The air on the giant leaf grew frigid as Reina and the Commander-rank beast squared off. It was a study in lethal contrasts: the towering, fifteen-foot insectoid monstrosity against the slender, five-foot-two woman. Reina's light brown eyes shifted, the pupils dilating into a crystalline, snowy blue that mirrored the arctic mana beginning to swirl around her. Intricate runes, delicate as snowflakes but glowing with a harsh, ultraviolet light, manifested across her palms. With a practiced motion, she drew her revolver in a blur while her wand drifted into her left hand, hovering as if possessed.
The Commander-rank grasshopper didn't wait. It surged forward, shattering the sound barrier with a thunderous crack that rippled across the vegetation. It moved with a velocity that turned its massive frame into a verdant smear. Its scythe-like claws were no longer just chitin; they were wreathed in a deep, viscous shade of green mana that hummed with corrosive intent.
Reina's reaction was a fraction of a second too slow to avoid the initial lunge. She pivoted, catching the downward sweep of the claw on the reinforced barrel of her revolver. Sparks flew as the green mana hissed against the weapon's metal. The beast's mandibles twitched in visible confusion; its corrosive aura was designed to melt through steel like a hot knife through butter, yet it couldn't leave so much as a microscopic scratch on her firearm.
Seizing the opening, Reina lunged, thrusting her wand into the gap in the beast's chest plates. "Frostbite!" she hissed.
A localized blizzard erupted at the point of contact. A patch of the grasshopper's thorax froze instantly, turning brittle and white. Had it been a creature of warm blood and pulsing veins, the thermal shock would have caused its heart to explode. Instead, the soulless beast screeched—a sound like grinding metal—and leaped backward, using its own claws to wrench the frozen chunk of flesh out of its chest to prevent the spread of the ice. Almost immediately, the toxic green mana flowed into the crater, weaving new tissue in a sickening display of regeneration.
Reina didn't let up. She aimed for the head and fanned the hammer of her revolver. Three shots rang out like cannon fire. The beast parried two with the speed of a professional duelist, but the third bullet found its mark, obliterating the right side of its head. The grasshopper staggered, yet it did not fall. It simply stood its ground, its remaining eye fixed on her as its head began to knit itself back together.
Within three seconds, the beast was pristine once more. Reina remained composed, though the mana cost was clearly weighing on her. She flicked her wand, and six jagged blades of ice manifested in the air, orbiting her like a lethal halo. She fired again, the bullet serving as the vanguard for the ice shards. But the beast had adapted. The mana on its claws darkened to a near-black hue. With a single, flickering cross-slash, it intercepted every projectile—bullets and ice alike—slicing them into harmless dust.
The beast retaliated with a mirror of its opening dash. This time, as Reina blocked with her revolver and prepared to counter with her wand, the grasshopper's blackened claw traced a trajectory she hadn't anticipated. It bypassed her guard and sheared through her left wrist.
Reina recoiled, her severed hand still clutching the wand as it tumbled to the leaf. A wall of translucent ice erupted between her and the predator, buying her a precious few seconds. She collapsed into the soft, mana-rich snow accumulating at her feet, her teeth clenched so hard they threatened to crack. Unlike Alex, whose Omniarch physiology shielded him from the raw agony of the world, Reina felt every nerve ending scream. Phantom sensations pulsed where her hand had been.
But the grasshopper was no gentleman. It slammed into the ice wall twice, the structure groaning under the impact. On the third strike, it sliced the barrier into ribbons and stepped through. Reina, her face pale and slick with sweat, had only managed to regenerate a stump of raw flesh. Desperate, she molded the surrounding snow into a makeshift hand. With a jagged flick of her mana, the wand—and the severed hand still gripping it—flew back into her icy grasp.
She conjured a second, thicker wall. Using every ounce of her remaining strength, she ripped the wand from her own dead fingers and took it into her makeshift snow-hand. Ice warped around the wand, extending and hardening until it formed a massive, crystalline snow-sword. It looked cumbersome, hitting with the blunt force of a falling glacier, but because it was an extension of her own mana, she swung it as naturally as an arm.
She realized now she had gravely underestimated her foe. In the world of Eternia, a core user was expected to slay a soulless beast one rank above their rank with relative ease, provided it wasn't a Monarch or a District Lord. Failing to do so was a mark of an amateur. She could almost feel Hakon's disappointment radiating from the sidelines. That shame triggered a final surge. Her eyes didn't just glow; they overflowed with pure, liquid mana.
She met the grasshopper's next slash with the snow-sword. The impact sent a shockwave through the leaf. Simultaneously, two beams of concentrated arctic energy erupted from her eyes, boring a hole straight through the beast's chest. Before it could heal, she brought the snow-sword down in a brutal arc, decapitating it.
Even then, the soulless monstrosity tried to stand.
Reina dropped her revolver and drew her combat dagger. With a blade in each hand—one of steel, one of ice—she began to systematically dismantle the creature. She ripped it in half horizontally, her muscles screaming under the strain. The Commander-rank's chitin was far denser than anything she had faced that day, but her training at the Adventurer Society had made butchery a mandatory, if grim, skill.
As the two halves of the beast finally went still, Reina collapsed. Before she could hit the ground, a cold, black slab materialized beneath her. It was a platform of shadow mana created by Franklin, colder and harder than any ice she could summon.
Ketovan immediately deployed his Healing Domain, a shimmering field of gold and green. As the adrenaline receded, Reina withdrew her skills. Her eyes faded back to their warm brown, and the snow-hand melted away, revealing a stump with blackened, necrotic edges where the beast's corrosive mana had taken hold. Without a word, Ketovan shifted his focus, casting a Sleep Domain to plunge her into a deep, merciful slumber.
"She got cocky," Hakon remarked, his voice devoid of pity but not without a trace of respect. "She'll live, but she's out of commission for now."
Ketovan didn't hesitate. He used Reina's own dagger to trim away the blackened, mana-burnt flesh from her stump. Only then did the Healing Domain begin to truly work, the tissue knitting together and regenerating at a visible rate. Alex, meanwhile, used a gust of wind to retrieve her severed arm. He didn't need the flesh; he needed the three enchanted rings still clinging to the fingers. Hakon took the jewelry and tossed the remains of the hand into the canopy below.
Alex was mesmerized. He had seen the gap between them. Reina had killed Soldier Ranks with single shots, yet those same creatures had nearly killed him. He felt like a fraud—he had only survived because he couldn't feel the pain that should have paralyzed him.
He moved toward the carcasses to extract the cores. The scale of the beasts was even more impressive up close. The Normal Ranks were seven feet tall, the Soldiers ten, and this Commander was a staggering fifteen-foot titan of chitin and mana. Seeing Reina, barely five feet tall, dismantle such a giant made him realize just how much he had to learn.
After the extraction, the total haul including the prior loot stood at 517 Normal cores, 7 Soldier cores, and 1 Commander core. Hakon decided they would hold their position on the leaf until Reina woke. As Alex dismissed his skills, the final screens appeared:
[Level Up! Normal Rank 7 – Normal Rank 8]
[Level Up! Normal Rank 8 – Normal Rank 9]
He felt a pang of disappointment. He had hoped the Commander-rank battle would push him to Rank 10, but he was still four kills short of the Soldier Rank. He sighed, leaning back against the cool, jade-like surface of the leaf, and looked out over the vast, alien landscape of the warped space.
***