Chapter 156: Awakening

Kael fought off exhaustion with all he had. He couldn’t fall unconscious here, not now, not when he was stuck in a room with dozens of Zombies crowding its only door.

Not when the red zone was creeping in, and not when he noticed that the Momentum Rune Zombie was also approaching the area he was in.

The door behind him wasn’t just there, it was a living threat. Every few seconds it shuddered with another hit, another scrape, another dull thump as bodies pressed in from the corridor. Nails dragged along metal like someone sharpening a blade slowly.

Teeth clicked. The sound wasn’t loud, but it was constant, and constant sound did something nasty to the mind. It made you imagine what you couldn’t see. It made you picture hands slipping through a gap that didn’t exist yet.

Kael kept his back against the door anyway, forcing himself to stay upright. His arms felt like they were filled with wet sand. His legs were worse. His internal energy wasn’t screaming the way mana did when it ran dry, no skull-splitting migraine, no white-hot spike behind the eyes, but his body was slipping toward that heavy, sick collapse that didn’t ask permission. The kind where your eyes close mid-thought and you wake up as food.

And the map in his head, his real sense, kept whispering the worse part: the closing fire zone didn’t care about doors, and the Momentum Rune zombie wasn’t going to politely wait outside.

Kael pulled out the bottle of alcohol from his backpack. A Trick he learned from his mother was that whenever he had nausea or was feeling about to pass out, a strong whiff of the substance would shock your brain into reality.

The bottle felt absurdly normal in his hand. Cheap. Earth-normal. The kind of thing you’d find in a construction site first-aid box or tucked under someone’s sink. He’d carried it out of habit more than logic, gauze, scraps, whatever junk he’d been able to scavenge. In a place where the Tower turned the world into windows and loot, the bottle didn’t belong. Which meant it was perfect.

He twisted the cap with stiff fingers. For a heartbeat, his hands fumbled, clumsy from exhaustion, and the fear of dropping it flashed through him. If it shattered, it would be loud. Loud meant the door would get hit harder.

He managed it anyway.

And it kicked him like a donkey.

The fumes hit his nose and clawed their way into his brain like a hook. His eyes watered instantly. His stomach lurched, the nausea sharpening before it snapped into clarity.

It wasn’t pleasant. It was a slap. A harsh reminder that he was still awake, still here, still in control of his body, for however long that control lasted.

Kael took a breather and covered the bottle again, looking around, there was nothing he could use at this moment, his internal energy had stopped dipping and was in a state where it was neither recovering nor, going down.

He forced himself to blink slowly, to breathe slowly, to keep his thoughts from scattering. The room around him was cramped, utilitarian, with old shelves, dead monitors, and broken equipment half-swallowed by dust.

The burned zombie corpse on the floor still smoked faintly, and the smell of it mixed with damp concrete until the air tasted greasy. The door behind him vibrated again, and Kael felt the impact through his spine.

Internal energy sat in that ugly limbo state: not refilling, not draining, just hovering like a dying ember that refused to become flame again. He wasn’t “resting” so much as delaying collapse. His gauntlets were still on. The chain still hung between them. But without energy, they were just heavy metal gloves.

He took several deep breaths, though it didn’t help much since it was mixed with the burning fumes of the corpse in front of him and the dampness of the old room itself.

Breathing in that air felt like dragging a wet cloth through his lungs. He could taste soot. He could taste old rot. The kind of smell that stuck to the back of your throat and refused to leave, like a reminder: this place ends worlds.

Kael’s eyes flicked to the corpse again. The headless zombie body lay twisted, the severed head rolled near a corner like trash. Two cores sat on the floor, faintly gleaming. In a different situation, he’d have scooped them up instantly. Right now, he barely cared. Two cores didn’t matter if he couldn’t stand long enough to spend them.

He checked his earlier notifications.

[You have slain the basilisk of Getava.]

You have obtained the title [Race Ender]

You have obtained one Medium Core.

You have obtained [Darkness Rune]

You have obtained [Leather of the Basilisk of Getava]

The list went on describing how many of the materials he got from the loot, and they were a lot.

Kael’s eyes skimmed the lines faster than he should’ve been able to. Titles, cores, rune, leather, proof of the kill, proof of the hidden piece being real, proof that he hadn’t hallucinated the electric slaughter.

For a moment, it felt unreal that the Tower could summarize something so violent into neat bullet points.

[Race Ender] sat heavier than the rest. Not because it sounded cool, honestly, it sounded like something an edgy teenager would pick as a username, but because it meant something ugly in system terms.

He hadn’t just killed a boss. He’d wiped out a presence on the floor. The Tower cared about that.

His gaze snagged on [Darkness Rune], and his fingers twitched reflexively like they wanted to pull it out and inspect it immediately. The rune was the kind of thing that changed fights, changed floors, changed the way people looked at you.

But he didn’t have time to drool over it. Not now.

There was a priority to things; there was one item there that was probably the reward that made the Basilisk a Hidden Piece.

[Awakening Material: Basilisk Eyes.]

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