Chapter 322: Loot
She hunted the climbers down until only a few remained, and by then the battle had lost its structure. The hunters had become the hunted. Their confidence had rotted into panic, and panic was killing them faster than Yenna could. They were not weak. That much was obvious. Their gear was decent. Their levels were higher than Kael’s official floor position by a wide margin. Their coordination had been solid before the lights began dying.
But fear had hollowed them out.
Not ordinary fear.
Something sharper.
As if a ghost was chasing them.
A man tried to flee into the darkness with a torch in hand, only for its flame to snuff out halfway through his first turn. He screamed, dropped the dead torch, and reached for another from his belt. His fingers found the handle just as the darkness peeled them off.
Another climber fell to his knees and raised both hands. "Wait! Wait, we can talk!"
Yenna’s saber passed through him.
"No," she said.
The last one standing was a woman with twin short swords and a torch strapped to her back. She fought better than most. Her steps were clean, her eyes locked on Yenna’s shoulders rather than the blade, and she used the light on her back smartly, forcing Yenna to approach from angles where the torch’s safe radius covered retreat.
Then the torch went out.
The woman felt it immediately.
Her eyes widened.
Yenna was already there.
One final cut ended it.
The ruined street went still except for the hiss of lanterns and the soft, wet settling of bodies.
Yenna withdrew her blade and exhaled.
It had been too easy.
She had fought climbers before. Killed them. Been hunted by them. She knew the difference between weak prey and strong people losing discipline. These were not amateurs. They had been prepared. They had known the sector. They had come for her with a formation built around Vanitas rules.
Yet once their torches began dying, they unraveled like children in a dark room. And she has yet to understand why that happened.
A ghost, she thought again.
Something had moved among them.
Something she had not seen nor felt. A monster she didn’t know about? This made her think of the danger that it could pose. That she would have to move differently from now on, in case this creature were to extinguish her light.
"Not bad."
The voice came from behind her.
Far too close.
Far too frightening.
Yenna turned and swung with everything she had.
Her saber clanged hard against something metallic.
The impact rang through the air.
"God damn it woman! That almost killed me!"
Kael materialized out of nothing, one gauntlet raised where her blade had struck. The metal of his gauntlet had caught the blow without cutting through, though the force still pushed his arm back a fraction.
Yenna stared.
Then rubbed her eyes once, as if the sight might correct itself.
"I thought you left."
Kael smiled faintly. "Who do you think turned off their lights?"
"You could do that?" Her eyes narrowed. "Invisibility? Powerful ability..."
"Something like that."
He was not about to explain how the Presence Rune worked.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever, if he could help it.
The discovery was too fresh anyway. [Presence] had worked on the darkness of Vanitas. To an unbelievable degree, actually. Kael had expected hiding from the darkness that surrounds the world of vanitas to drain him. Instead, the drain had been strangely light. Almost insignificant compared to what it should have cost.
Vanitas did not look for him.
Not the same way living things did.
The darkness responded to presence, proximity, rules, light, and perhaps existence itself, but while [Presence] wrapped him, the pressure of the floor slid past him differently. His internal energy had not dropped in the same brutal way it did when someone actively searched for him with intention. The climbers had panicked because their torches died without a visible attacker, but the dark itself had never screamed his location back to them.
That was useful.
Too useful.
Dangerously useful.
Yenna sat down near the lantern’s edge, blade resting across her knees for a moment. She was not exhausted, not exactly, but even she needed a breath after painting the sector red.
"We need to move fast," she said. "They must have informed the rest of the climbers. They’ll probably show up soon."
Kael glanced left.
The mini-map confirmed it.
From where they were, several distant green dots had begun pushing out from the fog of war. They were moving quickly. Not wandering. Not cautious. Rushing.
"How would they inform others?" Kael asked.
"What do you mean?" She asked.
"Like is there a communication device they use? Or something?"
"Huh? No, they’re just using the guild chat, or the friend chat."
"Wait, that’s a thing?"
"It’s been a thing since a while, why you don’t have friends."
"I’m not the one being hunted by a guild..."
"Touché"
"How does it work?"
"Add friend, and say their name."
"Add Yenna." He said.
[Adding Climber Yenna **** as friend.]
[You can voice call, and video call your friends. You can also type for them or leave messages.]
[You unlocked the achievement First Friend.]
+1 INT
"Hah, I never expected that to give an achievement."
"Well, now we can contact each other and even see each other on our mini-maps."
Kael took a look at his map, and Yenna was no longer green, but was a pale blue color there. While around them, things weren’t as colorful.
"Get your loot, and let’s go," Kael said.
"Already did," Yenna replied. "Auto pickup on kill. Mostly junk. I was also keeping tabs on any runes they had. Nothing much." She reached into her inventory and tossed something toward him. "But here."
Kael caught the cores.
"Soul Cores?" he asked. "For me?"
"You helped me out. Removing their light made them easier to kill." She shrugged.
"Thanks then."
Kael did not refuse.
He checked the amount.
One thousand eight hundred and sixty cores.
A decent chunk.
Especially for a fight where he had not needed to break his body, spend major energy, or reveal anything too obvious beyond the fact that people’s lights mysteriously died when he was around. Which, to be fair, was still suspicious as hell.
"This too," Yenna said.
She handed him several shards.
They looked familiar, faintly reflective and strange, carrying the unpleasant feel of Vanitas without the immediate hunger.
Kael held them up. "Oh yeah. What is this? I got a lot of it from monsters."
"Vanity Shards," Yenna said. "Vanitas currency. You can only use it here. Utterly useless outside and unusable anywhere else, but it can be exchanged with merchants on Vanitas floors."
Kael looked at her. "There are merchants here?"
"Yes."
"In this place?"
"Yes."
"That feels like a scam wearing a hat."
"It probably is," Yenna said. "But they have good stuff. I got this sword using those shards."
Kael looked at her curved blade with more interest.
That weapon had cut through trained climbers like wet cloth. If Vanitas merchants sold things on that level, then the shards in his inventory had just become far more important. Maybe he could even find a rune or two there. Worth the risk and the trouble if he were to bother.
"There is one in safe Sector Three-Three," Yenna continued. "We can get there if we run."
"Where is it, direction-wise?" Kael asked.
"North."
Kael looked at the mini-map.
North was not empty.
Several red dots shifted between broken streets and darkened structures. Some small. Some larger. A few moved with the slow, heavy patterns that usually belonged to things Kael preferred to see from farther away. No climber dots sat along the direct route yet, though that could change fast.
"Lot of monsters there," he said.
Yenna looked at him. "No climbers at least?"
"Nope."
She studied him for a moment.
He could see the question forming again.
The map.
How did he know?
How much could he see?
Then she decided, wisely, not to ask in the middle of an active hunt.
"I’m not going to ask how you know," she said. "I’ll trust you on that. Let’s go."
Kael smiled and adjusted his gauntlets.
"Aye aye, captain."
Yenna gave him a look.
"Do not call me that."
"Yes, captain."
She moved first hiding a smile, red hair catching the blue lantern light one last time before she crossed into the safer edge of a fallen torch’s glow.
Kael followed behind her, keeping one eye on the mini-map and the other on the street ahead.
Behind them, the corpses of the hunters cooled beneath dead torches.
Ahead, Vanitas opened northward.
They ran through the dark as fast as they could, both of them holding a torch each for one simple reason, if one of them dropped his, the other could light the path.
And just as they crossed a couple streets, Kael noticed something, that the darkness seemed to thicken a bit here unlike before and the range of his torch tightened a bit too much.
"We’ve arrive to the Second Sector, be ready, the creatures here are on a different level."