Chapter 71: An issue

Without wasting time, Kael proceeded to find the next hatchling, one that was thankfully also away from its brothers. The minimap made it almost unfair. A dot here, a dot there, each one a sleeping lump of profit tucked into the dark like the Tower had stocked shelves for him personally.

Still, the cave didn’t feel like a store. It felt like a throat. Every breath tasted damp and old, and every faint drip of water sounded a little too much like footsteps when you let your nerves get creative.

Though they were blind right now, that didn’t mean their teeth weren’t sharp, and as long as he could take them out one by one, he wouldn’t need to worry about those teeth.

Kael kept that thought close, repeating it like a rule. One by one. Quietly. Efficiently. He didn’t have the luxury of bravado down here. Bravado was how people ended up as bones.

Still better safe and efficient than rash and dead.

He pulled up his crowbar and struck down, this time even harder than before, hard enough that the crowbar pierced through the soft scales above the head and went all the way, penetrating the lower jaw of the young basilisk.

The impact made his arms vibrate up to the shoulders. The hatchling’s body jerked once, a reflexive full-body spasm that sent its tail scraping stone. Then it went limp, the sound dying in its throat before it ever became a howl.

A shudder, a sudden jerk, and a slew of notifications, similar to what he got before, stacked in front of his vision like the Tower was eager to applaud.

Kael didn’t stare at the messages long. He couldn’t afford to. He only registered the important part: cores, leather, scales, claws, fangs.

His inventory was now packing even more material. And more cores. The weight wasn’t physical, but it still felt like something piling up inside him, numbers adding, possibilities multiplying, his debt shrinking by brute force.

A small part of Kael was happy of what was happening right now. It was dangerous, deadly, and quite frightening that he is in a den of monsters where their mother wasn’t, but he got to kill high level creatures without much worry or fear.

The sick irony of it didn’t escape him. On the surface, people were stabbing each other over single cores, hiding in rubble like rats. Down here, in the belly of the metro, Kael was harvesting level fifteen monsters like they were sleeping chickens. And gained plenty of cores from such an event.

It was easy, efficent and rewarding. Many would have their insides twist with greed and turn purple from envy if they were to know what he was doing. Hording what should have been theirs, they’ll think.

“Let them envy,” Kael thought, ’None of them risked as much as I have, I deserve this break,’ he thought.

Where many others would have to risk their lives fighting goblins and each other for a single core at a time. The Tower rewarded whoever could find the loophole. Kael’s loophole just happened to be a map that should’ve cost a billion cores and a legendary hammer that should’ve been on floor forty.

Here he was taking advantage of the benefit the Mini-Map offered to him. While the rest of the Climbers had to rely on luck, he only needed to follow the scent of treasures.

It almost made him laugh, almost. Because the “scent” wasn’t his nose, it was the Tower’s system feeding him an itinerary like he was some VIP guest.

And it still wanted him dead.

He couldn’t be too careless now.

’Calm down Kael. It’s only the first floor. We have many more to go through if we want out…’ He took a collected breath to calm himself and almost regretted it as the stench from his clothes assaulted his nose.

Another hatchling’s death, and Kael realized that there were barely six more left, and three of them were sleeping right next to each other.

The dots on the minimap were clustered tight, practically overlapping. Kael paused in the dim moss-light and let the reality of that settle. Alone was easy. Clustered was a risk. Clustered meant one mistake became three problems in a heartbeat.

’This one will be tough,’ he thought. One wrong move and it might alert the other hatchlings.

But he couldn’t hesitate. He had a feeling, an ugly, crawling certainty, that if he didn’t finish this quickly, he might come face to face with the mother at the entrance of the cave.

His imagination provided the image unasked: a black wall of scales sliding back in, finding her den stinking of blood, and Kael standing in the middle of it with a crowbar like a joke.

He approached the closest of the three, moving slow enough that even the sound of his own breathing felt loud.

He kept his feet on the smoother stone where it wouldn’t crunch, kept the crowbar raised but steady, and chose the angle the same way he would choose where to hit a beam, clean, direct, no wasted motion.

He took it out with one single blow. Thankfully, it didn’t cause any scene. The hatchling’s skull caved with a dull thump, and it went still before it could even flail. Kael’s shoulders loosened for a fraction of a second.

However, the one next to it seemed to be sniffing at the air.

Kael’s stomach dropped.

’Fuck, blood. The stench of blood is growing inside the cave…’ Even with the mud and filth smeared on him, fresh blood had a way of cutting through everything.

It was coppery and sharp, a smell that didn’t care how much goblin gut you coated yourself in. It was a signal.

Although there was a lot of goblin carcasses everywhere, the smell of blood was still pungent enough to bypass the stink of goblin shit. That’s how worrisome it was.

It wasn’t just one corpse, either. It was accumulating. Pooling. The cave was turning into a slaughterhouse, and slaughterhouses had consequences.

A low hiss echoed from the nearest hatchling, thin, raspy, wrong, and Kael’s body moved before his mind finished the panic. He brought the crowbar down again.

But was silenced immediately by another blow.

All is well, Kael thought, until he realized that there was a problem.

His weapon became dull…

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