Chapter 43: New mission 1

Rain looked past Holt’s shoulder at the thing rooted in the center of the room, at the slow, patient way it turned its wide maw toward the sound of their voices without moving anything else, and felt something settle low and cold in his stomach.

’It’s not going anywhere,’ Rain thought. ’Which means whatever’s in this room, we’re the ones who have to go to it.’

"Alright," Holt said, straightening up and adjusting his grip on his sword hilt. "D-rank beast. Fifteen-foot threat radius on those vines. Anything steps into the water inside that circle, it triggers the lash."

"Same plan as the last one?" Fen asked, his twin daggers appearing in his hands with two quiet clicks.

"Same layout," Holt confirmed. "Fen, you draw the first lash. Run the perimeter edge to drag the main tendrils out of alignment. The second the maw opens to vent pressure, Priya marks the throat ring. I’m coming in right behind her to cut the main core stem." 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

"Got it," Fen said, a thin grin touching his mouth.

"Carriers," Holt added without looking back. "Pillars. Now."

Rain grabbed Peter’s sleeve, pulling him back behind a thick, rusted iron support pillar twelve yards from the edge of the water basin. They pressed their backs against the cold metal, watching through a narrow gap in the plating.

’Same layout as the last one,’ Rain thought, turning the phrase over. None of them had asked what the layout even was. Nobody had hesitated on their role, and Holt hadn’t so much as glanced at Fen or Priya while assigning them, like he already knew exactly where they’d end up standing before he opened his mouth.

’These three have done this a hundred times together,’ he thought. ’Maybe more.’ There was a kind of trust in that shorthand no amount of gear or rank could fake, the trust of people who’d bled next to each other enough times to stop needing to check.

It made the contrast sharper, standing behind that pillar with Peter. Nobody would ever say "same layout as the last one" about the two of them. They weren’t part of anything here. They were tools rented for the night, useful right up until they weren’t.

Fen moved first, angling hard left, boots splashing through shallow water as he hit the edge of the radius. The moment his heel touched the water inside the zone, three thick, thorn-covered tendrils erupted with a wet, tearing sound, whipping through the air toward his ribs.

Fen didn’t slow down. His legs blurred for a fraction of a second, some sudden burst carrying him sideways at an angle no ordinary stride should have managed, and the three tendrils slammed into empty concrete where he’d been standing, shattering it into a spray of grey gravel.

"Now, Priya!" Fen yelled, leaping onto a fallen steel beam to avoid a fourth sweeping vine.

The Rootmaw’s central trunk expanded, bark plates sliding apart with a grinding groan as its maw split open, exposing a ring of pale, soft tissue beneath the wooden teeth.

Priya stood still, pulled her bowstring to her ear, held her breath for a fraction of a second, and released. The arrow flew straight and true, and for a heartbeat something about the way she’d tracked it looked almost too precise, buried five inches into the soft tissue like she’d known exactly where it needed to go before the maw had even finished opening.

The Rootmaw let out a wet, gurgling shriek that rattled the iron pillar Rain leaned against.

"Mine!" Holt roared, charging through the shallow water. As he closed the last five feet, his shoulder and forearm visibly tightened, a dense grey sheen passing over his skin and steel, and he swung his longsword in a heavy, two-handed arc. The blade struck the base of the trunk with a metallic thud, cutting three feet deep into the woody core. Green sap and dark fluid burst from the gash.

The tendrils lost tension all at once, crashing into the black water. The trunk sagged sideways, the maw collapsing inward with a faint, dying hiss.

Rain watched every second of it from behind the pillar, running the mechanics through his head in plain, simple terms. ’Fen’s burst isn’t spatial. It’s just his legs doing something they shouldn’t be able to do for half a second. He still has to push off the ground, still needs footing under him.’ He glanced at Priya as she lowered her bow, already reaching for another arrow out of pure habit even with the fight over. ’And whatever she just did to that shot, that wasn’t just good aim. She hit dead center on a target that was only open for less than a second.’

He filed both observations away without a name for either skill, only the shape of what they did. It was the same way he’d learned everything else that actually mattered to him, watching first, understanding later.

"Harvest crew, up here!" Holt called out, wiping green sap from his face. "This one’s buried deep. Going to take some digging."

Rain and Peter worked the root mass together, Rain driving an iron crowbar into the fibrous tangle while Peter held the sack open, his knuckles white around the drawstring, until a dark red core the size of a fist popped free into the mud with a wet, sucking give. Rain handed it straight to Peter, who wrapped it in cloth with careful, deliberate hands, like it might still hurt something if he dropped it, and buried it in the center of the pack.

"Grain silo next," Holt said, checking his gauntlet straps. "Catwalk crosses the upper level to the secondary exit."

They moved through the flooded processing room into the base of the silo, a massive circular tower with a rusted spiral catwalk winding up the interior wall toward a platform forty feet above. Huge funnel-shaped grain hoppers hung from the ceiling in deep shadow, suspended on chains that creaked softly with every draft that moved through the tower.

"Watch your footing," Holt warned. "Grating’s old."

They climbed in single file, Holt leading, then Fen, then Priya, Rain and Peter holding their ten-pace gap behind. The metal groaned under every step, a low, tired sound like the whole structure was one bad afternoon away from giving up entirely.

Twenty feet up, a scrabbling shriek echoed off the curved wall below. Rain glanced down through the grating to see three grey, four-legged shapes crawling up the rusted framework from the base of the silo, chasing the noise of their own boots with an eagerness that had nothing patient about it.

"Climbers!" Priya called down, already turning her bow.

The creatures were low and lean, built for scaling, their legs ending in wide, splayed claws that gripped rusted metal without slipping. They moved fast, faster than the Bramble Hounds had, and they weren’t circling the way the hounds had either, they were coming straight up the shortest line to the catwalk, no hesitation, no testing the ground first.

Holt swore, planting his boots wide on the narrow grating. "They’ll be on us before we clear the gap. Hold here!"

The first one crested the edge of the catwalk six feet ahead of Holt, and he cut it down mid-leap with a short, brutal swing that sent it tumbling back into the dark, a thin trail of blood arcing after it. The second scrambled up past Fen’s side of the walkway, and Fen drove a dagger through its skull before it fully found its footing, twisting the blade free with a wet crunch.

The third came up the outer framework, past where Holt and Fen were already committed to their own fights, angling toward the gap where Rain and Peter stood.

Rain looked down at a loose iron strut lying against the railing beside him, one of the discarded support rods that had shaken free from the structure somewhere below. He picked it up without thinking twice, just a length of scrap metal any panicked carrier might grab.

The creature’s claws found the edge of the walkway a yard from Peter’s boots, hauling its lean body over the rail with a wet scrape of claw on metal.

Rain stepped in front of Peter and drove the iron rod through the base of its skull with both hands, putting his weight behind it the way Tenski had drummed into him through a hundred hours of stance drills, hips first, then shoulders, then arms, all of it moving as one piece. The creature convulsed once and went still, its claws slipping free of the rail, its body dropping away into the dark below.

[Target Eliminated: Climbing Stalker (D-Rank)]

[Experience Gained: +20]

[Experience: 38 / 900]

"Kid’s got some fight in him," Fen muttered, wiping his blade on his thigh, not sounding especially impressed, more surprised than anything, like he’d forgotten the carriers were technically alive people rather than luggage.

"Move," Holt said flatly, already climbing again. "More of them where those came from."

They pushed on, higher into the silo, thirty feet up now, the catwalk narrowing as it bridged the open center of the tower, nothing below it but forty feet of dark air and the faint gleam of standing water at the bottom.

Above them, hanging beneath the dark underside of a grain hopper, something pale shifted.

It made no sound. Long, hairless, grey-skinned, four jointed limbs ending in needle-thin bone talons, folded flat against the rusted metal until it dropped.

It fell straight onto Fen.

The impact drove him flat against the grating, bone talons punching through his shoulder armor with two wet snaps.

"Agh! Get it off!" Fen screamed, the creature’s limbs wrapping tight around his torso, dragging him toward the rail.

Priya didn’t freeze. She dropped her bow to her hip, drew a short iron hatchet, and drove it into the creature’s exposed flank. It let out a high, raspy hiss and released Fen, leaping backward onto a hanging chain and vanishing up into the dark rafters, gone before anyone could get a clean look at it.

Fen lay clutching his shoulder, blood welling between his fingers, his breathing ragged. "It came from above. It was hanging on the hopper. I didn’t even see it."

"Up! Don’t stop!" Holt shouted, sword pointed at the ceiling, his eyes never staying still.

They scrambled forward, boots clattering against the thin grating, Fen leaning on Priya’s shoulder, Holt watching the dark overhead the whole way, his sword raised like it might actually stop something coming straight down out of the shadows.

They reached the middle of a suspended section, a six-foot span where the support beams underneath had rusted through almost completely, the metal gone the color of old blood.

Peter crossed it first, the grating groaning softly under his weight, a sound that should have been a warning nobody had time to hear properly.

Rain stepped onto the grating right behind him.

The weld beneath his left boot gave way completely, tearing off its rivets with a screech of metal.

He didn’t have time to think about Flash Step, didn’t have time to think about anything at all. The floor simply wasn’t there anymore.

He fell straight down into the dark.