The subterranean highway stretched endlessly into the gloom, illuminated only by patches of pale blue phosphorescent moss clinging to the ceiling.
Kael kept his footsteps light, sliding his boots over the ground rather than picking them up, minimizing the sound of his soles hitting the stone.
It didn’t take long for him to realize he wasn’t walking on natural cavern floor.
Beneath a thick layer of dust and crystallized mana, the ground was flat.
It was cracked and buckled by tectonic shifts, but it was undeniably asphalt.
He paused, kneeling beside a massive, rusted husk sitting off to the shoulder of the road.
It was completely calcified, fused into the stone by centuries of mineral drip, but the shape was unmistakable.
It was a transport vehicle.
The Academy sat directly on top of a buried metropolis.
The ambient mana down here was so thick it felt like static electricity against Kael’s skin.
It was oppressive for a normal human, but for Kael’s starved, anomaly-driven physiology, it felt like standing in a warm rain after a drought.
[Atmospheric mana saturation is actively bypassing Host’s caloric deficit.] [Adaptive Regeneration is stabilizing at a low-level idle state.] [Recommendation: Do not get too comfortable.
You are currently trespassing in the basement’s food chain.]
Kael stood up slowly.
Click.
He froze.
He didn’t turn his head, merely shifting his eyes to scan the shadows between the massive support pillars.
Click-clack.
Sssshhhh.
It sounded like heavy claws dragging across concrete.
Kael’s Faster Brain immediately engaged, mapping the acoustic echoes in his mind.
Not one, Kael realized, his grip tightening on the cord-wrapped hilt of his black sword.
Three.
They dropped from the pillars simultaneously, landing on the asphalt with heavy, sickening thuds.
They were the size of large wolves, but completely hairless, their pale, translucent skin stretched tight over unnatural musculature.
Their jaws were split mandibles lined with rows of needle-like teeth.
[Threat Identified: Blind-Stalkers. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
F-Tier Dungeon Fauna.] [Attributes: Blind, highly sensitive to kinetic vibration, exceptionally hungry.]
The lead Stalker lunged like a coiled spring.
Kael stepped diagonally forward, slipping entirely out of the creature’s trajectory.
He guided the pre-Cataclysm black steel in a tight, precise upward arc pulled straight from Beginner Swordsmanship.
The heavy carbon-iron blade sliced cleanly through the thick bone plating of the Stalker’s neck with zero resistance.
As the first beast fell, Kael pivoted, using his momentum to parry the second creature’s mandibles.
He channeled a tiny fraction of mana into his left boot and slammed it into the asphalt.
Resonance Strike.
The kinetic shockwave scrambled the Stalkers’ vibration-sensitive hunting organs.
The third creature faltered, stumbling blindly.
Kael stepped in, driving the black sword through the second creature’s thorax, and seamlessly spinning to decapitate the third before it could recover.
The fight lasted exactly four seconds.
Zero wasted energy.
Zero noise.
Kael knelt, using a scavenged hunting knife to pry a glowing crimson stone from the base of the largest creature’s spine.
[External Mana Core detected.
Processing…]
[Assimilation successful.
Host’s cellular battery recharged by 2%.]
Before Kael could pocket the core, a violent, echoing explosion rocked the subterranean highway.
It wasn’t a monster.
It was the unmistakable, crackling boom of low-grade elemental magic.
A bright flash of orange fire illuminated a cross-section of the ruins about a half-mile down the road.
Kael immediately dropped low, melting into the shadows of the rusted car, and began to silently close the distance.
He moved from pillar to rubble pile, finally peering over a slab of broken concrete to look down into a sunken plaza.
There were five of them.
Academy students.
They were D and C-ranks, wearing unauthorized tactical gear mixed with Academy standard issue.
They were standing over the scorched remains of a half-dozen Blind-Stalkers.
“You incinerated three of the cores.
The black market brokers dock our pay for charred merchandise!”
“Relax, Garret,” a D-rank girl muttered, lazily waving a wand that emitted a bright, obnoxiously loud hum.
“We paid the gate guards double this week.
We have six hours before shift change.
Plenty of bugs to squash.”
Kael watched them from the dark.
This wasn’t an official expedition.
The Academy tightly regulated core harvesting to control the economy.
These upper-year students were running an illegal farming ring, bribing the guards to let them farm F-tier monsters in the shallows of the Deep Dungeon to sell on the black market.
They were arrogant, sloppy, and incredibly loud.
They were using massive, flashy area-of-effect spells to kill low-level beasts, destroying half the loot in the process and broadcasting their location to everything within a five-mile radius.
Kael looked down at his own black blade, then at the single, perfectly preserved core in his hand.
He didn’t need flashy magic.
He had surgical precision.
If these noisy amateurs were making a fortune down here, Kael was about to become the richest ghost in the Academy.
Suddenly, a low, guttural vibration shook the concrete beneath Kael’s boots.
Down in the plaza, the students stopped laughing.
The loud hum of the D-rank’s wand illuminated the darkness just enough to reveal massive, hulking shapes detaching themselves from the ceiling.
The students had made too much noise.
They hadn’t just attracted a pack of Blind-Stalkers; they had summoned the entire hive.
[Warning: Localized ecosystem has been aggressively disturbed.]
[Recommendation: Grab some popcorn.
The amateurs are about to learn a very hard lesson.]
Kael didn’t move to help them.
He just stayed in the shadows, his dark eyes calculating exactly how many pristine cores were about to be left behind for the taking.