Dorian was caught up in the frantic energy and atmosphere that had gripped the core room, which was now a maelstrom of sound and activity more so than it usually was. Sounds of welding, metal grinding and grunts as heavy equipment was carted to and fro created a sort of calmness in the madness. A calmness settled over Dorian who was lost in his task.

It was over.

The thought came unbidden and just like that his quasi-calm was broken. Dorian hadn't believed it at first, but seeing the heavy modifications being done to the cables and pipes, modifications he was actively engaged in finally drove the point home. There would no longer be any excess echo to coax into depleted cores. He would get back to his friends empty-handed and their hidden disappointed looks would wound him.

He had played it off nonchalantly but the thought of his friends gaining their powers back was uplifting and freeing. Uplifting because hunters now finally stood a chance against the armoured murderers and freeing because finally, he wouldn't be the only one who had powers. An imperceptible weight that should have lifted from him being the only hunter with powers now bore down even harder, and he was being crushed underneath it all.

It might take a while but one of his friends, frustrated with not finding out what power they had would most certainly try to get a core on their own. The borders of the wildlands were designed to keep things out not in, and with a wildland stirred up by a recent monster surge— death was pretty much assured.

With an effort of will, Dorian pulled his mind away from such thoughts with the hopeful thought things could change for the better. He just didn't see how.

With a final twist, the last rivet was fastened and the hunters stepped back to look at their work. Not in a million years would any of the hunters within the core room have seen themselves engaging in this kind of work. In the final stages of the war for humanity's continued existence— all of the hunters had envisioned for themselves the life they'd wanted after everything was done. From world renown and respect to alarming levels of debauchery and a quaint little house on a mountain somewhere and everything in between. Most of them hadn't lived to try to make their dreams a reality, those were the lucky ones.

And now here they were working frantically to avoid being killed by their own and by people they'd bled and died for.

Dorian knew something was wrong when Robert checked his old-timey pocket watch—an effect of the dragon core, and shook his head.

‘What could possibly be wrong now?’ he thought grimly.

Robert loudly cleared his voice and Dorian's stress levels reached a dangerous level. “ We were aiming to have at least eight hours to do this but I guess six will do. Places people. ”

Dorian watched in a daze as fellow hunters rushed to the locker rooms and brought out depleted and half-filled cores and then proceeded to arrange themselves around the brightly glowing dragon core.

'Huh?'

Was all Dorian thought before his frozen thoughts were thawed by Robert's voice snapping him into action.

“Move it, Dorian, we're on a tight schedule here.”

The hunter numbly walked into the locker room and out with his handful of depleted cores and found a spot reserved for him as close to the dragon core as possible. He tried really hard not to shed tears but it was a losing battle, the emotional whiplash of the last few hours having eroded any control he had on his emotions. No words were spoken or gestures made, his fellow hunters understood or thought they did and that was all that mattered.

Dorian slid into his spot and arranged his depleted cores before him, and then remembered to get into the pose taught by his fellow hunters. His heart finally started to beat with the first stirrings of cautious hope.

“Now before we begin—for our first-timers,” Robert began, “ The echo from the unprotected core might carry hints of its former bearer.” He smiled at the confused look on Dorian's face.

“You'll see.”

With a gesture, the metal and glass structure holding the core was lifted and echo rushed out, echo in unbelievable amounts. The energy blasted out in a pulse and when it hit Dorian it washed through his consciousness inundating him with feelings of rage and visions of burning everything alive.

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It took a few seconds for Dorian to claw his consciousness from the violent remnant thoughts of a dead dragon. Dorian didn't need the thoughts of a monster to understand the hate they'd held for humanity, he'd seen it among others, in a Taotie driving his spear deeper into itself just so it could get closer to kill him.

But now feeling the overwhelming power and potency contained within the core before him and the degree of hate it contained, Dorian had to wonder what really was the System and its unknown goals and how the hunters of old had managed to bring something like a dragon down.

Shaking his head to rid himself of meaningless thoughts about the system and depressing ones about the hunters, Dorian closed his eyes and viewed his core through his mind's eye and the view made him grimace. His core spun slowly, bereft of energy and the crack marring its surface looked wider which couldn't be good.

With all the echo he'd need and the time to fix his core, Dorian had no idea how to proceed. He'd been winging it since the day he discovered essence stones held abilities in them, sometimes to groundbreaking discoveries like creating his core or his latest earth-shattering blunder of cracking said core. With no way to proceed, he decided to fill up the depleted monster cores before him.

With a thought, he moved the echo which thundered into the cores and filled them in record time. He opened his eyes to find them shining brightly, the other hunters focused on filling their cores and Robert and a few of the senior workers assembling the new housing unit for the dragon core.

With a sigh of relief at having at least that taken care of, Dorian closed his eyes and began breathing deeply and evenly to pull Echo into himself. Everything went without a hitch and with the staggering amount of echo in the air, soon his core was full and spinning steadily.

A tremor wracked his body pulling Dorian out of his meditative trance, a wetness on his lip had him smearing blood when he went to wipe it. He was in trouble. Another tremor had him frantically closing his eyes and inspecting his core which showed him the problem almost immediately. His core was leaking echo back into his body— at first, it puzzled him why that would be a problem, he was steeped in the energy and nothing bad was happening.

Some more thinking on Dorian's part finally led him to the answer though he had to suffer two more tremors and acute pain radiating from his midsection. The echo he was currently sitting in was just particles of it floating in the air, the one in his core though was concentrated into a liquid form and packed away in an organ designed to carry it. Now said organ had raptured and the concentrated echo was leaking out and slowly poisoning him to death.

Dorian wanted to laugh but his mind was too busy thinking of solutions and he knew giving in to the laughter could lead to hysterics which would most definitely kill him. Echo poisoning was insidious like that. Out of options he desperately tried to coax the echo that was killing him back into his core and was met with failure, the echo resisted his attempts to control it when it passed the crack in his core.

In desperation, he spun his core and reversed gravity around himself and that seemed to work, the echo that was seeping out of the crack in his core now being drawn into the channels that came with it. Even with that something was wrong, when previously he'd reversed gravity it'd bottomed his core out quickly but now it was barely making a dent. To make it worse, the leak hadn't stopped totally but simply reduced from a deluge to a trickle.

The different states of echo and the slowly exacerbating echo poisoning pushed Dorian to try anything to save himself. He coaxed the readily available echo out of the air and directed its liquid form towards the crack in the hopes of sealing it over, his reasoning being the core was originally made out of echo so it should work.

It didn't.

The echo was absorbed and he was taken right back to square one. Desperation threatened to set in and growing wetness on his face was most definitely not good. Furious thinking had him re-examine what he thought he knew about his core. He'd called the injury to it a crack which seemed true as the core acted like a container for his echo. Now how to fix said crack in the container? Adding more echo to it was certainly out of the question.

The answer seemed obvious and yet Dorian was too scared to try, everything he'd done had just made everything that much worse. Another spasm and his tasting blood on his tongue decided it for him. Now all he had to do was create a solid echo or at least a semi-solid one to patch the hole in his core. How hard could that be?

Impossible it seemed. Everything he did just ended up being more liquid echo he couldn't afford to get close to his core. He cast his mind about and his eyes fell on what was killing him the core or at least what the core contained. Dorian's mind wandered on the feelings of heaviness and density that his core exuded and he subconsciously started gathering the liquid echo into a ball and imposing the concept of density onto them.

Dorian's mind screamed a warning and he came to find a semi-solid ball of solid echo floating close to his core. Dorian didn't know how he knew but he suspected making the echo solid would have outright killed him. With deft and careful movements that stretched his already taxed mind, Dorian evenly applied the semi-solid echo and patched up the cracks.

It was ugly, very much so but it would do for now.

A scream pulled Dorian out of his meditative state to find everyone in the core room staring up at him in equal parts fascination and horror. Dorian went to get up and found himself floating a few metres off the ground. He opened his mouth to assure them and coughed up so much blood. His last thought before darkness claimed him was of falling.