Chapter 439: The Ladder
Chapter 439: The Ladder
Bruce thought about Theron’s ’I don’t want to kill that.’ and sighed..
He understood it. There was something in him that agreed with it.
He set that aside. It made him wonder about Theron’s past. What was his past that made him have this kind of mentality?
But also Kael said It was food and he’s right. It was beautiful and it was food, and in this realm those were not separate categories.
And Bruce was hungry.
"On three," Bruce said quietly. "I’ll take the lead one with bullets. Kael, second one with flame. Theron, your scythe is back?"
Theron checked his hand. He extended his fingers and concentrated, and the long curved blade bloomed into existence in his grip the way it had in the mist. He had recovered just enough soul energy on the carriage and at the Guild to call it again. The scythe was thinner than it had been before, a sign of how depleted he still was, but it was solid enough to cut.
"Back," Theron confirmed, voice steadier than Bruce had expected.
"Third one with the scythe, then. Don’t push past your reserves. If you can’t condense it for more than one swing, drop back and use your fists. We’ll cover you."
"Yes," Theron said.
"On three."
The three of them moved.
---
Bruce reached out and drew up his soul energy.
It came more easily now than it had in the mist, even with the hairline cracks still in his soul-body, the energy was there, ready, responsive. He pushed it out through his palm. The familiar black ink-like substance pooled in the air in front of his hand, and he shaped it without thinking, the way a hand finds the shape of a tool it knows.
Bullets.
A dozen dark spheres formed and hung there, waiting.
"Three," he said.
He fired.
The bullets streaked across the open space and struck the lead deer-creature in the side of its slender neck and chest. They were small and dense and very fast, exactly the shapes he had needed in the mist, and the F-rank fresh soul of the creature was no match for them. The bark-plates on its body cracked. The creature staggered, made one small confused sound, the breath-and-chime sound, now uneven, and started to fall.
Beside Bruce, Kael was already moving. Flame leapt off his fist and arced toward the second deer in a tight contained ball. It hit the creature mid-flank. The flame did not explode this time, Kael was clearly conserving energy too, and instead clung to the bark-plates and spread, a fast burning sheet of fire that the deer could not shake off. It cried out, a higher version of the chime sound, and bolted sideways, but Kael was already throwing the second fireball before the first had finished its work.
The third deer ran.
It turned to bolt back into the trees, and Theron, to Bruce’s small surprise, was fast. The young man pushed off from the soft mossy ground in one long stride, scythe held back behind him, and closed the distance in a half-dozen running steps. The deer was quick, but the scythe was long, and Theron’s swing came in low and clean, taking the creature’s hind legs out at a single arc.
The deer crashed forward, twisting. Theron, eyes wide, brought the scythe back around in a second swing that was less practiced, clumsier than the first, the swing of someone who had no formal training, just terror and a sharp blade, and the second swing came down across the creature’s neck and finished it.
The deer’s chime-cry cut off mid-sound.
The forest was suddenly very quiet.
---
The three of them stood there a moment, breathing.
Bruce’s first deer was finishing falling, slumping slowly onto the soft moss, its faint blue light dimming. Kael’s second deer was on its side, the fire on its bark-plates slowly going out as the creature stopped struggling. Theron’s deer lay in the place where it had tried to flee, its long delicate neck cut nearly through, its leaf-tipped branch-crown dark.
It had taken less than ten seconds.
And then.
Bruce felt it.
It came from the first deer, the one his bullets had killed. A small wash of something, leaving the dying creature and crossing the open ground between them and pouring, very gently, into Bruce’s own soul-body.
It was warm. Not hot. Just warm, the warmth of food going down on a cold day, but spread through his whole self at once instead of his belly. It moved into his chest, into his arms, into the cracks that the carriage food had not finished healing. He felt those hairline fractures close. The thin pale lines across the back of his hand, the remnants of his near-dissolution, sealed shut and faded.
And underneath that, more importantly, he felt stronger.
It was not a dramatic increase. He had not jumped a rank. He had not leapt to the next plateau. But the energy that flowed out of the dying creature and into him was substantial. His core, which had been thin from the fight in the mist and the long depletion, filled, not all the way but a meaningful step toward full. His soul-body felt, for the first time since arriving in this realm, steady, fully steady, with no hollow ache and no crack anywhere.
A small portion of the deer’s essence had absorbed into him automatically. Just by killing it, by being the soul whose strike took it down, he had taken in a piece of its energy directly. The rest, the bulk of it, the meat and the core, was still in the body lying on the moss.
This was before he had even eaten anything.
Bruce looked at his own hands, slowly. The cracks were gone. The dim guttering glow of his soul-body had brightened, not to a flare, but to a clean, full, healthy light. He looked at Kael.
Kael had stopped where he stood, both hands open at his sides, eyes slightly wide. He was looking at his own glow with the same surprised attention.
"Did you feel that?" Theron asked behind them, voice small with wonder. He had walked back from his kill with his scythe still in his hand, and he too was looking at himself, at the way his soul-body had brightened, at how the cracks across his chest had simply gone.
"I felt it," Bruce said.
"What was that?"
"Some of the beast’s essence. It came into me when it died. I didn’t do anything to make it happen, it just came."
Kael let out a slow breath. He was already grinning, but the grin was different now, sharper, more focused, the grin of a man who had just understood the shape of his entire future in this realm.
"That’s the cycle," he said. "That’s how it works here. You kill a fresh soul, a piece of its essence flows into the soul that killed it. Automatic. The realm itself decides. You don’t have to know any technique. You don’t have to do any ritual. You kill, you receive."
"And then we still get to eat the rest," Theron said. He was looking at the body of his deer, and there was a new clarity in his face.
"And then we still get to eat the rest," Kael confirmed. "And then we still get to sell what we don’t eat. The kill gives us essence. The meat gives us a meal. The parts give us points." He raised one finger. "One kill. Three benefits at once."
He turned to Bruce.
"This is how you climb in this realm. This is the way."
Bruce nodded slowly.
It was clear to him too. He had felt it. Some part of him, the part that had spent decades in the physical realm learning the slow grind of cultivation, recognized the shape of what had just happened. In his old world, advancing had meant sitting cross-legged for hours and slowly absorbing ambient mana, breakthrough after careful breakthrough, every gain hard-earned. Here, the same advancement was packaged differently. Here, you went out and you killed a thing that was made by the realm to be killed for this purpose, and the realm gave you a portion of its strength back directly, the way water flows downhill. The labor was different. The principle was the same.
And it scaled.
The realm sent him a small amount because the creature was small and weak. F-rank kill, F-rank reward. A larger creature would give more. An E-rank would give meaningfully more. A D, more again. Climb the dungeons. Kill bigger things. Take in larger essences. Eat the cores of the strongest beasts. Sell the rest. Use the points to buy food, shelter, equipment, training, healing, time. Every step funded the next step.
He thought, briefly, of the long ladder ahead, F to E to D to C to B to A to S to SS to SSS. A ladder that, sitting in his apartment in the labyrinth, he had not been sure how to climb. He was sure now. He had seen the first rung. He had felt the system give him strength for taking it. The rest of the climb was just more rungs of the same kind.