Chapter 52: Corruption Crystals
"A minus twenty in all stats...? That’s ridiculous."
Damon rose from his stool. He didn’t need to read the notification twice. The time limit, the penalty, compared to every other task the system had given him, this one left no room for hesitation.
"I should wake Sera. I shouldn’t do this alone."
He turned toward the bunk where she lay sleeping, her staff propped against the wall within arm’s reach. But the moment his hand neared her shoulder, a golden screen flared between them.
[QUEST MUST BE DONE ALONE]
[SOVEREIGN’S PROTECTION ACTIVE]
[WAYSTATION IS PROTECTED]
[SOLO ADVENTURE VIABLE]
Damon’s hand stopped inches from Sera’s arm.
"What...?"
He read the screen again. The system had never intervened like this before. It had offered tasks, tracked progress, and dispensed rewards with the detached efficiency of a machine. But this was different.
It had actually given a boundary.
[QUEST MUST BE DONE ALONE]
The golden text pulsed, and Damon pulled his hand back.
"Fine," he muttered. "I’ll go alone."
Damon turned toward the door. The waystation was quiet except for the soft breathing of his sleeping companions.
He moved carefully, easing the door open just enough to slip through.
The barrier runes pulsed steadily, their golden glow unchanged. Beyond them, the three rogues lay where they’d been restrained, still unconscious.
"Wish me luck..."
***
Damon moved carefully, letting his eyes adjust to the faint bioluminescence of the same moss that grew in the D-Rank caves.
It was thinner here, scattered in patches rather than carpeting the walls, but it was enough to navigate by.
His system pulsed at the edge of his vision.
[TRACKING ROGUE ORIGIN POINT]
[FOLLOW THE MANA TRAIL]
A faint golden line appeared on the ground, visible only to him. It led away from the waystation, cutting through the underbrush at an angle that suggested the rogues hadn’t used the main road at all. They’d come through the forest directly.
Damon followed the trail.
The forest was different at night. The birdsong he’d grown used to during the day was gone, replaced by a silence so complete he could hear his own heartbeat.
The trees pressed close on both sides, their branches interlocking overhead like grasping fingers. Every few steps, something rustled in the underbrush, but nothing approached him.
The golden line led him deeper into the woods, away from the road, away from the waystation, away from anything resembling safety.
After twenty minutes of walking, he found the first body.
It was another student, slumped against the base of an ancient oak. His academy uniform was torn, and his eyes were open but unseeing. Unlike the three at the waystation, this one wasn’t moving.
Wasn’t breathing.
Damon knelt beside him, pressing two fingers to his throat. No pulse, he’d been dead for hours.
The golden line continued past the corpse, deeper into the forest. Damon forced himself to keep moving. Whatever had happened here, whatever had turned these students into hollow-eyed husks, the source was still ahead.
"No wonder why the time limit is tonight, I don’t even have to do the tracking myself."
He found two more bodies in a small clearing. Then another near a stream. Five dead in total, all academy students, all with the same dilated pupils and faint red rings around their irises. None of them had visible wounds.
None of them had been killed by monsters.
They’d died from whatever had infected their minds.
Or at least, that’s what Damon thought.
The golden line stopped at the mouth of a cave.
It was smaller than the D-Rank portals, barely wide enough for a single person to squeeze through. The rock around the entrance was scorched black, as if something had exploded outward from within.
A faint red glow pulsed from the depths, rhythmic and slow, like a heartbeat.
Damon stood at the threshold, his hand raised, mana already circulating through his palm.
[SOURCE DETECTED]
[INVESTIGATE]
"Yeah," he muttered. "I figured."
Damon didn’t enter. The cave mouth was barely wide enough to squeeze through, and he’d rather not slip through a small entryway and get immediately skewered by anything waiting beyond it.
And even if he survived the entrance, if something dangerous was deeper inside and he needed to retreat, that narrow gap would be his death. He’d be trapped, funneled toward whatever called this place home.
If he wanted to go in, he needed to make the cave’s mouth a lot bigger.
Besides, if he were lucky, the noise might attract some monsters from the inside. Better to force them to fight on his terms than crawl into a cave they had likely memorized.
[SOVEREIGN’S THUNDER]
Damon focused the skill on his foot, preferring not to punch solid rock with his fist, and drove his heel into the stone with full force.
BOOM!
The cave detonated. What had been a mouth barely able to support one person now looked like it could fit ten.
Damon didn’t enter yet. He drew his sword, eyes scanning the darkness ahead and all around him. The red pulse inside throbbed steadily, daring him to come in.
But he didn’t. He needed to wait. If anything inside was attracted to the noise, he’d take out as much as possible while he still had the advantage.
The red pulse inside the cave continued its steady rhythm, unfazed by the explosion. No monsters came rushing out.
No hollow-eyed students emerged from the darkness. The forest behind him remained silent, as if the very act of approaching this place had muted the world.
"Nothing’s coming out," he muttered. "Fine."
He stepped through the shattered entrance.
The cave’s interior was larger than the mouth had suggested. The ceiling rose high enough that his footsteps echoed, and the walls were lined with the same scorched-black rock he’d seen outside. The red light pulsed from somewhere deeper, casting long, writhing shadows across the stone.
The air was wrong.
It pressed against his skin like humidity before a storm, heavy and charged with something that wasn’t quite mana. His system pulsed in response, the golden text flickering at the edge of his vision as if struggling to categorize what it was detecting.
He didn’t have to walk far.
The main chamber opened before him, a wide hollow in the rock lit entirely by the source of the red light. It hung suspended in the center of the chamber, a jagged crystal the size of his torso, its surface crawling with veins of crimson energy that pulsed like blood through arteries.
It was beautiful.
It was wrong.
And beneath it, scattered across the stone floor like discarded dolls, were more bodies. Five more students, their eyes open and unseeing, their faces frozen in expressions that weren’t quite peace and weren’t quite terror.
Damon’s hand tightened on his sword.
[INVESTIGATE THE CRYSTAL]
He didn’t need the prompt. He was already walking toward it.
The crystal’s pulse grew stronger as he approached, the red light washing over him in waves. His system flickered again, the golden text glitching for the first time since his awakening. Fragments of text appeared and disappeared too fast to read.
But he caught one word.
[ERROR]
[ERROR]
[ERROR]
Then, just as suddenly, it stabilized.
[ANALYSIS COMPLETE]
[SUBJECT: SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION CRYSTAL — UNRANKED]
[ORIGIN: UNKNOWN]
[EFFECT: CORRUPTS THE SYSTEM INTERFACE OF RESONATORS WITHIN PROXIMITY. PROLONGED EXPOSURE RESULTS IN PERMANENT PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE. CRYSTAL IS SENTIENT. CRYSTAL IS AWARE OF YOUR PRESENCE.]
Damon took an involuntary step back.
Sentient... the thing was alive. And it was aware of him.
[SOVEREIGN’S CLASS PASSIVE IS PREVENTING CORRUPTION]
[DESTROY CRYSTAL]
"Don’t have to tell me twice..."
