Free Web NovelChapter 17: Arriving At the Core, The Target of Terror Minion
The gate to the Tier-3 Terrorized Dimension stood ten meters tall, a slab of swirling grey haze framed by two stone pillars carved with coiling serpents.
Five tents around it. Five teams. One dimension.
Aidan stood near the Blue Vortex camp with his hands in his coat pockets, eyes drifting from face to face.
’Inspect, inspect, inspect.’ His title and his curiosity worked in tandem. ’Boring. Boring. Boring. None of them are players.’
[The chance of two Transcendent Players appearing in the same low-tier contest is extremely low, Player Aidan.]
’Yeah, yeah. Still gotta check.’
He kept scanning.
The five guilds had each sent their best C-rank Hunters, and the camps made no effort to hide their rivalry.
Blazing Wings, ranked 28th, had the loudest tent. Their captain was a broad guy with a shaved head and burn scars up both forearms, surrounded by four others who carried themselves as if they’d already won.
Whispering Light, ranked 52nd, kept to themselves. Hooded robes, soft voices, a girl at the center who never once looked up from the small bell spinning above her palm.
Leonus Arten, ranked 73rd, were the showy ones. Golden armor, polished weapons, a lion sigil stamped on every chest plate.
Jadeblade, ranked 86th, were the youngest of the lot, five lean teens with twin short swords strapped across their backs, jittery and eager.
And then there was Blue Vortex, ranked 34th.
Aidan’s team. ƒreewebɳovel.com
Marvin, the big one with the Frenzied Warrior talent, cracked his neck. Carol fidgeted with a sprouting flower between her fingers. The Vale twins, Regis and Bella, stood close together, fire and ice, saying nothing.
"Listen up." Beatrix walked the line, handing each of them a flat black disc the size of a coin. "Core Compass. Every team gets one. It reads the concentration and frequency of the dimension’s energy and points you toward the corrupted core. Higher the reading, the closer you are."
Aidan turned the disc over. A faint needle of light hovered above it, dead and dim for now.
"The dimension is two mountains with a river running around them," Beatrix continued. "The core will be somewhere central. Reach it, purify it, and it’s ours. The other four teams want the same thing. So expect a fight."
"Sounds fun." Aidan grinned.
"It’s a contest, not a brawl. You have a safety band." She tapped the wristband on his arm. "Trigger it and you eject. Don’t die being stubborn."
’Like I could die from this.’ Aidan’s lips twitched. But he nodded. "Got it, Aunt Beatrix."
A horn sounded across the camps.
"Teams, link up. Entry in ten seconds."
Aidan glanced at his four teammates.
"You heard her. Grab hands. We appear together if we go in together."
Marvin grunted and grabbed Aidan’s wrist. Carol took the other. Bella and Regis closed the circle.
The grey haze of the gate brightened.
[The dimension you are entering is a severed chunk of a living planet somewhere across the Nine Realms Tree. It is cut off, its original spot replaced by a void. This cut-off chunk is sealed in its own pocket, yet still tethered to its source. It feeds on that connection. Destroying the corrupted core and stabilizing the tether is what makes a dimension permanent.]
’So we’re stealing a slice of someone’s world.’ Aidan blinked. ’Wild.’
"GO!"
The five teams stepped into the gate at once.
Cold haze swallowed them.
And spat them out somewhere else.
...
Aidan’s boots hit damp moss.
He looked up.
Two mountains loomed against a pale violet sky, vast and green-grey, their peaks lost in slow-drifting cloud. Between them and around them coiled a wide river, glittering silver, its current humming with a low, constant energy.
His four teammates stood beside him, blinking at the same view.
"Random drop point." Bella scanned the treeline, frost already curling off her shoulders. "We’re on the western slope. The other teams are scattered."
"Good." Marvin rolled his shoulders. "Means nobody jumped us on arrival."
Aidan pulled out the Core Compass.
The needle of light swung, steadied, and pointed straight between the two mountains. The reading pulsed faintly.
"Core’s that way. Center, low. Probably under the river." Aidan pocketed it. "Let’s move."
They moved.
The wilderness here was thick and alive, exotic in the way these places always were, all wrong colors and wrong shapes. Monsters prowled the slope, wolf-things with bark for skin and beetles the size of dogs.
Tier-3 monsters.
Nothing.
Marvin laughed and met the first wolf-pack head-on, his fists swinging, every hit landing harder as his own knuckles split. Carol sprouted glowing flowers across her teammates that lightened their steps and dulled their wounds.
Bella raised a hand, and a dozen ice spikes punched a charging beetle into shards.
Regis loosed an arrow of dark-orange flame that burned three monsters down to ash mid-stride.
Aidan barely had to do anything.
A wolf lunged at his flank. He pointed two fingers lazily.
Five Magic Bullets stitched it apart before it finished its leap.
"Show-off," Carol muttered.
"You’re growing flowers on people." Aidan grinned. "We’re all show-offs here."
They cut through the slope in clean order, the readings on the compass climbing with every kilometer.
...
The mountains narrowed.
The river slid between them through a stone gorge, and at the base of the gorge, where the water poured down into a black gap in the rock, the Core Compass screamed white.
"Down there." Bella peered over the ledge. "There’s a cavern under the stream." freeweɓnovel.cøm
They descended along the wet rock, the roar of the river above them fading into a deep, swallowing hush.
The cavern opened wide.
And it was already crowded.
Aidan stepped out last, eyes adjusting to the dim blue glow that throbbed from the heart of the chamber. A jagged crystal mass jutted up from the cavern floor, veined with black corruption, pulsing like a slow heartbeat.
The core.
And around it, spread across the cavern, the other four teams.
Everyone had arrived at once.
Blazing Wings on the far side. Whispering Light to the right, bell still spinning. Leonus Arten near the entrance, golden armor catching the glow. Jadeblade pressed against the left wall, twin swords already drawn.
Nobody moved.
Twenty-five Hunters in one room, all of them wanting the same crystal, all of them knowing exactly what came next.
Aidan, by reflex, started scanning.
’Inspect. Inspect. Inspect.’
And the beep he’d been ignoring since the entry sharpened into something cold.
His eyes pulled toward it like a needle finding north.
To the Blazing Wings team.
To a girl standing at the back of them.
Long black ponytail. Slim build. A short spear loose in her grip, like she was holding it only because someone had handed it to her.
Aidan inspected her.
[Mira Halden]
[Hunter Rank: C]
[Talent: Hollow Step (B)]
The status barely registered.
It was her eyes.
Not afraid. Not eager. Not anything.
Flat, dark, unfeeling, the way still water looks right before it freezes over. Aidan had spent more lifetimes than he could count looking into despair, in mirrors, in the dark, in the eyes of every broken version of himself the Darkness ever made.
He knew that look.
She wasn’t here to win.
She’d already let go of the part of herself that wanted to.
’There you are.’ His jaw tightened. ’That’s the one.’
[Confirmed. That is the Hunter in contact with the Terror Master’s Minion. The despair you sense is the foothold. The Minion feeds on a soul that has stopped wanting to live, then fills the hollow with itself.]
’She didn’t give up. She just had too much pain, and wants to end it with a bang against the one who gave her that pain.’ Aidan’s stomach turned, not from disgust. From recognition.
[It’s unlikely that the Terror Minion would make her a Terror Harbinger here. Its goal is to turn her into a rift in a crowded place.]
’And the easy fix is to kill her before that happens.’ Aidan’s eyes narrowed. ’But she hasn’t done anything. In fact, she suffered at someone’s hand, and the Terror Minion used that suffering to make her a time bomb.’
[The quest allows either outcome. Kill her, or prevent the turn.]
’Yeah. I heard it the first time.’
His fists slowly curled in his pockets.
Across the cavern, the standoff was fraying.
The Blazing Wings captain rolled his scarred shoulders and let a curl of fire snake up his arm.
"Well." His voice carried flat across the stone. "We all see the core. No point being polite."
The bell over the Whispering Light girl’s palm stopped spinning.
Leonus Arten’s golden line shifted into a wedge.
Jadeblade’s twins crouched low.
Beside Aidan, Bella’s breath fogged white, and Regis’s bowstring began to glow.
Tension stretched the air until it hummed louder than the river overhead.
A contest. Five teams. One core. And only one way it ever ended.
The fight was held breath away.
And Aidan stood at the center of it doing arithmetic no one else in the room could even see.
’Win the dimension for Blue Vortex. Get that girl out before the thing inside her cracks open. And do it without showing a single card I don’t want shown.’
He exhaled, slowly.
’...Right.’
His eyes blazed faint gold under the blue light.
’Let’s make this messy.’
