Chapter 3: SSS-rank Legendary Draw
The rest of the party followed, their laughter layering on top of Ran’s, bouncing around Leon from every direction.
He could hear them shifting, could picture them standing there watching with their arms folded and grins on their faces, treating the sight of him pinned and bleeding beneath a dungeon pig like something worth gathering around.
None of them moved to help.
Nobody took a single step forward.
Leon’s fingers curled slowly against the cold floor.
[— 2]
He winced, jaw locking against the sound that tried to escape his throat.
’Is this it?’ he thought. ’Am I just going to die? Like this. As a plate for a damn pig?!
And then his life flashed across his eyes in a series of images.
He had not achieved anything.
Not a single thing he could point to and call his own.
’No, I’m not going to accept it. There is absolutely no way I’m dying like this’ he thought.
His eyes, still pressed low to the dungeon floor, moved.
He made sure to be careful, scanning the ground around him without lifting his head enough to disturb the pig still feeding contentedly at his back.
And then he saw it.
Lying not too far from him, half swallowed by shadow but unmistakably there — a rocky spike, jagged and narrow, broken off from the dungeon wall at some point and left forgotten on the ground.
The pig’s snout was still buried deep in the torn bag, its jaw working noisily, entirely absorbed in its meal.
Leon moved his arm.
Slowly, inches at a time, pressing his palm flat against the cold stone floor and sliding it forward without any sudden motion that might draw the creature’s attention away from the food.
His fingers stretched out ahead of him, reaching across the ground towards the edge of the corridor where the rocky spike lay half hidden in shadow.
Then his fingers closed around it.
Rough and jagged, heavier than it looked, cold against his palm. He gripped it tight and pulled it slowly back towards his body.
[— 1]
The pig bit down again, oblivious.
Leon’s teeth ground together until his jaw ached.
He lay still for one more second, collecting every last scrap of strength remaining in his body, pulling the spike towards him.
Then he twisted his arm back and drove the spike into the open wound at the pig’s side with everything he had.
The reaction was immediate.
The pig let out a guttural, lurching grunt, its entire body flinching violently.
Blood gushed from the wound, pouring hot over Leon’s hand and wrist, spilling across the stone floor in a wide, spreading pool.
For one brief moment the creature staggered.
Then the anger hit it.
It swung its massive snout downward like a hammer, driving it straight into Leon’s back with the full weight of its body behind it.
Something cracked.
Leon felt it before he fully processed what it was — a sharp, devastating snap along his left side, the sensation of something giving way that should not have given way.
The pain that followed was the worst thing he had felt in the dungeon so far, a white hot explosion that swallowed everything else for a full second and left him breathless against the floor.
His ribs.
He knew without needing to confirm it.
The grunt that tore out of his throat was low and broken.
But beneath it, underneath the pain and the breathlessness and the cold spreading through his body, something else was burning.
It came up from the same place as before, hot and furious and completely done with lying still.
He roared.
Not loud. His body didn’t have the capacity for loud anymore. But it was real, ragged and raw, and it came with his arm swinging back and driving the spike into the pig’s wound a second time.
Blood sprayed out in a sharp arc.
He stabbed it again.
And again.
Dark red spattered across the floor, across his arm, across his face in warm, heavy flecks. It hit his cheek and his lips and the corner of his eye and he did not stop.
His arm rose and fell with a rhythm that had nothing to do with technique and everything to do with refusal — sheer, desperate, furious refusal to let this be how it ended.
The pig’s grunts changed.
It lost its anger first, the sound of its grunts becoming something lower and more uncertain with each passing second.
Its legs began to tremble beneath its own weight. Its breathing, already laboured from the original wound, grew shallow and wet and uneven.
Then it dropped with a heavy, final thud that sent a small tremor through the stone beneath Leon’s body. Its legs twitched once, and then went still.
Leon lay face down in the spreading blood, the broken spike still clutched loosely in his fingers.
His H/P had been nearly gone before the final blows landed. Now the last of it dissolved in a handful of quiet flickers, each one dimmer than the last, until the final number faded and there was nothing left.
His vision blurred at the edges, similar to the way a room loses light when a candle burns down to nothing.
The cold came with it, seeping up from the stone floor into his hands and chest and face, moving inward steadily.
He could hear Ran behind, laughing at him even now.
The others too, their voices carrying the loose, easy amusement of people watching something that had nothing to do with them.
But the sound kept pulling away from him, stretching thin and distant, as if someone was slowly turning down everything the world was producing.
’So... this is it.’ he thought.
The spike slipped from his fingers and clinked softly against the stone.
’But those bastards...’ he mumbled inwardly, feeling the cold rapidly spread to his chest. ’I wish I could at least teach them a lesson. Just once... even once would have been enough.’
His eyes were almost closed.
And then something appeared.
[Requirement Met!]
[Reawakening Talent...]
[New Talent Reawakened: Legendary Draw]
[E-Rank Grey Pig Killed!]
[+20 EXP]
[Item Drop: Dull Grey Sword]
Something solid appeared beside the dead pig. It was a sword, short and unremarkable, its blade the same flat, lifeless grey as the creature it had dropped from.
It lay on the bloodstained floor without shine or weight or any quality that would have made a person look twice at it.
Behind Leon, the laughter had stopped.
Ran was staring.
All of them were, the entire party standing motionless in the corridor with their eyes fixed on Leon’s unmoving body and the dead dungeon pig slumped beside it.
The silence stretched for several long seconds, nobody filling it, nobody quite sure what expression to arrange their face into.
They hadn’t expected it.
That was the honest truth written clearly across every one of their faces. They had pushed him toward a dungeon monster as a joke.
Nobody had genuinely believed Leon would actually kill it.
Nobody had even considered the possibility.
Ran recovered first, the way he always did, pulling his expression back together with a short exhale and a slow shake of his head.
"Poor stupid thing." His voice had lost its edge, replaced with something almost conversational.
"He finally killed his first monster." He paused, letting the irony of it land. "And then died with it."
The others shifted behind him, all having awkward expressions on their faces.
Some of them hadn’t genuinely expected Leon to die, feeling that Ran would step in at some point.
But he was lying completely still in a spreading pool of blood with a broken body and empty H/P, and none of them had moved to help him once.
That sat differently now that it was real.
Ran didn’t appear to share the discomfort. He rolled his shoulders, glanced at the grey sword on the floor with mild disinterest, and turned away.
"Let’s go," he said flatly. "He’s useless anyway."
He began walking.
The others hesitated for a moment, glancing back at Leon one final time. Then they followed, moving toward the dungeon exit.
Leon heard none of it clearly.
He was still on the floor, his cheek still pressed against the cold stone, his body feeling like it had been replaced entirely with something made of lead.
His fingers wouldn’t move. His legs were somewhere far away. Even breathing had narrowed down to something shallow and automatic that he had no real part in.
The darkness at the edges of his vision had not retreated.
And then another notification appeared.
Faint at first, as if the system itself wasn’t entirely sure he still had enough left in him to receive it. But it steadied, sharpening against the dark until the words were clear.
[Talent Activated!]
[Extracting Legendary Draw...]
