novelraw Chapter 181: Initiative
Chapter 181: Initiative
Back where the B-ranks had gathered, Guilliman appeared.
No announcement. No noise. He simply stepped back into the space, looked around at the assembled faces, and let the quiet satisfaction settle across his features.
"You?"
The Jackal was the first one to clock it. His eyes locked onto Guilliman immediately, scanning him up and down with the focused suspicion of someone who knew something was off but couldn’t locate exactly what.
"Why are you back so late? Did something happen?"
"No one said we couldn’t go off on our own after the first stage." Guilliman raised his eyebrows and looked at the Jackal with a smile that wasn’t quite a smile. "What do you mean?"
The Jackal opened his mouth.
Then closed it.
He stood there for a moment, working backward through the logic, and the more he worked the more the ground shifted under his argument. Guilliman was right. The first stage had a structure. After that, the rules were looser. Nothing had been said to prohibit anyone from moving independently once the primary objective was underway.
Sitting in place and waiting was the safe option.
It wasn’t the only option.
The Jackal’s eyes moved slowly across the space, doing a quiet headcount without making it obvious. His gaze landed on a bundled shape near the far rock. A figure seated with a blanket pulled up over them, still and quiet.
He walked over.
Grabbed the blanket.
Pulled it back.
Rocks.
A carefully arranged pile of rocks shaped just enough to suggest a person from a distance.
His jaw tightened.
Eric had been gone the entire time.
Out hunting. On his own. Quietly collecting gene points while the rest of them sat here doing nothing, waiting for clearance that was never coming because nobody had ever actually told them they needed it.
The Jackal stood there holding the blanket, staring at the rocks, putting it together.
If they wanted to get stronger, they needed to take initiative. That was the whole point of being here. That was the whole point of Athen.
He looked up at Guilliman.
Guilliman gave him a small nod.
"You have thirty minutes tops." He settled himself down against the wall, unhurried. "A few gene points never killed anyone."
The Jackal was already moving.
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Time passed.
The cave held its quiet.
Guilliman sat with his back against the rock wall and let the new weight of the level settle through him properly. Not analyzing it. Not running through the numbers. Just sitting with it.
It felt different.
A-rank was supposed to feel different and it did.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
The three A-ranks arrived at the rendezvous point and stopped.
Lucas swept the space in one look.
One person.
Just Guilliman, seated, unbothered, looking back at them with that same unreadable expression he seemed to carry everywhere.
The three exchanged a glance between them.
Neither said it out loud but the thought moved through the space clearly enough.
Did the others die?
Failing badly enough that even the B-ranks were gone was not something any of them wanted to process. The B-ranks hadn’t been assigned anything dangerous. They were supposed to be sitting here. Safe. Waiting.
And there was only one of them.
"What happened?" Poison Lilly moved forward first, stopping in front of Guilliman with worry sitting plainly on her face. The cut on her forehead had dried but hadn’t closed properly. The kind of wound that healed slow.
Guilliman looked at her.
"Eh? You’re back?" He blinked, genuinely relaxed. "Nothing’s wrong."
His eyes moved briefly to the cut. Stayed there for just a second. The gash was deep and uneven. The kind that came from rock, not a blade. It would scar if it wasn’t treated properly and soon.
He looked away.
"Where are the rest?" Lucas asked.
"They went out to pick off some stragglers."
Lucas paused.
One second. Two.
Then he nodded slowly.
Right. Of course. These were young people with ambition, the exact type Athen attracted. Standing around waiting while beasts were available to hunt was its own kind of waste. It made sense they would take the window.
He accepted the explanation cleanly.
"What about you?" Lucas asked.
The question came out after a beat, almost casual. But there was something underneath it that wasn’t casual at all.
He was watching Guilliman.
Guilliman was the type who spotted opportunities and moved on them before most people had finished registering the situation. Lucas had seen that much clearly enough from the abomination encounter. For someone like that to be sitting here while the others were out collecting points didn’t quite line up.
Something was different.
"Oh." Guilliman glanced away slightly, like it wasn’t worth much attention. "I already went. Just trying to soak in the new level."
He said it quietly.
Muttered, almost.
The three stood there.
A beat passed.
Then another.
It landed.
All three of them looked at him at the same moment, eyes dropping instinctively to his level display.
Level 20.
A-rank.
He had broken through.
The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was full of things none of them said. Poison Lilly’s expression shifted through something complicated before settling. Hammerhead just stared. Lucas looked at Guilliman for a long moment with an expression that was hard to read, something between reassessment and a quiet kind of respect.
Nobody said congratulations.
It didn’t feel like the right word for it.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
.....
Elsewhere in the cave system, the air was still sharp with the aftermath of a fight.
Two abominations had been engaged.
Only one was dead.
River Bandit stood over the corpse and said nothing, jaw tight, eyes working through what had just happened and not arriving anywhere satisfying.
"What was that?"
The man beside him couldn’t keep it in. He was staring at the space where it had appeared. A serpentine creature, massive and fast, materializing from nothing. It had closed the distance in less than a second and driven its teeth into the second abomination before vanishing the same way it came.
Gone.
Just like that.
The second abomination had fled with it. Injured but alive. Escaped into the deeper tunnels before anyone could close the angle.
Of two targets, they had one body.
"I don’t know," River Bandit said.
The frown on his face didn’t move.
He genuinely didn’t know. The creature hadn’t matched anything from the standard records of this zone. The speed was wrong. The appearance was wrong. The disappearance was wrong.
He looked at the corpse in front of him, then at the dark tunnel where the second abomination had vanished.
Something had been here.
Something that wasn’t supposed to be in this part of the valley.
He filed it quietly and said nothing else.