Chapter 46-The Level-2 Core

Chapter 46: 46-The Level-2 Core

A Level 2 carcass did not dissolve as fast as a Level 1.

Because the Silt-Serpent’s scales and meat were saturated with dense, Foundation-grade lunar ichor, the Silver Eye above took nearly five minutes to pull the twenty-five-foot body apart into silver mist.

Sol and Valera worked like two practiced butchers on a clock.

Using the cracked hatchet and Valera’s frost-edged gauntlets, they pried off thirty of the heaviest, uncracked slate scales along the back, which were too dense with mineralized mana for the sky to dissolve once separated from the flesh.

Then they hacked out the two four-inch fangs and the three bone-ice horns from the skull, and carved four massive, forty-pound slabs of clear, marbled white meat from the midsection.

When the rest of the carcass finally vanished into a swirling pillar of silver dust, what dropped into the mud wasn’t a rough, jagged shard like the Blighted beasts left behind.

It was a perfectly smooth, walnut-sized sphere of deep, translucent sapphire that hummed with a low, physical vibration against the frozen dirt, immediately frosting the mud for two feet around it.

A Level 2 Low-Stage Crowned Core.

Sol picked it up with a scrap of boar-hide so it wouldn’t freeze to his fingers, stuffed it into his pouch, and helped Valera load the meat, scales, and horns onto a drag-sled they had woven out of pine branches.

They didn’t stay in the Sunken Flats, the smell of Level 2 blood on the wind would bring every scavenger and neighboring Crowned predator within ten miles before dark.

They hauled the sled three miles back south, overlooking the ruined highway, and holed up inside their main winter camp: an abandoned, pre-collapse concrete bunker built into the side of a dry limestone cliff, with a heavy steel blast-door that only Sol had the strength to slide shut.

Inside the bunker, it was dry, windless, and smelled like six months of home, cured furs piled in the corner for a bed, stacks of dried meat hanging from iron ceiling hooks, and their flat black cooking-slate sitting in the center of the floor.

Once the steel door was barred, Sol stripped off his ruined, venom-soaked undershirt and sat down on the furs, his teeth finally starting to chatter as the adrenaline wore off.

The Level 2 frost-venom on his chest hadn’t washed off.

A hand-sized patch of skin right over his breastbone was dead, sunken black, and cold as river stone, creeping slowly inward toward his heart and fighting his tired furnace to a standstill.

"Sit still," Valera said.

She didn’t even take her coat off first.

She dropped to her knees between his legs, pulled off both Night-iron gauntlets, and pressed her bare, pale hands flat against the black, venom-rotted patch on his sternum.

Over the past six months, Valera had discovered something about her moon bloodline that not even her tutors in the Second Ring had known: because her frost was the pure form of lunar energy, she didn’t just generate cold, she had some kind authority over lesser cold, although for now it was not that useful for now.

Valera closed her eyes, her brow furrowing as her breath misted against Sol’s chin.

With a slow, pulling motion of her fingers, she latched onto the foreign, tainted Level 2 venom-frost buried in Sol’s chest muscles and dragged it backward out of his skin into her own palms, neutralizing the poison while Sol pushed a steady wave of solar heat up from underneath to flush the dead capillaries with fresh red blood.

Sol let out a long, shaky groan, his hands coming up to rest lightly on her hips as the crushing tightness in his chest finally broke.

Within two minutes, the dead black patch on his sternum receded, leaving behind healthy, dark-bronze skin marked only by a faint, pale-blue pattern that looked like a frost-fern right over his heart.

Valera opened her eyes and blew out a cold breath, shaking her hands to scatter a few drops of extracted blue venom onto the concrete floor, where they fizzled out.

She didn’t pull back from between his knees. Instead, she stayed right there, looking closely at the new frost-fern scar on his chest, then up at his scarred face and the three new holes in his right shoulder where the ice needles had hit him.

"You were two seconds away from losing your left arm in that thing’s gullet," Valera said quietly, her hands sliding up from his sternum to rest against the sides of his warm neck.

"My arm’s fine," Sol said, looking at the warm golden-blue glow of her face in his thermal sight. "Little peeled off around the wrist, that’s all."

"And your hatchet is cracked through the tang."

"I’ll get a new one."

"From where, Sol? Marrow only has rusted car parts."

Valera leaned forward, resting her forehead against his collarbone with a long, tired sigh, letting the rising heat of his recovering body soak through her clothes.

"That was the weakest Level 2 beast in that bog. A Low-Stage Silt-Serpent. It didn’t even have a real level 2 skill yet, and it nearly bit your steel in half and froze your heart through your ribs."

Sol wrapped his arms around her waist, resting his chin on top of her braided white hair.

"We killed it, didn’t we?" Sol murmured, his thumb rubbing slow circles against the patched leather at the small of her back.

"Six months ago, Captain Kael was a Late-Stage Level 1 and he put five inches of steel through my belly before I could blink. Today we walked into a marsh and killed a Crowned monster with a cracked fire-axe and a pair of gloves."

Valera tilted her head up, her chin resting on his sternum so she could look straight into his blind, glowing orange eyes.

"How far can we push before we hit the wall, Sol?" she asked softly.

"I’m at twenty-eight percent Peak right now. With that Level 2 core in your pouch, by tomorrow morning I’ll be past forty, maybe fifty. In another two months, we’re going to hit the next level with our current progress rate."