The portal let go of me with a soft whoosh, and I stumbled out into the damp, cold shadow of the Slag Quarry Caverns.
The air was thick and heavy, and it smelled of crushed granite, wet iron, and stagnant sulfur water. High above, the ceiling opened into wide industrial shafts, and narrow pillars of pale gold sunlight cut down through the underground mist. Water dripped somewhere. Everything else was quiet. The cold came off the stone and settled into my bare forearms within a minute.
I stepped off the arrival platform and stopped before I'd taken a single step into the tunnel.
Thirty venomous rock-snakes was a lot of dead weight. Even if I only took cores and hides, dragging thirty blood-soaked carcasses through the clean streets of District 3 in a burlap sack was a stupid way to spend an afternoon. Up in the high markets, wealthy cultivators used spatial rings, but I'd seen the freight tax on those in the shop. A basic three-cubic-meter ring ran over four thousand points.
"There's got to be a better way," I muttered.
I opened the Celestial Shop and set the filter to [UTILITY SKILLS — SPATIAL / STORAGE]. It brought up a short list of non-physical, soul-bound skills.
[SKILL: VOID STORAGE (BASIC)] — Price: 500 Celestial Points
Constructs an isolated dimensional pocket tied directly to the user's soul-anchor. Items can be stored or retrieved instantly with a thought, bypassing physical rings and external containers.
Note: Initial volume is 10 cubic meters. Capacity expands as the user's cultivation ranks increase across all four paths.
Five hundred points. No freight, no physical object to lose or have stolen, and more than three times the volume of a ring that cost eight times as much. It would grow as I did.
"Sold."
[TRANSACTION CONFIRMED]
[DEDUCTED: 500 CELESTIAL POINTS]
[REMAINING BALANCE: 5,194 CELESTIAL POINTS]
[SKILL UNLOCKED: VOID STORAGE (BASIC)]
A warm, gentle hum settled in beside my dantian, and I could feel it there: a clean, dark, weightless room waiting to be filled. I picked up a pebble, tossed it, and willed it away. It vanished in a flicker of silver. Another thought, and it dropped back into my palm, still cold from the cavern floor.
"Convenient," I said, and tossed it aside. "Now. Snakes."
I opened Soul Sight and Hyper-Cognition together, and the dark tunnel bloomed with pale green auras. Dozens of them, tucked into crevices along the walls and ceiling. Rock-snakes were ambush hunters. They blended into grey granite and waited for something warm to walk beneath them.
I walked straight down the middle of the tunnel, my boots echoing off the stone.
SZZZZT.
A shadow detached from a ledge six feet above my head.
A five-foot rock-snake dropped, as thick as a man's arm, jagged slate-grey scales rattling, jaw unhinged to a hundred and eighty degrees. Two hollow yellow fangs dripped dark green venom. It struck for the side of my neck.
I didn't dodge. I tilted my head an inch, raised my bare forearm, and let the jaws clamp down across my skin.
CRACK!
It wasn't the sound of teeth in flesh. It was a porcelain plate smashed on a steel anvil. Both fangs burst into a hundred brittle shards. Dark venom sprayed across my ragged sleeve and sizzled for half a second before the Primordial Physique swallowed it, without leaving so much as a red mark.
The snake hung from my arm, confused, its toothless jaw twitching.
"Ironhide," I told it, almost apologetically. "Level 1. Sorry."
I took it by the neck, drew a thread of Primordial Essence into my knuckles, and drove a short, precise Tyrant Shattering Strike into its spine.
PAK.
The force detonated inside the snake's frame. Stone spine and organs collapsed together.
[TARGET ELIMINATED: VENOMOUS ROCK-SNAKE (F-RANK MID-GRADE)]
[QI ABSORBED: 12 UNITS → 120 POINTS BANKED]
I touched the corpse with my left hand and thought store, and the five-foot body winked out into the dark pocket beside my dantian.
"One down," I whispered. "Twenty-nine to go."
For the next two hours, I turned the lower tunnels into an assembly line.
I didn't stop at thirty. It wasn't greed, or not entirely. Every snake taught me something. Every payout fed the shop. And under the quiet, rhythmic work of it, a small voice kept a running tally: Chen's twenty coppers. A second pill for Lin's mother. Boots, bread, a soft bed for an old man who deserved one.
When three snakes dropped from the ceiling at once, I blinked behind them with Phantom Steps, leaving a silver afterimage hanging in the air, and answered with three Tyrant Shattering Strikes in three heartbeats.
When a seven-foot alpha wrapped its heavy coils around my chest and squeezed, I let it. I held my ribs hard, flexing Ironhide, and listened to its own stone scales begin to crack under the pressure. Then I put my fingers behind its skull and twisted.
I waded through ankle-deep sulfur water, the cold of it soaking straight through the leather, and thought, with a short bark of laughter, so much for keeping my boots dry.
By the time I reached the deepest unlit extraction shaft, I'd killed more than fifty-five snakes. My Void Storage held a mountain of stone-scaled bodies and fifty-five green cores that glittered like bottle glass.
I wiped a fleck of grey dust off my sleeve and turned back toward the portal.
BOOM!
The walls shook. A shower of grit and loose pebbles rained down from the ceiling.
Then, from the lower eastern tunnel, a girl's voice, high and shrill with panic, and the desperate scream of steel on stone. "Damon, fall back! It's too big! My rapier can't get through its scales!"
"Shut up and keep casting your light!" a boy's voice shrieked back, cracking with terror. "My sword's chipped! It's blocking the exit!"
I went very still.
Maya and Damon.
I didn't think. I breathed out, slid my weight onto my right heel, and the dark folded around me in a blur of silver-black, step after step after step. In three seconds, I'd crossed three hundred feet of tunnel.
I rounded the last corner and skidded to a halt in a wide underground amphitheater, where an old spirit-coal mining rig lay in a mangled heap.
It was a disaster.
Damon was backed against the fallen rig, the arrogance gone from his face like a mask pulled off. His navy coat was torn and bloody. His sword was notched and burned dull with green venom, and his hands were shaking so badly he could barely keep hold of it. A scorched crater smoked at his feet where some alchemical talisman had gone off in the wrong direction and brought the tunnel down behind them.
Maya was pinned against the granite wall, silver rapier up in a trembling guard. Her left ankle was swollen and purple, and a nasty scratch ran up her leg, venom beginning to seep in around its edges.
And in front of them, filling half the cavern, was a monster that did not belong in an F-Rank training quarry.
[TARGET IDENTIFIED: MUTATED IRON-SCALE PYTHON (F-RANK PEAK — REALM 1 LEVEL 13)]
A rare mutated variant of the rock-snake. Metallic, iron-reinforced scales. Crushing mass over two thousand pounds. Highly corrosive acid-venom.
It was twenty feet long and as thick as an oil drum. Its iron-plated head towered ten feet off the ground, eyes burning purple, jaws wide, spraying a stream of green acid that ate through the granite at Maya's feet in a hiss of steam. The smell hit the back of my throat like bleach.
"Get away from me!" Damon screamed.
He didn't hold his ground. He hurled his chipped sword at the python's nose, spun on his heel, and bolted for a narrow crevice in the wall, leaving the girl with the broken ankle alone in front of the monster.
"Damon!" Maya cried.
She didn't run. I saw that. I saw her try to. She took one step and her ankle gave, and she caught herself on the wall, gritted her teeth, and raised the rapier again in both hands, trembling, aimed straight at the snake's eye.
The python's tail whipped around to pin her, and its jaws lunged for her chest.
Maya closed her eyes.
ZIP.
I came out of the dark beside her with my left arm already around her waist. There was no time for grace. The world slowed, and I wrenched her sideways in a blink of silver-black. We reappeared six feet to the left just as the python's skull slammed into the stone where she'd been standing.
It was the first time I'd ever carried someone with me through a step. It felt like forcing my way through a doorway with a wet sheet over my head, and it dragged at my core like a second body's worth of weight. Maya gasped, and her rapier skittered away across the stone.
"Stay behind me," I said, and when she started to ask what, how, I said it again. "Behind me."
I set her against the wall and stepped out between her and the monster.
The python reared. The acid came in a thick, glittering arc, aimed at my face. I twisted aside, and it splashed across the stone beside me. Some of it caught my left boot.
Hiss.
The iron toe cap smoked. The leather beneath it began to bubble.
Something went cold in me that wasn't Hyper-Cognition. It wasn't the fear I'd felt in front of the troll. It was smaller and sharper than that, and a lot more personal.
Not the boots.
I took one fast step back, scraped the acid off against the granite, and looked at the little pit eaten into the toe. A thumb's width of ruined leather.
Chen's boots. Oiled by lamplight. Stuffed with wool by an old man's thick, careful fingers.
"You," I told the python, very quietly, "are going to regret that."
I drew a thread of Primordial Essence into my right fist and drove a Tyrant Shattering Strike straight into its snout.
BOOM!
The python's head snapped back. A web of cracks ran across the iron plating of its snout, and the whole cavern rang. But the skull held. The force spread out across those thick plates and lost itself, the way it had against the troll's hide before I'd learned to look. The python shook itself, and its tail came around in a blur.
I tried to jump. I didn't clear it.
The tail caught me across the ribs like a falling girder. I felt Ironhide flex and hold, but the sheer weight lifted me off my feet and flung me across the cavern. I hit the opposite wall hard enough to crack the granite and slid down it onto my knees, all the air gone out of me.
"Andaras!" Maya shrieked.
I coughed. My ribs ached with a deep, ringing pain. The taste of copper filled my mouth.
Two thousand pounds, the cold voice noted. Peak Level 13. Armor over the skull. Don't hit what it can take.
The python's eyes fixed on me. It came forward in a long, rippling, grinding slither, scales rasping over the stone.
Look. Don't swing. Look.
I opened Soul Sight and Hyper-Cognition, and the world dropped into slow motion.
The python's aura was a roaring column of dull orange, thick and even across its great iron head. But where the skull plates met the spine, at the base of the skull, a handspan of it flickered thin and ragged. A seam. A place where the metal had to give, because a snake that couldn't turn its head was a dead snake.
It was behind the jaw. It was nine feet off the ground. And it was moving.
Phantom Steps, I thought. Over, not around.
I rose from my knees. The python struck, jaws wide.
ZIP.
I blinked straight up. Suddenly I was in the air above its lunging head, my body turning. For one clean, silent heartbeat I hung over it, looking down at the seam at the base of its skull, a thin, bright, flickering line.
I gathered everything in my core, every drop I could spare, into one narrow, shining point on two knuckles.
[TECHNIQUE ACTIVATED: TYRANT SHATTERING STRIKE (FULL OUTPUT)]
I came down on the snake's neck and drove my fist into the seam.
BOOM!
It sounded less like a punch than a cannon going off in a small room. A circular shockwave of gold and black burst out from my knuckles. The python's skull plates blew apart in a thousand glittering fragments. The force plunged down its brain stem and along twenty feet of spine, and every vertebra in its body snapped, one after another, like a string of firecrackers.
The two-thousand-pound monster jolted two feet off the ground and slammed back down onto the granite with a deafening THUD.
Silence.
Grey dust and green acid mist drifted slowly through the cavern. Water dripped. Somewhere in the walls, a loose stone ticked.
[TARGET ELIMINATED: MUTATED IRON-SCALE PYTHON (F-RANK PEAK)]
[QI ABSORBED: 180 UNITS → 1,800 POINTS BANKED]
I stood over the great, still body, panting, one hand pressed to my ribs. Green acid ran off my sleeve. My Ironhide skin was warm and unbroken. My ribs would be fine by morning.
I looked down at my left boot. The iron toe cap had a small, dull scar on it, and the leather had a pit about the width of my thumb.
I crouched, brushed it clean with my sleeve, and held my palm over the pit for a second.
"Sorry, Chen," I whispered.
Then I stood, touched the python's head, and willed the whole carcass into my Void Storage.
It vanished in half a heartbeat, leaving a crater in the granite where it had lain.
Maya was sitting against the rock wall, staring at the empty floor, then up at me. Her mouth hung open. Her dark eyes were enormous. "You killed a Peak F-Rank mutated python," she whispered. "With one punch."
"Two," I said. "The first one didn't count."
Behind her, a pale face slowly emerged from the crevice. Damon crawled out on his hands and knees, white as chalk, eyes bulging at the crater. His legs were shaking so hard he had to grab the wall to stand. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
I looked at him for a long moment.
I didn't hate him, and that surprised me. I'd seen him at the gate, all silk and swagger, and I'd have bet my boots he was the kind who'd run. And he had run. But I remembered a hand clenching and unclenching at a boy's side on the morning of the ceremony. I knew what terror looked like on someone who'd been taught he wasn't allowed to feel it.
"Running isn't what bothers me," I said at last, flat and quiet. "Anyone can freeze. Anyone can bolt. But she stood there on a broken ankle, and you were in a hole. Think about that."
Damon's face crumpled. He looked at Maya. Maya didn't look back at him.
I dug into my pocket and pulled out a small vial of Basic Recovery Salve, six points from the shop, bought after the troll fight when my knuckles ached. I tossed it into Maya's lap. "For the venom scratch. It'll stop the sting in five minutes. Get that ankle looked at."
She caught it in both hands. Her fingers were trembling. "Andaras. Wait. Who are you? Which guild? Which academy?"
"No guild," I said, turning toward the tunnel mouth. "Just a freelancer working a contract."
"Thank you." Her voice cracked a little. "You saved my life."
I paused and looked back over my shoulder, for just a moment, at a girl with a swollen ankle and a rapier she'd refused to drop.
"You were already standing," I said. "I just helped."
I didn't wait for a reply. I shifted onto my right heel and vanished down the dark tunnel in a streak of silver and black.
Please don't try to find me, I thought, a little guiltily, as the dark closed in behind me. I've got too many people to keep safe already.