After A Billion-Year Torture, I Returned As A Transcendent Player

Chapter 74: Emergency Outbreak

"You...killed my son." The avatar slowly spoke, his eyes on the horrible corpse of his son.

"Consequences." Aidan’s face was deadpan.

The avatar’s eyes snapped toward Aidan. "Then you better be ready for the consequences of killing my son."

Aidan conjured a sword out of dense metal and edged it with blade aspect, and pointed it at the avatar, his raging anger suppressed beneath a calm and icy gaze.

"I am ready. Do whatever you can to hunt me."

The crimson-gold border around his body rippled once, and he drew it inward, channeling all that translated anger out of the armor and down the length of the blade until the sword burned with the same consuming sheen.

"But for now, get lost."

He swung.

The arc of crimson-gold crossed the distance in silence, and the early-stage Divine-rank avatar, projection of one of the Desmeral Family’s two pillars, came apart inside it. Not cut. Consumed, the same way the blue flames had been, eaten from the edges inward until nothing remained above the ruined stage but drifting motes and the fading echo of a father’s scream.

The island stood in absolute silence.

Aidan let the sword dissolve, turned his back on the crowd, the corpse, and the kneeling acting chairman, and walked to where Tom hovered with Beatrix.

"We’re done here."

Space folded, and the three of them were gone before anyone on that island remembered how to breathe.

...

They came out of the fold on Hunter’s Shack Three, and slipped into the Legendary-rank dimension without a single soul marking their arrival.

The riverbank camp was exactly as Aidan had left it, and the reunion was loud, Arthur circling overhead roaring greetings, Solenne hurrying over, Jovan drifting up with his usual funeral calm and one raised eyebrow at Beatrix.

The problem got laid out over food.

Beatrix had watched a Desmeral heir die and his Divine-rank father humiliated in front of a thousand witnesses. She was now a target every bit as marked as Aidan, and neither of them could afford to wear their real faces in the open until the storm settled or the Desmerals stopped existing, whichever came first.

"Fortunately," Aidan said, jerking a thumb at Arthur, "we know a guy."

Arthur puffed up, delighted to be useful, and his Cybercraft Sentinal talent hummed as he worked. Light gathered between his claws and condensed down into a small, intricate rune, which he presented to Beatrix with enormous ceremony.

"Camouflage skill rune. Changes your face, hair, frame, and aura signature. It will have five uses. For more, I’ll have to recharge."

Beatrix turned the rune over in her hands, and something in her shoulders finally came down from around her ears. "That...is quite useful."

"That reminds me." Aidan looked at Arthur. "You have to recharge mine, buddy. I’m out of charges for that rune."

"You use them like candy, Master."

"I have a busy life."

...

A day passed, and the camp turned into a training ground.

Beatrix and Solenne took to each other fast, two SSS-rank women with everything to prove and a mountain of grinding between them and their next breakthrough. They scoured the Legendary-rank dimension alongside Arthur and Tom, hauling out meat, cores, and materials by the ton, and the haul went straight to the Shelter Hub under masked faces.

The riches came back as Tier-10 resources, crates of them, and the two women worked through the stockpile side by side, stats climbing steadily toward the ceiling of SSS-rank.

Aidan left them to it.

He and Jovan walked out of the dimension at midday and made for the nearby Elite-class shelter, hunting information.

Just then-

POOOOOOOONNNN!!

The alarm hit the whole shelter at once, a deep, bone-rattling klaxon that poured out of every formation pillar in the structure, and above it a voice rolled through the halls with flat urgency.

[EMERGENCY. A Divine-rank Terror Tear has opened in Sector Twelve and is spewing Terrors. All combat-capable Hunters of Epic-rank and above, attend to the mission board.]

The board lit up before the voice finished.

[Emergency Mission: Divine-rank Tear Outbreak Suppression.]

[Requesting: Epic-rank and Legendary-rank powerhouses to join the assault force.]

[Reward: Double Contribution Points per Terror slain. All risk borne by the participant. Go with potions, items, and proper preparations, ideally in a team.]

Hunters were already surging toward the registration pillars, some grim, some pale, more than a few smelling the double points and grinning through their fear.

Aidan read the posting, and slowly began to smile.

’A whole outbreak of Terrors from Epic to Divine.’ He cracked his knuckles. ’That’s not an emergency. That’s a leveling buffet with a hazard label.’

"Jovan. Head back and tell the others where I went. But be ready for anything. If I land in trouble, I’ll summon you right away."

"Fortune says you were going to go regardless of what I said."

"Fortune’s on a roll today."

He registered, pulled the outbreak’s location off the board, and stepped out of the shelter into open sky. Sector Twelve sat roughly 16,490 kilometers away, half a continent by this planet’s obscene scale, and the assault force’s transport formations wouldn’t have everyone there for an hour.

Aidan didn’t feel like waiting an hour.

He reached across the distance to the Legendary dimension and pulled Arthur back into his summoning space, then out again in the same breath.

"Suit up, buddy. And give me the wings."

Arthur poured over him in a storm of crimson-gold motes, the Argon Exo-Armor sealing shut, and then the back of it split open and unfurled, twin dragon wings of layered cyber-plate spreading wide against the sky.

Aidan bent his knees, and left.

The ground cracked beneath his launch point, and the world turned into streaks. Mach fifty-eight, nineteen point nine kilometers eaten per second, the air itself screaming apart around the armor’s leading edge as he tore across mountain ranges and inland seas like a crimson meteor with a schedule.

Thirteen minutes and change. That was all the whole crossing took.

Then the horizon ahead of him changed color, and Aidan killed his speed in a long, curving deceleration as Sector Twelve opened up below.

The Divine-rank Tear hung in the sky like a wound in the world.

It was massive, a ragged vertical slash of darkness kilometers tall, its edges weeping violet light, and from its depths Terrors poured in an unending flood. Epic-rank beasts by the hundreds, spilling out in shrieking waves. Legendary-rank horrors striding among them by the dozens, each one a calamity on its own.

And above them all, few in number but bending the very sky with their presence, shapes of Divine-rank hunger slid out of the Tear one slow wingbeat at a time.

Aidan hung in the air before all of it, wings spread, lightning already crawling down both arms.

’Yeah.’ He grinned inside the helm. ’Buffet.’