Chapter 10: Fighting for Beast Cores

The scavenger team’s news spread through Grevall Town very fast.

By the time he and Serah reached the gates, a crowd had already formed; low-tier demons, scavengers, and a few armed groups moving with more discipline than the rest. Everyone was pushing in the same direction, out past the town’s boundary markers toward wherever the team had found their kill.

"The team leader said there’s quite a lot of carcasses out there," Serah said, falling into step beside him without breaking stride. "A few beasts were already scavenging the site when they left. That’s why the horn sounded. Whatever’s out there is big enough to draw half the town."

"Is that good or bad?"

"Depends on how fast you move and how good you are at not dying." She glanced at him. "You’re coming either way, aren’t you?"

"I don’t have anything better to do."

Serah almost smiled at that.

"There’s something you need to understand before we get there," she said, as the crowd thinned into a loose stream moving across the open wasteland. "A fresh kill doesn’t stay fresh forever... that should be common sense. You’ve noticed that already, probably."

Koda thought of the demon rat and the thin, apologetic thread of essence it had given him.

"I have."

"It gets worse the longer a body sits. Eventually most of them bloats. Carcasses from anything peak-stage Demon Awakening Realm, Demon Core Realm, or even higher start building pressure inside as the essence destabilizes, and if nobody claims it in time..." She made a small, sharp gesture with one hand. "It ruptures, violently. Anyone standing close gets torn apart by the blast, and anything that was still inside the body gets scattered and wasted."

"So there’s a timer."

"There’s always a timer. And it’s not just the explosion you have to worry about. A rupture releases a surge of infernal essence into the air, that draws beasts and demons in from a long way off. It might even attract things stronger than those who are already fighting over the body." Serah’s expression tightened slightly. "I’ve seen a dispute over a carcass turn into a massacre because everyone was too busy fighting each other to notice something worse had shown up."

Koda filed the warning away carefully. ’A countdown and an alarm bell, both built into the same prize. Whoever gets there first and gets out fastest wins twice over.’

The site came into view a few minutes later, and the chaos Serah had promised was already well underway.

Two enormous carcasses lay sprawled across a wide crater of broken black stone, hides torn open, steam still rising from wounds too large to have come from anything Koda had faced so far.

Dozens of demons swarmed over both bodies, and dozens more fought each other on the ground around them, scavengers and low-tier demons locked in vicious, scrambling fights over scraps that had already been torn free.

It wasn’t organized. It wasn’t even close to organized. It was simply chaos with a shared target.

"There." Serah pointed toward the larger of the two carcasses, where a cluster of armed demons in matching gear, the actual scavenger teams, held a rough perimeter around the body’s chest cavity. "That’s the real prize. A beast with a beast core. Everyone fighting over scraps out here is fighting over what’s left after the scavenger teams takes their cut."

"And we want the scraps, or the core?"

"We want what the chaos pushes us to." Serah’s eyes moved rapidly across the scene, calculating. "There. A second carcass, near the shoulder joint. Smaller core deposits form along major joints on a beast this size. The scavenger team’s focused on the main cavity. Nobody’s covering the shoulder yet."

Koda looked where she was pointing. A knot of low-tier demons already fought over that exact spot, snapping and clawing at each other with the same desperate hunger he’d seen in every corner of Hell since waking up here.

"That’s going to be contested."

"Everything out here is contested." Serah met his eyes.

"Alright, I watch your back while you dig the cores out," Koda said, understanding the shape of the arrangement before she finished explaining it. "You know where to cut. I make sure nobody interrupts you while you’re doing it."

"That’s the idea." Serah studied him for a moment longer. "I feel you’re strong enough that most of what’s out here won’t be your match. But that’s just my thoughts, nothing more."

"So, we have ourselves a deal."

They moved together, Serah low and quick, cutting a path toward the carcass’s shoulder joint while Koda stayed close behind her, talons already extended.

The first demon to challenge them didn’t last long.

It came at Koda from the sides, snarling, more interested in driving him off than actually fighting, the way most of the scavengers out here seemed to operate; opportunists testing for weakness rather than committing to anything serious.

Koda caught its first swipe on his forearm, felt claws scrape uselessly against his hardened scales, and answered with a single strike that put it down before it understood it had made a mistake.

He didn’t stop to think about it. There wasn’t time, and more importantly, there wasn’t a reason to. This wasn’t the basement in Earth, where he’d needed a moment to settle something in himself before acting. This was simple math: a weaker demon had tried to take something from him, and he’d stopped it.

Behind him, Serah had already reached the shoulder joint, claws working fast and precise along a seam in the hide that Koda wouldn’t have noticed on his own.

Koda turned to meet the demons head on.

It went like that for longer than he expected; a steady rotation of challengers, some testing him out of hunger, others simply caught up in the frenzy of the moment and lashing out at whatever stood closest.

But none of them pushed him seriously.

At Peak Stage Demon Awakening Realm, with scales that barely felt their claws and talons that ended most fights in a single exchange, the disputes that had looked so dangerous from a distance resolved themselves quickly once he was actually standing in the middle of them.

He didn’t let the easy wins go to waste.

Each time a body dropped near him, he absorbs its essence between fights, quick and practiced now, drawing in whatever thin trickle of Infernal Essence a low-tier scavenger had to offer. It wasn’t much individually. But the fights kept coming, and the small gains added up nonetheless.

’Might as well take what’s offered. None of this essence is going anywhere otherwise.’

By the time Serah finally pulled a small, dense sphere free from deep within the shoulder joint, dark and faintly pulsing with contained essence, the chaos around the main carcass had only gotten worse.

Fights had spread outward in every direction, the scavenger team’s perimeter visibly straining under the pressure of too many desperate demons converging at once.

"That’s it," Serah said, turning the beast core over in her palm, something close to satisfaction crossing her face. "Smaller than what the main cavity’s producing, but better than nothing. This alone is worth more than most newcomers earn in their first few months here."

A sudden, booming laugh rolled across the crater, loud enough to cut through the surrounding noise entirely.

Every head within earshot turned toward the ridge above the site.

A demon stood silhouetted against the smoke-red sky, broad-shouldered, horned, arms crossed with the easy, theatrical confidence of someone who’d clearly made an entrance like this before.

"That’s Varkos," Serah muttered, her earlier satisfaction souring into something far more wary.

"Everyone," Varkos called down, voice carrying effortlessly over the chaos, "fuck off. The carcasses are mine. All of them. That includes you lot," he added, nodding toward the scavenger teams still holding their ground around the main cavity. "I’d hate to make this messier than it needs to be."