The silence that followed their core collection was broken by Irene's practical question.
"So where's the exit?"
Henry looked up from securing the last bag of cores, his expression suddenly grim. "That's... going to be a problem."
"What do you mean?" Old Hans asked, though his tone suggested he already suspected the answer.
"This is a black gate," Henry said slowly. "Black gates don't have exits. They only have clearance conditions."
Nox felt his stomach drop. "Which means?"
"We have to kill the boss," Henry confirmed.
"Whatever entity is controlling this realm, we need to destroy it completely. Only then will the gate collapse and send us back."
"And if we don't?" Irene asked.
"Then we're stuck here forever." Henry gestured at the endless expanse of black glass stretching in every direction.
"This realm becomes our tomb."
The weight of that revelation settled over them like a burial shroud. They weren't just on a hunting mission anymore. They were trapped in a nightmare dimension with no way out except through whatever horror awaited them deeper in this place.
"I saw something when I first fell in," Nox said after a moment.
"A village, maybe a few kilometers in that direction." He pointed across the glass plain. "Might be worth investigating."
"Any lead is better than wandering aimlessly," Hans agreed. "And if this is truly the Skin God's tomb, there should be clues about the boss's location."
They gathered their equipment and began the trek across the reflective surface. Walking on the black glass was unsettling—each step created strange echoes that seemed to come from beneath their feet, as if they were walking on the roof of some vast underground chamber. The red sky above cast everything in shades of crimson and shadow, making the landscape feel like the inside of a wound.
"Tell me what you know about the Skin God," Nox said as they walked, partly to break the oppressive silence and partly because he genuinely needed the information.
Old Hans adjusted his pack, his chimeras padding alongside with unusual wariness. "Ancient entity, pre-civilization. The texts mention it as one of the 'Flayed Divines'—gods who demanded their worshippers remove their skin as acts of devotion."
"Cheerful," Irene muttered.
"The Skin God was said to grant immortality through transformation," Hans continued.
"But the price was your humanity. Its followers would gradually lose pieces of themselves—first their skin, then their memories, finally their souls."
"And these Skin Walkers we fought?"
"Probably its most devoted servants. They've given up everything human about themselves except the desire to serve."
Henry, who had been scanning the horizon with his enhanced vision, suddenly stopped. "We've got company."
The ground ahead of them began to crack and shift. Something massive was rising from beneath the glass, pushing up through the surface like a submarine breaching water. The black glass shattered and fell away in house-sized chunks, revealing something that defied rational description.
It stood one hundred meters tall, a crystalline nightmare that seemed to be carved from the same black glass as the ground. Its body was roughly humanoid but wrong in every proportion—too tall, too thin, with arms that reached nearly to the ground and a head that split open like a flower to reveal rows of diamond teeth.
"Well," Nox said, stepping back and gesturing toward the towering horror, "your turn."
Henry grinned, the expression sharp and predatory. "Finally."
He reached over his shoulder and drew his golden bow, the weapon gleaming like captured sunlight against the red sky. The bowstring hummed with barely contained energy as he nocked an arrow that materialized from his quiver—not ordinary ammunition, but a shaft of pure light that made the air around it shimmer.
The giant creature let out a sound like breaking glass mixed with screaming wind and began to lumber toward them. Each step cracked the ground and sent vibrations through the glass plain.
Henry's first shot took it in what might have been a knee joint. The arrow struck with the force of a meteor, punching clean through the crystalline structure and causing the creature to stumble. Cracks spread from the impact point like a spider web.
The second shot hit its shoulder, spinning the massive form sideways. The third found its throat, producing a sound like a cathedral's worth of windows shattering simultaneously.
But the creature kept coming, and as it drew closer, Henry smoothly transitioned from ranged to melee combat. He slung the golden bow across his back and drew his dual daggers—curved blades that seemed to drink in the red light and reflect it back as silver flame.
The giant swung one massive arm down at him. Henry didn't dodge backward. Instead, he moved forward, running straight up the creature's arm with inhuman speed and agility. His daggers carved twin lines of fire as he went, each cut sending cascades of crystalline fragments raining down.
"Show off," Irene commented, but there was admiration in her voice.
Henry reached the creature's shoulder and launched himself into the air, spinning like a dancer. His daggers found the cracks his arrows had created and drove deep, widening them into gaping wounds. The creature's head-flower snapped at him, but he was already gone, having pushed off from its neck to land on its other shoulder.
The fight became a deadly ballet. Henry moved across the giant's body like water, never staying in one place long enough for it to pin him down. His daggers found weak points with surgical precision—joints, previous wounds, stress fractures in the crystalline structure.
Each cut was calculated. Each movement was efficient. There was no wasted motion, no showboating, just the methodical dismantling of something that should have been impossible for a human to fight.
"This is why he's S-rank," Hans murmured. "Speed, precision, and tactical thinking all in perfect harmony."
The end came suddenly. Henry had been systematically weakening the creature's structural integrity, and when he finally drove both daggers into a critical joint at the base of its neck, the entire hundred-meter frame simply collapsed in on itself like a controlled demolition.
The sound was tremendous—a symphony of destruction that echoed across the glass plain for what felt like minutes. When the dust settled, Henry stood atop the rubble, calmly cleaning his daggers on a piece of crystalline hide.
"Well," he called down to them, "that was fun."
"Show off," Nox repeated Irene's earlier comment, but he was genuinely impressed. Watching Henry fight was like watching art in motion—deadly, beautiful art.
The creature's core was the size of a basketball, pulsing with deep purple light. Henry extracted it with the same casual efficiency he'd shown in the fight.
"Calamity-rank core," he announced, tossing the valuable prize to Old Hans for safekeeping. "This thing would have given most A-rank teams serious trouble."
"But not you?" Irene asked.
"Please," Henry grinned. "I've been doing this for 3 years. Giant slow monsters are basically my specialty."
As they resumed their trek across the glass plain, Nox found himself reflecting on the dynamic of their team. He might be the one with the overwhelming firepower against horror-type enemies, but Henry was a reminder that S-rank hunters earned their status for good reasons. The man was a walking weapon wrapped in a cheerful exterior.
In the distance, something that looked like structures began to take shape on the horizon. Their destination was still far off, but at least they had a direction now.
"Well," Nox said, shouldering his share of the cores from their previous battle, "at least we know we can handle whatever this place throws at us."
"Famous last words," Henry chuckled, but his eyes were already scanning the horizon for their next challenge.
The glass plain stretched endlessly ahead of them, and somewhere in this nightmare realm waited the entity they would need to defeat to escape. But for now, they walked forward together, four hunters carrying enough treasure to buy a small country and the growing confidence that they might actually survive this impossible situation.