Chapter 86

  Raime rose smoothly from his nightly meditation, the faint chill of early morning still clinging to the house. The sky outside the window was a washed-out gray, dawn only just beginning to creep over the rooftops. Silence ruled the house.

  His father and Alice had collapsed into bed almost immediately after training the previous evening. After the happenings of the previous day, their bodies were pushed past their limits and their were minds too tired to do anything else. Still, the progress had been undeniable. Both of them had received a proper introduction to close combat.

  Raime had watched carefully.

  And his father… his father wasn’t telling him something.

  The old man was far too composed, far too instinctively correct in certain movements, for someone who had never come to blows before.

  The old man is not telling me something.

  It amused Raime more than anything else.

  Honestly, it was reassuring. A man who had lived his entire life preaching calm and peace, yet clearly knew how to be violent, in Raime not so humble onpinion was far more trustworthy than one who’d never faced it at all.

  His father’s class was another matter entirely.

  Half craftsman, half… something else. Mage didn’t quite fit. His control over stone was undeniable, but Raime suspected it didn’t end there. Earth wasn’t just dirt and rock; it was minerals, structure. Metals were just refined stone. Even bone, in its own way, was mineralized.

  Biological matter complicated things, of course. Soil was full of it. Living roots, decomposing remains. Whether his father could influence that was uncertain.

  But even without it, the versatility was staggering.

  Defense, especially. Layers of stone shaped instinctively, density adjusted on the fly. Offense, too—because nobody, absolutely nobody, wanted a boulder crashing into them at high speed. Raime was fairly certain his father was the strongest member of the family after himself… barring his mother, perhaps, if she ever managed to get the jump on him with a firearm.

  He stretched slowly, his body had healed completely. Even the lingering weakness was gone.

  Well, almost.

  His right arm stump still tingled faintly, traces of Orrhal energy refusing to dissipate entirely. It wasn’t dangerous, luckily, just irritating, like a phantom itch beneath the skin that no longer existed.

  His eye, though… that was different.

  Raime stepped into the bathroom and leaned toward the mirror, studying his reflection in the dim light. The regeneration had completed itself tonight, yet the result was… strange.

  The left eye was intact, whole. Something he believed to have lost forever.

  And yet, it was blind.

  No matter how he focused, no matter how he pushed his perception, there was nothing there. Worse still, the inner light that suffused his right eye—the glow that came with his new core was completely absent on the left.

  The iris had changed colortoo. Where it had once been brown, it now held a purple tint.

  He straightened slowly.

  “Hah,” he muttered. “At least I’m still alive.”

  The thought that followed came unbidden.

  If only I were stronger…

  He stilled.

  That line of thinking earned a sharp rebuke in his mind, spoken in a voice that wasn’t his own. His mentor’s, calm and unforgiving.

  Strength wasn’t something you regretted not having. Strength was something you built. Dwelling on what might have been only narrowed the future. Closed doors that hadn’t even been noticed yet.

  Raime exhaled, centering himself.

  Then he turned away from the mirror.

  Breakfast came next. He moved quietly through the kitchen, preparing food with practiced efficiency. Eggs, bread, and a steak, not an italian breakfast but something that was filling. He ate alone, consuming enough for five people without slowing down, barely tasting any of it.

  That, too, was becoming a problem.

  At this rate, they would need to hunt or scavenge more aggressively. His metabolism was requiring too much, he needed a solution.

  When he finished, he wiped his hands, then used a gentle pulse of telekinesis to write a short note and leave it on the table.

  I’m going to close a couple of Rifts this morning, I’ll be back before noon.

  Then he stepped outside.

  The air was cold, sharper than the day before. Winter was tightening its grip. Raime rose into the air, lifting smoothly above the rooftops, and turned toward the town center.

  Today was the day.

  Closing rifts.

  The thought sat heavy in his chest.

  He had done it before. And that single experience had changed him forever.

  But these weren’t Ithural.

  These were standard rifts. Tutorial-phase incursions. Dangerous, yes, but not for him. Tier I monsters, maybe a Tier II boss anchoring the core. Manageable.

  Still… entering hostile territory willingly never sat well with anyone sane.

  As he flew, he reviewed everything he knew. He’d read everything he could about Rifts, studied it for this exact moment.

  I wonder how long I should wait before the whatever council decides I’ve earned something, he thought dryly. Maybe closing some more Rifts would accelerate things, or make them worse, he didn’t know.

  The plaza came into view.

  Even from above, the orange rift was impossible to miss—an angry, swirling tear in space, hovering just above the stonework. No monsters emerged from it for now. It had been dormant for days, watched constantly, feared constantly.

  Raime descended slowly, boots touching down at the edge of the square.

  A few guards stiffened when they noticed him. Fighters straightened. People paused mid-task. Word spread in seconds.

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  He ignored the attention.

  Standing before the rift, he could feel it clearly now—not just with his senses, but with his psionic awareness. The energy, the mana leaking from it was constantly diffusing around. Aggressive, angry.

  “Alright,” he murmured. “Let’s do this.”

  He stepped forward—and into the tear.

  The world folded.

  Pressure hit first. Then a void, for an instant he feared getting his souls teared apart by that all consuming void. Then the heat slammed into him, Raime anchored himself instantly, psionic thread flaring, core revving up and preparing to unleash all his power, his perception expanding to compensate for the lack of familiar reference points.

  The other side resolved around him.

  A barren, fractured landscape stretched out in all directions, lit by a bruised orange sky. Cracked, dark stone underfoot. Jagged formations rising like broken teeth. The air tasted metallic and acrid, sharp enough to sting.

  He floated higher, surveying the area.

  Monsters stirred below—dozens of them, skittering shapes drawn by his arrival. Tier I, just as expected. Fast. Aggressive. Dangerous in numbers, but nothing he couldn’t handle.

  Farther in, at the center of the Rift, he felt it.

  The core.

  Stable. Guarded. Anchoring the rift to this reality.

  Raime clenched his remaining hand.

  “Let’s make this quick,” he said quietly.

  [SYSTEM MESSAGE]

  [You have entered an active Rift]

  [Spatial stability: Low]

  [Hostiles present]

  [QUEST — RIFT ANCHOR]

  [Objective: Reach the Rift Core]

  [WARNING]

  [Rift stability will rapidly decline after Core interaction]

  [Exit is advised immediately after completion]

  [REWARD]

  ? Experience (based on performance)

  ? System evaluation pending

  [SYSTEM NOTE]

  [Your choice will affect the surrounding region]

  [Proceed with caution]

  Ok, words from the System, thank you, and my evaluation is still pending… Because apparently a council of cosmic beings can’t make head or tail about what the fuck happened in Ithural. Of course.

  Raime stayed aloft, scanning.

  This place was small, he could see the distortion at the end of the Rift, while on Ithural he never managed to reach the border of the pocket reality, here it will take him maximum ten minutes at top speed to reach the end, he felt cheated.

  What if I ended up here instead the first time? Was my survival dictated only by chance?

  Movement registered in his perception almost immediately.

  He turned around, the creatures here were nothing like the horrors infesting the hospital. No creeping biomass, no living terrain. These were… simpler. Cruder.

  Just another kind of monster.

  Orange-skinned figures prowled the valley floor, their hides matte and rough, stretched thin over gaunt frames. Black claws extended from elongated fingers, scraping against stone as they moved, producing a constant, grating sound that echoed faintly in the surroundings. Most stood hunched, shoulders rolled forward, spines slightly curved as though their bodies had forgotten what it meant to stand straight.

  They looked starved.

  Not weak—there was a difference—but hollowed out, driven by something gnawing and constant. Their eyes were sunken, black like a pit without an end, and their mouths hung open just enough to reveal rows of jagged teeth.

  Tier I, Raime assessed calmly. All of them.

  Some were smaller, leaner, moving low to the ground with an unsettling quiet, slipping between rocks and shadows with practiced ease.

  Scouts, or ambushers, maybe.

  Others were broader, heavier, dragging their claws deliberately, conserving energy as they wandered in loose, disorganized groups.

  No coordination, just hunger and instinct.

  A few of them noticed him.

  Their heads snapped up almost in unison, eyes locking onto his hovering form. A shrill, rasping cry tore from one of the smaller creatures, and the sound rippled outward, echoed and answered by dozens more.

  The valley stirred.

  A wave of telekinetic pressure swept outward from his position, invisible and absolute. The nearest creatures were crushed where they stood, their bodies collapsing inward with wet sounds as bones shattered and organs failed simultaneously. Others were flung backward, smashed against stone ridges with enough force to leave dark smears behind.

  The rest surged forward.

  They weren’t fast despite being tier I, but their claws bit into stone as they launched themselves upward, leaping far lower than he expected. Orange bodies arced through the air toward him, but none reached his height.

  So Raime descended into them.

  Blades of compressed force formed around him, slicing outward in clean, precise arcs. Limbs severed. Torsos split. Heads snapped back as kinetic force crushed spines and windpipes alike. Acid wasn’t a concern here—these monsters fought with tooth and claw, raw and direct.

  Some of the smaller ones slipped through the initial assault, darting beneath his field of view, trying to climb up the invisible pressure around him. He caught them without looking, crushing them mid-leap, their bodies dropping lifelessly back to the ground.

  As he advanced deeper into the valley, the fighting settled into a grim rhythm.

  Sense. Kill. Move.

  There was no joy in it, but no hesitation either. The creatures died quickly, efficiently, leaving behind only stillness and the faint crackle of dissipating Rift energy. Raime catalogued their anatomy as he went—muscle density, claw composition, reaction times. They were adapted for endurance hunting, not prolonged combat. Built to harass, to wear down, to overwhelm by numbers.

  It would have worked, against other people.

  Against him, it was futile.

  Minutes stretched into nearly an hour as he swept the valley clean, circling inward, the density of monsters increasing the closer he got to the center. Still, nothing rose above Tier I. Just more of the same starving figures, driven harder, more desperate, their attacks increasingly reckless.

  Which only confirmed his suspicion.

  The guardian would be near the core.

  At the heart of the valley, the land dipped sharply, forming a shallow depression where the stone darkened further, almost black, veins of orange light pulsing faintly beneath the surface. The air here hummed, saturated with unstable mana, thick enough that even Raime could feel it pressing against his senses.

  Something large stirred.

  He slowed, hovering at the edge of the depression, and focused.

  The guardian rose into view.

  It was built from the same stock as the others—orange skin, black claws—but taken to an extreme. Its frame towered over the rest, easily three times the height of a normal creature, hunched shoulders broad and heavy with muscle. Its claws were longer, thicker, the black keratin veined with dull crimson light. Its skin was stretched taut, reinforced by dense layers of muscle beneath, and its eyes burned brighter, more focused.

  This one wasn’t starving.

  This one was fed.

  Tier II, Raime judged. Solidly so.

  The creature locked onto him instantly and roared, a deep, guttural sound that shook loose fragments of stone from the surrounding ridges. It charged without hesitation, each step cracking the ground beneath its weight.

  Raime met it head-on.

  Telekinetic force slammed into the guardian like an invisible wall, stopping it mid-stride. The impact rippled outward, a shockwave racing across the depression. The monster snarled, its claws digging furrows into the stone as it fought against the pressure with muscles bulging nearly to comic proportions.

  It held.

  That alone made Raime pause.

  Interesting.

  He increased the force incrementally, until the creature was lifted bodily from the ground, suspended in midair. It thrashed violently, roaring and snapping, but could not move an inch beyond what he allowed. He was holding it up by applying knetic energy to its head, and the only way it could escape was cutting it off, so the monster was well and truly in his grasp.

  He could kill it now.

  Instead, he reached forward, and inward.

  Slipping into the creature’s mind was like plunging into murky water. There was no language, no structured thought—only instinct, fear, and a single, overwhelming directive burned into every layer of its being.

  Protect the core.

  Images surfaced unbidden.

  A world like this one, but whole. Rocky plains beneath an orange sky, sparse but stable. Others like it—many others—moving together in loose packs, hunting, surviving. Then the sky tearing open. The System’s presence, vast and incomprehensible, descending like a verdict.

  This one had been chosen.

  Power forced into it. Flesh reshaped. Instinct sharpened into purpose.

  Protect the core, or perish.

  Not just it. All of them.

  Raime felt the knowledge the System had imparted, cold and absolute. If the Rift collapsed while they remained inside, extinction awaited. The creatures understood that much, even if they couldn’t grasp why.

  There had been another option. Leave the Rift. Enter the host world.

  They had tried.

  He felt flashes of that failure too—confusion, panic, slaughter. These creatures were built to survive harsh environments, but not coordinated resistance, not firearms, not organized fighters. Losses mounted rapidly. Fear took root.

  The few that retreated didn’t went back, better to starve slowly in a dying world than to be wiped out immediately.

  Raime withdrew from the mind, jaw tight.

  The guardian sensed the loss of contact and redoubled its efforts, thrashing wildly, but it was too late.

  With a precise twist of kinetic force, Raime snapped its neck. The creature died instantly, its massive body going slack before dropping heavily to the ground.

  Silence returned in the surrounding.

  He drifted forward, toward the cave embedded in the far wall, partially concealed by shadow. Inside, the angry orange light intensified, reflecting off dark stone walls polished smooth by the emission of energy rather than any natural erosion.

  At the center stood a pedestal.

  Rising just over a meter from the floor, carved from the same black stone as the surrounding rock. Embedded at its top was the Rift core, a jagged object that resembled a crystal only in the loosest sense, light swirling violently within it, as though barely contained.

  Power radiated from it in waves.

  Raime reached out and touched it.

  The world froze.

  [Rift Core Interaction Detected]

  [Quest Complete]

  Choose an action:

  ? Close Rift

  ? Retrieve Core

  ? Destroy Core

  ? Claim Rift

  [Warning: Each choice carries irreversible consequences]