Chapter 84

  Raime barely realized how much time had passed until the sun dipped low enough to stain the clouds orange and purple. The light filtered through the garden in long slanted bars, catching on the sweat-slick metal of blades, on trampled grass, on the crooked stick he still held loosely in his hand.

  He hadn’t stopped reading.

  The Ithurians tablet hovered at shoulder height, its surface etched with shifting glyphs that rearranged themselves every few seconds, responding to his attention. He skimmed lines of theory while his body moved almost on its own, correcting stances, redirecting blows, knocking weapons aside with soft, precise taps.

  Raime frowned slightly and corrected his brother for the same mistake he made just a minute ago and turned a mental page.

  They are not learning anymore…

  The tablet described dozens of failed attempts, cultivators who forced pathways too early, who widened conduits before their cores could support the strain, who crippled their growth permanently in pursuit of speed and power. The more he read, the more certain he became that the System’s assistance, standardized as it was, existed for a reason.

  And yet, he thought, eyes flicking briefly toward Victor as the boy overextended on a lunge, I don’t have that luxury. Not yet.

  “Victor,” Raime said without looking up. “Your weight’s too far forward.”

  “I’m attacking!” Victor protested, panting.

  “You’re nearly falling,” Raime corrected calmly. With a small twist of his wrist, the crooked stick tapped Victor’s blade aside and pressed gently against his chest. Victor stumbled backward and landed hard on his ass.

  Albert snorted. “Graceful.”

  “Shut up,” Victor shot back. “At least I’m not swinging like a windmill.”

  Albert opened his mouth to retort—and froze when the stick appeared inches from his throat.

  Raime finally glanced up from the tablet, one eyebrow raised. “Both of you, reset.”

  They groaned in unison.

  Laura watched from a few steps away, hands on her knees, breathing hard. The daggers lay in the grass beside her, their dark blades faintly humming as if disappointed to be idle. Sweat plastered her hair to her temples, and she looked like she might keel over if someone asked her to take another step.

  “Remind me,” she said between breaths, “why I agreed to this again.”

  “Because you want to be able to beat us even if we are martial classes,” Victor said promptly.

  “And because you know close combat is your greatest weakness,” Raime added.

  She shot him a glare that lacked any real heat. “I would like… hah… to be able to… survive the traing at least.”

  “I’m pushing you because you can handle it,” he replied. “And you’re progressing incredibly fast for that.”

  She scoffed, but didn’t argue.

  Raime returned his attention to the tablet, splitting his focus again. One part of his mind tracked footwork, angles, breathing rhythms. The other traced diagrams of astral anatomy, glowing lines branching outward from a core like roots seeking water.

  Placement matters more than number, he read. Two well-formed channels will outperform ten crude ones.

  He slowed his movements deliberately, forcing himself to match the pace of an ordinary human body. No dilation, it wasn’t needed to deal with his brothers.

  Albert attacked first this time, sword sweeping in a wide arc meant to herd him backward. Raime stepped inside the blade’s reach instead, the stick sliding along the flat of the sword and knocking it off-line. Victor followed immediately, blades flashing.

  Raime let them push him. Let the pressure build.

  Then he pivoted, tapped Victor’s wrist, stepped past Albert’s shoulder, and rapped them both on the head in quick succession.

  “Again,” he said mildly.

  Albert dropped to one knee, gasping. “I think… I think I’m dying.”

  “You’re sweating like a pig,” Victor said, collapsing beside him. “It means you’re still alive.”

  Albert rolled onto his back, staring up at the sky. “Mom… I can’t feel my legs.”

  “That’s because you didn’t listen to your brother, if you started following the stances he taught you you wouldn’t be this tired,” she replied without missing a beat.

  Raime finally lowered the tablet, letting it settle against his side. He studied them for a moment, really studied them.

  They were exhausted. He could see a bone-level weariness that came from the hours they spent fighting and practicing. The good kind.

  They’re learning, he thought. Slowly, but they’re learning…

  He exhaled and sent the tablet into his ring with a thought.

  “I’m heading out for a bit,” he said. “The errand I mentioned earlier.”

  Victor groaned louder. “You mean there’s more?”

  “For me,” Raime said. “Not for you.”

  Albert lifted his head weakly. “Promise?”

  “I promise that for today it’s all, tomorrow it’s another story though.”

  Laura let herself sink down onto the grass, sitting now instead of crouching. “Where are you going?”

  Raime glanced toward the horizon. The sun was almost gone, the chill of evening already creeping in. Winter wasn’t far off; he could feel it in the air, and the days were getting shorter and shorter.

  “South-west,” he said. “To the old hospital.”

  That got their attention.

  Victor sat up a little. “Why there?”

  “The abandoned one?” Albert asked. “The one everyone avoids?”

  “Yes,” Raime said simply.

  Laura frowned. “I heard from the people in the plaza that all those who approach don’t come back.”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “I want to clear it so we’ll have the means to heal who needs it, the healers doesn’t still have the power required to heal the worst of the injured with spells alone,” Raime replied.

  She didn’t argue further, just nodded once. “Be careful.”

  He paused, then nodded back. “I will.”

  He rose smoothly into the air, the familiar lift settling on him like an old habit. For a moment he hovered above the garden, looking down at them: his mother leaning back on her hands, eyes closed; Victor sprawled like he’d been struck down by divine judgment; Albert still clutching his sword as if afraid it might run away.

  It’s good to see them like this, how I dreaded the possibility of coming back and finding them dead, or worse… I’ll protect you, at all cost.

  Then he turned and shot south-west, the town slipping beneath him as twilight deepened.

  The hospital loomed in the distance, a dark block against the fading sky.

  As he flew, his mind returned to the tablet, to the half-formed ideas circling his core.

  How long should I wait? he wondered. Will the System intervene at all? Or is this another one of those paths I have to walk alone?

  He felt no fatigue, no strain from the hours of training. His body felt… light. Stable. As if the foundation beneath him was settling into place at last.

  Below him, the outskirts gave way to empty streets and overgrown lots.

  Raime slowed as he approached, from a distance, the structure still looked mostly intact—concrete blocks, glass facades dulled by years of neglect, the faint outline of emergency signage clinging stubbornly to the walls. But the closer he drifted, the more the illusion unraveled.

  Something had grown over it.

  Something that was… wrong.

  The ground around the hospital had lost its natural colors. Grass had withered into brittle gray filaments, fused together by a glossy, chitin-like film that pulsed faintly, as if breathing. Soil was no longer soil—it had been compacted into layered plates, ridged and uneven, patterned with vein-like grooves that carried a sluggish, translucent fluid. Every few meters, bulbous growths protruded from the earth, splitting open and closing again with a wet, squelching sounds.

  Raime stopped completely, hovering several meters above the corrupted terrain.

  Biomass conversion, his mind supplied automatically, Insight stitching patterns together faster than conscious thought. Consumption, restructuring. Not really terraforming but an ecosystem rewrite.

  It reminded him uncomfortably of something he had once read about in a book he never expected to think of again—fictional horrors that devoured worlds, leaving only themselves behind. Except this wasn’t fiction.

  It was real, and it was spreading.

  The hospital itself had fared worse. The lower floors were cocooned in thick layers of organic matter, as if the building had been partially swallowed by a colossal insect nest. Walls were pierced by hardened tendrils that had forced their way through concrete and rebar alike, cracking windows outward as they grew. Entire sections of the facade were sealed behind webbed membranes, semi-transparent and slick, through which he could see slow, shadowy movement.

  Raime exhaled slowly.

  “Well,” he muttered, voice barely audible in the dead air. “That’s… new.”

  The first creatures revealed themselves when he drifted lower.

  They emerged from the growths near the hospital’s outer parking area—shapes that at first glance resembled oversized arachnids, but only if one squinted and ignored the parts that didn’t make sense. They had too many limbs, some jointed like spider legs, others ending in fleshy hooks or blade-like protrusions. Their bodies were asymmetrical, patched together from chitin, sinew, and something disturbingly close to bone.

  Their heads—or what passed for them—were elongated and faceless, split vertically by a sensory slit that pulsed as they oriented toward him.

  They didn’t make any sound except for their movement, they didn’t communicate verbally in any way.

  Raime’s core stirred, a thin, luminous tension at the back of his awareness. He extended its energy carefully, preparing a basic attack.

  Let’s see if this work.

  It tore through the air like a silent comet, its passage warping the air around it. The first creature didn’t even have time to react before its torso came apart in a spray of viscous ichor and shattered chitin. The remains hit the corrupted ground and were immediately started to be absorbed, the biomass beneath rippling as if hungry.

  Raime’s eyes narrowed.

  “So they recycle,” he said softly. “They would make good neighbours if they weren’t trying to take over the planet.”

  More of them poured out, drawn by the disturbance. Not just from the ground—some dropped from the hospital walls, others crawled out of ruptured windows, their limbs punching through membranes that sealed behind them as if alive.

  He rose higher, refusing to let anything come close.

  This time he went for something more physical, he wanted to test something, so he started using kinetic attacks, his new Threads working overtime to allow him to perform the techniques required to eliminate these monsters.

  Each strike was precise, deliberate. He severed limbs, crushed central masses, shattered organs he could feel were faulty; places where the creatures’ cohesion faltered, where their biology struggled to provide an advantage. Every kill fed the environment, but there should be a limit to how fast it could reuse what he destroyed.

  And he was fast.

  Still, as minutes passed, Raime realized something troubling.

  For every creature he eliminated, the growths around the hospital thickened. The ground pulsed more strongly. New bulges formed at the periphery, swelling the more he killed.

  “They’re not just absorbing them,” he thought. “They’re going to birth more of these monsters in a bit.”

  He shifted tactics.

  Instead of targeting the creatures first, he turned his attention to the environment itself. He sent a powerful kinetic blast into the largest biomass node near the hospital’s entrance—a towering, root-like structure that had fused itself to the foundation. The impact sent a shockwave through the organic terrain, rupturing conduits and collapsing growths in a cascading failure.

  The response was immediate.

  The creatures faltered, movements stuttering as whatever network bound them together lost cohesion. Several collapsed outright, seemingly losing their connection to whatever was directing them, before being reabsorbed—more slowly now.

  Raime pressed the advantage.

  By the time he drifted toward the hospital’s main entrance, the exterior infestation was in disarray. Not destroyed—not even close—but disrupted.

  He floated through what had once been automatic glass doors, now shattered and sealed behind layers of organic resin. A telekinetic shove opened a hole through it, and Raime passed through without letting his boots touch the floor.

  Inside, the hospital was barely recognizable.

  Corridors had been reshaped into tunnels, walls curved inward by layered chitinous plating. The ceiling sagged with hanging sacs that glowed faintly, illuminating the interior in sickly bioluminescent hues of green and violet. The air was thick, humid, carrying the coppery scent of processed blood and something far worse.

  Medical equipment lay half-embedded in the growths, beds fused into the floor, IV stands wrapped in hardened strands. Whatever these things were, they didn’t eat anything inorganic. But everything was material for construction.

  Everything was used, repurposed.

  Raime’s expression hardened.

  “This isn’t just a nest,” he realized. “It’s like a… conversion node of sorts.”

  The creatures inside were different. Larger. Less numerous, but more specialized. Some were anchored directly into the walls, their bodies acting as living conduits, pulsing in rhythm with the structure. Others skittered along the ceiling, limbs clicking softly, eyes—or sensory organs of different kind—fixed on him with unsettling focus.

  He didn’t rush.

  He floated down the central corridor, a little sphere of light orbiting him like a patient predator, striking only when necessary. Each attack was economical, every action rooted in the teachings of his master. He crushed anchor-points first, severing the flow of energy to the various sectors. Then he killed the monsters.

  Still, even as he advanced, Raime knew the truth.

  This will take time, he thought grimly. Not just a few hours.

  The infestation had gone too deep. Entire floors were likely lost, converted into spawning chambers and processing layers. Clearing it properly would require systematic destruction, and his skill set, his powers, despite being great, didn’t lend themselves to the total kind of destruction that was needed here. Doing it alone, will take efforts he could better put to use, if he had an affinity for fire maybe, but light was less ideal for this.

  He slowed near what had once been the emergency ward, hovering above a pit where the floor had collapsed into a pulsing organic basin.

  “I can stop it,” he murmured to the silent, breathing walls. “But I can’t finish it tonight.”

  The growths pulsed, as if listening.

  Raime turned, retreating toward the entrance, already planning. Tomorrow, the rifts. After that, maybe he will talk with someone who had the adequate skills for dealing with this, or he could just bring a ton of gasoline and set the whole place on fire.

  Mmm… tempting, this thing is disgusting on another level.

  As he emerged back into the fading daylight, the sky tinged with the cold hues of an early winter dusk, he cast one last look at the hospital, at the spreading corruption gnawing at its foundations.

  He started to emit a less focused light from his palm, a constant burning energy who was incinerating the matter outside the front doors, it was working, but it was slow, and consumed too much energy.

  After he cleared up the ground outside, leaving literal scorched earth behind himself, he made to go back home.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” he said quietly.

  Then he rose into the air and headed back toward the city, mind already moving, calculating, adapting… because if this could happen here, where he could stop it befoe it became a problem, some part of the world will have something similar, and he needed to know how to face it before everything got devoured by some alien bio-recycling monstrosity.