novelraw Chapter 180: A Ranked
Chapter 180: A Ranked
Landing on top of the giant black crab’s shell, Guilliman steadied himself and looked forward.
Ahead, the three were dragging the abomination deeper into the tunnels. Lucas at the front. Hammerhead flanking. Poison Lilly moving light and precise on the outside.
He watched them for a moment.
To give them credit, they had actually planned this out. A trap was waiting somewhere deeper in those tunnels. They had come into this with a strategy and they were executing it.
He would let them work.
His plan wasn’t to interfere immediately. Let them tire it out first. Wear the shell down, drain its energy, push it toward its limits. Then, when the moment came, his move would read less like stealing prey and more like pulling them out of a bad situation.
That was cleaner.
He crouched low against the shell and rode the beast forward through the dark, completely undetected, the energy wrapped around him pressing flat and still.
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At the front, Evil Spirit Lucas glanced once at the two beside him.
A quick nod.
His hand came up and a beam of light formed in his palm, compact and dense, vibrating with the pressure of what he was holding in it. Without hesitation he thrust it forward and activated the array he had set.
Light pillars erupted from the ground and ceiling in sequence, front and back, locking the geometry together until a full prism of contained energy enclosed the abomination on all sides.
—boom
The beast hit the front wall head first.
A screech tore out of it. Not pain. Frustration. The wall held but the impact shook through Lucas’s concentration like a physical blow, rattling the edges of his control.
The abomination didn’t stop.
It reversed and hit the barrier again. Then again. Methodical in a way that low tier beasts never were.
Abominations weren’t stupid. Most estimates placed their cognitive capacity around the level of a fifteen-year-old human. Some, depending on how long they had lived and what they had survived, operated significantly higher than that. They learned. They adapted. They recognized traps and looked for the seam.
This one was already looking.
"Now!!"
Lucas’s voice came out sharp, eyes cutting to Hammerhead. The barrier was his. Every strike the beast made against it fed back through the ability directly into him. He could feel each hit landing somewhere behind his sternum. He wasn’t built to absorb this kind of sustained feedback indefinitely.
They needed to move.
"I know."
Hammerhead summoned the hammer.
It materialized heavy in his grip, constructed from a material that looked like compressed bone, pale and dense and slightly wrong in a way that was difficult to name. A high-level Wayfarer echo. The ability it carried wasn’t surface damage. It sent shockwaves inward on impact, bypassing shell and armor entirely and striking the body underneath directly.
River Bandit had originally wanted Hammerhead on his own team specifically for that. He had reconsidered only because pulling him from Lucas’s group would have left them with nobody who could actually fight back against an abomination at close range. It would have been unfair.
So Hammerhead stayed.
And right now that decision was paying off.
—woosh
He pushed through the barrier in one motion and drove the hammer into the crab’s side.
The impact was enormous. A crack split the shell along the strike line and the shockwave punched through into the body beneath it. The abomination seized, legs scrambling for purchase as the internal damage registered and its nervous system tried to process what was hitting it.
Poison Lilly moved in the same window.
Between the three of them, the pressure was relentless. Hammerhead keeping the beast reacting, Lucas holding the containment together, Poison Lilly working the angles and feeding the seal already embedded on the shell’s surface.
And still.
Kill it? No.
They couldn’t close that final distance.
The abomination was severely weakened. Its movements were slower. The cracks in its shell had multiplied. But it was still standing and still dangerous, and every second that passed was a second Lucas spent burning through his remaining control.
"The poison is reaching its final stage." Poison Lilly’s voice came in calm, cutting through the strain. "It’s a matter of minutes now."
The other two heard it and steadied slightly.
They could run. They both knew that. The option existed. But walking away from a nearly dead abomination this close to the finish was the kind of thing you thought about for a long time afterward.
"Can you speed it up?" Lucas asked. He was smiling but the edge in his expression gave it away. "I have maybe forty seconds left on the barrier."
He shook his head slowly before the question even finished landing.
Poison Lilly looked at him, then looked away.
Dismay. Quiet and honest.
The number of people who could hold an abomination contained for this long was small. Lucas doing it for this duration was already impressive by any measure. Asking for more wasn’t realistic.
As Hammerhead pulled back and the three shifted into exit positioning, the abomination moved.
Its claw came out like something fired from a machine. No wind-up. No telegraph.
It hit the ceiling of the tunnel directly behind them.
—boom
Rock cracked. Then split. Then came down.
The ceiling collapsed in sections, a cascading fall of stone and compressed earth that sealed the tunnel behind the group completely. The sound filled the entire underground space and didn’t stop for what felt like a full minute, debris still shifting and settling long after the main collapse.
When it finally went quiet, the dust was everywhere.
The three stood still, breathing hard, coated in rock dust and the particular silence that follows catastrophe.
Alive.
But only barely.
Lucas took stock of the situation in one sweep.
In front of them: the abomination. Still standing. Still watching. The seal was working but the clock on that was now meaningless because they had run out of options before the countdown finished.
Behind them: solid rock. The tunnel, completely sealed.
No exit.
"What do we do?" Poison Lilly’s voice was steady but the blood running down from her forehead said everything that steadiness was covering.
Evil Spirit Lucas opened his mouth.
"Nothing."
The voice came from the dark above.
Not Lucas.
Someone else.
Then the light came.
A spear, blazing from somewhere at the top of the abomination’s shell, drove straight down through the crown of its head in a single uninterrupted line. The light from it threw the whole tunnel into sharp, brief relief before dimming.
The abomination didn’t make a sound.
It dropped.
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[You have slain a Black Back Abomination]
[+28,000 gene points]
[Requirement fulfilled: You have evolved]
[Updating stats
Name: Guilliman Naldir
Rank: Level 20
Gene: 0/200,000 (Black)
Class: Soul King
Affinity: Wind, Ice, Arcane
Agility: 25,000 | Power: 15,000 | Stamina: 21,009]
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
The panel hung in Guilliman’s vision, quiet and complete.
He read it once.
Then he stepped off the shell of the fallen abomination and dropped to the tunnel floor, landing softly, the strange energy around him already beginning to settle.
He looked at the three.
Lucas hadn’t moved. Hadn’t spoken. His eyes were on Guilliman with an expression that was working hard to stay neutral and not quite getting there.
Hammerhead looked at the body of the abomination, then at Guilliman, then back at the body.
Poison Lilly pressed the back of her hand against the cut on her forehead and said nothing.
The tunnel was quiet.
Somewhere deeper in the rock above them, debris was still shifting.