Chapter 60: Ember Seed
Evan, who was fighting an E-Rank monster, felt the notification appear mid-combat.
A brief wave of satisfaction passed through him, and a slightly manic smile spread across his face, enough to make the unfortunate beast in front of him hesitate for a split second before being killed moments later.
[Ding! You have killed an E-Rank (Mid-Stage) Ironhide Bear!]
[You gained +500 ESS]
The kill notification followed immediately, but he ignored it. Instead, his focus was entirely on the massive amount of ESS he had received from the C-Rank monster.
He could feel the energy flowing through his body, a small but noticeable improvement. Insignificant if compared to what he needed for his next rank, but still a considerable amount when it came from a single monster.
’Stealing kills is the way.’
His confidence in his actions grew more and more certain.
The reason he got the ESS, even though that team had been fighting and had landed the finishing blow, was simple,
The beast, already on the brink of death after the brutal fight against the group, ended up dying before the group’s final strike could land,
not because it could no longer endure, but because something else had already delivered the finishing blow.
That "something" was Evan’s new ability, inherited from the bloodline of God of War, after his synchronization with the clone reached 10%.
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[Ember Seed]
Rank: F
Description:
Allows the user to implant an ember-like seed within a target in their vicinity. The seed remains dormant at first, feeding on the target’s own vitality and energy, steadily growing in strength over time. Once it reaches a critical threshold, the seed ignites from within, unleashing a rapid and ferocious internal burn that spreads through the body like a wave, destroying vital organs and internal structures. Note: Ember Seeds regenerate every 60 minutes.
[Seeds Available: 0/1]
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In theory, it was a straightforward ability. In practice, it was far more useful than it sounded.
The obvious problem was delivery. Beasts didn’t stand still and let things be implanted in them. But Shadow’s stealth resolved that cleanly, as long as the seed made contact with the target, it would work its way inside without the beast ever knowing it was there.
Silent. Invisible. The kind of thing that only revealed itself when it was already too late.
What Evan had found through experimentation was that he had options on the back end. He could let the seed run its course on its own, quietly draining the target until it hit a threshold and ignited,
or he could trigger it manually from a distance, choosing between two outcomes: a concentrated internal strike that channeled the accumulated energy as a single focused burst, or a full detonation that turned the seed into a bomb from the inside.
He had chosen the first option for the Grawlwood.
Cleaner. Less visible. The beast had been half-dead already by the time the seed fired, and the result had looked, to everyone watching, like the final blow had simply landed at exactly the right moment.
That was the point.
He had removed the bracelet before using the ability. The logic was simple: a D-rank sitting at the top of the rankings was unusual, but still within the realm of explanation. A D-rank accumulating points equivalent to C-rank kills, however, was exactly the kind of thing that would draw the attention he didn’t want.
So he hunted without the bracelet. He killed what he could safely claim credit for, and left the rest to be attributed to whoever had landed the final visible blow.
The pattern repeated.
Shadow moved ahead of him, unseen, threading between the chaos of the ongoing battle and pressing close enough to targets for the seed to transfer. Evan kept his distance, tracking through the clone’s senses, waiting for the right moment.
[Ding! You have killed a C-Rank (Mid-Stage) Bristlemaw!]
[You have gained +10,000 ESS]
[Ding! You have killed a C-Rank (Early-Stage) Barkhorn!]
[You have gained +5,000 ESS]
[Ding! You have killed a C-Rank (Advanced-Stage) Rootfang!]
[You have gained +20,000 ESS]
Four C-rank kills in just over four hours. Beasts that would have ground him into the dirt in a direct confrontation, taken down because they were already broken by the time the seed fired. It wasn’t elegant. But it worked, and it worked consistently.
In addition to the C-rank kills, he and his clones had been constantly engaging everything else within range. E-rank advanced stage and D-rank beasts made up the bulk of his focus, with the occasional F-rank that wandered into the path getting caught in the process.
By the four-hour mark, the count stood at over eighty beasts. Roughly fifty F-rank. Around twenty E-rank advanced stage. A dozen D-rank, most of them at early stage, three at mid, two at advanced.
The advanced-stage D-ranks had been the most difficult.
Without his clones, he wouldn’t have attempted them solo. But the battlefield was full of other adventurers fighting in groups, and that created a dynamic he had learned to use, let the group do the work, take the kill when the window opened.
Not everyone saw it as fair. Several of the groups whose targets he had claimed were visibly frustrated, though there was little they could do about it beyond swallowing the loss. The rules were clear. Whoever landed the killing blow, claimed the kill.
Evan had landed every one.
Not everyone saw it that way, of course, such as the group currently in fourth place, who were already planning how to deal with this nuisance.
"For fuck’s sake, how high is his score? I’m already at 4.000 points and all I’ve done is fall from second to fourth place?"
"Boss, I spoke to one of ours at the Association, and he said...."
"He said what?" he cut in, not willing to wait for the other man to take his time answering.
"He said that guy is already at twenty one thousand merit points."
The boss: "..."
The group: "..."
Twenty-one thousand from a single person, in just over four hours?
The silence stretched on, long enough that it began to feel heavy, almost tangible.
’He had to be cheating or the bracelet must be malfunctioning. There was no other explanation that made sense.’
It was the collective thought, unspoken, but shared among them all, because the alternative, that a single individual was outperforming their entire group by that margin, was not something any of them were prepared to accept.
Not for an E-rank. Not for someone who, by every piece of information they had, simply shouldn’t have been capable of this.
The illusion was more comfortable. So they kept it.
And kept fighting.
In the command room, Elena had reached a similar conclusion, though she knew it was impossible.
The reinforcement team that had been sent out was performing well, four C-rank kills between them, which was a number worth noting.
Split across multiple smaller groups as they were, their individual scores were distributed accordingly, with the highest among them sitting in second place at just under twenty thousand points.
Close to the top. Respectable, given what they were working with.
And yet, the name above theirs on the ranking hadn’t moved.
Elena had accepted early on that Evan’s rate of accumulation was unusual. What she hadn’t fully anticipated was that it would still be unusual four hours later, that whatever he was doing, he was doing it consistently enough that a team of professional fighters operating at C-rank level hadn’t been able to catch him.
She had briefly considered the possibility of a bracelet malfunction. She discarded it just as quickly. The bracelets didn’t work that way. They either functioned or they didn’t. There was no middle state, no gradual degradation, no condition that produced false positives at this scale.
Which meant the numbers were real.
’Just where the hell did this guy crawl out from?’ she thought, caught somewhere between surprise and not knowing what to make of the situation.
One thing was clear though, the boy had become considerably more interesting to her. Interesting enough that she found herself looking forward to seeing what else he had to offer.
Just over an hour later, the pressure shifted.
Not all at once. It happened the way these things always happened, a gradual decrease in the density of incoming beasts, a slight loosening in the frequency of attacks along the perimeter, until the battlefield reached something that almost resembled a pause.
The weaker fighters felt the relief immediately. The stronger ones didn’t.
They knew what a pause in an escalating tide meant. It wasn’t rest. It was the moment before something larger decided it was time to move.
Elena was already on her feet.
She had moved to the roof of the Association building at some point in the last hour, monitoring the field directly. The city spread out below her, the perimeter lines visible from above, the scattered points of light where combat had been heaviest.
She took one step forward.
And then she was gone from the rooftop, reappearing above the battlefield in the space between one breath and the next.
Below her, the beasts at the treeline had gone still.
The stillness wasn’t an ending.
It was only the calm before something far greater was about to begin.