Chapter 44: New mission 2

His body slammed into a pile of rusted plating, rotting grain sacks, and broken concrete ten feet below, the impact driving every ounce of air from his lungs in one violent burst.

[Damage Taken: Physical Trauma]

[HP: 130 -> 115]

His canvas pack slipped from his shoulder in the fall, tumbling into a crevice between two collapsed girders and gone before he even registered it leaving his hand.

Rain lay on his back in the dust, gasping, his heart slamming against his ribs hard enough that he could feel it in his throat feeling pain everywhere.

’Breathe,’ he told himself. ’Ribs are fine. Legs work.’

High above, a circle of pale light marked the gap he’d fallen through.

"Rain!" Peter’s voice, cracking with panic. "Rain! Are you alive?!"

Holt’s face appeared at the broken edge, lit dim by his shoulder torch, his expression cold and already moving past this. "Hey! Carrier! Can you stand?"

Rain pushed himself up, coughing dust out of his throat. "I’m alive! The floor gave out!"

Holt studied the crumbling walls of the pit for a second, not long enough to actually be considering anything. "Frame’s rotted clean through down there. We can’t drop a line without bringing the rest of this catwalk with it, and we are not standing around waiting for another one of those pale things to drop on us while we fish out a carrier."

"Holt, wait!" Peter grabbed his arm. "We have rope, we can’t just leave him—"

"Shove off." Holt looked back down, his voice flat and final. "Listen, carrier. You lost your pack, which means the run’s share on that pack is gone with it, and this kid carries the Rootmaw core alone from here out. We’re moving."

"Holt!" Peter’s voice cracked over the railing, raw and desperate. "Rain!"

Rain stood, wiping dust off his forehead, looking straight up at him. "Peter! Listen to me. Stay with the party. Do your job, keep your head down, get out through the main gate."

"But Rain—"

"I’m fine," Rain cut in, keeping his voice level even though his leg was still shaking from the landing. "Maybe I’ll find an access way through the lower drainage line and meet you at the gate. Don’t leave the party. Go."

Peter stared down for three long seconds, his hands white-knuckled on the railing, before Holt pulled him back by the collar. Their boots clattered away across the catwalk, and the heavy exit door slammed somewhere above, the sound rolling down through the silo and fading into nothing.

Silence returned to the lower silo.

Rain sat with that silence for a moment, letting it settle around him. The air down here was colder than above, thick with the smell of stagnant water and old copper, a slow drip echoing somewhere deeper in the dark, patient and steady, like a clock counting something down.

He walked to the wall and tried the rusted plating, jamming his fingers into a seam and pulling. The metal crumbled to flakes under his weight, offering nothing. He tried two more spots along the curve of the wall, working his way around by feel in the near-dark, and both gave the same way, nothing solid enough to hold his weight for even a second.

He stepped back, looking at his scraped, bleeding knuckles.

’Climbing’s not happening,’ he thought. ’Rust is too far gone. Even Flash Step wouldn’t help. Straight line means I’d just slam into open air and drop right back down onto the same girders I just fell through.’

He turned to face the black corridor leading away from the base of the silo, the only direction left that wasn’t a dead end of crumbling metal.

His chest was tight, his hands faintly cold, and for a second he let himself feel exactly how bad this actually was before pushing past it, because sitting with it any longer wasn’t going to change a single thing about where he was standing.

’Okay,’ he thought, the words coming fast and plain in his head, nothing composed about them at all. ’Okay. This is bad. Thirty feet down, no light, no pack, no weapon, eleven Mana. This is really bad.’

He made himself breathe slow until his hands stopped shaking, then looked down at the floor. It sloped gently south, toward where the main facility’s drainage lines had run according to the layout he’d half-noticed on the way in.

’Air’s moving,’ he noticed, a faint, cool draft brushing his cheek from somewhere ahead. ’If air’s moving, there’s a vent or an outlet somewhere down that slope. Follow it. Keep a hand on the wall so I don’t walk straight into anything.’

He stepped into the corridor.

A bright blue window opened in front of him, humming faintly in the dark, its light throwing strange shadows across the wet concrete.

[Hidden Mission Discovered: The Last Root]

[Condition Met: Host isolated from all external support within an active rift boundary]

[Objective: Eliminate every remaining hostile lifeform within the current rift]

[Reward: +750 Synthesis Credits]

[Special Reward: ???]

[Mission Accept? Y/N]

Rain stopped mid-step, staring at it.

’Seven hundred fifty credits,’ he thought, running the numbers from the store catalog automatically, the way his mind seemed to do with anything that had a price attached. ’Vambrace was two-twenty. Blade was two-sixty.’

Then the actual size of the ask caught up with him.

’Clear every last thing in this rift. Alone. With eleven Mana.’ A short, nervous laugh got out of him before he could stop it, the sound swallowed almost instantly by the dark around him. ’That’s insane. That’s completely insane.’

He looked back at the wall behind him, then at the glowing text still hanging patiently in the air. No ladder. No rope coming down. Whether he accepted this thing or not, the only way out was through whatever was still down here waiting.

He let out a slow breath through his nose and tapped the confirm.

[Mission Accepted: The Last Root]

[Current Status: 0% Cleared]

The window vanished, leaving him with only the faint green light bleeding down from somewhere far above.

He kept walking, one hand against the rough concrete, feeling his way through total dark for five minutes straight. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound except his own pulse, steady and loud in his ears, and the occasional drip of water finding its way through some crack overhead.

The corridor opened into a low, wide chamber where the floor gave way to a broad stretch of shallow, black runoff water. In the center of it sat a pale, bloated shape, half-submerged, easy at a glance to mistake for a discarded piece of piping left to rust.

Rain raised his foot to step into the shallow pool.

He stopped.

A slow ripple spread from the base of the shape, moving against the direction of the faint draft in the room, wrong in a way he couldn’t have named out loud but felt immediately in his gut.

’That’s not metal,’ he thought, his whole body locking still.

The shape moved. A thick, boneless appendage, pale and hook-covered, whipped out of the water and wrapped around his ankle before he could pull back.

"Agh!" His leg went out from under him. He hit the concrete hard, the back of his head cracking against stone, white light bursting across his vision.

[Damage Taken HP: 115 -> 98]

The thing began dragging him toward the water, its grip contracting like heavy rubber.

"No," Rain snarled, flipping onto his stomach, fingers tearing at the cracks between concrete slabs, nails splitting, blood welling under them before the pull ripped his hands free and dragged him three feet into the cold water.

[Target Identified: Sump Leech]

[Rank: D-Rank]

[Type: Beast / Ambush Predator]

[Attributes: Camouflage, Constriction, Aquatic]

[Threat Level: Moderate (Isolated Target)]

He rolled onto his back in the ankle-deep water, planted his free boot against the base of the appendage, and drove his fist down into the joint where it met the water with everything Strength 21 could give him.

The rubbery flesh ruptured, dark blood spraying across his face as the creature let out a low, bubbling hiss beneath the surface. Its grip loosened for half a second, just long enough.

Rain kicked free, scrambling backward on his hands and knees until he hit dry concrete.

He sat against the wall, his leg bleeding through torn fabric, his hand slick with dark, foul blood, his breath coming fast and shallow. He was down to a ninety eight health, sitting on eleven Mana, alone in the dark with the water still black and still ahead of him, and no way of knowing yet if that thing had been the only one waiting in it.

He wiped his face with his sleeve, his eyes fixed on the pool, his fingers slowly curling into fists.

’If Holt and the rest kill the boss, I’m as good as done for,’ the thought came unbidden.

"I’m not rotting here with these monsters!"