Chapter 146: Up Close And personal

Kael’s mind built the sequence instantly. Smoke spreads, line of sight breaks, panic triggers accidental friendly fire, and the contract snaps shut like a trap.

It wasn’t murder by blade. It was murder by rule.

Petrov wanted the Tower to punish the Sun Clan for him.

That was the kind of sabotage that looked “clean” on paper while still killing people.

Kael hurried back toward the boss, hearing one last word before he departed, “You saw that?”

The words were quiet but sharp, and they scraped Kael’s nerves.

Someone had either sensed the disturbance of [Presence] near Petrov’s group, or they were sharper than Kael wanted to admit. Either way, it meant his window was closing.

Kael made it to the boss’s side and removed [Presence]

“Trouble!” He said to Iori.

The Basilisk’s head snapped toward him immediately, like a hungry dog hearing its bowl. The sudden aggro shift was brutal. The creature’s pupils tightened, and it took a step that shook the ground enough to make dust drift down from above.

“Shit, get back into stealth, you’re ruining the aggro!”

“I can’t, we’re in deep shit!” Kael turned his head toward the Snakes. They began acting.

The boss was thinking in the rhythm of the fight, in aggro and positioning. Kael was thinking about the next ten seconds, about smoke and panic and contract punishment.

He could already see movement at the slope, one of Petrov’s archers raising an arm, the grenade ready to fly.

“You have a health potion on you?” He asked.

“I do, why?”

The Basilisk lunged, jaws wide, saliva stringing between teeth that looked like carved stone. Kael’s body moved on instinct, feet slipping across damp ground, the monster’s breath hitting him like rotten heat.

“Hand it over,” Kael said

He kept the boss in his peripheral vision while he retreated, because if the boss didn’t understand what was coming, they were all dead.

The creature had bloody murder painted in his eyes once Kael returned to reality and ignored all the battering and injuries the rest of the Sun Clan were dealing to him.

It didn’t care about the Sun Clan’s strikes. It cared that its target had returned. The Basilisk’s anger looked almost personal. Well, it was very personal in fact.

“Fuck, this won’t help if you get your head bit! But here,” he said as he pulled out a bottle and hurled it toward Kael.

The bottle arced through the air, glass catching a faint glint of light. Kael reached with his gauntleted hand, calculating the impact in a split second. The last thing he needed was for it to shatter in his grip and turn into useless wet shards.

Kael grabbed it mid-air after a small jump.

Thankfully, the impact was soft enough that he grabbed the bottle and went back into [Presence] immediately afterward.

The world forgot him again. The Basilisk’s rage had nowhere to land, and it responded the way stupid power always did, by trying to destroy everything around it.

This infuriated the basilisk as it began lashing and bashing at the ground, frustrated beyond belief.

Stone cracked. Dirt erupted. The creature’s tail whipped, smashing into the floor with enough force to send pebbles skipping. The sound of it echoed through the cavern, and Kael used that chaos as cover to move and reposition while reorganizing his thoughts.

His attention moved away from the raging Basilisk. He was looking in the distance toward the slope for the worst.

And the worst came to happen.

One of the archers hurled the smoke bomb, and it immediately detonated in the middle of the area.

The grenade hit the ground and burst like a flower of gray. Smoke poured out fast, thicker than normal camp smoke, the kind designed to flood lungs and eyes and turn a battlefield into guesswork.

It swallowed the Sun Clan’s formation in seconds. Shapes turned into silhouettes. Silhouettes turned into nothing.

The Basilisk’s massive outline became a moving shadow with teeth inside it, and that was worse than seeing it clearly, because now every accidental movement could be fatal.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!” Everyone went into a panic.

Voices overlapped. Boots scraped. Someone coughed hard. Someone else screamed a warning that didn’t specify direction.

Kael heard a weapon swing through empty air and knew exactly what Petrov wanted, confusion sharp enough to force a mistake.

“Everyone, back away, hug the walls, don’t attack!” the boss gave successive commands.

The boss’s voice cut through the smoke like a rope thrown into drowning water. Hug the walls. Don’t attack. Don’t break the contract by mistake.

Kael respected the discipline in that. But not the person commanding it.

Everyone expected the snakes to backstab them, but they didn’t expect it to be like this. Not with smoke blinding them, because this would not break the contract, but would break line of sight; the basilisk was bound to claim a few lives, even by luck if it grazes one of the climbers.

Kael could hear the Basilisk moving, heavy steps, breath, the scrape of scales against stone. In smoke, even a grazing tail could crush ribs. This was exactly the kind of chaos that didn’t count as a direct attack between allies, yet still produced bodies.

“I got you!” Kael shouted as loud as he could.

The boss, who just placed his back against the wall, looked hopefully in the direction from which Kael’s voice echoed.

Kael pulled out the fire rune from his palm, and then the Anchor rune afterward.

His gauntlets felt heavier the moment he committed to it, as if they knew what was coming. He could feel his internal energy like a reservoir that was about to be drained hard.

The smoke made it difficult to judge spacing, but Kael didn’t need to see everything. He needed to create an opening. And this attempt would cost him dearly.

“Shit, this better work.” He said as he raised both palms high up and then slammed them down toward the ground.

Heft was the only rune that was left in the gauntlets. And that was something.

Heft by itself was a monstrous rune. It doubled the cost of use. Meaning that his internal energy would dip hard. Especially with both palms swung down. And since it’s no longer ’Anchored’, it will release all of its power at once.

Finally, without the fire rune to release the ’hefted’ internal energy. Then all the power would be applied to the ’force’ that Kael unleashed on the ground.

The logic was brutal and simple. If he couldn’t burn the energy off safely, it would turn into raw impact. Kael didn’t have time to do elegant rune work.

The shockwave came in sound first. An ear-rending explosion of force that rattled the cave.

Dust, moss, dirt, and stone fell from high above when the follow-up took to the ground. A shockwave of pure force that shoved the smoke away from the area and back toward the only path possible for air to exit.

The slope.

The smoke tore apart in a rushing wave, blasted outward as a curtain yanked away. For a moment, visibility returned in jagged pockets, enough to see the Basilisk’s outline, enough to see the Sun Clan pressed against walls, enough to see Petrov’s people in their positions, trying to look innocent. The cave roof shed debris in response, and Kael felt grit strike his shoulders and hair as the air roared past.

The clearing of the area was all the Sun Clan needed to regain their senses. They could fight again, or even leave and let the snakes handle the enraged basilisk.

However, for Kael, things were a tiny bit different.

After all, with his incredible luck, he found himself right in front of the opened jaws of the basilisk with a notification that followed immediately.

[You’ve been crippled. Both of your arms are broken.]

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