Chapter 176: Tools

Kael slowed down the moment he was out of immediate danger, not because the streets suddenly felt safe, nothing in this damned city was safe, but because his body was sending him very clear, very rude messages. His legs weren’t failing yet, but they were right at that point where every step felt like it had to be negotiated.

He angled toward the nearest standing building that still had enough shadow and rubble to hide a man. The mini-map was his first check, as always: a few green dots loitering too close for comfort, drifting in lazy little arcs like sharks that didn’t need to swim fast because the ocean was small. He didn’t care if they were “friendly.” Friendly was a costume people wore until it got inconvenient.

Right now, Kael didn’t have the spare strength to deal with anyone wearing any kind of costume.

He was exhausted enough from having used the Momentum Rune that his body couldn’t amass any energy, not the Internal Energy that the Tower had forced on him, but the plain, ugly, human kind. The kind that made your lungs feel too small and your thighs feel stuffed with wet sand. The kind you couldn’t brute-force with willpower forever, no matter how many times you tried.

The cost of using Momentum was incredible. Sure, it gave you a great burst of speed and acceleration, but you still paid the cost in exhaustion.

It wasn’t like [Presence], where the price was mostly in that draining, grinding dip of the blue bar and the weird muffling of his senses. Momentum demanded payment straight from muscle and tendon. It stole the “reserve” part of you, the part that kept you from collapsing when things went bad. He could feel it in the way his calves trembled on the downstep of broken concrete, and in the sharp stitch under his ribs that came and went like a warning light.

It allowed Kael to do things that he could only see in movies.

For a few seconds, it had felt like the world was made of slow motion and he was the only thing moving at the correct speed. Corners came and went in blurs. The ground had slid under him like a conveyor belt. Even his own limbs had felt… wrong, like his body was outrunning its own sense of caution.

And then the bill arrived.

He didn’t need to dramatize it. The math was brutal and simple.

“One trip, and you die. Run too much and you die. Be stopped and you die…” He thought.

Even now, the memory of that acceleration made his stomach tighten. One bad step on rubble, one loose brick, one snagging strap, and he wouldn’t just fall, he’d launch. Momentum didn’t care that humans were fragile. It didn’t care that bones didn’t bend right. It would turn a slip into a rolling disaster of cracked ribs and internal bleeding before he could even register pain.

If he used momentum ’too’ long, his body would give up on him long before his Internal energy. Dying from exhaustion is a real thing. And if someone forcefully stops him or make direct contact with him, the collision would turn Kael into a patty.

That last one kept replaying in his head with an ugly clarity. Momentum wasn’t just speed, it was stored refusal to stop. If he collided with anything solid, all that stubborn motion had to go somewhere. If it didn’t go into the wall, it went into him. And Kael wasn’t interested in learning what it felt like to be tenderized by physics.

“I need way more stamina for this,” Kael realized as his current 23 points in stamina were not nearly enough for a proper run.

He said it like a complaint, but it was really just logistics. Twenty-three stamina was decent for surviving, for short fights, for bursts. It wasn’t built for a rune that treated the human body like a disposable engine. If he wanted to use Momentum more than as a panic button, he’d need to build himself into something sturdier, either with stats or with gear that supported the strain.

He kept moving anyway, because standing in the open was asking for a knife to find his spine. He cut into the building through a gap where a window used to be, ducking under a half-collapsed frame and stepping over powdered concrete. Inside it smelled like old smoke and dust and that sour rot that came from stagnant air trapped too long.

He found a corner where two walls still met, slid down with his back against the concrete, and let his head rest for half a second.

He looked back and said, “Twenty seconds… that’s the breaking point, more than that and I’ll simply collapse from exhaustion.”

He didn’t say it because he liked hearing himself talk. He said it because he needed to anchor the number in his brain. Twenty seconds wasn’t a guess, it was something he’d felt in his muscles, in the way his knees threatened to buckle when he finally killed the rune’s effect.

Twenty seconds was where control started turning into debt.

His heartbeat, which had been trying to claw out of his throat earlier, began to settle. Not smoothly, his pulse still thudded heavy in his ears, but it stopped spiking into panic. The strange thing, the thing he hated noticing because it made him feel less human, was how his heart always did that now. It would sprint up to the edge… then slam on the brakes like something inside him refused to waste fear.

His lungs didn’t get the memo. They burned anyway, drawing air like they were trying to fill a furnace.

He stayed still long enough to let the shaking ease, the kind of tremor that made even holding your hands steady feel like work. He swallowed and tasted dust. His mouth was dry even though the Tower didn’t demand water, and the sensation annoyed him more than it should’ve.

“Still, with these, I think it’s enough for me to take on the Ifrit. I need to get to the second floor first…” he opened his map and checked it.

It wasn’t confidence. It was him trying to force his thoughts back into a straight line. Ifrit first. Second floor after. Climb more. Elixir. Mother.

That list was the only thing that kept him from spiraling.

And immediately he realized one terrible thing had happened.

The circle of fire had started from around the entourage of the city. And began closing in.

On the map, it wasn’t just “near.” It had advanced. Like a giant hand tightening around the city and squeezing it inward. The red perimeter looked thicker, more aggressive, and the heat lines, the places where it had already eaten roads and buildings, were now too close to routes he’d considered “safe” yesterday.

The Ifrit’s Arena was at the edge of the city when he first saw it.

Back then, it had been a contained problem. A boss in an arena. A hazard with borders.

And now, that meant the circle had already consumed the arena entirely and is still closing in.

That realization sat heavy. If the arena was swallowed, then the Ifrit wasn’t sitting politely in its pit anymore. The zone was moving like a living thing. The “center” was no longer a place, it was becoming a destination, a funnel, a forced meeting point.

Kael moved the map around and gulped hard.

The Ifrit was moving.

And it was in the center of the city.

Not only that.

The circle was still wide, but it won’t be this size tomorrow or the day after that.

It’s herding people. No, not just people.

It’s herding everything.

Kael’s fingers tightened unconsciously against his gauntlet, metal creaking faintly. The picture formed too easily: monsters squeezed inward by fire, climbers squeezed inward by monsters, everyone squeezed inward by time. A grinding press turning the city into a smaller and smaller killing box.

Goblins, climbers, Atrax spiders, and even Zombies.

It wasn’t just a mess. It was a convergence. A forced collision of every nasty variable on the floor. Every creature that could bite, stab, web, infect, or simply stomp you into paste was being nudged toward the same center point… where the Ifrit now waited.

And Ifrit wasn’t passive. It was a boss. It didn’t “wander.” It claimed territory.

“At this rate… in the next three days, it’ll be a warzone at the center of the arena.” He realized.

The words came out quieter than he expected, almost like he didn’t want the city to hear him and agree. He’d been in fights. He’d been in raids. But a warzone with no sides, just hunger and panic, was different. In a raid, you could predict behavior. In a warzone, you got clipped by stray arrows and trampled by someone else’s mistake.

“I can’t afford that many variables,” Kael sighed.

He wasn’t being dramatic. He was being honest. Too many variables meant he couldn’t plan. If he couldn’t plan, he had to improvise. And improvisation was how you ended up relying on luck.

Luck had carried him far, sure, but it always demanded interest later.

If he needed to leave this floor, the Ifrit has to die today or tomorrow at most while the area is still relatively large.

He stared at the map and traced routes with his eyes, calculating distance and density, clusters of red dots, pockets of green, flame boundaries. Today or tomorrow meant he still had room to maneuver. It meant the center wasn’t fully clogged yet. It meant he could approach with a plan rather than a prayer.

But once all the monsters of the floor are herded to the center, even getting to the Ifrit would be a pain in the ass, not to mention killing it, an impossible feat with all the climbers and monsters in one place.

He imagined it: the Ifrit throwing waves of heat, spiders dropping webs from half-burned buildings, goblins screaming and swarming anything that bled, zombies pushing through everything like a tide. And climbers, desperate, greedy, terrified, adding their own chaos on top.

“But…” Kael thought as he looked at his gauntlets while he sat with a wall supporting his back, “Are these few runes enough to take on something like that…”

His eyes flicked over his gear as if it might answer him: the gauntlets, the chain, the belt, the sockets… Tools, all of them. Clever tools.

But Ifrit was a boss that didn’t care about clever if clever didn’t come with enough raw force to finish the job.

Kael’s jaw tightened under the helmet. He didn’t let the worry bloom into panic, panic burned energy, and energy was currency now. He just sat there, breathing through the ache in his ribs, watching the map redraw the city into a tightening noose, and silently measuring how many mistakes he could afford before the Tower collected him.

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