Chapter 19: The Gate Boss
The beast crossed the chamber in two strides.
It came in low, head down, the mane bristling out around its shoulders, and the speed was the first surprise of the fight.
A body that size had no business moving that fast. The dirt of the basin sprayed behind its paws in great sheets. The bass growl in its chest rose into a roar as it closed in.
I stepped to the side at the last second.
The claws came down where I’d been standing. The packed dirt shattered. A divot the size of a kitchen table opened in the floor of the chamber, and the beast pivoted on its back leg with the kind of momentum a four-ton predator wasn’t supposed to redirect mid-charge.
I got a forearm up.
The second swipe caught me across the chest.
The claws didn’t break my skin, which was its own kind of information about my new body, but the force behind the blow lifted me off the ground and threw me ten meters across the chamber.
My back hit the curved cavern wall. The stone cracked behind me by impact. I dropped to one knee, felt the air leave my lungs in a single hard cough, and rolled sideways before the beast’s follow-up came down on the spot I’d landed.
The strike hit the wall instead. More stone splintered.
I came up off the ground at a sprint.
I closed the distance before the beast could pull its forepaws free of the wall. My shoulder slammed into the side of its ribs, full strength, and the impact actually rocked it sideways. Its weight shifted onto its hind legs. The dirt under its paws cracked outward. I followed the shoulder with a closed-fist punch to the same spot, drove the knuckles in deep, and felt a rib give under the blow.
The beast’s head whipped around.
The jaw came at me from above, teeth bared, and I had to throw myself flat to the dirt to keep my face. The bite closed on empty air a hand’s width over my head. The heat of its breath rolled across my back. I rolled out from under its chest and came up at its flank, hammered another punch into the same broken rib, and got a second crack out of the bone.
The beast roared.
It threw its head back and the sound bounced off the chamber walls hard enough to bring dust down from the ceiling.
I was stronger than this thing, but not by much. My fists were doing some real damage. They were not doing fast damage. If I tried to grind it down at this pace, I was going to be in the chamber for an hour, and one mistake in that hour could change the entire course of the fight.
Taking a step back, the beast turned to follow me, slower this time, the broken ribs working against the pivot.
I lifted my right hand.
My palm faced the beast across the chamber, fingers splayed, and the gold light formed in front of me in a long heavy palm-shape.
[Buddha’s Palm]
The gold palm rushed forward and slammed into the beast’s chest.
The impact lifted it off its hind legs. Its body rotated in the air with the force of the blow. It hit the wall behind it back-first, the curved stone cratering inward where it landed, and a fresh roar tore out of its throat as it dropped to the dirt.
I lifted my hand again.
The second cast pulled deeper than the first. I could feel my mana dropping fast.
[Buddha’s Palm]
The second palm hit the beast as it tried to rise.
It folded the front half of its body around the blow in an attempt to defend against it.
Unfortunately for the beast, the mane on its neck flattened. One of its forelegs gave out under it, and the beast collapsed sideways into the dirt, blood foaming around the cracked teeth at the front of its mouth.
It tried to push itself up. But before it could do so, I gave it the third one.
[Buddha’s Palm]
The gold palm came down on the beast from above this time, my hand turning over as I cast, and the impact drove the beast’s skull into the packed dirt of its own basin.
The body of the gate boss shuddered once, twice, and then went still. Light escaping its eyes, forever asleep.
The chamber went quiet.
My chest was heaving from the exhaustion. It was the first time I had such real fight, even though I was a C-Ranker, I was still a newbie, and that showed.
I had low control over my mana channels, wasting a large portion of my Mana once I cast my skills.
My mana was down to maybe a fifth of what I’d walked in with. My back hurt from the wall hit, the bruise already coming up under my shirt, and my forearm where I’d blocked the first swipe was a long bright line of red.
[+50 SP]
I nodded at the screen.
"Worth it."
A new tear opened in the air at the far end of the chamber, smaller than the one I’d walked through to enter, the inside of it the same purple-black.
It was the exit, I cleared the gate. I walked over to the boss and crouched beside its head.
The body was huge. Luckily, my storage ring had enough space to accommodate its size.
The corpse dissolved into the ring’s pocket. The price tag on this one was going to be measured in the hundreds of thousands.
I stood up, brushed the dirt off my uniform, and walked through the exit tear.
My vision was welcome with the pavement having been cordoned off in a wide perimeter.
Yellow association tape strung between cones, mana barriers humming in soft blue lines at every intersection within two blocks, and a crowd held back behind it. The crowd noise rose the second they saw me.
A man in association black pushed through the cordon and crossed the cracked pavement toward me at a fast walk.
He was middle-aged, hard around the eyes, C-Rank badge visible on his chest. His gaze swept over me from boots to face. His eyes caught on the F-rank badge clipped to my uniform jacket and stopped there.
He stopped two meters in front of me.
"You walked into an E-rank gate. By yourself."
"Yeah."
"And you came back out in one piece?"
"Yeah."
He stared at the badge on my chest. He looked up at my face. He looked back down at the badge.
"You’re an F-rank."
I remained silent.
The gate tear behind me chose that moment to do its work. The purple-black collapsed inward.
The edges curled, folded, and the whole thing winked out of existence with a small soft pressure-wave that pushed the dust on the pavement outward in a ring. The space where the gate had been was empty.
A temporary gate. Not a persistent one. It wouldn’t be opening here again.
The man in association black watched it disappear. He looked back at me,
"You’re going to need to answer some questions."
I nodded.
"Lead the way."
