It had taken over a dozen stabs to kill the Cavern Charger, and that was with it pinned beneath a column. Seras didn’t know what exactly differentiated a bronze beast from iron ones, but she had decided that she needed to avoid finding any more.
Seras knew the beast was dead when the air of oppression around her shoulders vanished. After that her knife cut its skin with far greater ease. Seras cut open its skin and did her best the hack through its bones so that she could reach into its chest cavity.
“Now, if I were a magic core I’d either be next to the brain or-” she stopped as her hand felt something solid near its heart.
It took a little effort to pull it out of the still warm carcass of the cavern lurker, but eventually it came out with a loud slurping sound. She wiped sound of the viscera off on a clean part of the monsters hide and examined it.
It was teardrop shape crystal with an orangish brown luster. “I guess that’s how they get their rank names.” Seras said out loud as she held the bronze monster core. “Now how do I go about, oh!”
A popup window had appeared.
Would you like to use Bronze rank monster core to enhance auto-repair speed. Y/N
Seras selected yes and saw the timer cut in half. She went from over one day down to just a half day. It was an improvement but still not ideal, could she speed it up further with more cores?
Auto repair in progress time to full functionality 13 hours and 11 minutes. Consume 3 bronze rank monster cores and 10 iron quintessence to speed up process.
Okay the requirements went up. Unless she got very lucky she was stuck with a broken arm for the next half day. Still, if she could find more cores and quintessence then she’d have a good leg up on facing more beasts. One of her largest reoccurring expenses as a merc had always been getting her augs fixed up. And the price only went up as Seras added more and more high end augs. Her current gear had cost her nearly 150 million chits, which had been her whole life savings. Gear like hers couldn’t be bought on the open market, only lifted off private armies or corpo-execs.
Seras did her best to wipe the blood off her bare skin, but eventually had to give up and make peace with filth coating her skin.
Glancing back to the road Seras made an observation that should have been apparent before, that walking on the roads left her exposed. The Charger had only seen her because she was out in the open like an idiot.
With one leap Seras jumped up nearly a whole story, she caught the edge with one hand and pulled herself up. From there she climbed the next four stories in a series of leaps and kick jumps. It was hard with only one arm, but Seras had managed more difficult parkour with worse augs before.
From above Seras plotted her route. She didn’t necessarily know where an exit might be, but she figured the city’s edge was as good a place as any.
She ran along the roofs of the city’s remaining buildings. She thought it was strange that someone had put gabled roofs on buildings in an underground city. There were even rain gutters, which left her wondering if it rained down here?
Her assumption was no given all the dust on the road and roofs. But it wouldn’t be the strangest thing today.
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Seras had been making good progress towards the outer city section when something caught her eye. Nestled in the crook of one of the roofs Seras saw a small cube that gave off a small amount of light.
At first Seras thought it was just another variety of the glow crystals, but instead she found a soft yellow glowing cube that wasn’t fused to the stone structure of the roof.
Awakening stone of Earth. Absorb to unlock the power of earth. Requires one unawakened essence ability.
Seras blinked in surprise, then she called up her growing list of unanswered questions and went to the section regarding awakening stones. So far, she only had the one that was supposedly left by an inter-dimensional entity, and she had been wondering if that was the only way to get them. But between the essence power list she had access to and this stone she could now confidently say that they don’t ‘only’ come from extra-dimensional entities.
She had the feeling it might be like the Quintessence, just appearing in an environment.
She had been contemplating the awakening stone when an oppressive weight landed on her shoulders. Her eyes went wide as she crouched down on the roof.
Silver rank aura from Earth golem has suppressed your normal rank aura. All damage is reduced. Speed is reduced. Mobility is reduced. Strain from higher ranking aura has effected your remaining internal organs. Degradation 2%
Seras knew in an instant that silver was higher than bronze, by a lot. It was like all her nerve connections went numb and an unshakable weight descended on her limbs. Her vision, despite being provided by ocular systems, went black and fuzzy around the edges, and the quality dropped to a grainy image. Her HUD was glitching, the icons blinking in and out of view. And the feeling in her gut was like a storm of acid and razor blades, tearing up her remaining organic flesh.
Then she felt the ground shaking and saw the figure of a giant stone humanoid lumbering down one of the streets at nearly the edge of her view. Its misshapen head poked above the five story buildings, and Seras knew that if that thing saw her she was dead.
In an unconscious move of desperation Seras activated the active camo feature in her smart skin. Her skin shade darkened, and the reflective quality that let her skin look like real skin faded away until she was just a human shaped smudge of darkness blending into the surrounding darkened tiles.
Once the camouflage was complete a message appeared before her.
Stealth mode engaged. Aura suppression has caused an additional power draw. Any attempt to activate abilities or aura powers will negate aura suppression.
Degradation 4%
The golem paused, and Seras realized that it might have been tracking her by her aura. Before today Seras had always scoffed when fake mystics said she had a potent corrupted aura and needed to by their crystals and meditation books to cleanse it. now if she had the chance she might actually buy a couple on the off chance that they might help her hide from the Earth Golem.
Hiding was good, but not if they already knew your position.
Seras slowly began to move away from where she had been, trying her best to avoid being within the Giant's sight-lines.
As she began to move the earth once again began to shake.
The Golem was moving to where she had been.
Degradation 10%
Seras felt her mechanical heart begin to pound as time slowed down. Careful not to be too hasty in her retreat Seras slowly crawled to the next building. This building had already had half of its roof caved in, though whatever did it was long gone. She scooted all the way to the edge of the massive hole in the roof when the shaking stopped.
Seras looked through the corner of her eye and saw the Golem right next to where she had been. It had moved so fast!
Its light green orbs that were probably its eyes were fixed on where she had been.
Seras felt a shiver crawl up her spine.
Then, faster than she would have thought possible for a thing of its size, a fist fell on the place where Seras had been. Bits of roof, tile, and dust burst out in a small cloud that obscured her vision. When the dust cleared she saw the Golem standing before a pile of rubble. Its eyes scanning the heap that used to be a brick building.
Then it turned away and began back down the street.
Seras caught herself before she let out a sigh of relief.
She was about to unclench her jaw when a putrid scent reached her nose and burned her eyes. The dried blood from the Cavern Charger was dissolving into a sickly rainbow-colored smoke that smelled like all the steps of decay had been distilled and packed it the shimmering smoke.
Seras was used to awful acrid smells; one didn’t grow up in lower Mantel without their fair share of poisonous vapors. What terrified her was that thing having a sense of smell.
The slight cavern breeze blew the smoke its way, mixing it with the dust. Seras prepared her legs for mad dash just as the last bit of smoke left her skin. With the smoke no longer giving her position away Seras judged her chances at survival to be better than just a second ago.
The smoke reached it, and despite not having a nose it turned as if could smell the smoke.
But instead of looking at her hiding spot it looked at the rubble of the broken building, as if it thought the smoke came from there.
It stared a little longer until the smoke passed and it turned back to its original path.
Seras wasn’t sure why the smoke had dissolved, or why the Golem had only looked at the rubble. But what she did know was that she had been lucky.
Very, very lucky.