The boar put its head down and the ground shook.
"What's the plan?" I asked, watching the Thornhide Boar barrel toward us. Its tusks caught the filtered light, showing jagged edges that could tear through my borrowed leather like paper.
No answer.
I turned to see Cassia already twenty feet away and gaining distance, her pink ponytail bouncing as she sprinted in the opposite direction.
That little—
The ground trembled beneath my feet as the boar closed the gap. Two tons of muscle and rage with tusks that could skewer me clean through. My freshly acquired stats might have upgraded me from "immediately dead" to "dead with slightly more dignity," but math was math.
I bolted after Cassia, my legs burning as they pushed harder than F-rank muscles should allow. The shadow wolf remained dismissed—smart choice since summoning it now would drain the Ichor I desperately needed for running.
"You left me!" I shouted at Cassia's retreating back.
"DON'T RUN STRAIGHT!"
I had maybe one second to process the instruction before the boar's breath hit the back of my neck, hot and wet and furious.
I dove left.
The roll was ugly. My shoulder hit packed dirt, then a root caught my ribs, then I was tumbling through undergrowth with no control and my blade still somehow in my hand, and the boar's tusk passed close enough that I felt displaced air press against my face like a slap.
It missed.
By the length of my hand, maybe less.
I came out of the roll into a crouch with my heart doing something that wasn't its normal rhythm and the boar already slowing, all that momentum redirected into a wide arc as it turned. A creature that size didn't corner fast. That was the only advantage I had. Everything else about this situation favored the boar.
I stood.
My legs were strong, but my F-8 Strength wasn't going to be enough. Not against that hide.
The boar completed its turn and faced me from thirty meters away. Its small eyes found mine. It snorted. The bone protrusions along its back and shoulders caught the filtered light and I could see why Cassia had run, because that hide was thick. Dense. The kind of surface that absorbed F-rank strikes the way concrete absorbed rainwater.
I needed Plunder.
I needed to not die first.
The boar lowered its head again.
"NOX, MOVE!"
I moved.
Right this time, hard right, cutting behind a root formation the size of a small car. The boar adjusted mid-charge faster than something that size had any right to, but the root clipped its shoulder and the impact shook the ground and sent bark flying in a radius and the creature lost half a second finding its footing.
Half a second was enough.
I came around the root and sprinted back toward where Cassia's voice had come from. My lungs were already burning because F-rank Endurance meant running for thirty seconds felt like running for thirty minutes. The armor was good but it had weight. My legs understood this deeply and personally.
Cassia stood twenty meters ahead in a cleared space between two massive trees. Her hands were out, fingers spread, and something extended from her fingertips that I couldn't fully see. Thin lines, barely visible, catching light the way spider silk caught light in the morning. They ran between the trees in a pattern I couldn't map from this angle, low to the ground and higher up and crossing somewhere in the middle.
She'd been setting something while I was getting chased.
I ran past her without stopping because the boar was eight seconds behind me and the gap between those trees looked exactly like a path a panicking idiot would take at full speed.
"OTHER SIDE, GO LEFT."
I went left. Threw myself behind the left tree and pressed my back against the bark and put the blade up on instinct.
The boar hit the thread web at full charge.
I heard it before I saw it. A sound like a dozen bowstrings pulled tight simultaneously, high and sharp, and the boar screamed. Not the rage sound from before. Something different. Surprised. Restrained. The creature's forward momentum got redirected upward and sideways, its legs tangling as the threads caught between the bone protrusions on its back and shoulders and wrapped tighter with each panicked movement.
It went down.
Not dead. Not close to dead. But down, on its side, legs churning air, the threads Cassia had laid holding it with a tension that looked impossible given how thin they were.
"NOW," Cassia said. She was breathing hard, her free hand braced against the tree, threads still running from both sets of fingers. The Eye device on her shoulder was off. "NECK. WHERE THE PLATES DON'T MEET."
I was already moving.
The boar's neck had one spot. One. Where the bone protrusions along the shoulder couldn't fully cover the transition point, where the hide thinned out to allow the creature's head to turn. I saw it while I was running. Right side. Small. Maybe three inches of exposed tissue.
I needed F-8 Strength to get through hide that could deflect F-rank strikes.
I did not have that.
But I had the blade, and the blade had weight, and if I put all of my momentum behind a two-handed overhead strike directly into that three-inch gap instead of swinging it sideways like a person fighting normally, then physics could do work my stats couldn't.
The boar saw me coming. Its legs churned harder. The threads groaned but held.
I planted my foot on the creature's shoulder and drove the blade down.
The impact went up both arms to my shoulders. The blade sank into the gap, through hide and muscle, not deep enough to kill outright but deep enough that the boar stopped thrashing and started a low, grinding scream that was worse than the thrashing.
I pulled the blade free. Drove it in again, same spot, same angle.
The scream stopped.
The threads went slack.
I stood on the boar's shoulder with my borrowed blade buried in its neck and both arms shaking from the impact feedback and absolutely no breath left in my body.
Cassia let out a long exhale. Her threads retracted into her fingertips, gone so fast I almost missed it. She pulled the Eye device off, checked something on its screen, put it back.
"Still off," she confirmed. "No footage."
"Good."
"Not good." She walked over, stepping around the boar's legs with the ease of someone who'd done this many times. "That thing is a Beast Two. The Core alone is worth three hundred Ash minimum. I just helped you kill a Beast Two and I don't get to stream any of it."
"You ran first."
"Tactically."
"You were gone before I turned around."
"I was establishing position."
I looked at her. She looked back with complete composure, purple eyes steady, not a trace of shame anywhere.
"You ran," I said.
"I positioned," she said. "And you're welcome for the Web Trap that kept you from getting gutted."
Fair point. Annoying fair point.
I crouched beside the boar. The prompt appeared immediately, same as before, blue text hovering in my field of vision where only I could see it.
" PLUNDER AVAILABLE "
" Thornhide Boar — Beast II "
" Activate Plunder? Core will be destroyed. "
===
A/N:
Welcome to the end of the chapter, Chat. You want to see Nox rob the Tower blind and build his shadow army?
Then feed the algorithm.
Add this to your library, drop those Power Stones and Golden Tickets like Beast Cores, and flood the comments.
Every comment tells me to keep pushing the pace, and every Stone keeps the chapters flowing.
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