Chapter 63: Jon and Stark

Chapter 63: Chapter 63: Jon and Stark

Jason ducked into a quiet alley a few streets from the meeting point, pulling the mask free from his bag.

He paused.

A thin crack ran along the left cheekbone of the porcelain, barely visible unless you were looking for it.

’Didn’t have that when I bought it.’

He turned it over once, thinking back through the last few fights.

’Probably the Pagoda. Something clipped it during the chaos and I never noticed.’

He decided it wasn’t worth fixing today, settled the mask over his face anyway, and summoned Kane’s sword into his grip before heading out, jogging the rest of the way to the meeting point as a loose, easy warmup.

He arrived at exactly three.

---

Two figures were waiting near the Gate, both young, both armed with swords, and both radiating some tension that Jason couldn’t quite place.

Then he felt their cultivation properly.

Both of them were at the first Stage of the Third Level.

They looked like they couldn’t have been more than eighteen.

’That’s borderline absurd.’

"You’re Ash," one of them said, not quite a question, sizing him up with open skepticism.

"I’m Jon."

"And I’m Stark," the other added, arms crossed, already glancing sideways at Jon like the introduction was itself a competition.

"We only really needed a third for approval, so would you mind staying out of our way while we’re in there?" Jon said, flatly.

"Nothing personal."

"Didn’t take it personally." Jason replied dryly.

Even in that short exchange, Jason could feel the shape of whatever history sat between them, a rivalry that had clearly been simmering for quite a while.

He let his senses settle over the Gate itself and felt something that didn’t match the listing at all.

’This isn’t D-Rank. Not entirely. There’s something stronger buried in there.’

He glanced at the two of them, both carefully not reacting to anything, and understood immediately.

’They know. And they’re not telling me.’

’Fine by me.’

---

The Gate opened into dense, shadowed terrain, quiet at first, nothing moving in the gray half-light beyond the entrance.

They advanced carefully, all three on edge.

Jon and Stark almost seemed to stumble over each other, both aiming to be at the very front of the team.

Jason just watched from behind.

Then the first squad of ogres broke from the tree line, hulking, D-Rank, clubs the size of small trees.

Jon and Stark moved as one, blades flashing in a rapid, competitive rhythm, each of them clearly keeping count of who claimed more kills.

Jason hung back, watching, mildly amused.

’Not here for me at all, are they. This is just round forty of whatever’s been going on between them.’

A handful of ogres broke off and barreled toward him instead, and he dealt with them efficiently.

Kane’s sword cut clean through the armored hides of the beasts without much ceremony.

They advanced deeper, the ogre numbers swelling until even Jon and Stark’s competitive pace started to strain, and Jason was forced to stepp in properly then, trimming the overflow before it could overwhelm either of the boys.

Then the C-Ranks arrived.

---

Larger, meaner and radiating a presence that made the earlier ogres look like training dummies.

Jon and Stark, for all their raw talent, had clearly never faced anything at this tier, and their confident rhythm fell apart almost immediately, forced into an awkward, defensive alliance just to survive the first exchange.

Jason watched them get driven back, clubs the size of tree trunks slamming the ground where they’d stood a heartbeat earlier, and then the dungeon boss stepped out from behind the rest, dwarfing even the other C-Ranks.

The boys’ combined effort barely kept them alive.

Jason moved the instant he saw an opening close behind Jon, a C-Rank ogre’s club already rising for a killing blow.

Sun Shift tore the distance away in an instant, and his blade, glowing faint red with concentrated heat, punched clean through the creature’s heart from behind.

[System: C-Rank monster defeated.]

He ignored the notification.

"Take care of the others boys!" he barked at the boys.

"I’ve got the boss."

He didn’t wait for a response.

The boss met him with a club strike that cracked the ground on impact, and Jason ducked under it, cutting deep into the tendon behind its knee, the limb buckling instantly.

He followed through fast, driving the superheated blade up through the base of its skull before it could recover its footing.

It dropped.

---

By the time he turned back, Jon and Stark had each managed a kill of their own against the remaining C-Ranks, one apiece, though both were breathing hard and visibly rattled.

One C-Rank remained, alongside a scattered handful of D-Ranks still closing in.

Jason lowered his sword and didn’t rejoin the fight.

"You’re both sloppy," he said instead, watching them reset their stances.

Jon shot him a sharp look.

"You’re barely surviving out here."

Jason crossed his arms.

"You’ve both been trained to fight against actual people.

Human opponents telegraph differently than beasts do. You’re reading these things like they’re swordsmen, and they’re not."

Stark hesitated. "...What should we be reading, then?"

"Weight shift before a strike, not stance. These things don’t feint. When the weight commits, the attack’s already decided. Watch the shoulders, not the blade."

They tried it, and very quickly, the fight slowly shifted in their favor as Jason called out corrections from the sideline, dry and economical.

The scene was reminiscent of his lessons with Darius.

---

Stark finished the last ogre with a clean thrust through its throat, and both boys turned to look at Jason, equal parts suspicion and open awe.

"How are you this strong?" Stark asked, studying him.

"Your cultivation level is lower than ours."

Jason gave them both a flat, unimpressed look.

"You’re Third Level cultivators who couldn’t tell a suppressed signature from a genuine one.

That should concern you more than it concerns me." Jason said, shaking his head in disappointment.

Both of them went slightly pale.

"...Sorry," Jon muttered.

"We should’ve noticed," Stark added.

Jason let the silence sit a beat longer than necessary, savoring it.

"Now," he said, gesturing toward the fallen ogres scattered across the clearing, "harvest the cores. All of them. You have one hour."

Jon blinked. "All of them? There’s at least twenty."

"One hour."

Neither of them argued.

Jason settled onto a nearby rock, arms crossed, watching with open amusement as two genuinely talented Third Level cultivators scrambled across the battlefield, cracking ogre skulls with increasingly desperate efficiency as the clock ran down.

"Faster," he called, unhelpfully, when Stark fumbled a particularly stubborn skull.

"We’re trying!"

"Try harder. I’ve seen toddlers move faster than this."

Jon shot him a look that suggested he very much wanted to argue, then visibly thought better of it, apparently having decided somewhere in the last hour that questioning the strange, inexplicably powerful masked man currently calling himself their master was not a battle worth fighting.

They finished with barely ten minutes to spare, both of them soaked in sweat and ogre blood, hauling the collected cores into a pair of overstuffed sacks.

"We’re headed to the hunter association.

" Jason said, already walking.

"Keep up boys."

They fell in behind him without complaint, and the three of them made their way out of the Gate together, Jon and Stark trading quiet, exhausted glances at each other.