Chapter 57: Red Zone

The hurt and pain came at him like a wrecking ball.

The transition was violent, like someone had ripped out the padding between him and reality and thrown it away.

With the dulling of senses that the Rune of Presence offered gone now, all the pains he never thought he had came crashing down on him.

Heat slammed into his skin. Sound roared back. The arena’s oppressive temperature became immediate punishment instead of a muted pressure.

His arm was the worst of the bunch since he got it far too close to that pit of fire, it was too red to be healthy, and signs of first degree burns were apparent on it.

The skin looked angry, raw, swollen, and the pain was sharp enough to make his fingers twitch uselessly.

His back which he thought was barely grazed by the flaming wave of earlier was now giving signals of agony. It felt like someone had pressed hot coals against his spine. While his entire body had already entered the state of hyperthermia.

Sweat poured off him. His mouth felt like sandpaper. His heartbeat was too fast, too loud, like it was trying to outrun his blood.

And once agian it calmed down like nothing had happend but that wasn’t his biggest worry at the moment.

Another roar from the Ifrit signaled that Kael was discovered. And just then it turned to see the running Kael.

The sound was different now, less searching, more certain. Kael didn’t need the minimap to understand what had happened. [Presence] was gone. The glitch had ended. Now he was prey in perfect clarity.

With his head turned toward the creature while the rest of his body sprinting for all he was worth he saw an incoming fireball the size of a room ball charging toward him.

It wasn’t a neat sphere. It was a mass of compressed flame and molten light, rolling forward with weight, like the air itself had been forged into a projectile. The heat ahead of it reached him before it did, a blast that made his eyes sting and his skin prickle.

Kael cursed as he rushed past the fallen buildings and jumped forward, grabbing a protruding metal beam from one of the buildings with one hand, the power of inertia from his run and the beam as an anchor helped him spin his body away from what came soon after as he was lurched to the side of the building cleared from the entrance path.

The motion was ugly and desperate, his shoulder yanked hard, pain screaming through his burned arm, but the [Legend] strength made the grip hold. His body swung outward, boots leaving the ground for a heartbeat, and he felt the beam bite into his palm as it took his weight and the ground’s hard surface as it took his body.

An explosion of heat and fire blasted right under where both buildings had crossed against each other, turning the pathway that Kael used to enter and leave into a tunnel of fire. The blast didn’t just fill the gap, it owned it.

Flames roared through the choke like a cannon shot, lighting the shadowed passage into a furnace. The air surged outward with force, whipping ash into a storm and punching Kael’s lungs with heat even from the side.

The fire found no way to blow up the two buildings, so it burst out like a pulsar beam of fire and turned the walls of the building where he killed the two goblins earlier into sundered scorches and remains.

Stone blackened instantly. Wood that had been hanging by a thread turned to char and collapsed. Windows popped and shattered. The building groaned like it was alive and dying, and Kael could smell burning rot and old furniture turning into smoke.

Kael could only gulp hard as he was thankful to have avoided that blast. His throat hurt with the swallow, dry and scorched, and his chest heaved as if his lungs were trying to suck in cooler air and failing.

But he didn’t have much choice in the matter at hand, he checked his map and noticed several green dots rapidly approaching the area. The sight made his stomach twist again. Witnesses. Survivors. People who would ask questions, or worse, people who would decide he looked like a profitable target.

Without wasting a second, he sprinted toward the nearest alleyway and dove in. The alley was narrow and shadowed, the kind of place where heat lingered, but light struggled. He slammed into it like a man falling into water, using the corner to break lines of sight. His feet skidded on gravel, and he caught himself against a wall with one burned hand, biting back a sound.

The few climbers that arrived were mostly shocked seeing the area being full and aflame. Even from his hiding angle, Kael could hear their voices rising, confused, angry, overlapping.

Kael could even hear them arguing about who got there first and who was the cause of this whole issue.

Their words were muffled by distance, but the tone was unmistakable: people realizing something big had happened and immediately trying to assign blame before understanding it.

Fifteen days gone right there, fifteen days where they had to prepare for the tower were simply gone.

And one climber was responsible for it.

Kael felt the weight of that statement press on him, not as guilt exactly, but as awareness. The Tower had just changed pace for everyone. He had pushed the floor’s timeline forward like he’d kicked over a clock.

Kael simply looked at his clothes and realized that he can under no circumstances go out in the open like that, everything was burnt to a crisp. His sleeve was ruined. The fabric on his back was blackened and brittle. Strands of hair had been singed unevenly.

All they needed to do was put one and one together and realize that he was the reason for this clusterfuck. If anyone saw him up close, the story wrote itself: burn marks, fleeing, near the arena, right after the global notification.

That was his thought until what happened next.

The two buildings that had collapsed on top of each other and made the entrance to the arena were simply blasted aside, as if they weighed nothing. The sound was a deep grinding roar of stone being shoved and torn apart.

A few green dots were immediately turned gray when a roar from the Ifrit shattered the silence that echoed after the blast. The silence didn’t last long, panic replaced it. Screams, footsteps, sudden movement. Kael’s pulse spiked as he watched dots vanish on his minimap like candles being snuffed.

[The Ifrit is Enraged! The territory of the Ifrit will start growing each day.]

Massive pillars of flame emerged on Kael’s mini-map that surrounded the entirety of the map. They weren’t small markers.

They were huge, ominous structures of heat and danger drawn into the world with the same casual certainty the Tower used to draw itineraries. The arena wasn’t just dangerous anymore. It was expanding. A boss that didn’t stay in its cage.

’Time limit and now a zone shrink… Fuck…’

The curse sat heavy in his head, because it wasn’t just a problem for him anymore. He’d stolen a rune. He’d enraged a floor boss. And now the whole floor was being squeezed tighter, day by day, by a wall of flame that didn’t care who had started it.

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