Chapter 179: Let it Rain

Plans usually require time and thought. The kind of time where you can sit somewhere quiet, run the numbers in your head, then run them again because the first time you were probably lying to yourself. The kind of thought where you test your tools against something safe first, where the worst outcome is embarrassment instead of a funeral you don’t get to attend.

In any other scenario, Kael would have at least studied the surroundings more or tried to come up with some measures. Maybe a day or two of planning and testing his own tools some more to understand their limit. He would have mapped out sightlines, picked escape routes, marked choke points, calculated how long [Presence] could hold without turning him into a wheezing idiot on the pavement.

That would be the usual, the way any sane man would act when it came to a situation where death is the result of failure.

But not in this case.

Unlike plans that require you to change the plan to fit the circumstances.

Here, the circumstances changed to create a new plan.

Kael knew it the same way you knew a falling object was going to hit you, no debate, no philosophy, just instinct backed by harsh experience. He’d just watched the Ifrit react, watched it flare when something heavy smacked into it, watched it waste a bigger fireball on revenge. That meant something simple and beautiful:

It wasn’t untouchable.

And if it wasn’t untouchable, it was killable.

Kael knew it; it was the golden opportunity. And he couldn’t waste it.

He checked the minimap again, not trusting his own excitement. No clusters of green nearby. No moving packs of red closing in from side streets. A few distant dots tucked into buildings like cockroaches, but nothing close enough to matter in the next minute. For once, the city felt… empty. Not safe, never safe, but empty in a way that gave him room to breathe.

He was almost alone, and the chance to deal with the Ifrit was right now.

A golden opportunity that couldn’t be missed.

Without hesitation, Kael ran down the stairs to the main street and activated Presence before he emerged.

The stairwell spat him into heat. Even through his armor and the helmet, the air outside felt thicker, like he’d opened a door into a working furnace. The smell was worse than the heat, burnt asphalt, scorched stone, that sharp metallic bite of something overheated that wasn’t meant to be.

He moved fast but not sloppily, feet placing themselves on the most stable patches of ground. Broken glass crunched under rubble somewhere nearby, and it took effort not to flinch at every little sound.

In that moment where he had rushed down and right before Presence was activated, the Ifrit turned toward his general location.

Kael felt it even before he saw it on the map: that subtle pressure of attention sliding across the street, the way a predator’s focus could make your skin crawl even if you were behind cover. The Ifrit didn’t have eyes like a man, but it had a sense for living things, movement, heat, whatever the Tower used to cheat.

Even behind walls and concrete, Kael was sensed.

His stomach tightened.

But thanks to the muffling effect of his rune, the Ifrit was unable to decide whether to attack the empty-looking lot or hold on and save his energy.

That hesitation was everything. A half-second of indecision was a gift in a world where most things killed you the moment they noticed you existed. Kael kept his head down, Presence flattening him into the background of the street, turning him into something the world refused to bother acknowledging.

He ran up the middle of the street, where he was only a dozen meters away from the Ifrit.

The closer he got, the more his armor mattered. Heat pressed against him like a hand trying to shove him backward. His exposed senses didn’t burn the way they would’ve before, but he could still feel the Ifrit’s temperature as a constant assault, hairline prickling, lungs protesting with every inhale.

Even with 99% heat resistance, he could still feel the flames. They weren’t to the point of blistering his skin like last time, but he knew they were there.

He kept his eyes on the terrain, on the Ifrit’s position, and on the building beside it, because that building was the real weapon here, not his gauntlets.

The Ifrit was right in the middle of the street, and next to him was a barely standing building that had its entire bottom floor blasted away by the earlier shot, which killed the climber that hid there.

It looked like a broken jaw missing teeth. The ground floor was open air, pillars exposed, inner structure visible, debris hanging in places where walls used to pretend they mattered. The upper floors sagged like they didn’t believe in gravity until gravity reminded them.

That did a great service for Kael.

It tore away at the walls and revealed six supporting beams, the pillars that held the building standing, barely held the building standing.

Six points of failure. Six targets. Six chances to make a “boss fight” into a demolition job.

Kael angled his body so his left arm had a clear line, the chain between his gauntlets hanging with a faint metallic weight as he shifted. He could feel his internal energy ready, full, and warm like a muscle he’d finally learned how to flex.

Kael aimed his left hand at one of the pillars and released his energy.

The Ifrit couldn’t see Kael, but he could see the ball of black manifest, then shoot and splatter against one of the pillars.

Darkness wasn’t flashy like fire. It didn’t roar. It didn’t bloom. It just arrived, a blot of nothing that made the air feel wrong around it. The moment it hit the beam, the pillar didn’t crack, didn’t crumble, it simply… wasn’t there anymore.

Making the whole thing disappear from the world.

The building reacted like a living thing, flinching. A subtle shift, dust trickling from above, a low creak as weight redistributed. Kael’s pulse spiked, then steadied.

Confused on how that happened, and unable to understand why, the Ifrit stared at the anomaly. Unaware of the danger it posed.

Kael didn’t waste the moment. He couldn’t afford to. Every second [Presence] stayed active was another bite out of his internal reserves, and he already knew what it felt like to go empty in the wrong place.

A second ball manifested and slammed into the other pillar. This one was closer to the Ifrit, which made it slowly back away, not from the building but from the pillar; its backing away was actually making the Ifrit get in an even better position now, right at the middle of the building.

Kael almost wanted to laugh at the stupidity of it.

The Ifrit wasn’t retreating from the collapse; it was retreating from the weirdness of the disappearing structure, like it didn’t like standing near something it couldn’t burn.

And in doing so, it stepped into the center, into the one spot where falling mass had the best chance of landing clean.

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