The crowd waited and watched with baited breath as all that was visible on the big highlight screen was a cloud of grey, billowing dust. The noise of boulder grinding against boulder made the hairs stand up on the back of their necks.

  Oxygen seemed utterly unwilling to make its way into Michael’s lungs as he stared open-mouthed at the enormous display.

  Eik was gone — buried under hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rock. But… that couldn’t happen. Eik couldn’t die. Eik never died. He always survived.

  The others next to him were also completely silent. “Wh-Wha—” Heath stammered. “B-But he… but.”

  “I guess your guy wasn’t worth all that much after all, huh?” the guy with whom Heath had been arguing laughed with a sneer. “Crushed by rocks is literally the dumbest way to die I have ever heard o—”

  His spiteful words were cut short by Heath’s fist clocking him right in the jaw and sending him to the ground in a limp heap. Heath stared down at his hand, so used to dealing with people magnitudes more powerful than himself that the possibility of knocking out a guy in a single hit hadn’t even occurred to him.

  “Heath!” Mikla snapped, appearing behind the tank and seizing him by the arm and preventing him from throwing any more punches on the downed man. The spectators standing closest to the short lived scuffle looked over with little to no real interest, the things going on on the big screen much more interesting. They simply took a few steps away from the relatively low level fight and continued watching the main event.

  Tears began to roll down Michael’s cheeks as his lower lip trembled, a lump in the size of a tennis ball settling in his throat. His eyes were virtually glued to the high definition image that still showing nothing but rolling layers of smoke and dust.

  “Come on, Eik,” he muttered under his breath. “You can’t leave us. We need you. You can’t leave us. You can’t leave us. You can’t leave us.” It was repeated almost like a chant.

  Sonja put her arm around the young man’s shoulder, tears threatening to push through her own eyes as well. She wanted to offer some words of consolation but it wasn’t looking good and she wasn’t the type to lie to a friend.

  Instead she just held him as they watched it together, the dust beginning to settle. Slowly and gradually, the image cleared up, revealing nothing but cracked boulders and splintered wood. Eik was nowhere to be seen but if that was the view that was supposed to show him, then where was he?

  “Is he…” Heath whispered, Mikla letting go of his arm as the man seemed to have completely forgotten that the guy he had punched even existed. “Is he down there? Hey, is Eik down there?” His voice rapidly went from a whisper to a frantic roar. “Mikla, let me go there now!”

  “Heath, no, listen,” the fracture specialist tried, but Heath wasn’t having it whatsoever.

  “No, you listen to me now! I need to get in there right now! My friend is buried under a fucking pile of fucking rocks right now, and I’m supposed to just sit here and watch it like it’s a fucking game show on TV? Yeah, no, fuck that! Get me in there, right fucking now, Mikla!” Heath raged, grabbing the much smaller fracture specialist by the collar and lifting him into the air, his face turning red as a tomato from agitation.

  Impressively, Mikla’s voice was completely steady even though he was clearly not unaffected by what was happening on the screen either. “Heath, even if I could just send you in there on a whim, I don’t have the slightest clue of the location of th—”

  Gasps spread like a wildfire through the audience and Michael flew to his feet as his tear-filled voice shouted. “H-Heath! Look, Heath, look! Eik is—”

  Heath whirled about and stared up at the screen, Mikla looking up as well, still dangling like a sack of potatoes in the tank’s massive hands.

  There was Eik’s face. From one moment to the other, the display seemed to have cut over from nothing to the Dane, as if it had taken it a moment ot relocate him.

  His face was covered in cuts and a large rock had rolled across his leg, trapping it beneath. His skin, clothes, and armor was gray with dust and debris. If not for the crystal clear image, he could have been easily mistaken for a corpse but as it was, there was no doubt that Eik was breathing still, his chest rising and falling steadily.

  ***

  “Guh…”

  Eik’s head was pounding like crazy, dust and crust making it difficult to open his eyes. Absolutely everything hurt. And not just a little bit either. Like, super duper hurt. And especially his leg felt like a freaking boulder had decided to build its nest on top of his shin.

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  “What’s going on? What happened to the mountain?” he coughed, throat dry like a desert.

  It was difficult to sit up since his leg refused to move whatsoever but he managed it somehow. Tears flowed as he slowly blinked his eyes open. It was completely dark wherever this damned place was.

  Responding obediently to his will, copious amounts of Profound Toxin seeped out of his skin and flowed across the hard, unpolished rock floor. At the same time five thin branches of solid poison extended diagonally up from his back and shoulder, bathing the space immediately surrounding him in a soft, steady glow.

  The ceiling must have been too high to see with the range offered by the branches and the toxin on the floor seemed to keep streaming outward, never reaching a far wall.

  Right in front of him, however, was a gigantic pile of rubble that must have followed him to wherever this was from the crumbling mountain. It was a stroke of luck that he had landed in front of it. Any of those freaking things could have crushed him if it had landed on top of his while he was knocked unconscious. But damn if his leg didn’t still hurt like an absolute bitch.

  He looked down.

  Apropos his painful leg… Where was it? All that was visible where it should have been was a huge and heavy-ass boulder that could hav—

  Oh! Oh, no! “My leg! My leg’s stuck under a rock!”

  Even with D-rank strength, the position of the boulder on his leg and the hindering of his movement made it impossible to push the thing off. It hurt like hell! Swallowing a Potion of Mighty Strength class 2 along with a handful of clumps of poison faster and more desperately than he had ever done before, he tried again with renewed power.

  It moved, but only slightly. Certainly not enough to get it to roll away from his leg. It was properly stuck under there. Whimpering, he went through his ability set in his head, trying his best to think of something he could do to get free. Why did the heroes in the stories never have that problem?

  At this point he had acquired so many abilities, evolutions, traits and whatever else there was that he could barely keep track of them all, and certainly not of all the possible ways he could combine them. There wasn’t exactly a strategy manual for this crap that he could just pull out and consult in any moment of need. This required big picture sort of thinking and at least the semblance of a tactical mind, and Eik was lacking in both departments.

  ‘Have you got a boulder stuck on your leg today? Well, worry not and look no further! Turn to page 83 for the perfect solution!’ Yeah, no, that would have been great.

  And what does one do when in a situation that seems difficult to find a creative solution to? Well, that’s obvious. Homemade combat gauntlet, of course.

  Solid toxin flowed around his fist as he wound up for the first punch. A sharp, protruding edge extended from the proximal knuckle of his index finger to the same knuckle of his little finger.

  The first impact cracked the rock despite the bad positioning and and inability to utilize his whole body for the punch. The second broke off three large fragments and proved that ingenuity wasn’t everything. Dumb muscle power had a lot to say as well.

  Five more full power punches saw the boulder split in two and roll away from his leg. The limb was bloodied and maimed, the shin plate he’d looted from the lightning user he had killed in the beginning of the challenge nothing but a bent and twisted piece of metal. Gingerly, he unfastened it and lifted it off the skin, hissing at the stinging pain. He took a few doses of the same painkiller he’d provided to the clinics around Forest which helped a bit.

  There was no exposed bone to be seen so that was nice. That piece of metal might well have saved him a spontaneous amputation. But that didn’t mean it was looking good. There was no way he could walk on it right now.

  Eight vials of the red healing potion remained and with the severity of this injury he might have to dip a little deeper into his supply than he would have preferred at this point. He pulled one from the dimensional storage that was his rucksack and took it all in one swig. Another was poured over the leg directly to speed up the recovery further. Vials were apparently safer to store in a bag of holding than the orbs they’d been given when they went into mushroom land in the practical of the E-rank Crucible.

  Relief was immediate and the torn skin in the wound began to knit itself back together. As soon as the viscous liquid had been absorbed into the skin, Eik poured out another one, albeit slower and targeting certain points more deliberately.

  He turned the vial around between his fingers. Again, he was reminded just how important it was to get his hands on the recipe for this miracle fluid. Already, the wound was looking much better and the combination with the other pills had made the pain fade almost completely.

  Tentatively, he climbed to his feet, careful to not put all of his weight on the leg right away. It felt surprisingly alright despite how terrible it had looked just a couple of minutes before. Modern magical medicine was truly a wonder for the ages.

  Finally, mobile again, he began to head out, following the cold and damp rock wall. Two branches of solid toxin remained, extending from his shoulders to illuminate the surface as far up as he could make it go. Within only a few seconds, the first of the tunnels appeared and Eik felt frustration rise up in his stomach.

  “Are you kidding me with this crap – ap – ap?” he yelled, the cavernous echo mocking him cruelly. “I just got ooooooouut – ouut – ouut!”

  As he walked on, it gradually became evident that he hadn’t just stumbled upon the single coincidental hole in this giant wall — there were dozens, and then hundreds, of them, scattered all over the space. If he’d suffered from trypophobia, he’d have been shivering in the fetal position on the ground.

  Another half hour of walking, only the wall on his right providing any sense of direction, found him at a tunnel about five times wider than all of the others, this one opening up at ground level. Finally seeing a possible way out, Eik hurried in.

  After a few minutes of walking, a disgusting sound between squelching and ruffling feathers reached his ears. Thirty seconds later, he stood at a precipice, staring down into the blackness below.

  He lowered one of the glowing branches down as far as he could and right there, at the edge of the darkness, an undulating mass of long bodies wriggled hauntingly in the pallid light.

  This wasn’t just a hub for the tunnels. It was a nest.

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