The towering, bloated corpse of the giant slowly began to dissolve, its central parasite shattered beyond repair, leaving behind nothing but a foul, evaporating puddle of inert sludge. The remaining undead knights who hadn't been vaporized by my shotgun blasts collapsed onto the cold stone, their puppet strings entirely cut. Silence, heavy and absolute, returned to the vast cavern of the third tier.
I walked over to where my brass lantern lay, lifting it by its heavy handle. The high-grade kerosene burned brightly, casting a defiant, golden light across the glittering, silver-laced walls. I strapped it securely back onto my right thigh.
But as I turned toward the blocked entrance of the Fourth Mineshaft, my progress was completely halted. The giant's final, desperate kinetic shockwave had done its job well; a colossal, jagged boulder of solid silver ore had sheared off from the ceiling, completely wedging itself into the structural archway and sealing the path forward.
I stood before the heavy obstruction, my lone jade-green eye narrowing. I couldn't lift it out of the way single-handed, and blasting it with my remaining three shotgun shells would be a waste of precious ammunition.
Instead, I extended my right hand, focusing my mind on the volatile life force pulsing through my veins. Channeling Blood Manipulation, I forced my own crimson essence to erupt from my palm, instantly hardening and molding itself into the dense, razor-sharp head of a heavy blood pickaxe.
I swung the tool with the full brunt of my S-rank physical strength.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
The cavern echoed with the sharp, rhythmic strikes of metal against stone. Chunks of pure, high-grade silver ore began to rain down around my boots, shattering the boulder piece by piece. As I mined through the obstruction, a familiar, bitter thought crossed my mind.
"If I actually had a legal mining license and a signed distribution contract with the royal minting industry, I would be a multi-millionaire in seconds just by collecting these scraps." I thought
The sheer volume of silver in this single cave was staggering. I resolved right then that once this nightmare was over and the plague was purged, I would look into registering an official permit. Until then, any unvouched ore in my possession would just get me thrown into a capital jail and expose me as the winged demon.
After several minutes of intense, unyielding manual labor, the silver boulder was completely reduced to rubble. The dark yawning threshold of the fourth tier was finally clear.
I stepped through the shattered archway, my heavy boots clicking against the beginning of the new rail line. The surveyor's map hadn't lied… the tracks plunged sharply downhill into a dizzying, vertical abyss.
I looked at the steep, roller-coaster drop stretching into the pitch black. A faint memory of my reckless minecart ride through the copper tier flickered in my mind, but I instantly suppressed it. My little bit of fun had almost gotten me killed up there, and I was running out of time. I wasn't going to play games anymore.
I violently flexed my spine. My massive, blood-red wings snapped outward to their full, terrifying span. With a single, explosive flap, I launched myself off the ledge and flew directly downward, cutting through the freezing subterranean wind at breakneck speed. Diving through the darkness was infinitely quicker, and it kept me entirely out of reach of any potential land-bound ambushes.
Within minutes, the freezing draft turned warm and heavy, and the steep shaft suddenly opened up into a breathtaking, terrifyingly massive underground space.
I flared my wings, catching the dense air, and touched down gracefully onto a jagged stone precipice. I had officially arrived in The Gold Mines… the Fourth Mineshaft.
The sight before me was dizzying. Under the radiant glow of my thigh-strapped lantern, the cavern walls were literally bursting with wealth. Huge, thick veins of raw, glittering gold webbed through the dark bedrock like molten liquid suns, bright enough to blind an ordinary man. Yet, I didn't touch a single nugget. I kept my hands firmly at my sides. To mine or trade gold required a highly exclusive royal permit… the kind of documentation reserved strictly for noble houses and imperial favorites. Walking into a capital bank with unrefined gold without those papers would be an instant death sentence for a mercenary like me.
I forced my gaze away from the wealth, focusing entirely on the environment.
The industrial infrastructure of the Caria Mines had completely collapsed here. The operation had been left utterly unfinished six years ago when the initial breach occurred. Just a few meters ahead of me, the iron railings were violently cut off, twisted and melted as if torn apart by a colossal force.
Past the broken tracks lay a staggering, bottomless underground ravine. The colossal chasm split the mountain's core wide open, plunging down into an unimaginable depth. There were no man-made tunnels left… just raw, primeval geology. The entire ravine was heavily bathed in a thick, choking fog of shifting, bioluminescent colors. Deep blues, toxic purples, and vibrant greens pulsed lazily along the jagged cliff faces, signaling an extreme concentration of the biological plague.
I walked to the absolute edge of the broken rail line, peering down into the glowing, colorful abyss. Somewhere down in these beautiful, deadly depths was the exact spot where my mother, Linera Rynd, had made her final stand six years ago. The air was thin, the ambient mana was suffocating, and the real high-ranking monsters were waiting in the mist. I unhitched the Death Chant Shotgun from my back, my thumb resting over the slide. I was at the threshold of my past, and the descent into the grave was wide open.
I reached into my goat-hide purse and pulled out the surveyor's map once more. But as I held it up, the radiant light from my thigh-strapped lantern began to drastically dim, casting long, sputtering shadows against the shimmering gold walls. The fuel was dying again. I quickly uncorked the dark glass bottle from my bag, carefully pouring the remaining handful of high-grade kerosene directly into the reservoir.
Fwhoosh!
The wick drank the fuel, and the golden light erupted anew, brighter and sharper than before. I held the map close to the flame, my single jade-green eye scanning the intricate ink lines, desperately searching for the threshold to the absolute bottom: The Fifth Mineshaft… The Jewelry Mines. According to the surveyor's frantic red annotations, the gateway to that deep, primeval trench and the pulsating central source of the six-year plague lay precisely at the absolute floor of this glowing underground ravine. I just had to fly down to the very end of the chasm.
Satisfied with the direction, I folded the parchment and slid it securely back into my purse.
I never even heard the sound.
BOOOOOOMMM!!!
An absolute cataclysm of raw force detonated directly against my back. This wasn't just the blunt kinetic shockwave of the giant from the upper tier… this was a localized, high-tier military disaster. The invisible wall of pressure hit me with the velocity of a speeding semi-truck, but it was horrifyingly synergized with high-density Explosion Magic.
The sheer thermal heat and concussive violence of the blast completely bypassed my passive defenses. I let out a choked, agonizing scream beneath my canvas mask as the explosion literally tore half the skin completely off my body. The right side of my torso, shoulder, and face were instantly flayed, exposing raw muscle, charred tissue, and weeping blood to the toxic cavern air. The agony was blinding, entirely overwhelming my Pain Manipulation before I could even process the breach.
The force of the explosion launched me like a ragdoll across the yawning ravine, sending me crashing violently into a massive, jagged boulder on a lower ridge.
CRASH!
My body smashed into the stone with enough momentum to shatter the bedrock, kicking up a colossal cloud of choking gray dust and pulverized gold flakes.
As I lay there in the debris, coughing up thick pools of crimson, a sickening darkness threatened to pull me under. Worse, a harsh metallic smash echoed beside me. My reinforced brass lantern had finally hit its limit. The glass shattered completely, extinguishing the golden flame in an instant. The thick, unrefined mining tar and leftover kerosene spilled out across the cold cobblestones, mixing with my own pooling blood.
The radiant light was gone. The entire ravine fell back into the sickly, undulating, multi-colored glow of the toxic bio-slime bioluminescence.
Through the haze of smoke, dust, and my own failing vision, I gripped the handle of the Death Chant Shotgun with my remaining good hand. My flesh was burning, my left arm was a stump, my light was dead, and whatever had just hit me from the shadows possessed power far beyond anything I had faced in the upper mineshafts.
I lay trapped against the fractured boulder, the smoke from the explosion stinging the raw, exposed muscles on the flayed side of my body. The shattered lantern was useless, its black tar pooling around my boots in the sickly, colorful glow of the ravine.
Squelch.
A sudden, heavy shadow dropped from the jagged ceiling directly above me. An enormous, pure A-rank bio slime ambushed me, its massive, gelatinous form expanding as it leaped onto my pinned chest. The moment its translucent mass made contact, the highly concentrated acid began to fiercely corrode my remaining skin. The blue-green sludge hissed against my flesh, eating through the tattered remnants of my merchant cloak and threatening to dissolve my vital organs down to the bone.
Ignoring the blinding white heat of the pain, my right hand snapped upward with my executioner reflexes. I jammed the muzzle of the Death Chant Shotgun straight into the center of the slime's shifting mass and squeezed the trigger.
BOOM!
The high-pressure blood shell detonated inside its core. The explosive kinetic force blew the main body of the slime into a million ragged pieces. However, because it was a pure liquid organism, the shattered, acidic remnants rained heavily back down onto me, splashing across my open wounds.
But the shotgun's ancient, vampiric curse didn't fail me. The moment the shell destroyed the core, the lifesteal effect activated violently. A massive, roaring tide of stolen vitality rushed backward into my veins. I gasped as the life force instantly went to work, knitting the flayed tissue from the explosion and neutralizing the slime acid, successfully healing half of my mangled body in a matter of seconds. I still had two rounds left in the chamber.
As the smoke and blue-green mist slowly cleared, heavy footsteps echoed through the natural ravine. I pushed myself up against the boulder, wiping the dark blood from my canvas mask, my single jade-green eye tracking the shadow emerging from the colorful fog.
I froze. My breath completely hitched in my throat.
Walking out of the mist was a young girl. She appeared to be exactly 18 years old, the exact same age as me. But it wasn't just her age that made my heart hammer violently against my ribs. Her face... it was an uncanny, striking mirror image of my own. She possessed the same structural features, the same sharp jawline, and a mane of striking brown hair that pulsed with glowing blue-green bioluminescent slime at the very tips. And when she raised her head, she stared at me with jade eyes, a perfect, terrifying match to my own.
She didn't wear clothes. Instead, her body was completely encased in a living, shifting slime bodysuit that pulsed like liquid armor over her skin. And right there, nestled behind a translucent gap in her chest, a massive biological core was beating violently inside an exposed cage of calcified bone, the exact same parasitic heart structure as the giant I had just slaughtered above.
She looked at me, her gaze cold, highly intelligent, and entirely predatory. When she opened her mouth, her voice didn't possess the raspy, broken cadence of the giant. She spoke in flawless, elegant, pure Alatist, the words echoing off the gold-laced walls of the chasm.
"You... human, a winged demon. You dare trespass our lands."
She said, her jade eyes narrowing as she took in my compressed, blood-red wings. The horrific truth clicked in my mind. She had been doing exactly what the giant did… consuming the high-tier Bureau soldiers and knights who had fallen into the gold mines over the last six years, digesting their memories, their language, and their combat traits to evolve into a perfect, humanoid apex predator.
"Well, I be damned."