Chapter 56: The Conspicuous Silver Case
[Battle ended. Based on the numerical difference between enemies and allies, you have gained an additional 108 Trial Points.]
[[Limit Trial]: Current Progress 510/1500]
Only after the fighting truly ended did the extra Trial Points settle into place.
Hodell glanced at the panel and let out a slow breath.
So that was how it worked.
Facing a siege really did grant additional Trial Points, but those points were only calculated after the battle state ended completely. He had been too busy clawing his way back from death to even look at the notification until now.
Thinking back on the operation, he could only admit that he had underestimated the enemy.
He had thought that with Elanis's character summon card in hand, he could bulldoze everything in one go. Instead, the energy drain had been far worse than expected. Worse still, Elanis had appeared earlier than he planned, forcing the entire risk of the operation sharply upward. In the end, he had no choice but to dump all his remaining free attribute points into Endurance just to survive the blast.
What a pity.
The rules of [Limit Trial] were a little twisted.
The harder the victory, calculated by how close he came to death, the more Trial Points he received. If it had been based purely on level difference, farming points would have been far easier for him.
But there was no loophole to exploit here.
Lowering his own health on purpose before battle would not work. The system clearly judged the overall danger of the fight, especially the difference between enemy and ally strength. In other words, the more outnumbered he was and the fewer allies he had beside him, the more bonus points he would get.
It was a system that practically encouraged lone wolves to gamble with their lives.
A fair design, if one ignored the part where it wanted him half dead.
Hodell pushed the thought aside and focused on the path ahead.
"I'm here."
Before him stood an abandoned magic pressure release vent, one of the back routes he had marked for himself long ago.
He stepped forward, reached for the rust coated rune dial, and twisted it with his fingertips.
Click.
The heavy alloy blast door shuddered, then slowly slid open. A violent rush of freezing air and snow came funneling down the shaft, instantly scattering the stale underground smell clinging to him.
Hodell narrowed his eyes.
"In the end, it's still Shawshank Redemption. Time really is a circle."
He bent his knees and sprang upward.
His body flickered through the narrow maintenance shaft like a specter, leaping from rung to rung in rapid succession. When he finally shoved open the last manhole cover and climbed out into the open, the world before him shattered into slanted bands of rainbow light.
Dawn.
So it was already dawn.
He stood in that fractured light and took a long breath. The wind scrubbed the blood and sewer stench from his lungs until the cold bit all the way down to his chest. Above him, the sky of Liuli Star was streaked with a star dappled rainbow, like a celestial curtain breaking apart into glittering shards.
He did not look back.
He simply stepped onto the route he had prepared in advance.
[Tactical Optical Mask]
[Quality: Blue]
[Effect: Facial equipment. Can change facial features at any time to disguise identity. Extremely low energy consumption.]
[Remark: The world is a broken mirror. I have merely borrowed the most inconspicuous face from those thousands of shards.]
On the transit platform, a magic guided orbital liner gave a deep metallic roar.
Wearing the mask, Hodell stood in the mottled dawn, his appearance already transformed into a forgettable, ordinary face. Then, instead of heading toward the ticket gate, he slipped into a blind corner and dropped straight into the ground with Earth Evasion.
[Phase Shuttle]
As his strength improved, the feeling of passing through solid matter had changed as well. In the past, it had been like forcing his way through heavy glue. Now it was more like running through knee deep water. There was still resistance, but it no longer felt impossible.
He moved from the soil into the liner's lower shell, found the boundary of the alloy plating, and phased through it.
Silent. Smooth. Soundless.
His figure flowed into the wall like spilled ink, then crossed the three meter thick hull without the slightest scrape or tremor. Thankfully, civilian transport liners did not employ complicated defensive arrays. If they had, this trip would have ended before it began.
He landed inside a narrow maintenance mezzanine, rune lines humming beneath his boots. After a brief look around, he locked onto the sealed cargo compartment above, phased upward once more, and entered the hold.
Darkness swallowed him.
The cargo bay was cold, still, and stacked with heavy ores shipped out of Oluson. There was no heat, no light, only the thick earthy smell of metal and rock.
For a dead man, it was perfect.
Then the steel beneath his feet began to tremble.
Boom!
The liner lifted, and the heavy pull of acceleration pressed through the hull. Hodell leaned back against a rough ore container, listening to the shrill whistle of the shell cutting through the air, then closed his eyes and let darkness swallow everything.
His destination was a place with many names.
In the old era, it had been called the God Forsaken Land.
In the new era, it was known as the Silent Silver Disk.
The name came from the way it looked from above, a flawless silver grey circle, stark and untouched, carved into the face of Liuli Star.
It was perhaps the strangest place on the entire planet.
A crater nearly five hundred kilometers across, where active energies simply did not work.
Magic failed.
Superpowers failed.
Psychic force failed.
Even the galactic civilization Halax had once sent an investigation team there, only to discover to their embarrassment that even mechanical systems behaved abnormally above the crater. Engines stalled. Calculations degraded. Instruments failed with eerie inconsistency, as though some unknown law was rejecting interference.
Theories bloomed like weeds after that.
Some claimed Liuli Star's entire magic environment was like wallpaper pasted over a rough concrete foundation, and the Silent Silver Disk was simply the original floor exposed after the wallpaper had been torn away.
Others argued that the crater functioned as a negative pressure zone in the planet's circulation system, preventing catastrophic energy overload.
A more radical theory held that the crater had once been struck, not by a meteorite, but by some ultra dense dimensional anchor that reinforced local spacetime to the point that all probabilistic fluctuations were suppressed.
The most common theory was called [Cosmic Lever Failure]. According to it, energy had not vanished there. Rather, the universe had stopped amplifying it. Outside the crater, one unit of power could trigger ten units of destruction because the world itself helped it along. Inside the crater, one unit of power remained just that, one unit, no miracles, no amplification, no hidden leverage.
Whatever the truth, the Empire could not fully control the regions near the Silent Silver Disk.
And where order could not fully reach, lawlessness took root.
When the liner finally arrived and the hatch opened, Hodell still chose not to leave through the proper exit. He phased out through the hull instead.
What greeted him was no longer the dreamy rainbow haze of dawn, but a violent, chaotic flood of turbulent energy.
This was the edge of the Silent Silver Disk.
The black zone of Liuli Star.
The horizon looked split in two.
To the left lay the world outside the crater, floating islands, strange clouds, and shimmering auroras.
To the right sprawled the land beneath his feet, Shadow Valley, a savage place clinging to the edge of the Silver Disk like mold on a wound. It remained just outside the dead zone, which meant energy still functioned here, but because it was so close to that enormous negative pressure region, the local flow was exceptionally unstable and violent.
This was not like chaotic Oluson.
This was a place where law had simply stopped trying.
Broken floating towers leaned against one another in rusted heaps. Rune bases flickered sickly in the half light. Snapped alloy cableways knocked dully in the wind. Cheap alchemical fumes and sulfur stung the air.
Hodell stepped out of the station, the silver metal case in hand, and headed inward.
Even with high grade potions flooding his system, he still needed time to recover. He needed shelter. He needed silence. He needed a place where Ryan's ghost could stop being watched.
His oversized black robe concealed his body. His presence was fully suppressed.
Then someone called out ahead.
"Hey, brother."
Seven or eight figures emerged from behind a broken stone pillar and spread out to form a loose half circle.
Their leader was a scar faced brute with a semi mechanized prosthetic arm. His skin was rough and green grey with old alchemical callousing. Behind him stood several others armed with rune inscribed weapons, all of them staring at the silver case in Hodell's hand with naked greed.
"That case must be full of treasure."
The burly man did not rush. He watched like a jackal, eyes narrowing as he took in Hodell's pale face and unstable breathing.
"Stop pretending. Even top grade healing potions can't completely hide that smell. You're badly hurt, carrying something valuable, and walking alone. That's just another way of asking us to help you lighten the load."
Hodell stopped.
He did not even lift his head.
"Scram."
The brute's smile vanished.
"Looking for death!"
He lunged.
The metal plates under his boots clanged loudly as earth elemental mana compressed around his fist, swelling into a vicious rock spike nearly a meter long. It tore down through the air with enough force to crush a wall.
Hodell stood his ground until the last instant.
Then he moved.
His toe hooked a jutting piece of rusted steel. Using the rebound, his body slipped sideways at an angle that felt almost weightless.
Bang!
The rock spike smashed into the railing beside him, blasting rusted alloy into a cloud of shrapnel.
At the same time, Hodell extended two fingers and lightly flicked the vibrating rock spike.
The unstable force inside it shifted.
The brute's momentum instantly went wrong. It felt to him as though his arm had struck greased ice. His center of gravity lurched forward and he stumbled hard into the stone pillar ahead.
In the instant they crossed, a black flash appeared in Hodell's hand.
A short tactical dagger.
He stabbed.
[Lethal Critical Hit triggered. Vital point critical damage increased to 250%.]
Puchi.
The blade punched precisely into the man's throat.
Turbulent energy flooded through the wound and shredded everything inside.
Hodell let go and moved past him.
The corpse slammed into the pillar with a dull thud.
"Boss!"
The others panicked.
Two crossbowmen fired at once.
Hodell's body tilted with almost no wasted motion. The bolts hissed past his temples and embedded themselves in the steel pillar behind him. Using that brief opening, he cut low across the ground like a shadow and crashed into the right side of the formation.
A mercenary with a mace swung horizontally.
Hodell drifted with the blow like a leaf in wind, sliding just outside its reach. As he passed, he reversed his grip and sliced the man's throat open in one smooth motion.
Blood spattered over the cold steel deck and hissed where it struck residual heat.
Hodell planted one foot, spun, and rose.
A mage in the rear, face twisted in fear, tried to cast Slow.
Hodell raised his left hand and clenched.
A chaotic pulse tore through the air.
Bang!
The core in the mage's staff exploded from the violent resonance. Mana backlash blasted both eyes into ruin. The scream had barely begun when Hodell was already in front of him, his hand clamping down over the crown of the mage's head.
A violent current surged through the skull.
The body dropped.
Another mercenary, huge and broad shouldered, roared and swept a greatsword wreathed in fire in a wide arc.
Hodell stepped forward instead of back.
His dagger vibrated at a subtle, unnatural frequency. He tapped the side of the greatsword with the blade's spine.
The heavy weapon slid off line as if it had struck an invisible slick surface. It crashed into a nearby alloy pillar in a shower of sparks, leaving the wielder completely open.
Hodell drove the dagger upward from beneath the jaw.
Straight through the head.
He let the corpse keep moving.
The dead man's own momentum carried him over the edge, and he plunged screaming into the abyss below, greatsword and all.
That was enough.
The last three mercenaries broke.
This pale man who kept coughing between movements, who looked like he should have collapsed hours ago, was no wounded noble.
He was a ghost wearing human skin.
They turned and ran.
Hodell stood amidst blood and bodies, a flush of sickness flickering across his face. He lifted one hand and flicked his fingers.
Three wind blades, thin as hair, slashed through the dark.
Slash.
All three men lost their legs at the knee. They crawled several more meters before realizing what had happened, and then the screaming began.
It did not last long.
Hodell carried the case over to them at an unhurried pace. Under their pleading, terrified gazes, his expression remained flat.
The dagger rose and fell.
Soon, the platform fell silent again.
He crouched, took out a clean handkerchief, and meticulously wiped the blood from his fingers, the grooves of the dagger hilt, and the back of his hand. Then he covered his mouth and coughed hard a few times. When it passed, he tossed the bloody handkerchief over one corpse's face.
After that, he burned the bodies, erased the traces, picked up the case, and left without another glance.
His thin black robe snapped in the freezing wind as he stepped onto the final chain bridge leading toward the black market.
The bridge was glazed with frost, swaying in the air.
Whether it welcomed him or feared him, even the wind could not decide.
.....
[If you don't want to wait for the next update, read 50 chapters ahead on P@treon.]
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