Chapter 74: Was a Good Run

“This is nice,” Kael muttered as he placed everything in his backpack. The words came out half as a joke, half as disbelief, because nice wasn’t the word anyone should be using in a basilisk den at night.

Still, he couldn’t help it. The inventory felt heavier now, not in weight, but in value. It was the kind of heaviness that made a man walk differently, like his spine knew it was carrying something people would kill for.

So far, he had already obtained close to 40 soul cores, with one of them being a medium one.

The number kept repeating in his head like a drumbeat.

Forty. Forty meant progress. Forty meant his debt was shrinking into something he could actually bite through. He didn’t know the exact value of that medium core, but it should fetch a good price at Baltak. The imp had made it clear he priced things however the Tower wanted that day, but a medium core wasn’t exactly something you pretended was pocket lint.

And not to mention all the materials he obtained. The leather. The scales. The claws and fangs that looked like they belonged in a nightmare’s mouth.

Normally, Kael would’ve looked at that pile and shrugged, great, stuff I can’t use. But the thought didn’t stick anymore. Not after Brokk’s Hammer. Not after the stupid reality of the Tower deciding he was a blacksmith now, whether he liked it or not.

Though he isn’t a craftsman, it is no longer an excuse with the hammer he has. Brokk’s hammer should help him make something out of these pieces of leather and scales.

Kael’s fingers flexed unconsciously, as if they remembered the rhythm of hammering even though his brain insisted he didn’t know what he was doing. The tool had that effect, like it whispered expectations into your bones.

He could already picture himself wearing a full set of armor. Black scales layered like plates, leather stitched tight under it, something that didn’t look like makeshift junk.

Something that looked like it belonged to a person who wasn’t one unlucky breath away from dying. The image was… comforting. Dangerous, but comforting.

Though that by itself might be risky in this floor since a lot of people with bad intentions would want a piece of what he has, if not the whole pie. Kael already knew how greedy people can get. The Tower didn’t create greed. It just removed the shame and the rules that kept it leashed.

Just his crowbar alone, which wasn’t even a Tower item, almost got him killed by those three bastards. That memory was still fresh: the grin, the bow, the word dibs. He could still hear the casual hunger in their voices.

“Though two of them are dead and the last one escaped…” he said, more to himself than anyone else. His voice sounded small in the cavern, swallowed by stone and damp. “Oh, speaking of which…”

Kael looked at his map and immediately his face turned paler than a ghost.

A red dot was coming down with extreme speed toward his location. Not drifting. Not wandering. Charging. It had already entered the dungeon.

It was close enough that the dot’s movement felt like it was chewing up distance in bites. Kael was too preoccupied with the loot to even realize what happened, too caught up in counting cores and imagining armor like a fool daydreaming in a slaughterhouse.

The cave didn’t care about his plans.

Without a second to waste, he used [Presence]. The word came out like a choke, like his tongue knew the rune was his only shield now.

His stigma burned hot on his chest, sharp, immediate, and the world went slightly wrong again. Sound dimmed. Color drained. Heat and cold flattened into a dull, distant sensation. He hated the feeling, but he loved what it did.

He could already guess what the red dot was.

A howl so terrifying rumbled through the dungeon with enough force that the dust that hung in walls, ceilings and crevices fell down. The sound was not the angry shriek of a goblin or the mindless groan of a corpse. This was something older. Heavier. It vibrated through the stone like an earthquake had found a voice.

Kael’s knees threatened to buckle.

[You’re under the effect of Fear]

[You’re paralyzed for 3 seconds]

His body locked up like someone had flipped a switch. Muscles refused to answer. His fingers clenched around the strap of his bag, but even that grip felt involuntary, like his body was holding on because it didn’t know what else to do.

Three seconds it said, but for him it felt like an eon, an endless, stretched-out moment where his mind ran faster than his body could follow.

He saw her.

The basilisk, not the small ones. Not the hatchlings he’d been crushing like sleeping rats. This was the one that probably ate its own mate and is now grieving the loss of its children. The one whose scales were the obsidian shards he’d picked up like souvenirs. The one that made the tunnel feel too small for its anger.

Those very children that Kael killed.

And the problem was he was still in the cavern with the beast.

The creature moved toward Kael with so much speed Kael’s face, which was already pale, drained even more. It wasn’t sprinting. It was sliding, surging, its massive body rippling with muscle under scale.

Every movement scraped stone and metal and made the cave seem like it was whining under pressure. Its head was enormous, jaws heavy, teeth like curved knives. Even in moss-light, the blackness of its hide swallowed illumination rather than reflecting it.

He saw the creature opening its mouth wide, jaw unhinging with a sickening ease, and then…

“This is the end…” he thought, and for the first time that night it wasn’t dramatic. It was plain math.

Those jaws were too big to escape, too mighty to survive. Right there and then, he turely realized it. He was without a shadow of a doubt. A dead man.

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