F Grade Healer Becomes Strongest Biomancer

Chapter 84 84: Four Years

Kaito

The rot started at the tail.

Brown patches bloomed across the translucent chitin and spread forward along the segments in uneven waves. The tissue beneath the shell was dissolving. Muscle fibers separated and liquefied, visible through the thinning membrane as though the creature were being unmade under glass.

The Hammertide's swimmerets sputtered. Two on the right side went dark entirely, the tissue that tethered them to the body sloughing off in wet strips that slapped against the tile.

[Brisk Hammerwraith — B-grade Elite]

[HP: 26,000/26,000]

The number made no sense. Climbing while the body fell apart.

It dropped from the ceiling with both clubs unfolded, faster rotting than it had been whole. The remaining swimmerets compensated with raw output, burning through whatever the terminal phase had dumped into its system.

One club caught Kise across the hip before Kaito could close the gap. She hit the corridor wall and slid, leaving a red smear down the tile.

She pressed her gauze-wrapped hand against the wound and looked at it.

Kaito drank his third and last potion. Warmth flooded his chest and ebbed.

The Hammerwraith circled from wall to ceiling to floor. One eye stalk was dead. The other locked on Kaito. Chitin peeled off its back in curls. The raptorial limbs fired without wind-up, every strike committed, nothing held in reserve.

[Brisk Hammerwraith: 23,102/26,000]

The HP was ticking down on its own. Kaito watched the number drop between strikes while black fluid dripped from the Hammerwraith's underside and pooled on the tile.

20,000.

18,000.

It was eating itself alive. If he waited long enough, the rot would finish it.

One club cratered the floor at his feet. The shockwave blew tile fragments into his shins. If he waited long enough, it would kill Kise first.

He was a simple man. The math just helped him consider his options.

So Kaito drew Lord Daimon's Farewell.

The blade caught the chemical light and held it.

[Brisk Hammerwraith: 17,640/26,000]

"By Daimon's eye, I mark thee."

The first strike punched through the rotting chitin at the thorax. The armor that had turned his blade in the first phase was dissolving from the inside out.

The relic's weight settled behind his sternum, a coldness that took the shape of a year he'd never get back.

[Lord Daimon's Farewell: 1/3]

The Hammerwraith's response was immediate. Both clubs fired. Kaito sidestepped the first. The second clipped his right shoulder and spun him into the wall. His collarbone didn't break. The muscle beneath it seized.

He pushed off the wall. The creature was already banking across the ceiling, circling back. Chitin rained from its body. The remaining eye stalk swiveled to track him.

[Brisk Hammerwraith: 15,219/26,000]

"By Daimon's hand, I bind thee."

The blade went through the creature's neck joint as it dove. The clubs stuttered mid-swing. One swimmeret row went dark.

[Lord Daimon's Farewell: 2/3]

The coldness doubled. His chest felt thinner, a wall losing plaster, still standing but less of it than before.

The Hammerwraith hit the floor. Its clubs fired into the concrete beneath it, blind. The binding had severed the connection between brain and limb, but the limbs kept going on muscle memory alone.

Kaito repositioned.

[Brisk Hammerwraith: 11,877/26,000]

"By Daimon's grace, farewell."

The third strike traced a line across the creature's thorax, through the dissolving chitin, and out the other side.

[Lord Daimon's Farewell: 3/3][Ritual acknowledged.]

The coldness hit a third time. His vision whited. His heart skipped. The corridor vanished and he was nowhere at all.

Then it came back.

The Hammerwraith collapsed. The rot accelerated, execution and decay working together, pulling the creature apart from inside and out.

The clubs went still. The swimmerets stopped. The body deflated as the tissue beneath the chitin dissolved into a spreading puddle of black and brown.

[Brisk Hammerwraith: 0/26,000]

Kaito sheathed the blade.

His hands were steady. His heart was not.

Four years left. He'd told himself he'd stop at ten.

He went to the hole in the wall. Togashi was where he'd left him, against the pipes, potion vial still in hand, eyes open, looking at nothing. The jaw scar caught the dim light from the corridor. Kaito reached through and closed his eyes. The lids were warm.

"Kise."

She was sitting where she'd fallen, her gauze-wrapped hand pressed against her hip. The stain had spread past the hand, past the fabric, pooling beneath her.

The hip was wrong. Fractured at minimum, but the volume of blood meant the club had ruptured the artery beneath.

"Can you walk?"

She tried. Her knee buckled before she got halfway up.

Kaito picked her up. She was light. Bannai's gear—the charges, the extra primers, the pack—was on Path C because she couldn't carry them with one working hand. All she'd brought into Path B was herself. Blood ran from her hip down Kaito's forearm and dripped off his elbow.

The stone wall sealing Path B's exit ground open at the end of the corridor, rock pulling apart in slabs. The warped architecture straightened behind them. Ticket gates settled to the floor. A vending machine slid down the wall with a groan of bending metal.

Kaito walked. Kise's head rested against his shoulder. Her breathing was shallow and too fast, blood loss outpacing whatever her body could do about it.

"Bannai," she said. Her voice was clear.

"He's on Path C."

Kise closed her eyes.

The stone ground the rest of the way open. The staging platform outside was dim under emergency lighting. Scanner drones circled in wide patterns.

Mio was on the floor, facedown. Still breathing. The rise and fall was visible from twenty meters.

He walked past her.

He found a spot by the wall and lowered himself down, settling Kise across his lap the way Bannai would have, if Bannai had been here.

Her eyes were open again.

Her hand found the gauze on her right wrist and pulled. The wrapping loosened. Underneath, her fingers were still bent from Tachikawa, never set properly.

She was looking at her own hand.

Then she wasn't looking at anything.

Kaito sat with her. The staging platform held a dead woman and two people who weren't dead yet.

He had four years left. The woman in his hands, none. The girl with the obsidian arm, he didn't know at all.

The arithmetic was getting harder.