Chapter 18 - 17 — Before the Minute Ends [III]
My right hand was broken inside the gauntlet, Bria was on her knees, and the mine had not finished making up its mind about whether to stay standing.
[Gate Failure cleared.]
[Emergency exit restored.]
[Gate collapse begins in 30:00.]
Down the entrance passage, a green surface folded itself back into the air, and the orange started draining out of the crystals in the walls one at a time.
The Manticore did not dissolve.
It stayed exactly where it had died, under a heap of ceiling, with its hide and its claws and its trapped tail and everything that had been keeping it alive still inside it.
"Idris. Get up here."
Every monster grows a mana stone near its heart. That is not clan knowledge, that is something every child in the region learns, though growing up in a Player house meant I learned what happens to them afterwards.
They hold the dungeon mana that fed the creature, which is why people build with them. Mana-conductive weapons, barrier systems, medicine, research equipment, and most of the power infrastructure sitting around every Tower and Gate on the planet.
Grade, purity, damage, and species decide what one is worth.
A Green stone out of an ordinary dungeon monster covers a set of decent equipment. An intact Orange boss stone is the kind of thing guilds and clans and research bodies start making phone calls about.
And the System pays you in experience, not in materials. It puts EXP on your board the instant the thing dies, and then it leaves the body lying there, and if you walk out without it, the Gate takes everything when it goes.
Thirty minutes. Enough for the parts that mattered and nothing else.
"Under the chest, where the ribs meet," I said. "Not the middle. There."
I could not have cut anything with my right hand the way it was.
Idris put his mana edge along the line I gave him and opened the hide, and it did not part cleanly, because a dead Manticore is still several hundred kilos of muscle and bone that does not want to come apart for four exhausted teenagers.
Bria got both hands into the cut and hauled the flap of hide back while he worked deeper.
Nia looked at my hand, decided a fracture was not going to kill me, and bound it against a strip of split timber instead of spending what little she had left.
Tomas went along the buried tail with his knife, working loose the spines that had not snapped, keeping well clear of the stinger.
Then Idris’s blade reached something beside the heart, and orange light came up out of the opening and lit the underside of his face.
They pulled it out together.
It was the size of my fist, translucent orange, and hot enough that Idris nearly dropped it into the rubble before Bria got a hand under it. Threads of light moved inside it, slow and thick, like fire that had been made to sit still.
I took it in my left hand.
[Manticore Mana Stone.]
[Grade: Orange.]
[Condition: Intact.]
Intact mattered more than the grade did.
A stone that gets cracked on the way out leaks most of what makes it useful, drops a tier in value, and occasionally lets go of everything at once while somebody is holding it.
I put it into a reinforced field pouch and sealed it.
We took the stinger as well, and the spines Tomas had cut free, since the venom alone was worth studying and the material was worth crafting with.
The rest of it we left. There were five of us, four could barely stand, and nobody was carrying a Manticore through a collapsing mine.
The walk back was slow.
Bria carried her shield in the crook of her arm, because the grip had bent out of shape and she could not hold it properly any more.
Idris kept stopping to work the notches in his blade with his thumb, and Tomas had four arrows left in a quiver built for thirty.
Nia flexed her fingers twice on the way out, and no light came.
Two levels had steadied me, and I could feel the difference in my legs, and none of it had done a thing for the hand strapped to a piece of timber against my chest.
Then the green surface took us, and we came out the other side.
The compound had changed completely.
The Bureau had watched a Green Gate turn Orange on their instruments with five newly awakened Players behind it, and they had done exactly what they were supposed to do about it.
Ambulances stood in a row with their rear doors already open. Armed Players held a line around the containment zone, and an Orange-response team was kitted and waiting at the barrier for the readings to steady enough to send them in after us.
None of them were wondering what had happened in there. Their instruments had told them.
What none of them expected was the door opening from our side.
Bria came out first, and the whole compound went quiet.
Then everybody moved at once, medics coming forward before anyone had finished counting heads, and Idris came through behind her, then Nia, then Tomas.
I came out last with my hand bound to a piece of mine timber and the pouch held against my chest.
The field officer looked along the line of us. He counted, and then he counted again, and his eyes went back to the Gate as though the real rescue team ought to be coming through behind us with the survivors.
Nobody came through behind us.
I opened the pouch far enough for the light to get out.
The orange came up out of my palm and across my face, and the people nearest me knew exactly what grade they were looking at, because that is not a colour anybody in this profession has to guess at.
The response team stopped checking their weapons.
One of the medics simply stood there with a bandage roll in her hand, looking at the stone, and then at five rookies who had been listed as trapped nineteen minutes ago.
The field officer’s voice came out lower than it had been all morning.
"You five cleared an Orange Gate?"