Chapter 281: Loot
The Beast lowered itself again, muscles swelling further as another wave of red vapor rolled off its body. Its hind leg twitched once, but the instability did not slow it enough to make the next charge safe. The creature was still deadly, perhaps deadlier than before because the cracking rune seemed to make every surge more violent. Kael could keep dodging. He could conserve just enough energy, use light defensively, and wait until the Beast’s own power broke it.
He looked at the blue bar again.
Then at the glowing runes beneath the Beast’s hide.
Then at his gauntlets.
"You know what," Kael muttered, "screw being passive. At least now."
He slammed both wrists together.
The mechanisms inside the gauntlets locked with a heavy metallic snap. The chain linking both fists engaged, and Kael pulled his arms apart hard. The sound that followed tore through the arena like the ignition line of some iron beast being yanked awake, a harsh, ripping grind of metal teeth catching, sliding, and locking into place. The gauntlets rumbled in answer as the runic channels accepted the link, carrying pressure from one fist to the other.
Kael pressed the first of his newly acquired runes.
[Execrate Activated.]
Then the second.
[Exploit Weakness Activated.]
Finally, after a short breath that tasted of heat and blood, he let his focus sink toward the rune he had used least and feared most in chains like this.
[Darkness Rune Activated.]
The shadows around the arena stirred.
Not the Beast’s shadows. His.
Darkness pooled around the seams of Kael’s gauntlets, folding itself into the fire rather than extinguishing it. The two forces did not blend cleanly. Flame flared orange and red across the metal, while strips of blackness dragged along the edges of his fists like torn cloth refusing light. The chain between his gauntlets vibrated as if something inside the link disliked being asked to carry both heat and absence at once.
A warning appeared.
[Volatile synergy detected.]
[High consumption of internal energy will be applied to your next runic application.]
[+300% Internal Energy Consumption.]
Kael’s jaw tightened.
Three times the cost was not something to scoff at. His energy reserves were already lower than he wanted, and this next exchange would bite deep into what remained. For a moment, he considered adding Excise to reduce the consumption or cut away the waste from the chain. The thought died almost immediately. Heft was already active, and Excise did not like Heft. More importantly, cutting away output now defeated the entire point. He did not need efficient damage. He needed enough damage to matter before the Beast became too large to stop.
The Dark Beast lunged.
Its paw swept toward him with enough force to uproot an oak tree, claws cutting through the air in a red blur. Kael ducked beneath the swing and stepped inside, but this time he did not throw a punch into the opening. Every instinct in him hated wasting the chance. The Beast’s neck was right there, the line of its jaw exposed, the damaged mouth still leaking blood from the shattered fang. A fully reinforced blow could have done something.
But not enough.
He needed the mark first.
Kael opened his hand and slapped his palm against the side of the Beast’s neck.
The contact lasted less than a second.
It was enough.
[Execrate has been applied.]
[Target has been marked with instability.]
[Exploit Weakness condition secured.]
[Weaknesses revealed.]
The world changed in Kael’s vision.
Three blue circles ignited across the Beast’s body, clear and viciously bright against the red fur and black rune-light. One appeared directly beneath the place he had touched, along the side of the neck where the runic script had begun to crack under the skin. Another burned on the creature’s forehead, slightly above the eyes, pulsing in time with the repeated command buried inside it. The last appeared beneath the chest, over the heart area, glowing with the kind of invitation that made Kael’s fingers tighten inside his gauntlets.
At the same moment, Execrate took hold.
The runes inside the Beast flared violently. The repeated word that had been commanding more, more, more suddenly brightened too hard, every cracked symbol pulsing out of rhythm with the others. Its massive body jerked. Then jerked again. The Beast spasmed, one forelimb slamming into the ground hard enough to fracture stone while the other clawed at empty air as if its own body had briefly forgotten how to move.
Kael grinned despite the exhaustion biting into his core.
There it was.
The downside was instability. The rune had been pushing the Beast past its natural limit, but Execrate did not need to create a weakness from nothing. It only needed to touch a flaw that already existed and make it worse.
"Better clench those teeth!" Kael shouted.
The Beast’s head snapped toward him, rage fighting through the spasms, but Kael was already moving. Fire and darkness flared together around his right gauntlet, the two forces violently disagreeing with each other while Heft and Stone dragged the weight of the blow into something dense enough to make the floor complain beneath his step. His internal energy plunged, the cost of the volatile chain tearing through the blue bar in a visible chunk, but he did not stop.
The nearest blue circle burned against the Beast’s neck like a target drawn directly onto fate.
Kael did not have time to admire it.
Exploit Weakness was not a generous rune. It was not some permanent blessing that let him see the truth of an enemy forever. The rune opened a window, brief and sharp, and once that window closed, the weakness would still exist but it would no longer be exposed in a way his attacks could benefit from the damage amplification. The Beast was too large now, too swollen with whatever repeating rune had been carved through its flesh. If he missed the timing, if he wasted the mark, if he struck anywhere other than one of the blue circles, then the next exchange might return him to the same miserable problem as before, except with less internal energy and a Beast that kept growing.
The Dark Beast did not know what had happened to it.
It could not understand Execrate. It could not understand the blue circles in Kael’s vision or the instability now spreading through the cracked runes under its red fur. But instinct did not need language. The creature felt danger. Its body knew something had gone wrong. The spasms running through its limbs enraged it further, and rather than retreat, the Beast did what feral things always did when wounded and afraid.
It attacked harder.
Its massive head snapped toward Kael, broken jaw opening wide, one shattered fang leaving a bloody gap while the remaining teeth behind it sharpened in red light. Kael shifted away from the bite by less than an inch, hot saliva and blood spraying across his cheek as the jaws closed beside him with enough force to make the air crack. A paw followed immediately, claws tearing sideways toward his ribs. Kael ducked under the first two talons, but the third grazed his shoulder, cutting through the already ruined jacket and opening a fresh line across his skin. Blood sprayed, warm and bright, but his eyes did not leave the blue circle.
The Beast twisted, trying to crush him beneath its weight.
Kael slipped between its forelimbs, the chain between his gauntlets rattling as fire and darkness dragged against each other. The volatile synergy tore through his internal energy with every heartbeat. He could feel the cost now, not as a number alone, but as a hollowing pressure inside his chest and limbs. His body wanted him to stop. His runes wanted payment. His instincts wanted distance.
He gave none of them what they wanted.
The Beast’s tail swept toward him, wide and low. Kael stepped over the first part of the swing, then leaned backward as the thicker base passed close enough to bruise the air against his stomach. The movement was too narrow for comfort, but that was the point. The Wanderlusting Demon did not teach fear to flee properly. It taught fear to move only as much as survival demanded, because every wasted step was a step that could not be used to strike.
The blue circle on the neck was still there.
Fading, but still there.
The Beast roared and lunged again, its front half dropping low, claws carving into the stone as it threw its head toward him in a final, hateful bite. Kael’s vision narrowed until the arena, the flames, the red vapor, even the internal energy bar dropping in the corner of his sight all became distant things. There was only the Beast’s movement, the exposed weakness, and the exact instant he needed.
His eyes sharpened.
Something old and cold moved through them.
[Petrifying Gaze.]
The Dark Beast froze.
Not completely. Not truly. Its body did not turn to stone. No gray spread through its limbs, no final statue formed in the middle of the arena. The ability was not strong enough for that yet, and Kael knew it. But for one small second, the Beast’s charge halted. Its muscles locked. Its jaws remained open, its remaining teeth inches from closing around him, and the burning red fury in its eyes stalled under the sudden pressure of the Basilisk’s gaze.
One second was more than enough.
Kael stepped in.
Heft dragged weight into his arm. Stone hardened the structure of the fist and made the bones beneath the gauntlet feel as dense as the arena floor itself. Fire surged around the metal, burning hot enough that the air screamed against the edges of his knuckles. Darkness folded over the flame in strips of hungry black, not extinguishing it, but making the blow feel like something that would not simply burn what it struck, but erase the space damage needed to travel through.
Execrate had marked the Beast with instability.
Exploit Weakness had opened the point.
Kael gave the punch everything he could afford to spend.
His fist struck the blue circle on the Beast’s neck.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, there was resistance. Red fur, thick hide, layered muscle, reinforced bone, and the frantic rune-script beneath all of it tried to deny the impact. Then Execrate flared. The cracked runes inside the Beast spasmed out of rhythm, the repeated command beneath its skin collapsing around the point of contact. The blue circle shattered like glass in Kael’s vision.
His fist went through.
The blow dug into flesh, bone, and skin like a heated blade through rotten wax. Fire exploded into the wound. Darkness devoured the resistance around the impact. Heft carried the force deeper, and Stone kept Kael’s arm from collapsing under the pressure of what he had asked it to do. The Beast’s neck caved inward around his gauntlet, then burst outward on the far side.
The explosion ripped through the creature.
A blast of fire, black energy, blood, and fragments of broken rune tore out from the other side of its neck, punching a hole through the red vapor behind it and splattering the arena floor in a wide arc. The Beast’s roar died before it fully formed. Its massive body continued forward for half a step because momentum had not yet realized the creature was dead, then the legs failed all at once.
Kael pulled his arm free as the Dark Beast collapsed.
The impact shook the arena.
The blood-red body hit the ground and slid, claws scraping uselessly against stone before going still. The red vapor pouring from its fur thinned, then broke apart into scattered wisps. Beneath the skin, the repeated runic word flared one last time, every symbol cracking in sequence until the script shattered into fading embers. The creature’s enlarged body twitched once, twice, then began shrinking unevenly, not returning to what it had been, but deflating like a curse whose payment had finally come due.
Kael stood beside it, breathing hard.
His right arm shook violently inside the gauntlet. Not broken. Not ruined. But close enough that his fingers refused to fully close for a few seconds. His internal energy bar had taken a savage drop from the last exchange, and the hollow feeling in his body told him the number was not lying. Blood ran down his shoulder. His jacket was torn to hell. The arena around him still burned in scattered patches from the earlier firewave.
But the Beast did not get up.
Kael stared at it for another breath, waiting because monsters in the Tower had a bad habit of treating death like a suggestion.
Then the first notification appeared.
[Dark Beast of Getava has been slain.]
[Hidden Objective Completed.]
[Corrective Measure Challenge Completed.]
[You have defeated the Hidden Objective Boss alone.]
[Challenge Conditions exceeded.]
[Original Hidden Objective Balance: Group Encounter.]
[Current Clear Method: Solo Slay.]
[Performance evaluation recalculating...]
Kael exhaled, slowly.
"Yeah," he muttered, lowering his trembling fist. "You better recalculate."
More windows opened.
[Overall Trial of Endurance Ranking Re-Evaluated.]
[Previous Placement: Fourth.]
[Hidden Objective Status: Completed.]
[Completion Method: Direct Slay.]
[New Overall Placement: First.]
[New Record Achieved.]
[You have completed the Trial of Endurance with the lowest Fracture ever recorded by a climber.]
[You have also completed and slain the Hidden Objective Boss under altered solo conditions.]
[Additional corrective reward applied.]
The arena lights brightened faintly, as if the Tower itself had decided that the darkness no longer had any right to remain. The corpse of the Dark Beast cracked along its side, and something inside it pulsed with a dull red-black glow.
[Rewards generated.]
[Your Experience Gain has been deferred]
[You have obtained: Dark Beast Core.]
[You have obtained: Corrupted Getava Fang.]
[You have obtained: Beast Hide of Broken Night.]
[You have obtained: Rune Fragment – Beast.]
[Warning: Rune Fragment is unstable.]
[You have obtained Title: Getava’s Nightmare.]
[Getava’s Nightmare]
[Effect: +5 Strength, +5 Stamina.]
Kael looked at the last reward window, then at the corpse.
The word beneath the Beast’s fur had repeated over and over again.
The Tower had not given him a full rune, only a fragment. That was probably for the best. But the fact that the fragment had an Octagonal shape... meant that this was supposed to be a legendary rune.
Yet, with it being merely a fragment. It lost the majority of its power.
***
[Beast - Fragmented Rune - Epic Tier]
[One-Time Use]
Unstable Rune.
Grants growth of body and power.
Amplifies all sources of energy without exception.
Reduces cognitive ability based on duration of use.
Fatal upon exceeding 300 seconds of activation.
"Shit, I really only needed to wait for it to die..."
Another notification appeared.
[Due to exceptional performance under altered conditions, you received :]
[Dark Beast Egg]
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