Chapter 216: The Bronze Class
Three Bronze class kills in roughly fifteen seconds from the moment the first one had come out of the ground.
The gene material went into inventory automatically, no pause, no interruption, and Neil was already moving deeper into the territory before the root systems had settled from the disruption the engagements had caused.
The Bronze class kills accumulated over the following hours with the rhythm of systematic hunting, each encounter contributing to the picture he was building of how these creatures operated, the picture getting more complete and more reliable with each addition.
The Wood Snakes never came alone when they had the option.
Pairs and threes were the minimum grouping, and when a disturbance reached a sufficient threshold to draw coordinated attention the groups were larger, four and five and sometimes more, the root network serving as both a transportation system and a communication system so that the deaths of individual snakes propagated information through the ground to others within range.
It was the same vibration communication principle the Stone Crawlers in the Mantel Stone Realm had used, but more sophisticated, more layered, capable of transmitting directional information and urgency and some form of threat assessment rather than just the simple fact of a disturbance.
Neil adapted to it within the first hour.
The root network was their advantage but it was also a source of information about them, the vibration patterns of multiple Snakes moving through a connected system readable to his Phantom perception with enough consistency that he could map approach vectors with reliability, and once he had calibrated the reading he could track every incoming threat simultaneously regardless of direction or depth.
He began clearing sections rather than responding to individual encounters, moving through the Bronze territory in a methodical path that covered the terrain comprehensively, working from the edges inward in a systematic spiral that ensured nothing was left behind to add to the next territory’s numbers.
The Inferno chain did most of the significant work.
Bronze class Wood Snakes had genuine regeneration even at their tier, a real and active healing response rather than the passive toughness of creatures that just had a lot of hit points, but regeneration required the damaged tissue to be present and in a state where repair was possible.
The Inferno chain’s internal discharge model bypassed the surface entirely.
A Bronze class Snake regenerating the scale damage from a blade strike had no defence against the infernal heat working inside its body simultaneously, and the discharge Neil put into a Bronze class body at full intensity left very little in the relevant systems in a state where regeneration could meaningfully engage.
The kills were clean and the gene material went into inventory automatically and Neil moved deeper.
The canopy above remained total and the sourceless green light remained constant and the root systems continued their slow continuous rearrangement beneath his feet, and the realm was quiet in the specific way of an environment where everything was listening rather than nothing being present.
The Silver class territory announced itself not through any visible boundary or marker but through the quality of what began appearing when he crossed into it, the change arriving in the specific way that tier shifts arrived in environments like this, sudden and comprehensive and entirely impossible to mistake once you were encountering it.
The first Silver class Wood Snake was longer than any of the Bronze class ones by a factor that made comparison feel imprecise, its body carrying a different density, the scales deeper in their green and more precisely fitted against each other, the movement of it as it came at him from the canopy above carrying a quality that the Bronze class had not had.
It dropped from above, not with the eruption of the underground emergence but with the controlled and committed speed of something that had used height and gravity as a hunting combination enough times to have optimised it completely.
Neil stepped aside and felt the displaced air of the full-speed drop and watched it hit the ground and immediately coil for the second strike with a speed that was genuinely different from the Bronze class, not incrementally faster but qualitatively different, the coil completing in a fraction of the time the Bronze class had needed and the second strike already committed before Neil had fully processed the first had missed.
He threw the Inferno blade forward.
The Snake’s body moved to avoid it with the speed advantage it had at this tier, and it did avoid the blade itself, clearing the trajectory by a margin that was precise rather than generous, the kind of avoidance that communicated the creature knew exactly how fast it was and had calculated the minimum necessary evasion.
The chain was still connected to the blade.
Neil pulled it sideways mid-flight, redirecting the arc into the path the Snake’s evasion had taken it, and the chain caught the body two-thirds of the way down with the weight of the Frost behind the wrap.
The binding took.
He activated the Frost immediately and felt the resistance of the Silver class body fighting it with an intensity that the Bronze class had not produced, the chain straining in a way he had not felt against the lower tier, the Snake’s physical strength at this level making the restraint a genuine contest rather than a foregone conclusion.
He increased the discharge and the resistance dropped but did not stop, the Silver class body continuing to fight the binding even as the frost worked on it, the regeneration and the physical strength competing against the chain’s effect simultaneously.
He drove the Frost blade through the head cleanly while the body was still fighting the chain.
The freeze front spread from the point of entry outward, meeting the Frost chain’s effect from the binding and combining with it in the way that the two tools of the same element combined when applied to the same target from different angles, the thermal shock comprehensive and total and moving through the bone and the brain matter and the body systems in the fast pattern the Frost produced at full discharge.
The Silver class Snake went still.
The second one hit him from the side while he was reading the first.
Fast enough that the impact registered before the approach did, the weight of a Silver class body in full committed charge from the left flank, the fang going for the neck with the angle that would put the injection directly into the spine rather than the muscle.
The fog armor of his Phantom physique caught the fang.
Not cleanly, the fang penetrating deeper into the fog layer than he would have preferred, but the armor held the penetration at the layer boundary and the fang withdrew before completing the injection, the venom discharging into the fog rather than into him.
The fog was not a biological system and the venom had nothing to work on in it.
He registered the trace amount that had made it through before the full withdrawal and noted it for the clearance cycle.
He grabbed the Snake by the head with his left hand, the Frost chain materialising over his grip as he did, and he drove the Snake’s head into the root-covered ground hard enough that the root network below the surface cracked from the impact, fragments of root spraying upward.
He discharged the Frost chain fully into the impact point.
Total and instant crystallisation, the ground around the impact site freezing in a spreading pattern, the roots cracking under the thermal shock of the sudden temperature change, and the Snake’s head and neck locked in the ice with the completeness of a full discharge.
He drove the Inferno blade through the ice and the skull beneath it with a single clean downward strike.
Both kills went into inventory.
He paused.
The trace venom from the second Snake’s near-injection was present, small in quantity but the kind of thing that Cynthia had told him was the real danger rather than any single heavy dose.
He ran the Aquamorph clearance cycle at the affected site, producing the specific neutralising compound his understanding of the venom’s chemistry called for and running it through the tissue at the injection site until the trace was gone.
It took several minutes.
He made a note of the time and set the internal monitoring interval to a consistent rhythm, something he would check whether or not he noticed anything symptomatic.
The Silver class encounters continued and they were harder than Bronze in every measurable way, the speed and strength and regeneration all stepping up in the specific way that class progression stepped things up, genuinely different rather than just more of the same.
But manageable.
The Primordial Blades were the right tools for this tier and he had enough understanding of the environment and the creatures’ movement patterns now that the engagements were not mysteries to be solved in real time but problems with known parameters that he was applying known solutions to.
The gene material went into inventory after each kill and he moved deeper still.
The Gold class territory was different in every way immediately apparent.
The light was less, the canopy here having achieved a density that went beyond the already complete coverage of the Bronze and Silver territories into something that felt deliberate rather than simply biological, the branches interlocked in ways that no random growth process would produce, the angles and spacings carrying the quality of something that had been shaped over a long period of time toward a specific outcome.
❖❖❖
Thanks for reading...
