the soft tissue and stayed, Kael was pouring energy into the shot for the full duration, not just a single strike but a sustained burn that continued through the neck and into the interior of the creature.

Bruce had not seen Kael do this before. The demon had figured out, at E-rank, that his fire-lance could be held rather than pulsed. Theron came in from the side.

The scythe, at E-rank, moved with a strange fluid authority. Theron aimed the blade at the base of the super-alpha’s skull, the same joint he had cut on the two-core alpha, and swung with the full-body arc he had developed. The E-rank scythe was longer than the F-rank scythe had been, and the cut reached further. The blade passed through the joint cleanly.

The super-alpha’s head came off. The bind seal released as the target it had been holding ceased to exist.

The body sagged. The remaining pieces of the curl unfolded slowly, without direction, the last mechanical motions of a creature that had died the instant the head separated.

The chamber was very quiet. The super-alpha lay in three pieces on the stone floor.

Bruce felt the essence begin to come.

It came in a slow long wave that made the two-core alpha’s essence feel like a small drink.

Bruce stood very still and let it come. The essence poured into him for what felt like a full minute, the foundational depth-essence of a super-alpha’s lifetime of accumulation flowing into his soul-body’s foundation and settling layer by layer.

It was denser than anything he had received in this realm. It was more organized than raw essence usually was, the super-alpha had held its essence in such stable formation for so long that the essence came into Bruce already partly refined.

His soul-body’s interior chamber, the small architectural space he had first noticed in the mist, expanded.

Not just widened. Deepened. The walls of the chamber pushed outward and the floor pushed downward, creating a new lower level of the space, a second layer that had not been there a moment before. Bruce could feel it as a distinct architectural change. He had gained not just more room, but a second story.

He understood what he was feeling. He was crossing another threshold.

Not E to D. Not yet. But the same kind of threshold he had crossed at the alpha flank dinner, an internal reorganization within a rank, the consolidation of essence into a new stable configuration. He was moving from early E-rank to middle E-rank. The middle of the rank, where a soul’s talent began to demonstrate its second-tier capabilities.

He held very still and let the reorganization complete.

When it finished, he was breathing slightly heavier. He looked at Kael and Theron.

Both of them had also gone still. Both had received their share of the super-alpha’s essence.

Both had also just crossed an internal threshold within E-rank. Kael’s glow had deepened another shade. Theron’s scythe, resting on the stone floor beside him, was faintly larger than it had been ten seconds ago.

"Middle E," Kael said softly.

"Middle E," Bruce confirmed.

Theron picked up his scythe and looked at it. "It grew again."

"Yes."

"Bruce, this is what happens every time. The rank shifts and the scythe changes. Not just scales. Changes."

"Yes."

"I want to know why. Why my talent evolves architecturally when yours only scales."

"I have a guess. It’s not a good guess. But I’ll share it, since you asked."

"Please."

Bruce took a breath.

"My talent is writing. Writing is a full-formed system. It has letters, words, meanings, seals, phrases, all of them structured from the beginning. When I advance, I get more of what I already had. The system was complete when I awakened; ranks just give me the reserves to use more of it."

"And mine?"

"Yours is reaping. Reaping is not a system, it is a function. A reaper is defined by what it does, not by a fixed toolset. When you advance, the tool that performs the function changes to reflect a wider range of what reaping can be. The scythe is not the talent. The scythe is the current form of the talent. At higher ranks, the form will keep evolving. You might not even have a scythe forever."

Theron thought about this. "So you have a system that expands. And I have a function that evolves."

"That’s my guess. It’s my best current interpretation."

"Which is more powerful?"

"That’s a bad question. They’re powerful in different ways. My talent has a ceiling that is defined by how much I can write. Your talent has a ceiling that is defined by what reaping means at the highest levels of the realm. Those are not the same ceiling. Yours might be higher. Mine might be more predictable. I don’t know."

"Reaping at the highest levels," Theron said. "What would that mean?"

"I don’t know. I told you my guess wasn’t a good one."

Theron was quiet. "Later," he said. "I’ll think about it later. Butchering now."

"Yes, butchering now."

The super-alpha butchering took the rest of the afternoon.

The creature was enormous, and the spine-blades alone were worth significant points at the market. Kael and Bruce did the primary work. Theron handled the cores. This super-alpha had three cores, not two, which was another rarity beyond the two-core alpha and which Kael identified immediately as a creature in the very late stage of preparing to advance to E-rank as a full creature. It would have been an E-rank super-alpha within another month or two. They had caught it right at the peak of its F-rank development.

The three cores were of graduated size. The primary chest core was substantial. The secondary belly core was smaller but still large. The tertiary, a small third core they had not seen before in any previous kill, was located at the back of the neck, near where Theron had cut. It was small but very dense.

"Three cores," Kael said, when Theron laid them out. "I have heard of two cores. I have never heard of three."

"The guard did say the alphas beyond the fifth chamber were rare and real."

"Rare. This is not just rare. This is remarkable."

"Then remarkable is what today is."

They packed all three cores into Bruce’s ring, which had the most room. Kael and Theron insisted, because if for any reason the meat and materials had to be abandoned during their return trip, the cores were the most valuable and Bruce’s ring was the smallest target for any watcher. Bruce accepted the reasoning. The cores went in his ring. The rest of the haul was distributed.

They walked out of the chamber past the cracked wall where the super-alpha had hit, back through the interior chambers, and finally out through the portal into the late-afternoon gold of Xiltra.